Yankees Magazine: DJ LeMahieu
Minute Maid Park was deafening the entire night, but now it had reached another level. DJ LeMahieu — coming off an explosive first season with the Yankees in which he swatted a career-high 26 homers and drove in a career-best 102 runs — stepped into the batter’s box. The Astros had their closer, Roberto Osuna, on the mound, and stood just two outs away from the 2019 World Series.
Everyone who made up the sea of orange knew that this was the moment. Thousands of towels waved through the air. With a runner on first, one of the most dangerous hitters in the American League was at the dish with a chance to keep things going or maybe even tie the game. If he failed, the Yankees’ season would be on life support.
Osuna missed with a 95-mph cutter on his first pitch, then blew a 98-mph fastball past LeMahieu. The Yankees’ infielder caught up to the third pitch, another 98-mph fastball, fouling it off. Osuna threw a slider that missed the plate with his fourth pitch, bringing the count to 2-2. The right-hander, who had led the league with 38 saves, followed with two fastballs in the high 90s, a changeup and another fastball that registered 99 mph on the radar gun. LeMahieu continued to battle, fouling off each of those offerings. Osuna’s ninth pitch, another fastball, missed the strike zone. The count was full.
The expression on LeMahieu’s face was stoic and serene. It was almost as if he didn’t blink during the marathon at-bat, despite being in the center of a cauldron of noise and dealing with the pressure of trying to save the season.
Osuna had thrown everything he had at LeMahieu; this had already been an epic battle between two of the most talented players at their respective crafts. On the 10th pitch, Osuna went back to his cutter, and finally, LeMahieu was able to drive it.
LeMahieu got just enough of the baseball, sending it to right field and into the first row of seats, barely beyond the reach of Astros right fielder George Springer. Suddenly, the ballpark was quiet. Fans were no longer waving their orange rally towels. LeMahieu pumped his fist once as he rounded first base, but retained the stone-faced “the game is not over yet” expression he had during the long at-bat. The game was tied, 4-4, and the Yankees’ season, for now, was still intact.
“I was just trying to get on base, and I ended up hitting a home run,” says LeMahieu, who signed a new six-year deal with the Yankees this past January. “I felt like that’s what we did that whole year. When we had to deal with adversity, we just fought back.”
For LeMahieu, whose humility and calm demeanor are as prominent as his all-world hitting prowess, that at-bat was a microcosm of his first season in pinstripes, and really, his entire career. A Major League star from Day 1 he was not. A player who worked hard year in and year out, and over time slowly elevated his game to the top tier of big leaguers, well, that’s a little more accurate.
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Out of Brother Rice High School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, LeMahieu was selected by the Detroit Tigers in the 41st round of the 2007 Draft. He didn’t sign with the hometown team, instead enrolling at collegiate powerhouse LSU, where he helped lead the Tigers to the 2009 College World Series title. During that run, the Chicago Cubs grabbed LeMahieu in the second round of the 2009 Draft, and he signed his first professional contract at 21 years old. He made it to the big leagues after two seasons in the Minors, splitting his time in 2011 between Chicago and the team’s top two affiliates. During the offseason before the 2012 campaign, the Cubs traded LeMahieu to Colorado, and that’s where the steady maturation really began for the second baseman.
LeMahieu split his first two seasons in the Rockies organization between the big league club and the Minors, playing 109 games for Colorado in 2013. In 2014, he came up for good, batting .267 with five home runs and 42 RBIs in 149 games while also taking home a Gold Glove Award at second base. For many of those games in 2013 and 2014, LeMahieu shared the middle infield with perennial All-Star shortstop Troy Tulowitzki, the team’s unquestioned leader and an icon in Colorado.
“Tulo was a guy who went out of his way to help me,” LeMahieu says. “I don’t think I would be the player I am today without having played with him because he challenged me. He challenged me to be better when I thought that the ceiling was what I did in 2013 or 2014, but I kept getting better after that. Tulo was the one person who would challenge me to be better than I thought I could be.”
LeMahieu took on that challenge, working to raise his own personal bar. In 2015, a season that saw Tulowitzki leave town in a July trade to Toronto, LeMahieu batted .301 and earned his first All-Star selection. In 2016, the second baseman took a quantum leap, leading the Majors with a .348 batting average.
