Josh Donaldson

Josh Donaldson's Yankees career started about as perfectly as a Yankees career can start. On April 8, 2022 -- his very first game in pinstripes -- he came up in the bottom of the 11th with the score tied and singled home the winning run, capping a comeback from a 3-0 first-inning hole and giving the New York Yankees their first walk-off win on Opening Day since 1957. Per Elias Sports Bureau, he became just the third Yankee ever with a walk-off RBI in his first game, joining Roy Weatherly (1943) and Chase Headley (2014). It was, in hindsight, the best moment of the whole thing.

How He Got Here

Donaldson didn't arrive as some reclamation project nobody had heard of. He was the AL MVP in 2015 with Toronto -- .297/.371/.568, 41 doubles, 41 homers, a league-leading 123 RBI, an 8.8 bWAR season that trailed only Mike Trout's in the AL. He won it with 23 of 30 first-place votes over Trout, the first primary third baseman to take home an MVP since George Brett in 1980. Three All-Star nods, two Silver Sluggers, and a 2019 NL Comeback Player of the Year award with Atlanta later, and he was still good enough in 2021 that the Twins had him hitting .247 with an .827 OPS.

Then, on March 13, 2022, the Twins flipped him to the Yankees in a deal that was bigger than most people remember. It wasn't just Donaldson for Gary Sánchez and Gio Urshela -- the Yankees sent those two to Minnesota and got back three players, not one: Donaldson, infielder Isiah Kiner-Falefa (who'd been a Twin for less than 36 hours after a separate trade with Texas), and catcher Ben Rortvedt. New York absorbed the roughly $50 million left on Donaldson's contract. On paper it was a former MVP walking into a lineup that badly needed a competent third baseman. That's not how it went.

The Decline

2022 was rough in a way the box score undersold and the walk-off masked for exactly one night: .222/.308/.374, 15 home runs, 62 RBI, 148 strikeouts (second-most of his career) across 132 games. He was still a useful enough piece to help the Yankees to a 3-2 ALDS win over Cleveland -- during which, in Game 1, he thought he'd hit a home run off Cal Quantrill, started his trot, and got thrown out diving back to first when the ball stayed in play off the top of the wall (freakin' brutal, and also kind of hilarious if it's not your team). New York went on to get swept by Houston in the ALCS, with Donaldson managing just one hit in 13 postseason at-bats in that series.

Then came 2023, and it got worse before it got shorter. In May, Donaldson called Chicago's Tim Anderson "Jackie" during a game at the Stadium -- a reference, he said, to a 2019 interview where Anderson had called himself "today's Jackie Robinson." Anderson didn't take it as a joke. Benches cleared after White Sox catcher Yasmani Grandal confronted Donaldson at the plate, and MLB suspended Donaldson one game for what the league called "disrespectful comments," a punishment upheld on appeal (though the fine got cut to $5,000). Donaldson later said he holds Robinson's name "in the highest regard." Anderson's response was blunter: he said the two hadn't had a relationship since 2019, and that he "could care less about the suspension."

A hamstring strain cost Donaldson roughly 52 games that spring. He came back, played through July, then went down again with a calf strain after an 0-for-4 final game on July 15th against Colorado. He never played for the Yankees again -- released outright on August 29, 2023, with New York out of contention and looking to get a younger player some at-bats instead. His line at the end: .142/.225/.434 in just 34 games.

Where It Ended

Combine the two seasons and you get a Yankees tenure that never remotely lived up to the résumé that walked in the door: 166 games, .207/.293/.385, 25 home runs, 77 RBI. Milwaukee signed him to a minor-league deal a few days after the release, hoping for a September audition, and this time it actually worked out -- the Brewers selected his contract on September 11, 2023, and he closed out the season with 17 games in Milwaukee (.169, 3 homers, 11 RBI), then went 2-for-7 with a hit-by-pitch in both games of the NL Wild Card Series as Arizona swept the Brewers out of October. It was his last taste of the majors. On March 4, 2024, on a podcast rather than a press conference, Donaldson announced his retirement -- 13 seasons, seven organizations, an MVP trophy, and a Yankees stint that started with a walk-off and ended in a DFA.

That's the whole tenure, really, bookended by two nights that couldn't have looked less alike: a walk-off single that had the place rocking on Opening Day 2022, and a quiet release notice seventeen months later. The résumé said MVP. The stat line said something else entirely.