Clint Frazier will officially miss the remainder of the 2018 season due to his continued suffering of post-concussion symptoms.
The 24-year-old (today is his birthday-- oof!) has had one of the most frustrating seasons I could imagine after suffering a concussion in spring training.
Clint hit his head making a nice play in spring training that caused him to miss a lot of time. When he was finally healthy, he was blocked at the MLB level. He suffered from post-concussion symptoms, causing him to miss time again. It’s really sucked.
He had two major chances to earn playing time this year that he lost due to the injury. The first was when Aaron Hicks went on the disabled list after the first game of the season (remember Jace Peterson playing a bunch of games and then getting our first taste of Sugar Shane Robinson?), and the second was (is?) all of this time that Aaron Judge has missed since breaking his wrist on July 26. Both would have been opportunities to carve out a role as the fourth (fifth) guy in the outfield/DH rotation between Hicks, Judge, Brett Gardner, and Giancarlo Stanton.
Instead, we got to watch Sugar Shane start many games for us and we traded for Andrew McCutchen. The McCutchen move is cool, but I’d rather Clint have been healthy and playing this whole time and we didn’t have to look at Beeker from The Muppets almost every day for a full month.
Clint’s had a really good year in between the DL stints. In 15 games with the big league club, he hit .265/.390/.353 (113 wRC+) while upping his walk rate from 4.9 percent in 2017 to 12.2 percent this year. Both numbers could be due small sample sizes, but I’ll just accept it as a sign of offensive growth and development from Frazier. Clint also mashed in Triple-A this year, slashing .311/.389/.574 (170 wRC+) in 48 games with Scranton/Wilkes-Barre.
The main concern right now obviously has to be Clint’s personal health. Concussions are no joke, and Clint has to worry about getting healthy first and then, hopefully, be able to play out the rest of his career with no issues. It sucks that we didn’t get to see him this year, but he should be in good shape by spring training.
This all obviously really really sucks for Clint and you can’t help but feel for the guy. I think I speak for everyone when I say that I hope he can move past these symptoms soon and get his career back on track. I can’t wait to see what he can do in 2019.