It feels proper that on the day we rejoice Aaron Decide becoming a member of an elite pantheon of athlete — the multi-time winner of the Most Beneficial Participant award — that we take a stroll again to the start, when Decide was little greater than a 6-foot-7, 280-pound curiosity who largely specialised in hanging out.
Exhausting to keep in mind that, proper?
Decide homered in his big-league debut, a solo second-inning shot off Tampa’s Matt Andriese on Aug. 13, 2017, that helped gas an 8-4 win in an in any other case forgettable Yankees season. However that was about nearly as good because it acquired that 12 months for Decide, who hit .179 and had a 61 OPS-plus in 95 plate appearances and 84 at-bats. He struck out 42 instances, or precisely half these at-bats.
The Yankees group was excessive on Decide, however there have been pockets of uncertainty. He’d by no means hit greater than 20 homers in a minor league season. There was that huge, looping swing. There have been quite a lot of who believed Greg Chicken — and even Tyler Austin — might need an even bigger upside.
