Third baseman Josh Donaldson announced his retirement today on The Mayor’s Office (YouTube link). Back in November, he expressed an openness to playing one more year under the right circumstances, but it now seems he has decided it’s time to hang up his spikes.
Donaldson, now 38, took a winding path to the major leagues and was a late bloomer, but he nonetheless reached incredible heights as a big leaguer once everything aligned.
While playing third base at Auburn University, he began to learn how to catch. The Cubs then selected him as a catcher with the 48th overall pick in the 2007 draft. In July of 2008, he was traded to the Athletics, one of four players going to Oakland in exchange for Rich Harden and Chad Gaudin.
As he climbed the minor league ladder with his new club, his bat was considered ahead of his glove, an understandable situation given that he was relatively new to catching. He made his major league debut in 2010 but hit just .156/.206/.281 in his first 34 plate appearances.
He was stuck in the minors in 2011 and then spent 2012 being shuttled between the majors and the minors, gradually spending more time at third base over that stretch. His breakout season finally came in 2013, when Donaldson was 27 years old. Now done with catching for good, he got into 158 games for the A’s that year as their everyday third baseman. He hit 24 home runs and drew a walk in 11.4% of his plate appearances, only striking out at a 16.5% rate. His .301/.384/.499 batting line translated to a wRC+ of 147 and he got strong grades for his defense at the hot corner, leading to a tally of 7.3 wins above replacement from FanGraphs and 7.2 from Baseball Reference. He finished fourth in American League MVP voting.
Donaldson followed that up with a similarly excellent season in 2014 and the A’s made the postseason for a third straight year, but made a quick playoff exit all three times. The club decided to undergo a huge roster overhaul that winter, a frequent occurrence for the club and its persistent financial concerns. Going into 2015, the club traded away guys like Brandon Moss, Jeff Samardzija and also flipped Donaldson to the Blue Jays for a four-player package.
More to come.