Yankees Designate Aaron Hicks for Assignment
Well, it’s the news Yankees fans have been waiting to hear for quite some time now. Aaron Hicks has been designated for assignment and will no longer be a Yankee, the team announced Saturday. It’s been a rough stint for Hicks in New York and now fans can rejoice at the news of his departure.
For a while, it seemed like Hicks didn’t really have a role with this Yankees team, in large part because he hasn’t been a good baseball player for quite a while, making the seven-year, $70 million contract look worse as each season passed. The Yankees were set to pay Hicks until 2025 but have instead opted to just eat the rest of the contract and move on.
A pretty telling sign in terms of how desperate the Yankees were to move on. He also has been at the mercy of New York fans for what felt like forever. If you have social media of any kind, you’ve seen just how hated he became among the fanbase. It really just hasn’t been pretty and a change of scenery will likely benefit both parties.
Aaron Hicks was once a highly touted prospect in the Twins system, being selected with their first-round pick in the 2008 draft. He initially impressed in the minors and quickly became the Twins’ top prospect. He made his debut in 2013 where he flashed his raw power and elite defense but still struggled to find his footing at the plate.
After a couple more lackluster years, the Twins traded him to the Yankees in exchange for John Ryan Murphy. The Yankees were hoping to unlock that potential he showed as a prospect, showing their confidence by signing him to a seven-year contract, a move that seemed questionable to many at the time given his shaky track record to that point.
But it’s clear that Hicks hasn’t been able to ever live up to that hype. He just hasn’t been able to develop a consistent enough bat to pair with his defense, which was enough to keep him in the Yankees lineup at one point. But in recent years, his defense has fallen off and he has even become a below-average defender.
If Hicks isn’t providing that great defense, then it becomes really hard to find his value. This is what I think the Yankees were having an issue within the past few months. His bat was never good enough to where he needed to be hitting on a nightly basis. The plus defense is what made him a nightly starter, but with that gone he quite literally has no value.
I know it’s not ideal to have to absorb the rest of Hicks’s contract. But hey, it’s the Yankees, it won’t even be a hiccup for them financially and Hicks will soon be forgotten about in New York. You couldn’t really trade him either as he has to have little-to-no value. So it may not be ideal but this is probably the only way you get Hicks off the team. For now, the Yankees have bigger fish to fry.
They sit at 27-20, third place in an AL East that is going to be a blood bath. The last-place team the Blue Jays, sit at 25-21, showing just how complete this division is and how difficult it will be to stay competitive. It’s going to make for a long season and the Yankees will certainly have their work cut out for them. But I believe that cutting Aaron Hicks is a good first step in that direction.
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