Miguel Andujar

Miguel Andujar should've been a New York Yankees fixture at third base for a decade. Instead he gave the Bronx one absolutely electric rookie season, lost the follow-up to a torn labrum on a routine dive back into a bag, and spent the rest of his run as a guy fighting for at-bats behind the player who replaced him. It's one of the more frustrating "what if" stories the Judge Era has produced, and it deserves better than the footnote treatment it usually gets.

The Debut Nobody Forgets

The Yankees signed Andujar out of the Dominican Republic on July 20, 2011, for a $750,000 bonus -- the largest in their international class that year -- out of a program run by trainer Basilio Vizcaino (the same guy who developed Gary Sánchez). He was 16. Seven years later he was the best rookie the organization had produced since Judge himself, but you could've called that shot the day he debuted.

June 28, 2017, at Chicago. Andujar goes 3-for-4 with four RBI and a walk in a 12-3 Yankees win, breaking the franchise record for RBI in a player's first career game (Judge hit his MLB-leading 27th homer of the season in the same game, because of course he did). Then the Yankees optioned Andujar right back to Triple-A. Baseball is a weird sport.

2018: The Best Rookie Season Nobody Talks About

He came back for good in 2018 and just hit. All year. .297/.328/.527, 27 home runs, 92 RBI, an .855 OPS, and -- this is the stat that should get him more shelf space in Yankees lore -- 47 doubles, which broke Joe DiMaggio's 1936 rookie record of 44 and tied Fred Lynn's 44-year-old AL rookie doubles mark on the literal final day of the season. He led every rookie in baseball in hits, doubles, RBI, and extra-base hits. In August alone he hit .320 with 10 homers and 29 RBI, good enough to become just the second Yankees rookie ever (after Judge, June 2017) to clear .320 with double-digit homers in a calendar month.

And then he lost the Rookie of the Year vote. Not to some flash-in-the-pan -- to Shohei Ohtani, who was pitching AND hitting like an All-Star in the same season, which is a category of unfair that doesn't really apply to normal human comparisons. Ohtani got 25 of 30 first-place votes; Andujar got the other five. (Andujar also picked up the James P. Dawson Award that spring as the Yankees' top rookie in camp, which is a nice trophy to have and a lousy consolation prize for the one that actually mattered.) Looking back, losing to peak two-way Ohtani isn't an insult -- it's just brutal timing. Nobody beats that season. Andujar just happened to be the best non-Ohtani rookie in the league the one year that mattered least for finishing second.

His only real postseason memory came that October, and it wasn't a good one. The Yankees dropped the 2018 ALDS to Boston in four games, and Andujar went just 2-for-10 while starting the first three before Aaron Boone benched him for Neil Walker in the finale. That's the entirety of his playoff résumé -- four games, no rings, gone before the next October rolled around.

One Dive Changes Everything

March 31, 2019. Third game of the season, Yankee Stadium, Orioles in town. Andujar dives back into third base on a routine snap throw and just freakin' wrecks the labrum in his right shoulder. He stays in the game -- finishes 1-for-5, scores a run, because that's apparently how tough this guy is -- but it doesn't matter. He tries to play through it for a few more weeks, goes 6-for-47 with zero extra-base hits, and on May 15 the Yankees announce season-ending surgery, performed by Dr. Christopher Ahmad. Final line: 12 games, .128, one RBI, done.

Here's the part that actually ended his Yankees career, even though nobody wrote the obituary in real time: some journeyman named Gio Urshela took over at third while Andujar rehabbed, hit well enough to keep the job, and just... never gave it back. Andujar came back healthy in 2020 and found himself buried on a roster that no longer needed him at his own position.

The rest reads like a slow fade. He hit .242 in 21 games in 2020, and the Yankees left him off the ALDS roster entirely. A left wrist sprain in July 2021 turned into a 60-day IL stint and wiped out the back half of a season in which he'd managed just 45 games and six homers. By 2022 he was a bench bat trying to find a defensive home in the outfield, hit .229 over 27 games, and the Yankees designated him for assignment on September 22. Pittsburgh claimed him off waivers a few days later. The Yankees career that started with a franchise-record RBI debut ended with a transaction wire blurb.

Andujar bounced through Pittsburgh, Oakland, Cincinnati, and San Diego after leaving the Bronx, still hitting well enough here and there to hang around a roster. None of it ever looked like 2018. That's the whole tragedy in one sentence: for one summer, Miguel Andujar was one of the best young hitters in baseball, and a diving play back into third base is the reason nobody remembers it that way.