Clint Frazier

Clint Frazier's New York Yankees career started with a home run and ended with a DFA, and somehow both felt inevitable the moment you saw the hair. The Yankees got him from Cleveland on July 31, 2016, in the Andrew Miller trade -- a four-player return (Frazier, Justus Sheffield, Ben Heller, J.P. Feyereisen) for a lefty reliever in the middle of a dominant run out of the Yankees bullpen. Cleveland rode Miller to a Game 7 World Series loss. New York got a redheaded, top-10 prospect with a swing built for the short porch and a habit of saying exactly what he was thinking. Five years later, the hair was still there. The prospect never quite was.

The Debut, and the Haircut

Frazier's first big-league at-bat was a strikeout. His second was a double. His third was a home run into the Crawford Boxes -- making him the first Yankee since 1913 to double and homer in his debut, on July 1, 2017, in Houston of all places. His mom cried in the stands. It was, briefly, the best version of the Clint Frazier story: five tools, load management energy from a 22-year-old, a guy Baseball America had ranked as a top-10 prospect in the sport.

Then came the haircut. In March 2017, Joe Girardi sat Frazier down and told him the flowing red mop had "become a distraction." The club later admitted it didn't technically violate George Steinbrenner's decades-old grooming policy -- Girardi just wanted it gone. Frazier got buzzed, said the right things ("I like my hair, but I love playing for this organization more"), and everyone moved on. It set the tone anyway: a guy who rarely got to just play baseball without becoming a story first.

Red Thunder, 39 Games at a Time

Here's the maddening part about Frazier's Yankees run: he was actually good, in bursts (freakin' frustrating to watch play out that way). His rookie half-season -- 39 games, four homers, a wild swing-happy .231 average -- was rough. But 2019 was a real season, at least the first two-thirds of it: 69 games, 12 homers, a .267/.317/.489 line, before a June option to Triple-A (to clear room for Edwin Encarnacion) and a rocky September dragged the final number down. Then 2020 happened, and for 39 games in an empty, COVID-hollowed Stadium, Frazier looked like the guy Cleveland drafted fifth overall in 2013: .267/.394/.511, a .905 OPS, a Gold Glove finalist nod in right field. Career year. Almost nobody got to watch it.

He hit a walk-off, two-run bomb off Tampa Bay's Andrew Kittredge on June 1, 2021, then flipped the bat, tossed his helmet, and let his teammates mob him at the plate. That's the Frazier highlight reel in one swing -- loud, joyful, a little much, exactly what you wanted from him. He hit .286 in his four career postseason games, all in 2020, capped by a solo shot off Blake Snell in Game 1 of the ALDS. First playoff start of his career. He hit a homer. Of course he did.

The Concussion That Never Fully Left

The injury that actually derailed everything traces back to February 24, 2018 -- a spring training collision with the left-field wall in Bradenton that limited him to 15 games all year. It recurred that July, again that September, then quietly wrecked much of 2019 through depth-perception issues and defensive struggles nobody outside the clubhouse fully understood at the time. "I was fighting for my life," Frazier said later. He seemed to shake it in 2020 (that peak season didn't happen by accident). Then he banged his head again before the 2021 season, was placed on the IL on July 1 with what the team called vertigo, tried to come back in August, and never did.

By November 2021, the Yankees needed 40-man roster spots to protect prospects from the Rule 5 Draft. Frazier -- hitting .186 in 66 injury-limited games -- got designated for assignment on November 19, alongside Rougned Odor and Tyler Wade. He cleared waivers and was released four days later. Nobody claimed him (a former top-10 prospect who'd homered off Blake Snell in the playoffs a year earlier) on waivers. That's how quickly this league moves on.