Troy Tulowitzki hopes legacy goes deeper than stats,
It was four years ago Monday that Troy Tulowitzki made his debut for the Blue Jays, then a .495 team that sat fourth in the American League East, eight games back of the divisionleading New York Yankees and three games out of a tight race for a wild-card spot.
Even now, Tulowitzki, who announced his retirement last Thursday after 13 seasons, can’t say he was pleased by the “abrupt” trade to Toronto by the Colorado Rockies, the only club he had ever known after more than nine years.
“Obviously, I did not expect when I got traded it (would be) to a new country and a team at the time that was below .500. I thought the whole time that I was going to go to a team that was sitting pretty in first place,” Tulowitzki said on a conference call.
Little did the shortstop know that his deal — along with reliever LaTroy Hawkins for shortstop Jose Reyes and pitching prospects Jeff Hoffman, Miguel Castro and Jesus Tinoco — would be the first of two bold moves at the 2015 trade deadline. The Jays also acquired lefthander David Price from Detroit, and went on to reach the AL Championship Series that fall and the next.
“Sure enough, we made a run that year, got into the playoffs and the next year we had a good team as well, back in the playoffs,” Tulowitzki said. “That experience was fun, man. There was some great times, some great teammates.”
Tulowitzki focused on the fond memories of 31⁄ seasons as a Jay, but it was also a time when injuries took a major toll. The 34-year-old was putting together a hall-of-fame-calibre career until 2017, when he suffered a severe ankle injury in late July. He missed all of 2018 following surgery on bone spurs in his heels and was released last December, despite $38 million (U.S.) remaining on a deal through 2020 — money Toronto is still on the hook for. He attempted a comeback with the Yankees, but played just five games before suffering a strained left calf on April 3.
For a man who prides himself on eating, sleeping and breathing baseball, the game became less enjoyable when he could no longer perform at a high level no matter how hard he tried.
“I talked to people that I was close to and told them my decision (to retire) and everybody kind of seemed to agree,” he said. “I gave it everything I’ve got. My body was just going south on me.”
What makes Tulowitzki happy, outside of time with friends and family and watching 5year-old son Taz grow up, is being out on a diamond helping others. He knew early on that coaching was in his future and it didn’t take long to land his first job at the University of Texas as an assistant. He said he looks forward to helping develop well-rounded players.
“Being a teammate, being a friend, being someone that played the game the right way was definitely more important than, say, my stats. And I say that because when I did retire, the texts, the phone calls, everything I got, no one said, ‘Hey man, it’s incredible how many home runs you hit and it’s crazy what your fielding percentage was,’ ” Tulowitzki said. “It’s not about the numbers. It’s about you as a human being and if you did everything you possibly could.”