“I was just trying to get on base, and I ended up hitting a home run,” LeMahieu, who in January of this year inked a new contract extension with the Yankees, said. “It seems like we spent the entire year doing it. We simply fought back when faced with hardship.
That at-bat, for LeMahieu, whose composure and humility are just as evident as his all-around hitting ability, was a microcosm of his first season in pinstripes—actually, of his entire career. He was not, from the start, a Major League star. That’s a little more accurate—a player who consistently put in a lot of work throughout the course of the season and gradually improved to the highest level among major league players
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Out of Brother Rice High School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, LeMahieu was selected by the Detroit Tigers in the 41st round of the 2007 Draft. He didn’t sign with the hometown team, instead enrolling at collegiate powerhouse LSU, where he helped lead the Tigers to the 2009 College World Series title. During that run, the Chicago Cubs grabbed LeMahieu in the second round of the 2009 Draft, and he signed his first professional contract at 21 years old. He made it to the big leagues after two seasons in the Minors, splitting his time in 2011 between Chicago and the team’s top two affiliates. During the offseason before the 2012 campaign, the Cubs traded LeMahieu to Colorado, and that’s where the steady maturation really began for the second baseman.
LeMahieu split his first two seasons in the Rockies organization between the big league club and the Minors, playing 109 games for Colorado in 2013. In 2014, he came up for good, batting .267 with five home runs and 42 RBIs in 149 games while also taking home a Gold Glove Award at second base. For many of those games in 2013 and 2014, LeMahieu shared the middle infield with perennial All-Star shortstop Troy Tulowitzki, the team’s unquestioned leader and an icon in Colorado.
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