What was the strangest late-career signing?

NEW YORK, NY - OCTOBER 03: New York Yankees' Andrew McCutchen #26 waits to hit during batting practice before the American League wild-card game against the Oakland Athletics in the Bronx borough of New York City on Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2018. McCutchen was recently traded from the San Francisco Giants

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Spring training can often bring us some strange sights as players that have been with one or two franchises long-term suddenly pop up in new uniforms. Seeing stars change teams at their peak and don their new threads is one thing, but the guys who have been through most of their careers before popping up somewhere new feel especially jarring. Yesterday, longtime Pirate Andrew McCutchen officially departed Pittsburgh for a chance to make the Texas Rangers on a minor league deal. Now, it was already

clear that the Pirates weren’t interested in bringing McCutchen back for another year after not engaging with him over the offseason, and McCutchen was already traded away from Pittsburgh in 2018, but his return in 2023 felt like the kind of homecoming one makes to ride things out before retirement. Seeing his career now potentially end in a different uniform feels surprising, even if he bounced around to several teams after that trade to San Francisco (including a brief stint here with the Yankees).

The Yankees, of course, are no stranger to this phenomenon, having brought in a wide array of mercenary veterans during and past their prime. Perhaps one of the strangest that sticks out in my memory was seeing Kevin Youkilis don the pinstripes for the 2013 season — though in essence, that signing encapsulated what would be one of the strangest seasons New York played through in the 21st century. That one of the faces of the 2000s Red Sox would get traded away midseason in 2012 and the very next season end up with their archrivals felt inconceivable at the time, regardless of how much he had left in the tank realistically. It still stands out as one of the weirdest looking fits to me, but it’s far from the only one.

New York has seen it happen in reverse to some of their franchise stars when they reached their latter years and the organization decided to move on. Hideki Matsui, for instance, had a legendary 2009 World Series run that capped off a fantastic Yankees career for the slugger, and then he proceeded to take a tour around the league making one-year pitstops in Anaheim, Oakland, and Tampa Bay before retiring.

Outside of the Yankees, one case that’s a textbook example was Joey Votto signing on with the Blue Jays in 2024 after 17 years with the Reds. He wound up getting injured and playing 31 games in the minors for them, but never got the call up before deciding to retire in August of that year — still, we got to see him put on the Jays’ unis in spring and thus got the complete picture for the purposes of jarring Google images a decade down the line. Is there a player that stands out in your mind when you think of guys being in uniforms you’ll never remember them putting on? Who would be the strangest star of today’s game to see in a random one-off uniform five-ten years down the line?

With the World Baseball Classic now in full swing, Andrew will catch us up on yesterday’s action to start the day before Andrés previews Anthony Volpe’s upcoming make-or-break season as he returns from labrum surgery. Nick then covers the promising talent that Francisco Cervelli showcased during his years as the Yankees’ backup catcher to celebrate his birthday, Matt looks at the youth movement going on in Miami for our next team preview, and later in the day I’ll be around to answer your latest mailbag questions.