Troy Tulowitzki

Troy Tulowitzki's entire Yankees career fits in one line of a box score: 5 games, 2 hits, 1 home run, gone by April. That's it. That's the whole tenure. And somehow it's still one of the more interesting footnotes of the 2019 season -- a five-time All-Star, once considered a top-five player in all of baseball, signing for the league minimum just to see if his body had one more run left in it. It didn't. But for about a week in late March, it looked like it might.

The Bargain Bin Version of a Star

By January 2019, Tulowitzki was 34 years old and hadn't appeared in a big-league game since July 2017. The Toronto Blue Jays released him that December with two years and $38 million left on his contract -- an eye-watering figure to just write off, but bone spurs in both heels had wiped out his entire 2018 season, and Toronto had seen enough. (When a team eats $38 million rather than keep you around, that tells you something.)

The Yankees needed a shortstop. Didi Gregorius was still recovering from Tommy John surgery after tearing up his elbow in the 2018 ALDS, and Brian Cashman wasn't about to leave the position empty. So on January 1, 2019, the Yankees agreed to a one-year, league-minimum contract with Tulowitzki -- $555,000, officially announced January 4 -- with a full no-trade clause thrown in almost as a courtesy. Since Toronto was still on the hook for the bulk of what it owed him, New York's actual financial risk was next to nothing. Ten days later they added DJ LeMahieu too. Two low-cost infield fliers instead of chasing Manny Machado, who signed with San Diego that February for $300 million. Cashman built a patchwork. Nobody called it exciting.

A Week Worth Remembering

Tulowitzki won the Opening Day shortstop job in camp, and he made an entrance. In his very first Grapefruit League at-bat that spring -- February 25, against Toronto, the team that had just released him -- he led off with a home run down the right-field line off his former teammate Marcus Stroman, then stared into the Blue Jays' dugout while he rounded the bases. (You don't get released and just let that go quietly.)

The real thing started March 28, Opening Day at the Stadium against Baltimore. Tulowitzki started at short for the first time in a regular-season game in 20 months -- his last one had come in July 2017. His first hit as a Yankee was an eighth-inning double. Two days later, in the Yankees' next game on March 30, he hit his first regular-season home run in pinstripes, a solo shot to right off the Orioles. For a few days, the reclamation story looked like it might actually work.

Five Games, Then Nothing

It ended fast. On April 3, in a 2-1 home loss to Detroit, Tulowitzki left the game after the third inning with left calf tightness. He was diagnosed with a low-grade strain, went on the injured list the next day, and Thairo Estrada came up from Triple-A to replace him. Five games. Eleven at-bats. That was the whole audition.

He never got back on the field. On July 25, 2019, more than three months after his last game, Tulowitzki announced his retirement in a statement the Yankees put out before that night's game against Boston. He thanked Cashman and the organization for letting him "live out another childhood dream" -- wearing pinstripes, even briefly -- and said he wished his body had let the story end differently. Thirteen big-league seasons, a career that once had him mentioned in the same breath as the game's best shortstops, and it wrapped up with a calf strain against Detroit nobody saw coming and everybody should have.

The numbers from Colorado are the real résumé: five All-Star teams, two Gold Gloves, two Silver Sluggers (all of it wrapped up by 2011, before the injuries really started piling on), and a runner-up finish for 2007 NL Rookie of the Year that lost by two points in the closest vote the league had seen since 1980. In September 2010 alone he hit a freakin' 15 home runs, one shy of Ralph Kiner's NL record for the month, and helped drag the Rockies to their first-ever World Series three years before that. None of that happened in New York. The Yankees got five games and one souvenir swing off Marcus Stroman that didn't even count.