Clint Frazier's wild trade deadline story has Yankees fans playing detective

Former New York Yankees outfielder Clint Frazier has spent the aftermath of trade deadline week sharing engaging stories and really opening the door on his time in pinstripes — which is saying something, considering how much of that he'd already done in recent seasons.

On Sunday, he got Yankee fans buzzing one level higher by both defending Brian Cashman's stone-cold attitude and revealing an intriguing trade deadline nugget from a previous season gone wrong.

According to Frazier, Cashman took the whole team aside prior to the 2020 season and asked the room to please let him know if they didn't want to be Yankees/refused to buy in. If they weren't interested in the program? Boom, here's the door. Ironically, the team was still about seven months away from messing with JA Happ's rhythm in a playoff game and learning a little something about "buy in," but that's neither here nor there.

Frazier continued by admitting that someone Cashman acquired in 2019 "never wanted to be on the Yankees," which had fans digging for details until they realized ... wait a minute, that's a really limited pool of acquisitions to choose from.

Clint Frazier's trade deadline story time had Yankees fans putting pieces together about Brian Cashman speech

See, it seems that the person Cashman was referring to was no longer on the team in 2020, allowing him to speak freely and remind the roster of his authority. The only impact addition the Yankees made in 2019 didn't even come at the deadline; it happened over a month before when Edwin Encarnacion arrived from Seattle.

He walked the parrot to the tune of 13 bombs in 44 regular-season games in pinstripes, then hit .056 in an ALCS disappearing act against Houston, another Yankee who somehow managed to play nowhere near his pedigree when the lights were brightest during this era.

Other than Encarnacion ... the pickings are slim here. They added Kendrys Morales in May? The move they made closest to the trade deadline was importing ... pinch runner extraordinaire Terrance Gore into the system, a man Frazier apparently loved?

Later, Frazier expressed interest in starting a baseball show and/or a Yankees podcast, so stay tuned for more potential behind-the-scenes scoops.

Anything that helps explain why so much talent has turned to curdled milk so often for the post-2017 Yankees is worth diving deeper into.