Major League Baseball

Gardner not a fan of Yankees' awkward All-Star bid campaign

Published Jul. 9, 2015 10:00 a.m. ET

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UPDATE (Thurs. 3:32 p.m. ET): Brett Gardner was named the replacement for injured Royals star Alex Gordon, ith the announcement coming in the fourth inning of Thursday's A's-Yankees game in New York. The Yanks outfielder reacted in low-key Gardy style.

Brett Gardner is among the five players in the American League whose 2015 MLB All-Star Game fate will be determined by this week’s online “Final Vote” process. The New York Yankees, like most teams, are attempting to do their part to get one of their own onto the roster, mainly through an aggressive — and ultimately awkward — social media campaign, mostly revolving around the use of the #VoteGardy hashtag on Twitter.

But to hear it from the Yankees outfielder, he would have preferred it had the team not initiated the campaign on his behalf.

“That’s just not me. I’m more of a low-key guy,” Gardner told the New York Daily News' John Harper. “I don’t even have a Twitter account.”

Harper adds in his column that Gardner was around when Nick Swisher and the team pulled out all the stops in their bid to get him on the AL’s All-Star roster. When asked if he intended to reach out to Swisher to get some advice, Gardner chuckled and declined.

“No, no, no,” he said. “I was here for all that, and that’s all great and everything. It worked for him, right? I’m not going to take the same exact approach, but hopefully the fans go out and vote for who they want in the game, and we’ll see how it shakes out.”

In light of how the Yankees awkwardly stumbled through its initial attempts to boost Gardner’s prospects at cracking the American League’s All-Star roster, perhaps avoiding it altogether would have been the better option.

Among the questionable missteps by the Yankees included having Alex Rodriguez and Joe Girardi don bald skull caps to mimic Gardner’s cleanly shaved head.

But even before that image of abject awkwardness, the Yankees offered up an even more questionable tweet.

In a “Who are the ad wizards who came up with this one?” kind of moment, the Yankees tweeted out a quote about Gardner railing against the use of (yep) PEDs (which has since been removed; screencap courtesy of Big League Stew):

Not much contemplation or deep thought is required to come up with one huge reason why the Yankees alluding to the admirable qualities of being PED-free is rife with awkwardness . . . arguably even more awkward than seeing A-Rod himself in a bald skull cap.

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