It was also the difficulty of climbing baseball’s proverbial ladder that LeMahieu believes helped him immensely.
“A lot of hard work paid off,” he says. “But so did a lot of failure. I picked myself up after failing on a lot of occasions. I was a good player, but not a great player. I knew there was more in me, and I was always trying to improve.”
LeMahieu won Gold Glove Awards in 2017 and 2018, and he earned a second All-Star selection during the 2017 season, which he finished with a .310 batting average. That individual success was accompanied for the first time by a team accomplishment. After a long drought, the Rockies returned to the postseason in 2017 and 2018.
“As a team, we had some tough years,” he says. “But making the playoffs in my last two seasons was an important accomplishment for that group, and going through that experience helped me improve. I was finally playing in games that had playoff implications every day in the regular season, and then in postseason games with all the pressure in the world. It’s hard not to grow as a player from that.”
LeMahieu hit the free-agent market in November 2018. It appeared likely that the then-30-year-old’s resume, his reputation as a good teammate, and the many productive years presumably ahead of him would land him a long-term contract. But as unpredictable as the sport itself is, so, too, was the market for top-flight free agents leading into the 2019 season. As he had done so many times before, Yankees general manager Brian Cashman seized the opportunity to bring in a player he believed would make a difference for his team, signing LeMahieu to a two-year contract.
LeMahieu’s arrival in New York came with little fanfare. The contract didn’t rival those of the other high-profile players in the sport or even on the team in terms of financial compensation. Of even greater significance, LeMahieu — a two-time All-Star, three-time Gold Glove Award winner and batting champion — wasn’t even guaranteed a starting position. Instead, he was joining an infield already comprised of everyday players who had locked down their respective positions.
“I was just excited to be a Yankee,” LeMahieu says. “I was surprised that they had interest in me because they had such a young, up-and-coming and talented infield already. But I had watched the Yankees from afar before that, and I admired the group they had in New York. I didn’t exactly know how much I was going to play or where I was going to play, but I knew that I could help the Yankees in one way or another.”
A few months prior to LeMahieu’s arrival, Didi Gregorius, the team’s popular shortstop for the previous four seasons, underwent Tommy John surgery on this throwing arm. His return was projected for midway through the 2019 season. That development compelled Cashman to bring in Tulowitzki — whose lifelong dream was to play for the Yankees, but whose career had been ravaged by injuries in the two seasons before that — as a stopgap.
Tulowitzki realized his dream of wearing the pinstripes, but it was short-lived. After just five games and one home run, the former All-Star would again fall victim to injury, this time effectively forcing his retirement at 34 years old.
Ironically, it was LeMahieu — a reserve on Opening Day — who would fill the void. Taking the field at first base, second base and third base while Gleyber Torres handled the shortstop duties, all LeMahieu did during that time was hit at a .323 clip and give the team solid defense at all three positions.
“People were surprised that DJ came to the Yankees and suddenly became one of the best players in the American League,” Tulowitzki said after his retirement. “But I don’t know why anyone would have expected anything different. He was a great player in Colorado, and he was only getting better when he left. For the Yankees, it was an incredible signing. What really is the surprising thing is that there wasn’t more competition from other teams for DJ. The rest of baseball missed out on an all-time great player.”
When Gregorius returned to the field on June 7, manager Aaron Boone knew that regardless of who was healthy among an infield cast that included Torres, Luke Voit and Gio Urshela, among other options, LeMahieu had to be in the lineup.
LeMahieu finished the 2019 season with a team-leading .327 average. Additionally, he set new career highs with 197 hits, 26 home runs, 102 RBIs and 33 doubles. A below-the-radar free-agent acquisition a few months prior, LeMahieu finished fourth in the AL MVP voting.
“It all came together for me with the Yankees in terms of consistency and raising the level of my game,” he says. “I just feel like getting over the humps I had dealt with prior to that made me stronger, and it was just my time when I got to New York.”
LeMahieu’s time stretched into the postseason. His game-tying home run in Game 6 of the ALCS pushed his batting average to .346 in that series. But it ended up
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