Brett Gardner could be in Yankees’ 2020 plans

BALTIMORE — Brett Gardner and CC Sabathia re-signed with the Yankees within a week of each other last November, one-year deals and pay cuts for both, and the dual transactions carried the feel of the movie “Last Vegas,” a couple of baseball geezers going on one last joy ride together.

One problem existed with that narrative, however: While Sabathia immediately declared this season to be his swan song, Gardner never signed off on the script. And with the way he has played for the Yankees in 2019, exactly why shouldn’t they bring him back for 2020?

“At this point in the season, I expect to be playing next year. Hopefully it’s here,” Gardner told The Post on Wednesday, before the Yankees concluded this Oriole Park at Camden Yards series with the lowly O’s. “I feel like I’m definitely still capable.”

He has seemed particularly capable as of late. The 35-year-old went deep in each of the first two games of this series, giving him 17 homers and putting him on a pace to top his personal best of 21, which he established in 2017. That uptick in power has increased his offensive value, as the career-best .479 slugging percentage he brought to work Wednesday neutralized his lower-than-normal (for him) .253 batting average and .333 on-base percentage.

Those rates, plus his typically stellar defense and base running — combined with his good health — made Gardner the Yankees’ most valuable outfielder this season, as per Baseball-Reference.com’s WAR calculation. He sported a 3.2 WAR to Aaron Judge’s 3.0. That resulted in large part from Gardner’s good health relative to the rest of his injury-riddled club, as his 99 games, including Wednesday, put him third on the team behind Gleyber Torres (105), who is currently confusing the Yankees with an unidentified condition, and DJ LeMahieu (102).

I asked Aaron Boone if it was fair to say that Gardner has played more and better than the Yankees expected.

“Maybe slightly more, just obviously with all of the injuries, so he has played so much,” the Yankees’ manager said. “But I envisioned him as a regular playing a lot. Better? I don’t know. I have a pretty high expectation of what Gardy is still capable of doing. Obviously the amount of power he has hit for this year, he’s still a really good player. But I think we all saw him that way.”

The pay cut from $11.5 million to $7.5 million reflected Gardner’s diminished production — he slashed .236/.322/.368 last year — as well as the plan for him to play less.

“I think that’s something that we kind of communicated through [the front office] and obviously, with the guys that we already had on hand, me re-signing back here, a little like DJ in the infield, right?” Gardner said. “Not really sure how you fit in at the time.

“… I just knew that it was going to be a special group of guys and I wanted to be back here. I knew that things would, I don’t want to say work out for the best because I don’t want somebody else to obviously get injured, but yeah, I probably wasn’t expecting to play as often or as frequently as I have.”

While Gardner historically hits far better in the first half (.273/.353/.421) than the second half (.244/.329/.360), he has flipped that script, going .246/.328/.470 before the All-Star break and .298/.365/.532 since.

“As you get older, you learn to do different things and make different adjustments,” said Gardner, who explained that he has worked recently with the Yankees’ coaches on hitting to the opposite field more.

Older, wiser and still durable? Sounds like a good fit for a 2020 Yankees outfield that should feature Judge, Aaron Hicks, Giancarlo Stanton, Aaron Hicks and perhaps Clint Frazier (and Jacoby Ellsbury. LOL).

Looks like Gardner, who described this season as “the most exciting, fun year of my career” because of the myriad surprise performances around the Yankees, has at least one more joy ride in him.

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