The New York Yankees no longer wanted Alex Verdugo to play left field, so he decided he didn’t want to, either. It was the middle of September—a lifetime before he lifted the team to a 5–4 victory in Game 1 of the American League Division Series against the Kansas City Royals on Saturday—and he found himself in his apartment at midnight with his hand in a bucket of delivery fried chicken and macaroni and cheese, searching for comfort. Something about the moment snapped him out of what he now calls a “spiral.
Man, he thought. I’ve gotta stop.
“There’s two ways you go about it,” he says now. “There’s either you mope about it and you go that depressing way, or you f------ lift up your chin, you f------ put your big boy pants on and you make something happen.”
On Saturday, he made the Yankees’ victory happen. First there was his third-inning single on an 0–2 count that made him the tying run in a game that featured five lead changes. Then there was his sprinting, desperate snare of a sinking liner, clutching the ball against his chest before mercifully finding it with his glove, to end the fourth and save two runs from scoring. He scored the tying run again in the sixth, and finally in the seventh he drove in the go-ahead run.
“He lives for this,” says third baseman Jazz Chisholm, who scored the run Verdugo drove in. “He’s played in big cities before. He played in Boston. He played in L.A.—and I’m not talking about the Angels.”
Late this summer, as Verdugo limped to the worst season of his career, his teammates reminded him: You can make up for a lot of things in the playoffs.
He wanted to make up for a lot. In his first season with the Yankees, he hit .228 in the second half and .154 over the last two weeks of September. The team all but benched him, calling up top prospect—and natural center fielder—Jasson Domínguez and installing him in what Verdugo considers his office.
“I understood,” Verdugo says now. “I put myself in a bad spot. If I played anywhere near remotely to my caliber, we would have never had this situation. So I was like: It was my fault.”
He decided to use his newfound time off to improve. He worked on his swing mechanics, trying to control the way he shifted weight through his left hip rather than crashing into his back side. He called his agent and asked for help eating better; together they found him a personal chef who began incorporating vegetables into his meals in a way he describes as “way over my head.”
Pressed for details, he says, “There’s onions, tomatoes, a bunch of stuff! Kale! Peanuts! Oils!” He adds, “I look at it and I’m like, ‘I don’t know if I’m gonna like this.’ But then I start eating it and I’m like, ‘All right!’”
He began to notice a difference in his energy levels. He found himself hitting fastballs to the opposite field and offspeed pitches up the middle. (“That’s my bread and butter,” he says.) His teammates continued to psych him up. “We've been talking about this from the day I got here,” says Chisholm, who was traded to New York from the Miami Marlins at the deadline. “Like, yeah, he hasn’t had a great season, but watch, he’s gonna go off.”
Meanwhile, Domínguez was struggling. He is only 21 and just over a year removed from Tommy John surgery, which cost him the offseason and the first month of the season. He missed another five weeks with an oblique injury. When Juan Soto arrived before the season to play right field, pushing Aaron Judge to center, the team asked Domínguez to get reps in left, where he had never played professionally before last year or in the majors before August. After the Yankees called him up to challenge Verdugo, Domínguez misplayed three balls in the final 10 days of the season. In only 17 big league games this year, he was worth –3 outs above average, placing him in the bottom sixth of the league for the season. If he continued that pace for a full year, he would be the worst outfielder in the sport by a factor of three.
“There are a few plays, clearly, that have gotten attention, and understandably so,” Yankees general manager Brian Cashman told reporters on Thursday. “This is a very young, high-end prospect who has been dropped into the middle of a pennant race while playing a position he’s still developing in. It’s a tough spot to be in.”
In a bit of gamesmanship, manager Aaron Boone declined to announce a starting left fielder until Saturday morning, but “I had a good idea by the end of the year that I was going to be here,” Verdugo says. “I think everybody else didn’t really know, but I had a pretty good idea.” He began to prepare himself to make up for the regular season.
On Thursday, Boone told Verdugo the move was official. On Saturday, Verdugo did his best to make it permanent.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Alex Verdugo Proves His Worth in Yankees’ Game 1 Win After In-season Benching .
