Even the people who like Josh Donaldson know he’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Maybe it was the haircut, or the attitude, or the lasers he’d smack all over the field to beat you on any given day. He’s the kind of player that you love to hate when he’s on the other team.
Sure, Donaldson, a former American League MVP, can be a handful. He’s battled with opponents and umpires, and even his own teammates and coaches. But his fire burns from deep inside, stoked by what Donaldson calls “a pretty crazy childhood.” Now at 36, entering his 12th major league season, Donaldson’s clubhouse presence could be what makes or breaks the Yankees in 2022.
“He’s everything you want in a winning player,” says Alex Anthopolous, who acquired Donaldson twice as General Manager of the Blue Jays (in 2014) and the Braves (2018). “The way he plays and the way he goes about it, you can’t help but immediately have a ton of respect for.”
Anthopolous spent two years in Los Angeles from 2016-17 and people there still talk about Kirk Gibson’s impact when he joined the Dodgers in 1988: ramping up the intensity, winning the National League MVP, and leading them to the World Series. Anthopolous thinks Donaldson brings a similar quality to the Yankees.
"He just brings a level of expectation. There’s an impact on everyone around him where you feel like you need to do the same. He’s all about winning. And I think in between the lines Josh Donaldson brings a swagger to your team, a competitive fire, a confidence. He exudes it, really.”
“He will give the Yankees that edge that I think they need,” says former Blue Jays manager John Gibbons.
A fire. An edge. These are the things people around Donaldson talk about the most. But where does it come from?
“I had to learn from adversity and intense moments from a young age,” Donaldson said last month in Tampa. “It wasn’t necessarily great for me, but I don’t think I’m here today if some of those things didn’t happen.”
Donaldson was born in Pensacola, Florida, and his parents divorced when he was just four years old. Then his father was imprisoned for 15 years for drug related and domestic violence crimes.
“Most of the males on that side of the family are either dead or in jail,” Donaldson told The San Francisco Chronicle’s Susan Slusser in 2013. Despite the troubles, he did maintain a relationship with his father growing up.
But Donaldson’s close bond with his mother, Lisa French, is what helped him navigate all the turmoil. She’s also the one who helped sports become a regular part of his life. He would go on to become a baseball and football star at Faith Academy in Mobile, Alabama, and earned a baseball scholarship to Auburn University.
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Though it wasn’t the fairytale, all-American upbringing, it is this childhood that shaped Donaldson so profoundly that a main focus of his charitable foundation is helping children who are growing up in single parent households.
“I had to be aware about decisions from a very early age, that if I made mistakes I might not be able to get a second chance like most people. So that’s probably where some of that intensity comes from, that fire,” he said.
Donaldson was a first round pick out of Auburn by the Cubs in 2007, but didn’t become a big league regular until 2013 with Oakland. In 2014 the A’s lost an epic wildcard game to eventual American League Champion Kansas City, but that’s where the seeds were planted for Donaldson to be the type of player, the type of leader he would become.
Oakland had acquired veterans Adam Dunn and Jonny Gomes in trade deadline deals in 2014. In mid-September, as the regular season was winding down, the A’s were in a battle for the AL Wild Card. Gomes (who had also been with Oakland two years earlier) and Dunn went out to dinner with Donaldson, and the mission seemed to be to instill in a budding star the attitude he needed to emotionally take his game to the next level. It was a conversation Donaldson said he wasn’t quite ready for.
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“We’re only going as far as you take us,” Dunn, owner of 462 major league home runs and playing in the final month of his 14-year career, told the 28-year old Donaldson, who had just made his first All-Star team.
“I wanted him to realize that he’s the baddest dude on the field,” Dunn says almost eight years later. “There’s a lot of young guys you can’t put that much pressure on early, but I felt like he’s wired different, as everybody knows. I just didn’t know if he realized how good he is and that people look up to him.”
And veteran status wasn’t the driving force as far as Gomes was concerned.
“He had a lot of superstar characteristics, but some people thought it was a little early to showcase,” Gomes says. “I was not one of those. I was always poking the bear to let those characteristics come out.”
After the Royals completed a remarkable comeback win in the 2014 Wild Card Game to end Oakland’s season, as Donaldson left the losing clubhouse, a little light went on in his head.
“I wonder if there’s a different way I need to go about this,” Donaldson said to himself. “Like, there would definitely be times where I felt like I should say something (to the team) but I didn’t because I didn’t think it was my place. But obviously there were other people in the clubhouse who thought it should have been me. And so I took that to heart. I didn’t want to have another season like that where if I thought something was going on that I would miss it, that it might hurt us down the line. And I think that’s when I started to grasp that leadership role.”
Donaldson hasn’t been shy about speaking his mind since. He is a willing instigator, challenging teammates to be better, prowling the clubhouse like a beast of the jungle. As his intensity rises, he tries to get others to rise to the same level.
