Josh Donaldson wants to finish his career on a positive note.
The American League’s Most Valuable Player for the 2015 season spoke with Josh Wegman of The Score about his plans for next season and beyond. Donaldson, who turns 38 years old in December, said that he’d be open to playing one more year if he can find the right situation for himself.
“I think at the end of the day it just depends on the situation,” Donaldson said. “If it’s a situation that I feel [comfortable in] then I’m definitely up for playing one more year. But I think after this upcoming season, that would be my last season no matter what. I would like to play one more year and go out on a good note and then that’d be it.
Among the situations that Donaldson would consider is a return to the Blue Jays, as it would allow him to be closer to his fiancée’s family in Toronto.
“I’m definitely looking forward to seeing if [the Blue Jays] reach out,” Donaldson said. “That would definitely be something that I would be interested in doing. That’s just where I’ve always felt like it was home for me. My fiancée, she’s from Toronto. Our kids are half-Canadian. Her family is all up there, which would be great for them to be able to be around all year long. For me, that would be the tip of the iceberg, which would be great and we’ll see what happens.
Donaldson appeared in just 50 games between the New York Yankees and Milwaukee Brewers during the 2023 season. He landed on the Injured List a week into April, returned in June, and got released by the Yankees in August while sporting a batting average of .142 and an OPS of .659 across 33 games.
The Brewers inked Donaldson to a minor-league contract and he joined the team in the middle of September for their playoff push. He went 10-for-59 with three home runs over 17 games with Milwaukee during the regular season and went 2-for-7 with a pair of singles during their Wild Card Series loss to the Arizona Diamondbacks.
The Blue Jays traded Donaldson to Cleveland during the 2018 season and he signed a one-year, show-me deal with the Atlanta Braves in free agency the following winter. After a big year in Atlanta, Donaldson inked a four-year, $92 million deal with the Minnesota Twins. He played out two years of that contract before getting traded to New York for Gio Urshela and Gary Sanchez and slashed a .207/.293/.385 line in two years as a Yankee.
Donaldson can still mash, as he hit 13 home runs in 189 trips to the plate in 2023, so there’s some logic behind the idea that he could be a veteran bench bat for the Blue Jays, a team badly in need of some slugging. But those home runs come with low on-base numbers and a lot of strikeouts, plus it isn’t easy to rely on Donaldson’s body holding up playing defence and running on the artificial turf at the Rogers Centre.
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