How Donaldson’s relentless drive hypercharged a struggling Blue Jays team

TORONTO — Closing out the 2023 season with the National League Central champion Milwaukee Brewers left Josh Donaldson feeling re-energized. Some adjustments he’d found difficult to make earlier in the year with the New York Yankees started to take, the quality of his at-bats improved and his body responded well enough that he wanted a little more run on the field.

Once the off-season hit, he kept working out, but in late December leading into his January wedding to long-time girlfriend Briana, constantly surrounded by daughters Aubrey, 3, and Lilly, 1, other family and friends, it struck the 38-year-old how rarely he had time to enjoy the people in his life. He felt like he was missing out. “That definitely started changing my mind,” he says.

“I came back from vacation and I’m just like, I’m not going to work out anymore, really, unless something were to blow me away, which I wasn’t expecting. That was going to be it,” Donaldson continues over the phone Tuesday from his Alabama home. “There were teams that showed interest, but it wasn’t anything that I would say was too serious. And I’m sure some of that was teams not wanting to offend me (by offering a minor-league contract).”

No matter, mentally, he’d already started the transition into retirement mode after 13 seasons in the majors that included an American League MVP award in 2015 and three all-star games, a decision he revealed Monday during an appearance on The Mayor’s Office with Sean Casey.

Already, he’s making plans for how to channel the searing intensity that became one of his trademarks, especially during his four memorable seasons with the Toronto Blue Jays from 2015-18, with golf front and centre. He’s planning to play on the Lite Scratch Tour, an amateur circuit featuring “a bunch of former golfers, college golfers, just for something to get the juices flowing and something to have a goal to work towards.”

Donaldson isn’t necessarily pursuing a pro career on the links, but as the retirement decision loomed, Briana often asked him, “‘What are you going to be obsessed about now?’” he recalls. 

“Baseball is something I always obsessed over. I’m either all in or I’m all out, that’s just my personality,” he continues. “Being with my family and being able to play golf — I’ve always had a passion for golf, as well — it’s fun to be like, I don’t have to leave now and I can do the things that I’ve thought about doing when baseball was over.”

That all-in approach was transformative for the Blue Jays during his time in Toronto, where his relentless drive helped hypercharge a team struggling to emerge from a 21-year post-season drought. Acquired from the Oakland Atheltics for Brett Lawrie, Kendall Graveman, Sean Nolin and Franklin Barreto in one of former general manager Alex Anthopoulos’ signature moves.

Donaldson joined with free-agent add Russell Martin to immediately transform the club’s personality, complementing Jose Bautista’s fire and Edwin Encarnacion’s steely determination.

The Blue Jays fully took off when Anthopoulos patched up roster flaws midway through the season en route to a 93-69 finish and an AL East title, a remarkable second-half run ending in a six-game loss to the World-Series champion Kansas City Royals in the AL Championship Series.

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“It worked out so well because the lineup that we had, the coaching staff that we had, the training staff that we had, everybody was ready to win and had the desire to do that,” says Donaldson. “I knew what it took to win because I’d won before, not a World Series, but I’d won a lot of games in Oakland (going to the post-season three times) … So I knew what the formula is supposed to look like. I just knew that I had to come in there and take care of myself first so that people would be like, OK, he’s having success, he knows the deal about this. Once that happened, the questions started coming to me. I wasn’t the one saying, ‘Hey, this is what we’ve got to do.’ I just sat back early on and let my teammates build the trust in me to come toward me if they had questions. I didn’t always have the answer. And I would tell them that. But if I had the answer, I would say this is what I feel like we need to do.”

To that end, the priority was in doing everything necessary to ensure personal performance, within a framework and mindset around doing whatever is necessary to win a game. Donaldson believed that his personal numbers would be better if the team was successful, which made him willing to shoot a ball the other way to beat a defensive shift, or charge hard after any ball hit remotely near his direction in the field. 

“That was the message I always spread to all the guys on my team and especially guys that are going to arbitration, guys that are trying to go into free agency,” he says. “If you focus on putting yourself in the best position to succeed and on winning the ballgame, then if your team is having success, you’re probably going to have a part in that. It’s not about the business side of the game when you’re on the field. Take all of the money and playing time, whatever it is that guys could get disgruntled about, take that and throw that out the door when you get here. It’s natural to have those feelings. But when you step into the clubhouse, that doesn’t matter anymore. We’re here to focus on winning and how can we bring out the best version of each and every single guy that’s in the clubhouse.”

That mentality was forged during Donaldson’s difficult development path to stardom, when he equated himself to a student writing a math exam without having understood the relevant formulas, at times grasping for quick fixes just to get a hit on a given night. Over time, he became very attuned to the very specific things needed for him to do damage at the plate, and that was the springboard to his eventual success.

“A lot of big-leaguers are very good at certain things, but overall, I would say big-leaguers, either they don’t want to know necessarily what makes them successful or they don’t know what makes them successful,” he says. “For me, I wasn’t able to get to the big-leagues strictly on talent. I had to figure out a way to answer the problems that I was facing. And by doing that, I felt like I had a better understanding of how I wanted to accomplish things and how I needed to go about it, versus just relying strictly on talent.”

Over time, as the game changed and hitters began to rarely see the same pitcher multiple times in the same game and teams cycled through an endless array of live-armed relievers, the math questions at the plate became more difficult to solve because, “you’re constantly on the fly.” A series of soft-tissue injuries that started with calf problems in 2017 also began to take their toll, exacerbated by the unusual season buildups in the pandemic season of 2020 and lockout-shortened spring of 2022. 

Before he joined the Brewers last September, Donaldson says he spoke to Blue Jays GM Ross Atkins about a possible return north and “we were trying to make something happen.”

“I let him know the interest I had. At the end of the day he’s got to make decisions for his ball club and I respect the fact that he reached out and made calls toward me,” Donaldson adds. “I’m very much in tune with the business side of baseball and understand it. It’s not something that hurt my feelings or anything like that.” 

That’s why even as he concedes this “very much was a weird off-season,” he figured the free-agent market would be relatively slow and understood his situation wouldn’t be resolved quickly. Eventually, “I just came to the point where I was like, I feel happy and proud that I was blessed enough to have the career that I had.” 

“Not everybody can have a fairy-tale ending like Albert Pujols did when he was going out, banging a bunch of home runs,” Donaldson adds. “Would I have liked for that to happen? Of course. That wasn’t how the cards played out and I’m OK with that.”

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