One month after that eye-opening playoff loss, Donaldson was traded to Toronto. In 2015 he won the American League MVP, hitting 41 home runs with a league-leading 123 RBI, and led the Blue Jays to their first American League East Division title in more than 20 years. He finished 4th in the MVP voting in 2016 and led the Blue Jays to the playoffs again before a series of leg injuries caused him to miss 159 games in 2017-18.
Back with the GM and the training staff that knew him from his best years in Toronto, Donaldson enjoyed a bounce back season in 2019 with Atlanta and won Comeback Player of The Year. There, Donaldson tried to do for some of the younger Braves players, like rookie Austin Riley, what Dunn and Gomes had done for him.
“I was trying to be that guy for Austin, because I know how important it can be,” he told The Athletic.
In 2021, Riley became one of the best young players in the league and helped lead Atlanta to a World Series title.
After two years with the Twins, Donaldson, who played 135 games last year and produced an .827 OPS with 26 home runs, now joins the Yankees. It’s not impossible to think his presence could cause a similar awakening in a player like Gleyber Torres, or even Aaron Judge, to push them to the next level.
Normally, a former MVP like Donaldson would slide right into the Yankees lineup without much debate. But as Dunn said, this dude is wired differently.
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“He’s going to piss some people off in the clubhouse, but he’s going to lace them up and play hard every day.”
“I never had a problem with JD, but he’s certainly a lot. Everything about that guy is magnetic.”
These are the things former teammates – ones who liked him, but preferred to remain anonymous – say about Donaldson. They know firsthand that his Alpha male personality doesn’t always mesh seamlessly with 25 other guys in a clubhouse.
“I can promise you it doesn’t,” says Dunn. “But that’s kinda what I liked about him. He’s gonna rub some people the wrong way. And you know what? That’s okay.”
Watching Donaldson show up to play, Dunn says, is what matters.
“You’re not going to outwork him. You can say whatever you want about somebody, but until you see the guy at 1:00 in the weight room or 2:00 in the cage every single day trying to get his body and mind right to play, what else is left to say?”
“The people that he rubbed the wrong way, I think, were not confident players,” Gomes adds. “I told dudes that we’re trying to win some ballgames here, not trying to make new friends. This is a results driven industry. So if he does rub you the wrong way you’re going to have to harden up.”
“He’s an energy that good teams need,” is how Braves coach Sal Fasano describes it. “He brings the attitude of, ‘Play as hard as me, perform at my level, and be as intense as me!’”
When Anthopolous speaks about Donaldson’s personality and clubhouse presence, he is reminded of a quote attributed to legendary Alabama football coach Nick Saban: High achievers don’t like mediocre people and mediocre people don’t like high achievers.
“Josh Donaldson is a high achiever,” Anthopolous says. “He demands 100 percent, and excellence from everyone around him. That’s why he’s a winner.”
Or, as Dunn puts it, “He’s gonna rub some people the wrong way, but if they’re not about everything he’s about then I’d question them.”
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The one thing left to wonder about Donaldson is how he fits not just into the Yankees clubhouse, but into New York the town and all the extra attention that comes with it.
“I think it’s a match made in heaven,” says Dunn. “He’s able to take a lot of negative stuff and use it as fuel, and a lot of people can’t do that.”
Donaldson knows what the AL East grind is all about from his days in Toronto. So does Gomes, who played with both Tampa Bay and Boston during his 13-year career.
“He is absolutely made for this environment,” says Gomes. “This is one dude that doesn’t shy away from the big at-bat, the big moment, the big situation. And the thing that drives greatness in those big markets are results, flat out.”
“I think he’s going to be adored by the (Yankees) fan base because you can’t help but admire the way he goes about it and the way he plays,” Anthopolous says. “He grinds at-bats, he’s a winning player, has toughness and intensity, very good defensive player, great athlete. He will thrive in that environment. He’s a big time player and he’s going to become a fan favorite very fast.”
And to become a leader in the Yankees clubhouse, Donaldson knows that will take time.
“I’ll try to get to know the guys first,” Donaldson says. “They know that I care about the game because I played against a lot of these guys. They kind of know what kind of competitor I am.”
Donaldson seems an easy-going type during a spring training clubhouse conversation. But it’s clear that there will be a different energy when the regular season starts. And as he reaches into where the fire comes from, Donaldson will rely on the things that drove him there in the first place.
“I think I’ve always kind of had that chip on my shoulder,” Donaldson says. “As a kid growing up I was never the best on my travel ball teams. Just kind of knowing that I had to work harder than everybody – that’s what I felt like at least. Really just from a heart aspect of the game, I was just like, ‘I’m not gonna stop, I’m not gonna stop.’”
That’s an attitude that plays well in New York. And if he hits lasers all over Yankee Stadium, he will no longer be the player you love to hate.
Follow Sweeny Murti on Twitter: @YankeesWFAN
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