
The New York Yankees have many decisions to make this offseason, and everyone is talking about the needs and what to do about them. One decision the Yankees won’t have to make is whether to put Clint Frazier on the trading block. He has lost that status and now appears to be a huge part of the Yankees from now on for years to come. Twenty-one games into the shorted season, Frazier was called up from Scranton, and to put it plainly, he paved his path to Yankees Stardom. He hit .267 with eight home runs and turned into a Gold Glove-like defenseman.
The New York Yankees always knew that his quick swing and ability to hit both for contact and for power highlighted his talent. But, for Frazier, his poor play in the field has dogged him throughout his career. His maturity was also a factor. This season a new 26-year-old, more mature Frazier, showed up at summer camp. But even that didn’t help as he was to start the season at the alternate site. Due to need, the Yankees called him up on August 12th. In his first game, he went 3 for 4 with a monster home run. Frazier continued to play like a star with much-improved field play, making diving catch after diving catch. Late in the month, manager Aaron Boone rewarded him a permanent place in the lineup.
Frazier continued his excellent play into the postseason, going 2 for 7 with a 286 batting average and a 1.000 OPS, and a homer to his name. Those two months of play has cemented him as a part of future Yankee teams and a player too talented to use in the trade market. To discover how Clint reached this plateau, let’s start from the beginning.
Clint Frazier was born on September 6, 1994, in Loganville, Georgia. He is of Scot descent and played baseball in the Loganville high school’s baseball team’s outfield. He played well, and in his senior year, he batted .485 with 17 home runs and 45 RBI’s. He was even named the Gatorade National Baseball Player of the Year.
Clint doesn’t have to borrow a dollar for a coke; he was given a 3.5 million signing bonus with the Cleveland Indians, being selected fifth in the 2013 draft. He decided to sign with the Indians instead of attending college at the University of Georgia. After the signing, he was sent to Arizona to play with the minor league team there. In his first game, he hit a triple and a home run. In 2014 he played for their Class A team, the Captains of the mid-west league. He batted .266 with 13 home runs in 120 games.
Frazier’s big break came in July of 2016 when the Indians traded Clint to the Yankees in a multi-trade that got the Indians Andrew Miller. Clint was assigned the triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Rail Riders. In 2017 Clint played in 73 games for the Rail Riders amassed 42 RBI’s, a batting average of .257 with 12 home runs. He played only 73 games because he was called up to the stadium on July 1st of 2017. Big Red or Red Thunder as he is called, enamored himself to Yankee fans on July 8th, when hit his first career walk-off home run, giving the Yankees a win over the Brewers.
During spring training in Tampa in 2018 in catching a fly ball to the left-field, he crashed into the wall and suffered a concussion, which ended his 2018 season. From May to August, he was frequently on the AAA/Stadium shuttle although seldom playing. On September 8th, the Yankee Manager Aaron Boone said that Frazier would miss the rest of the season to receive treatment for the concussion’s ongoing symptoms.
As spring training started last year, the never shy Frazier announced that he was ready to make an impact and wanted Brett Gardner’s left-field job when the time was right. During spring training, Clint was not particularly remarkable. Boone said that he would probably be sent down to the minors to start the season, which happened. Frazier was given another big chance to prove himself due to all the New York Yankee injuries. He was called up April 1st, and in three games and 10 at-bats, he had 2 hits and 1 RBI and a batting average of just .200.
During June of 2019, all Clint Frazier did was hit. In fact, he hit .320 with four multi-hit games. Despite his hot hotting, Frazier was controversial as he failed at times in the field, and then there was the episode when he failed to answer questions about his poor fielding. When Edwin Encarnacion was traded to the Yankees from Seattle, the Yankees decided that rankled many, but sent Frazier down to Scranton. Frazier then further damaged his reputation by tweeting snarky comments about the Yankees and removing everything Yankee from social media. Many consider these actions quite immature, and to be a real Yankee, he needs to grow up.
While at Scranton Wilkes/Barre, Frazier had hit for a .283 average with eleven home runs and 34 runs batting in. Clint has been mostly hugely popular and made a big impact on getting the Yankees over the .500 mark earlier in the last season. He ended his major league season playing in 69 games with a .267 batting average and 12 home runs. Last year, although he had a miserable fielding percentage in the right field replacing Aaron Judge, he improved his play in left field with a 1.000 fielding percentage in seventeen games.
This year in spring training and the delayed summer camp, a new, more mature Clint Frazier had appeared. He played well behind the plate and in the field during the training camps. After baseball restarted after the coronavirus shutdown, Frazier was the only player elected to play in the field and at-bat with a face mask. When interviewed, he stated that it wasn’t a problem; he was wearing the mask to protect his fellow players.
But even that new maturity didn’t help Frazier. When the New York Yankees announced their 40 man roster at the beginning of the season, Frazier found himself back at Scranton. Fast forward to this past week, Giancarlo Stanton injured a hamstring running the bases at Tampa. The New York Yankees in a somewhat puzzling move, called up Thairo Estrada instead of the obvious left field replacement, Clint Frazier. Yankee and Clint Frazier fans were wondering if he will see major league action this year in this shortened season. He would be hitting third or fourth in their lineup with almost any other team, but with the Yankees, he continued to sit and wait for another chance at Yankee stardom.
That chance came on August 12, as part of a two-game series with the Atlanta Braves. All Frazier did from that game on, and into the postseason, was to show the New York Yankees and its fans a new Clint Frazier, and what he could do for the team. It now appears he is a permanent part of the team with a career of stardom to fill.