After 13 seasons in the big leagues, Josh Donaldson has called it a career. The third baseman burst onto the scene with the Oakland A's during the 2012 season, and was a major part of the come-from-behind AL West title that nobody predicted the team would win on the final day of the season.
After starting the year with the A's in Tokyo, he was optioned to Triple-A Sacramento not once, but twice over the course of the year. When he came up in August, he cemented himself at the hot corner and looked like the player that would terrorize opposing pitchers for the next decade.
In 2013, his first full season in the Majors, he hit .301 with a .384 OBP, played stellar defense, and bopped 24 homers. That led him to a fourth place finish in the AL MVP voting since Miguel Cabrera and Mike Trout were in the midst of their battle over the top spot, and Baltimore's Chris Davis hit 53 homers that season.
Donaldson was named to the AL All-Star team in 2014 and would finish top-eight in the MVP voting. Then, he was traded to the Toronto Blue Jays in one of the more lopsided deals that Billy Beane and David Forst have ever made. In exchange for Donaldson, who went on to win the MVP award with the Jays in his first year, the A's received Franklin Barreto, Sean Nolin, Kendall Graveman, and Brett Lawrie.
Nolin spent 29 innings with the A's in 2015 before being selected off waivers by the Brewers. Lawrie played in a career-high 149 games with Oakland in '15 before being traded to the Chicago White Sox for J.B. Wendelken. Barreto made his A's debut in 2017 at the age of 21, but could never quite put it together in the big leagues. He was traded to the Angels for Tommy La Stella during the 2020 season and hasn't been in the majors since.
Kendall Graveman has had lots of recent success as a reliever in recent seasons, bouncing around from the Mariners to the Astros to the White Sox and back to Houston. He appeared in 78 games with the A's, none as a starting pitcher.
A's fans on social media were commenting about how Donaldson tweeted, "they have plenty of money my friend. They just tell everyone they don't" about A's ownership, and then a week later the team traded him. Given the team's collapse and eventual defeat in the wild-card game in 2014, some changes were likely on the way regardless of what Donaldson said about ownership.
Donaldson was with Toronto until 2018, when they traded him to Cleveland for reliever Julian Merryweather. After signing with Atlanta as a free agent ahead of the 2019 season, Donaldson had his last season finishing in the MVP race, placing 11th.
The Twins signed him in 2020, and two years later traded him to the New York Yankees in a stunner of a deal that sent Gary Sanchez and Gio Urshela to Minnesota. Last season in his time with the Yankees, he had 15 hits and ten of those were home runs.
Love him or hate him, Donaldson was definitely a character in the baseball landscape, and his Hall of Fame case will be interesting. According to JAWS, he was roughly the same player as David Wright, if not a little more valuable at his peak and over the course of a full season. That said, only five Hall of Fame third baseman finished their careers with a lower WAR total, and the most recent of those was George Kell who last played in 1957.
José Ramirez is just behind Donaldson in WAR, WAR7, and JAWS, so the question could end up being: is Ramirez a Hall of Famer right now? By the time his career is over he could end up in Adrián Beltré, George Brett, and Chipper Jones territory, but is he a Hall of Fame player with the career he has currently had?
The answer to that question, and whether or not David Wright ultimately gets in after finishing with 6.2% of the vote in his first year of eligibility will give us a good idea of Donaldson's fate on the ballot.
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