Patience has rewarded the Yankees with one of the best center fielders in baseball: Aaron Hicks. Despite a brutal first season in pinstripes, the team stuck with the former first round pick. It would have been easy to cut ties with him, citing an extensive track record without success, but he got another opportunity in 2017 and ran with it. Since that year, the only two center fielders with more WAR than Hicks are Mike Trout and Lorenzo Cain.
2019 could have been Hicks’s final year in New York, but that was quashed once the two sides agreed to an extension on Monday.