Greg Bird

Greg Bird was the New York Yankees' first baseman during the early years of the Baby Bombers rebuild, a left-handed slugger whose career is remembered for one enormous October swing and four separate injuries that never let him build on it. He played for the club in 2015 and again from 2017 through 2019, hit .211 for his career, and delivered a home run in the 2017 ALDS that's still one of the more replayed moments of that Yankees run. Bird hasn't played in the majors since 2019.

Path to the Bronx

Bird was drafted by the Yankees in the fifth round of the 2011 draft -- 179th overall -- out of Grandview High School in Aurora, Colorado. He was a catcher in high school (Kevin Gausman's battery mate, if you can picture that), but the Yankees moved him to first base in the minors and let the bat do the talking. He'd passed up a commitment to Arkansas to sign.

He made it to the Bronx fast. Bird debuted on August 13, 2015, going 0-for-5 against Cleveland in a game the Yankees still won 8-6 (first career hit came two days after that, a single off Toronto's LaTroy Hawkins). Four days later, Mark Teixeira suffered a season-ending shin fracture on a hit-by-pitch, and the job Bird had just started sharing became his alone for the rest of the year.

Yankees Career

The rookie season was the best baseball Bird ever played in pinstripes. In 46 games he hit .261/.343/.529 with 11 home runs -- tied for the most by any player debuting in August or later, per Baseball Almanac's home run log. Joe Girardi compared his approach at the plate to Miguel Cabrera's, which is the kind of comparison you don't forget even when the rest of the career doesn't follow the same script.

Then 2016 happened, and it turned out to be a preview. Bird missed the entire season recovering from surgery on a torn labrum in his shoulder. He returned for 2017 hoping to build on the rookie breakout and instead fouled a pitch off his own ankle in the last week of spring training. He tried to play through it -- batted .100 in 60 at-bats -- before finally going on the disabled list and having surgery that July to remove a bone called the os trigonum.

While he was out, an anonymous team source told the New York Daily News that people around the organization wondered whether Bird even wanted to be part of what Aaron Judge, Gary Sánchez, and the rest of the young core were building. Bird pushed back publicly: "I want to play... I've always wanted to play since I can remember. I love baseball." Girardi backed him too. Three months later, Bird made that quote look pretty easy to believe.

The Home Run That Defined Him

Down 2-0 in the 2017 ALDS and facing elimination, the Yankees needed something. They got it in Game 3 on October 8 at Yankee Stadium, when Bird turned on a 96 mph fastball from Andrew Miller -- a former Yankee, no less -- and drove it into the right-field seats in the bottom of the seventh. It held up as the only run of the game. Yankees won 1-0, forced a Game 4, and eventually finished off the comeback from 0-2 to take the series.

He wasn't done. In Game 1 of the ALCS against Houston, Bird took Astros closer Ken Giles deep in the ninth for the Yankees' only run in a 2-1 loss. Across that whole 2017 postseason run, Bird hit .250 with 3 home runs and 6 RBI in 14 games. Not a huge sample. Just an incredibly loud one.

The Injuries Won

That's the frustrating part of writing about Greg Bird -- every good stretch has an injury waiting on the other side of it. Another ankle procedure in March 2018 (a calcium deposit this time, not the os trigonum) cost him the start of that season. He came back in late May and played out the year, hitting .199 with 11 home runs in 82 games -- a full workload, but a below-replacement bat. Then in April 2019, a torn plantar fascia in his left foot ended his season after just 10 games and a .171 average.

Four different injuries in four different seasons -- a shoulder, two separate ankle procedures, and a foot. That's not bad luck stacked on bad luck. That's a career.

The Yankees designated Bird for assignment on November 20, 2019 (the same day they released Jacoby Ellsbury), and he elected free agency a week later rather than accept a Triple-A assignment. He bounced through a few more organizations after that -- a strong Triple-A year with Colorado's system in 2021, a brief return to the Yankees on a minor league deal in 2022 that ended in a release that July -- but the big league at-bats never came back. He later played independent and international ball, including a stretch in Australia's pro league, and by the mid-2020s had stepped away from the game.

The home run off Miller still shows up whenever people run down great Yankees postseason moments of the 2010s. It's a good one -- a guy who'd just been publicly doubted, turning around a 96 mph heater to keep a season alive. It just never got the follow-up it deserved. Bird's body made sure of that.