Jason Giambi announces retirement

Following a 20-year career that included an MVP trophy, a mega free-agent contract and a steroid scandal, Jason Giambi announced Monday he is retiring.

Jason Giambi had an amazing career in Major League Baseball, at least from a perception perspective.

Giambi traversed a path from rising prospect, to established star, to MVP, to free-agent darling, to steroid pariah, to part-time player, to beloved veteran.

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And he did it over two decades in the big leagues that ended on Monday.

Giambi announced his retirement in a statement to the New York Daily News.

The statement was the typical retirement speech—thanking family and friends, thanking his agent and his sponsors, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Giambi was a second-round pick by the Oakland Athletics out of Long Beach State in the 1992 amateur draft and reached the big leagues in May 1995.

His rise mirrored that of the A’s, who culminated a major overhaul in the late 1990s with four straight playoff berths from 2000-03.

Giambi was a part of two of those playoff runs, earning American League MVP honors in 2000 after hitting .333/.476/.647 with 43 homers and 137 RBI. After finishing second in the MVP voting in 2001 following a .342/.477/.660, 38-homer, 120-RBI campaign, Giambi signed seven-year, $120 million contract with the New York Yankees.

He hit 41 homers in each of his first two seasons in New York, but by 2003, his slash line had dropped to .250/.312/.527 and he led the AL with 140 strikeouts.

After an injury-plagued 2004 season, Giambi was outed in a December 2004 article in the San Francisco Chronicle as testifying to a grand jury in the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative case (also known as Operation Get Barry Bonds) that he had used steroids both before and after signing with the Yankees.

In February 2005, Giambi issued a strange apology … for something. He repeatedly talked about how he “let down the fans,” all the while never saying what it was he had done to do so.

“I know the fans might want more,” Giambi said during that Feb. 11, 2005, press conference. “But because of all the legal matters, I can’t get into specifics. Someday, hopefully, I will be able to.”

Giambi quietly played out the remainder of his deal in New York, hitting .247/.373/.502 with 32 homers in 2008 before returning to Oakland as a free agent on a one-year, $4 million deal. He hit .193 with 11 homers in 83 games and was released in August, landing with the Colorado Rockies, where he remained as a bench bat and occasional first basemen through the 2012 season.

Giambi was a finalist for the Rockies’ managerial job after the 2012 season, eventually losing out to Walt Weiss, and went to the Cleveland Indians, where he played two more seasons as a reserve and pseudo-coach.

Coaching and managing are likely in Giambi’s immediate future. Cleveland skipper Terry Francona told WKNR in Cleveland during spring training in 2013 that Giambi is a “manager-in-waiting.”

For his career, Giambi hit .277/.399/.516 in 2,260 games, with 440 home runs and 1,441 RBI—numbers that might have made him a borderline Hall of Fame candidate once upon a time.

But baseball-reference.com’s Hall of Fame monitoring of statistics show him to fall short—and that’s not even taking into consideration the performance-enhancing drug issues that many of the holier than thou members of the Baseball Writers Association of America electorate will cling to until the end of days as a reason for denying players induction into the Hall of Fame, as well at hot dogs and apple pie.

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