Ruben Sierra

Ruben Sierra spent five seasons with the New York Yankees across two separate stints -- 1995 and 1996, then 2003 through 2005 -- and somehow the game people still bring up first is one he played in a Detroit uniform. Nine days after the Yankees traded him at the 1996 deadline, Sierra walked back into the Stadium and drove in every single Tigers run in a 5-3 win over his old team. (Three-run homer off Andy Pettitte in the first, then a two-run double in the fifth, just so nobody missed the point.) That's Ruben Sierra in a nutshell -- a switch-hitting slugger who arrived carrying somebody else's baggage, left right before the good part started, and had a knack for showing up exactly when you didn't want him to.

Arrival and the First Stint

The Yankees got him from Oakland on July 28, 1995, sending disgruntled outfielder Danny Tartabull the other way and eating half of Tartabull's remaining salary just to make it work (nothing says "we really wanted this guy" like paying two outfielders at once). Sierra was already a four-time All-Star by then, a switch-hitter who'd led the AL in RBI back in 1989 with Texas, and he helped push a Yankees team into the playoffs for the first time in 14 years. The 1995 ALDS against Seattle ended in five gutting games -- Sierra hit two homers in the series -- and it still wasn't enough. Nothing was enough that October.

He came back in 1996 as an everyday outfielder/DH and hit .258 with 11 homers and 52 RBI through July. Then, about 90 minutes before the trade deadline, the Yankees flipped him and minor-league pitcher Matt Drews to Detroit for Cecil Fielder -- reportedly the first trade in baseball history involving two players who'd each already hit 220-plus career home runs. Sierra didn't take it well. He said later that nobody on the team even said goodbye, except for Mariano Duncan.

Nine days later he was back in the Bronx wearing the wrong uniform, and he made sure everyone remembered what they'd traded away.

The Yankees went on to win the World Series that October. Sierra watched it from Detroit.

The Return

Sierra didn't resurface in pinstripes until 2003, dealt back from Texas on June 6 as a well-traveled 37-year-old who'd since played for Detroit, Cincinnati, Toronto, Chicago, Texas again, and Seattle in the seven years since he left the Bronx (that's six organizations in seven years -- a lot of frequent-flyer miles for a switch-hitting DH). He hit .276 with a .760 OPS in 63 games down the stretch -- the best OPS of either Yankees stint -- and got a ring-less taste of October when the Yankees lost the 2003 World Series to the Marlins in six games. He re-signed that December, then again in January 2005, settling into a part-time DH role that suited a late-30s body a lot better than the outfield did.

His signature moment as a Yankee came in the 2004 ALDS. Up 2-1 in the series but down 5-2 to the Twins in Game 4 at Minneapolis, with a decisive Game 5 back in the Bronx the only alternative, Sierra hit a three-run homer off Juan Rincon in the eighth to tie it. Alex Rodriguez scored the winning run on a wild pitch in the 11th, Mariano Rivera closed it out, and the Yankees closed the series instead of dragging it to a fifth game. Sierra was 39 years old, hitting DH three days a week (a Wednesday-Friday-Sunday kind of role by that point in his career) -- the kind of contribution that never makes a Hall of Fame case but wins a series anyway. It felt like the whole freakin' season pivoted on that one swing.

2005 was the last chapter, and a quieter one: 61 games, a .229 average, mostly DH duty against right-handers. The Yankees lost the ALDS to the Angels in five games, Sierra got one more postseason at-bat than most people remember, and that was it for the Bronx. He played one final season in Minnesota in 2006 and retired with 2,152 hits, 306 home runs, and a .268 career average across nine organizations.

Between the two stints, Sierra played in the Bronx during a championship year and a near-miss, and never got a ring out of either one -- traded away from the first, on the losing end of the second. Somewhere there's a version of this story where the timing breaks his way.