Michael Cuddyer retires after 15 year MLB career
Former Minnesota Twins player Michael Cuddyer confirmed on Saturday he is retiring from Major League Baseball.
Cuddyer spent the first 11 years of his career with the Twins. He was a two time All-Star, once with the Twins in 2011 then again in 2013 when he was with Colorado. He also won a National League batting title in 2013 with the Rockies.
He announced his decision in a post on The Players' Tribune, and in it spoke of his time at the Twins, saying joining the franchise was one of the three "best choices" he made in his life, despite admitting he wasn't exactly "fond" of the decision at the time.
"I should have remembered the pitfall of judging something before you give it a chance. From the day I got to Minnesota, I learned another important lesson about professionalism. What I didn’t know was that the Twins organization was on the rise — and the reason was because they did things the right way. From the bottom to the top.
Our lockers had to be in order, our cleats had to be clean, and our infield needed to be errorless. Professionalism off the field translated to it on the field. I remember one time he made me get a new glove because there was a crease in the palm that shouldn’t have been there. Everything had to be perfect. One day one of the players didn’t have his locker arranged in the right order. We came in after practice and every single locker was unpacked in a pile in the middle of the room. It took us forever to sort everything out. But it never happened again.
That mentality was contagious and trickled up throughout the organization. It’s one of reasons we won six division championships in nine years. We didn’t beat ourselves. If you were watching a Twins game from the early 2000s until the end of the decade, you saw how hard we went all of the time. These were lessons that as I got older and began to carry a little veteran clout, I tried to instill in younger players."
Cuddyer finishes his career as a .277 hitter with 197 home runs and 794 RBIs, with three teams the Twins, Rockies and his most recent team, the New York Mets.
