Longtime Angels Infielder Announces Immediate Retirement

Former Angels infielder David Fletcher tried extending his career in professional baseball like few before him have.

After getting into five games with the Atlanta Braves in April 2024 as a second baseman, Fletcher resurfaced with the Braves' Triple-A affiliate in May as a knuckleball pitcher.

More news: Angels Pitcher Retiring Following Conclusion of 2025 Season

A conversion that often proves futile for even the best athletes worked for Fletcher — for a time. By the end of the 2024 season, he had pitched exactly 100 innings across Double-A and Triple-A.

Yet by 2025, Fletcher was back to hitting primarily. He threw one inning at the Triple-A level and slashed .180 in 67 Triple-A games. Last week, Fletcher elected free agency. Tuesday, he retired. Robert Murray of FanSided.com was first to report the news.

Fletcher played out the 2025 season on the last year of the five-year, $26 million contract extension he originally signed with the Angels in April 2021.

From 2018-23, Fletcher slashed .277/.323/.359 in 534 games with the Angels in a variety of roles. Primarily an infielder, Fletcher earned the extension by slashing .298/.356/.395 from 2019-20, his first two seasons in the league.

More news: Angels Right-Handed Pitcher Elects Free Agency

As a 26-year-old in 2020, Fletcher led the Angels in hits (66), doubles (13), batting average (.319) during the pandemic-shortened season. Even in a small sample, that was no small feat on a team with two perennial American League MVP contenders in Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout.

But the 2021 season saw Fletcher post a .262 batting average, .287 on-base percentage, .324 slugging percentage, and .622 OPS (70 OPS+) — all career lows. His defensive versatility allowed him to accumulate 1.6 bWAR over 157 games, but his bat continued to regress in the years that followed.

In 2022, Fletcher slashed .255/.288/.333 (76 OPS+). In April 2023, Fletcher was 2 for 16 when he was outrighted to Triple-A Salt Lake. He would return to the majors for two sepearate stints later in the year but finished with a .247/.302/.326 slash line and 72 OPS+.

A Cypress native, Fletcher's rapid rise from being a sixth-round draft pick out of Loyola Marymount in 2015 to a starting middle infielder in Anaheim five years later was an exciting, if fleeting, hometown success story.

"This is the type of guy, the type of DNA we want in this organization," Angels general manager Perry Minasian said after Fletcher's contract extension became official.

Fletcher retires with a career batting average of .276, 16 home runs and 170 RBIs.

Latest Angels News

For more Angels news, head over to Angels on SI.