Former Yankee prized prospect Greg Bird was in the opposing clubhouse during New York’s spring training loss to the Blue Jays on Saturday, as the oft-injured first baseman tries to earn his way into his first big-league action since 2019.
It was after that 2019 season that the Bird experiment came to an end in the Bronx, with the Yankees parting ways with a smooth lefty-hitting first baseman that many envisioned as the next Don Mattingly or Tino Martinez.
Aside from a few postseason home runs in 2017, Bird never got close to that hype, as injuries limited his Yankee career to just 186 games over four seasons. But he still looks back on his time in pinstripes with fondness.
“I think it needed to happen the way it happened,” Bird told Newsday’s Erik Boland on Tuesday. “I think it will serve me well. Long story short, the lessons that I learned there about ball and life will serve me better in life than if I would have just blown it up right out of the gate and went down that path. I really believe that. It was crazy, though, no doubt.”
It initially looked like Bird would indeed storm right out of the gate into the big leagues, as he smashed 11 home runs in his first 46 games in 2015. But a shoulder injury sidelined him for all of 2016, and after swinging the hottest bat in the league during spring training, a ball off his foot led to all kinds of problems that limited him to 48 games that season. He came back and put together a productive September before providing one of the biggest swings of New York’s last magical season, blasting a titanic go-ahead home run against Cleveland in game three of the ALDS, sparking a dramatic series comeback.
“I have great memories,” Bird, now 29 and a member of the Blue Jays organization, said by his locker at the club’s minor league complex here. “I met a lot of great people. I learned how to be a professional baseball player the right way in the right organization.
“The highs there were high,” Bird told Boland of that home run. “Playing there, awesome. The people I met, awesome…I enjoyed it a lot and I learned a lot, and I don’t think I’d be here without it.”
But Bird could never get back to that highwater mark, hitting .199 in 82 games in 2018, and playing in just 10 games in 2019 before his Yankee career was over. Now, he will look to make it with a division rival, and put that long list of injuries behind him.”
“I couldn’t play and I couldn’t do anything about it,” Bird said of his multiple Yankee injuries. “There was all this noise, and I couldn’t do anything about it, so I felt helpless all of the time.”
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