Gio Urshela

Gio Urshela was the New York Yankees' starting third baseman from 2019 through 2021, a cash-considerations pickup who nobody expected to matter and who ended up permanently taking the job away from the guy he was supposed to be filling in for. He hit .292 with 41 home runs and 153 RBI over 291 games in pinstripes, made an All-Star-caliber leap in his first full season, and turned a broken-down journeyman reputation into three years as one of the most reliable infielders in the league. Then the Yankees traded him away in a deal that never worked out the way they hoped, and that was that.

Path to the Bronx

Urshela signed with Cleveland as a 16-year-old international free agent out of Cartagena, Colombia, on July 2, 2008, for a $300,000 bonus. He debuted with Cleveland in 2015, never hit enough to stick, and got traded to Toronto for cash in May 2018 (not a prospect, not a player to be named later -- just cash, like a guy trading in a used car). The Blue Jays didn't want him either -- he hit .233 in 19 games, got designated for assignment, and got outrighted to Triple-A Buffalo before Toronto shipped him to the Yankees that August, again for cash. Two organizations gave up on him inside four months. The going rate for Gio Urshela in 2018 was basically bus fare.

He spent the rest of that year buried in Triple-A. Then, in Scranton, hitting coach Phil Plantier got him generating more power from his lower half, and the swing tweak turned out to be the whole story.

Taking Over Third Base

March 31, 2019. Miguel Andujar tears his labrum diving back into third base and needs season-ending surgery. The Yankees have nobody ready -- so on April 6 they select Urshela's contract from Triple-A, and he comes off the bench that night in Baltimore. He gets a start. Then another. He opens 25-for-71 (.352) once the at-bats start piling up, and the Yankees never bother finding a reason to sit him back down.

The final 2019 line: .314/.355/.534, 21 home runs, 74 RBI, a league-leading-for-the-team 34 doubles, and an .889 OPS in 132 games -- second-best batting average on the entire roster behind DJ LeMahieu. A guy who couldn't hold a job in Cleveland or Toronto finished his age-27 season as one of the best hitters on a 103-win Yankees team. Baseball doesn't usually work like that. It worked like that here.

That October, Urshela got his first real postseason moment, and it came in a loss. Game 6 of the 2019 ALCS against Houston, down 3-0 in the fourth, he took rookie Jose Urquidy deep to cut it to 3-2. The Yankees clawed all the way back to tie it 4-4 in the ninth on a LeMahieu homer, and then Jose Altuve ended the whole season with a walk-off two-run shot. Urshela's homer is a footnote in one of the more painful losses of the Judge era, but it's a good footnote.

The Grand Slam Game

2020 was shorter -- 60 games leaguewide because of the pandemic -- but Urshela didn't slow down, hitting .298/.368/.490 with 6 homers and 30 RBI in 43 games. His glove got him a Gold Glove finalist nod at third that fall (a .992 fielding percentage, best of any third baseman in the league that year), though he lost the actual award to Texas's Isiah Kiner-Falefa. Remember that name. It's going to matter again in a couple of paragraphs, and not in a way Urshela would've picked.

Then came September 30, 2020. Game 2 of the AL Wild Card Series against Cleveland, Yankees down 4-0 early, and Urshela unloads a grand slam off James Karinchak in the fourth to erase the whole deficit in one swing, tying it at 4. New York won 10-9 in a rain-soaked marathon that ran nearly five hours -- longest nine-inning postseason game ever played. Aaron Boone called it afterward: "Gio was probably the star of the game, among many big-time performances." Even the ESPN broadcast couldn't help itself -- Buck Showalter, on the call that night, admitted he'd "had a man crush on him for a couple of years now." Fair.

The Fade and the Trade

2021 was the one that got away from him physically. A knee tweak in May, a fastball off the shin in June, a hamstring strain that cost him most of August, a bad landing on his hand in September (that's four different body parts in five months, for those counting at home) -- Urshela played just 116 games and hit .267/.301/.419, a real step down from the two years before it. He started at third in the winner-take-all AL Wild Card Game that October, a 6-2 loss at Fenway on a Tuesday night that ended the season in one nine-inning gulp.

On March 13, 2022, the Yankees traded Urshela and Gary Sánchez to Minnesota for Josh Donaldson, Isiah Kiner-Falefa, and catcher Ben Rortvedt -- taking on roughly $50 million of Donaldson's contract in the process. Kiner-Falefa, the guy who'd beaten Urshela out for the Gold Glove a year and a half earlier, was now walking into his old job. The trade didn't age well for New York. Donaldson battled injuries and controversy, Kiner-Falefa couldn't hit enough to justify the position, and Urshela kept being a solid everyday infielder somewhere else -- Minnesota, then the Angels, Tigers, Braves, and Athletics, bouncing around the league the way he did before the Yankees ever found him. He retired in May 2026 after ten big league seasons and eight organizations, a .270 career hitter who peaked in the Bronx and never quite matched it again.

He bounced from Minnesota to the Angels to Detroit to Atlanta to Oakland after leaving the Bronx, still a solid glove and an occasionally dangerous bat, never again the guy who hit .314 in pinstripes. Ten seasons, eight organizations, and the best stretch of all of it happened in New York -- for a player two different teams handed away for nothing but cash. Cleveland and Toronto both looked at Gio Urshela and saw a guy not worth keeping. The Yankees looked at the same guy and got three years of everyday third base out of him. That's the whole story right there.