As a kid growing up, I loved baseball movies.  An underrated one from my childhood was Angels in the Outfield with Danny Glover.  Just a solid wholesome baseball movie.  The way the Yankees have been playing, they could definitely use some Angels in the Outfield.  Instead, though, they have decided to put infielders in the outfield.  As the saying goes in Dodgeball, that is a “bold move, Cotton.”  Let’s take a look at the movie and see if it makes sense.

Outfielders are all hurt

 Ok, that isn’t true.  Congratulations to Cody Bellinger, who has somehow avoided the injured list.  The same, however, cannot be said for Aaron Judge, who is there and will be there for a while (until at least mid-August).  Grisham spent 10 days there, and Dominguez spent over a month there.  Also, if we consider Giancarlo Stanton an outfielder, he lives on the injured list.  Spencer Jones has avoided injuries, but he is a work in progress, and for some reason he is back in AAA (more on that later).

There is one guy who didn’t get hurt …

 His name is Randy Grichuk.  I understood the signing, but I preferred Dominguez.  He started the season as the fourth outfielder and didn’t do very well (.194/.212/.313).  The Yankees decided to pull the plug on him just to bring up a spot starter, and boy did it backfire.  Randy has been on fire with the White Sox (.286/.323/.637).   The Yankees could sure use a real outfielder.

Instead, they prefer infielders

The Yankees’ current roster has three real outfielders: Grisham. Bellinger, and Dominguez (who we all know is horrible out there).  After that, it’s some infielders who had little outfield experience coming into the season (Jose Caballero, Max Schuemann and Amed Rosario).  Rosario hasn’t really played the outfield (a couple appearances, but no starts).  Caballero came into the season with 25 starts in the outfield.  He has already made 12 this season.  If you have seen him play the outfield, then you know he is not a good outfielder.  Scheumann has looked decent in the outfield, but he only had 9 outfield starts coming into the season and has 7 already.

While the Yankees’ odd obsession with playing infielders in the outfield started before they promoted Anthony Volpe, it has been his presence that has pushed at least Caballero to the outfield.  And if you look at their team now, they have a four-man bench with one backup catcher and three other backup infielders with very limited outfield experience.  All this is quite odd when the Yankees could simply call up Spencer Jones and have four outfielders on the roster.  Instead, they decided that it was more valuable to keep Anthony Volpe on the roster, rather than send him down to try out other infield positions.  I think that was an obvious mistake, as when you play infielders in the outfield, they perform like infielders playing out of position.