Yankees' worst nightmare comes true as former polarizing player launches a podcast

Clint Frazier has a complicated history with the New York Yankees. He played for the team from 2017-2021, showing signs of brilliance during the 2020 season, when he logged a 150 OPS+ in 160 plate appearances. But he was also bedeviled with injuries (such as a concussion in 2018) and inconsistent play, all while the Yankees tried to fit the right fielder into left field, a position he never seemed especially comfortable playing.

It didn’t help that there was a perception (fair or unfair) that he had something of an attitude problem.

All of that, however, was in the past … until Frazier announced on his he would be launching a podcast in which he would discuss, among other things, his insider’s perspective of the Yankees organization. The debut episode revealed a number of interesting tidbits about his time with the team, how the Yankees operate, and what he believes are some of the Bombers’ biggest issues as they struggle in 2025.

Clint Frazier started his own Yankees podcast in a wild turn of events

These days, Yankees players and staffers have a tendency to be fairly tight-lipped and disciplined. It’s a notable change from the more emotional, impulsive days of George Steinbrenner, who was once described by his biographer Bill Madden as being “an absolute menace” during the 1980s. Team Captain Aaron Judge is the Yankees’ platonic idea of a leader and player. He’s always positive, says the right things, and is almost never a source of controversy.

So now that Frazier is publicly sharing secrets and offering his unfiltered takes on all things Bronx Bombers, one has to wonder if the Yankees brass might be a little bit unhappy.

In the debut episode of his podcast, Life After the Show, Frazier revealed how new Yankees are coached in press relations.

“One of the first things that happens when you become a New York Yankee is that if you have under three years of service time, they are giving you media training every spring training. Mandatory. You sit in there, they come up with questions, they pin you in the corner, they ask you political questions, they ask you anything that’s freaking trending at the time that might be a spicy topic to talk about… That’s the first thing they do is like, ‘Yo, a huge part of being on this team is navigating the media because ultimately that can be your demise.’”

Frazier also criticized his former team for playing too many guys out of position. “The way they lost that game [Aug. 1 against the Miami Marlins] was the pitchers come in, they blow the game and the guy [Jose Caballero] that’s playing right field is an infielder and he misses the ball. They had a right fielder on the bench that they traded for that is sitting there while an infielder is playing outfield. Playing for that team, I played out of position many times. I had never played left field my entire career but went to the big leagues and played left field, and that’s the hardest f---ing position to play at Yankee Stadium.”

Most recently, he weighed in on the team's decision to handle certain injuries which ... confirmed what fans had already believed.

Frazier also talked about the hottest topic in Yankee world right now: whether manager Aaron Boone deserves to be fired. “If you fire Boone, you’ve got to fire a lot of other people too because Boone is just the mouthpiece for a lot of other things that are happening inside that organization. There [are] a lot of times that Boone has pre-determined things that are gonna happen in the game. When the lineup is made, I was told by other people, Boonie would write his lineup, and then the analytical team would write their lineup, and that they would come together and decide how the lineup for the day was going to be written.”

Whatever one thinks of Frazier’s time with the Yankees, his behind-the-scenes stories do help shed some light on how the team makes decisions and manages its players. Some of those stories might make the Yankees front office uncomfortable, but some transparency isn’t a bad thing for the fans, who often feel baffled by what those in charge do.