It seems all great, young teams need that one guy who’s been through it before. We just saw the Toronto Blue Jays on a World Series chase with Max Scherzer holding court in the dugout every night, and for the 2017 Baby Bomber Yankee team, that man was Matt Holliday… or at least he was before one fateful series in Oakland.
Matt Holliday’s 2017 was a critical one for this writer, as a nascent Joshua Diemert was wrapping up college and covering the Yankees for the very first time, particularly highlighting
how strong Holliday’s early turn as DH was. Joining a team full of youngsters without much expectation, Holliday helped set the tone for one of the most fun Yankee teams I’ve ever seen, in the penultimate season of his Hall of Very, Very Good career.
Matthew Thomas Holliday
Born: January 15, 1980 (Stillwater, OK)
Yankees Tenure: 2017
Holliday was well-established as one of the most talented hitters in baseball, winning four Silver Sluggers and a batting title across 13 seasons with the Colorado Rockies, Oakland Athletics and St. Louis Cardinals. He finished second in NL MVP voting en route to the controversial slide-aided Rocktober National League pennant in 2007, and after a couple trades put him on the Cardinals midway through the 2009 season, the Redbirds inked him to the richest contract in team history at the time, a seven-year, $210 million deal that was worth more than the extension the club originally gave Albert freakin’ Pujols. It certainly worked out well, as Holliday was a four-time All-Star and posted a 154 wRC+ for the Cards in their championship 2011 campaign.
By the time that contract was up, the Yankees were a very young squad with a high ceiling and a whole lot of downside risk. Rookie Aaron Judge would hit eighth (!) on Opening Day, a crazy thing to think about when he was setting out on an MVP-caliber campaign. Gary Sánchez wasn’t going to repeat his Babe Ruth performance from 2016, but it was an open question at the time if he’d regress to a 130 wRC+ bat or a 105. Jacoby Ellsbury — yes, him — was coming off a healthy season for the club but one that he hit well below league average.
Holliday was a pretty classic solution to this kind of downside risk, a high-floor hitter that could secure against some of the growing pains that young hitters will go through. And the gamble worked! Across the first 70 games of Holliday’s time in pinstripes, he was the fourth-best hitter on the club, a more than respectable 133 wRC+ that helped give the Yankees one of the deepest lineups in the sport. He clubbed 15 home runs across that span, but none bigger than the walkoff home run in the game that set the pace for how the whole damn year would go:
All was well in the Bronx, Brian Cashman looked like the smartest GM in the world to put his money behind a mammoth right fielder and an aging DH. Then came Oakland. At some point in the team’s road trip through the then-O.Co Coliseum, Holliday contracted Epstein-Barr virus, which is the virus most commonly associated with mononucleosis, or “mono,” the “kissing disease.” EBV is more frequently spread through contaminated water supplies especially in bathing facilities. We’ll never know exactly how Holliday ended up with EBV, but the ol’ Coliseum never had a reputation for being the cleanest of buildings.
In came fatigue, weakness, and fever, as the viral infection turned Holliday’s bat speed into cloth. He would play just 37 more games for the Yankees that season, with a paltry 35 wRC+ that helped necessitate that big trade with the White Sox for Todd Frazier and others. Holliday would end his career in 2018 where it began, back in Colorado, but certainly left the Bronx with unfinished business — in many ways a microcosm of that entire 2017 squad.
Of course, now Matt Holliday is more known for his genes than just about anything else (outside of dabbling as a volunteer for Oklahoma State baseball, which his brother Josh coaches). Holliday’s eldest son, Jackson, was the first overall pick in the 2022 MLB First-Year Player Draft, and the shortstop-second baseman made his debut with the Baltimore Orioles in 2024. Jackson hasn’t quite matched his father’s early-career output, but the O’s infielder started his career four full years younger than dad did. Meanwhile, Matt’s second son Ethan was just drafted fourth overall in June by the Colorado Rockies — with one more son potentially following after Ethan, the Holliday family’s impact on baseball isn’t done just yet.
See more of the “Yankees Birthday of the Day” series here.
