Didi Gregorius

Derek Jeter played shortstop for the New York Yankees for 20 years and left the position feeling less like a job opening and more like a shrine. Didi Gregorius got handed the keys in 2015, at 25 years old, fresh off a three-team trade that sent Shane Greene to Detroit and Robbie Ray to Arizona so the Yankees could get him. (Robbie Ray, for what it's worth, went on to win a Cy Young for someone else years later. These trades never stop being complicated.) Nobody outside the organization was thrilled about it. Two months into the season, plenty of people inside the Stadium were actively hostile.

The Impossible Job

Gregorius hit .221 through the first two months of 2015 and made six errors doing it. Fans at the Stadium started chanting "Der-ek Je-ter" whenever he booted a ball, which is about as blunt a message as a fan base can send a 25-year-old still learning a new league. Gregorius's response was almost disarmingly calm: "I've been hearing that a lot. I just laugh. There's nothing I can do about it."

He backed it up. From early June through early August, he made one error and started hitting his way toward respectability. By 2016 he was a legitimately good everyday shortstop. By 2017 he was better than that -- and somewhere in there, the chants just stopped. (Nobody ever announced it.)

Sir Didi Finds His Power

Gregorius brought a nickname with him: "Sir Didi," earned after the Netherlands beat Cuba to win the 2011 Baseball World Cup, when the Dutch federation knighted the roster instead of paying out prize money. He's a fifth-class Knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau. (No, seriously.) He also turned out to be a left-handed pull hitter built for the short porch in right field.

The power showed up fast. He set the Yankees' single-season home run record for a shortstop with 25 in 2017, then broke his own record with 27 in 2018 -- a year he also hit .268, drove in 86 runs, and posted five multi-homer games, more than any shortstop in franchise history had managed in one season. Jeter never hit more than 24 home runs in a season. Gregorius passed him inside three years of everyday power hitting.

October, Twice

Gregorius saved his best theater for the games that mattered most. In Game 5 of the 2017 ALDS, with the Yankees facing elimination against Cleveland, he took Corey Kluber deep twice -- a first-inning solo shot and a third-inning two-run blast -- in a 5-2 win that sent New York to the ALCS. Two years later, in Game 2 of the 2019 ALDS against Minnesota, he snapped a personal 9-for-51 postseason slump (a .176 average, if you were counting) with a grand slam off Tyler Duffey in a seven-run third inning, the first Yankees postseason grand slam since Robinson Cano's in 2011.

Neither one was a walk-off, whatever you might remember. They didn't need to be. Both games ended with Gregorius as the reason the Yankees kept playing.

The Elbow

That 2019 slam meant more than the highlight reel let on. Gregorius tore wrist cartilage sliding headfirst into home during a walk-off win over Baltimore in September 2018, and the Yankees later determined he'd damaged his elbow during that same postseason run. Tommy John surgery followed in October 2018. He opened 2019 on the 60-day injured list and didn't play a game until June 7.

The comeback wasn't smooth, exactly -- he hit .238 for the year -- but it had moments that mattered more than the batting average. On July 23 he went 5-for-5 with seven freakin' RBI in a wild 14-12 win over Minnesota, joining Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio as the only Yankees ever to post a 4-hit, 7-RBI game more than once in a career. That's the company Didi Gregorius kept, eight months removed from elbow surgery.

Goodbye, Sort Of

The Yankees didn't give Gregorius a qualifying offer after 2019. Gleyber Torres and DJ LeMahieu had made the infield crowded, and $17.8 million felt like an unnecessary risk on a shortstop one year removed from elbow surgery. He signed with the Phillies that December for one year and $14 million, hit .284 with an .827 OPS in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, and got rewarded with a two-year extension.

He didn't leave the Bronx angry, and the Bronx didn't stay angry at him either -- not after everything it took just to get here. He left the way most good tenants do: having more than paid the rent, with the landlord just not quite ready to renew.