The Yankees have a problem.
It has nothing to do with sitting out the World Series for the last 13 years. This is an aesthetic problem, something that one of the few teams in professional sports that doesn’t wear alternate jerseys has dodged for most of its existence.
The problem is jersey number-related. Most people know that the Yankees have an absurd 22 retired numbers. But as fans gaze out onto the field and see digits more regularly associated with speeding tickets than baseball players, what they might not know is that the Yankees have plenty of perfectly fine numbers available. They’re just choosing to not give them out.
As of this writing, there is nobody on the Yankees’ 40-man roster or coaching staff wearing 11, 13, 14, 18, 19, 24, 29, 30, 33, 36, 50, 52, 53 or 54. Some of those numbers recently became available due to the departures of Joey Gallo, Miguel Castro, Tim Locastro, Jameson Taillon and Aroldis Chapman, among others. But some of them have been available for years — mainly 11, 19, and 52 — but have not seen the field in a big league game since Brett Gardner, Masahiro Tanaka and CC Sabathia left.
It’s certainly possible that nobody has asked for those numbers, but that also seems a tad unlikely — especially for 11 and 19 — given how few numbers under 20 are not retired. Sabathia stands a good chance of getting his number retired for good, and rightfully so. But keeping Gardner and Tanaka’s numbers on ice while important pieces of last year’s playoff roster wore 86, 91 and 95, resembling a third-line hockey group more than players the Yankees want to build around, is beyond foolish.
If those three players (Clarke Schmidt, Oswald Peraza and Oswaldo Cabrera) and their inflated numbers make the team out of spring training, as they very likely will, they deserve to wear more traditional numbers, for several reasons.
For one, the concept of “earning it” is stupid. If these are players you care about and are counting on to help the team win, treat them like it. While this is obviously not the only factor in his dramatic star turn, Michael King transformed into one of the best relief pitchers alive after ditching the horrendous-looking No. 73 he wore for his first three seasons.
That number was given to him by the team’s equipment manager, making King just the fourth player in team history to wear it in an MLB game. As soon as he claimed the No. 34 that his idol Roy Halladay wore, he began pitching a lot more like Halladay than the afterthought that a number like 73 would suggest. We don’t have any way to quantify it, and there are absolutely some players who do not care at all about what number they wear, but the concept that people perform better at work when they’re treated well, feel like they belong and are made comfortable is not difficult to grasp.
Apart from the mental impact it can have on the players, ditching a spring training number for something smaller also creates a more visually pleasing product. There’s something about watching a guy with 70, 81 or 92 (all numbers that real life Yankees wore on the field last season) on their back that feels very un-big league. This is very counterintuitive to everything the Yankees try to do, given that they still fancy themselves as the arbiters of all things good and righteous across the entire sport. But by retiring every number in sight, they’ve turned themselves into a mishmash of unsightliness, just giving out whatever numbers are available and will never be requested, which looks extremely unprofessional.
Peraza and Cabrera are regarded as instrumental pieces of both the Yankees’ near and distant future. But the jerseys handed to them by the club send the exact opposite message. Before Peraza, the only other person in the long and storied history of the Yankees to don No. 91 was middle reliever Alfredo Aceves. Cabrera became only the second Yankee to get a No. 95 uniform, joining Trey Amburgey, who made a grand total of four at-bats. Those weren’t exactly guys the Yankees were trying to build around.
It’s a no-brainer to reward Peraza and Cabrera on their first opening day by letting them choose the numbers that the franchise hopes they’ll wear proudly for the next decade. A shortstop wearing something in the teens looks infinitely better than 91, and also creates an air of permanence that is hard to conjure when the captain of the infield is still rocking his September call-up number. Two of the team’s best available numbers are currently in the hands of non-roster invitees (Willie Calhoun, 24 and Wilmer Difo, 30) but if they don’t make the team those numbers should absolutely get snatched up.
Schmidt would look a lot better and likely feel a lot better if he was in No. 30 instead of the garish and boxy-looking 86. Ron Marinaccio, whose No. 97 assignment last year was more about the team viewing him as early-season bullpen filler than the actually useful reliever he turned out to be, also deserves to upgrade. Something like 33 or 36 would look much better on him.
It is true that some dudes develop a sentimental attachment to their first major league number and don’t want to part with it. But it is even truer that they joke around at their lockers about the atrocious appearance of a number above 66, cracking-wise about how they can double as a pitcher and a backup wide receiver if needed. Players know that the least desirable numbers are given to the people on the bottom of the totem pole, and as they get more established, so too should the number on top of their pinstripes.
Is this pedantic, silly and ultimately meaningless? Yes. But if it matters to the players — and they’ll tell you in the clubhouse that it does, at least for feeling like a legitimate part of the roster — it should matter to the people in charge of this type of stuff too.
There are plenty of numbers up for grabs that won’t make the person at the plate or on the mound look like a video game Create a Player. Until the Yankees actually start giving them out, they are doing their players, and anybody with a working set of eyes, a tremendous disservice.
