It's time for the Yankees to let Frazier play

Clint Frazier returned to the Yankees from the team’s alternate site in Moosic, Pa., on Wednesday night and hit a home run and got three hits and ended up a triple shy of a cycle as the Yankees beat the Braves. It doesn’t mean Frazier, a perennial prospect, is now officially on his way to being Mike Trout or Mookie Betts at Yankee Stadium. But he showed once again in his season debut that he’s no alternate-site guy when he gets a chance to play. He’s got the talent to be a big-room guy, like the big room at Yankee Stadium, even without fans in attendance this season.

• Frazier falls triple shy of cycle in '20 debut

Frazier has never been known for his defense, he’s occasionally been a little rough around the edges from the time the Yankees traded for him four years ago. And he’s had his dust-ups with the media, most notably last season, when he kicked the ball around in the outfield one Sunday night against the Red Sox and then walked away from the media afterward. What he can do is hit. And make you want to watch him do it. And make you wonder all over again how much more he might do if he got to the plate a lot more.

Right now Giancarlo Stanton is back on the injured list with a hamstring injury and no one is sure for how long, after a season when he played just 18 games because of various injuries. Aaron Judge, who missed 60 games last season with injury issues, was pulled from a game against the Braves the other night with what was described as tightness in his lower body. Maybe it is nothing with Judge. Maybe it’s something. When Judge hits, he hits home runs, some out of sight, and already has nine this season, in 62 at-bats. When he sits, and you can look this up, he doesn’t hit any. In 2018-19, he sat out 110 games.

Even with Stanton and Judge just combining for 30 homers a year ago, the Yankees still managed to hit 306 as a team. They can still mash this year. You wonder how much more they could if Clint Frazier did more playing and less bouncing around.

The Yankees are going to be just fine in the American League East. And they’ve done fine the past couple of years with Frazier being nothing more than a part-time, stop-gap player, winning 100 one time and 103 another. But there always concerns about Stanton and Judge, neither of whom would have started the regular season on time if it had started back in March. Maybe this season is finally Frazier’s big chance, after all the excitement at the Trade Deadline of 2016, when they got him from the Indians in the trade that sent Andrew Miller to Cleveland. Frazier, once drafted ahead of Judge, was 21 at the time. Now he is about to turn 26 in September.

So it’s fair to ask the question about him in the summer of 2020: If not now for the Yankees, when?

Frazier had concussion issues for almost all of 2018. Last year he got into 69 games for the Yankees and hit 12 home runs and if he’d gotten twice that many, he might have gone for 30. Even if Judge’s lower-body tightness just turns out to be something minor, this is a time when the two terrific defenders in the Yankee outfield -- veterans Brett Gardner and Aaron Hicks -- are hitting .171 and .227 respectively. But as long as the Yankees continue to hit, with or without Stanton, it appears that Frazier will continue to be an alternative from the alternate site -- as much fun as he is to watch when he is on a ballfield, even behind the mask he started wearing during summer camp and hasn’t yet taken off. Of course he hit a home run in his first at-bat back.

“I’m just glad that tonight I was able to start with a bang,” Frazier said after the game. “Tonight was my first real game of 2020, and it felt good. It’s not going to be easy every time I step up to the plate. Being in the alternate site from a few weeks, I wondered if I was going to get back. I was just thrilled to play tonight.”

He would go to the Minor Leagues in other seasons not knowing if, or when, he would be back to the big club. There is always the chance that Frazier could be included in the kind of trade that brought him to the Yankees if general manager Brian Cashman goes looking for more pitching at the Trade Deadline, the way the Indians were looking for pitching when they traded Frazier away.

This is what Cashman said about Frazier at the time of that deal:

“The bat speed is already legendary. He’s got all the tools -- he can run, he can hit, he can hit with power, he can play all three outfield positions -- he’s a very exciting, high-energy guy that shows up in a dirty uniform. That’s the exciting thing about his mentality. He’s a super-competitive guy.”

On Wednesday night, Frazier came back from Moosic, Pa., and looked like a big-room guy and got three hits and the Yankees won. The last time I wrote about him here last June the column ended this way: “Let the kid play.”

Let the kid play.