NEW YORK — The 29-year-old outfielder, who spent the 2024 season with the Yankees had one more chance to prove he belonged in the major leagues. That chance seems to have gone.
The San Diego Padres have released him. He had signed with San Diego on a minor league deal in March. Alex Verdugo now is set to undergo season-ending shoulder surgery.
The news lands hard for a player who has spent the better part of two seasons trying to find his footing after a steep decline. Verdugo has not played a major league game since 2025. By the time the 2027 season begins, assuming no work stoppage, he will have been away from MLB for roughly 20 months.
The road back just got much longer. For the Yankees, who once bet a full season on him, his story is a cautionary tale about how fast careers can turn.
Verdugo’s time with the Yankees and what went wrong
Verdugo arrived in the Bronx before the 2024 season via trade from the Boston Red Sox. He was part of a Yankees outfield that needed production and reliability. He delivered neither at the level the Yankees needed.
In four seasons with the Red Sox, Verdugo posted a .761 OPS. He was considered a solid, professional hitter with good contact skills and reliable defense. Those numbers declined sharply the moment he put on a Yankees uniform.
With the Yankees in 2024, Verdugo posted a .647 OPS. He started the season well but hit just .233 in the second half. That was the lowest mark for any full season in his career.
The Yankees played him 149 times that season and used him through the postseason. Despite that investment of playing time, he earned just a one-year, $1.5 million deal from the Atlanta Braves when he hit free agency in March 2025. That contract told the full story of how the market valued him after his Yankees year.
A brutal 2025 with Atlanta accelerated the decline
The Braves gave Verdugo a chance to reset. It did not go as planned.
He appeared in 56 games for Atlanta in 2025 and posted a career-low .585 OPS. His slash line read .239/.296/.289. He managed a minus-0.3 bWAR and did not hit a single home run in 213 plate appearances.
Atlanta released him in July 2025. The market’s response was silence. No team claimed him. No team offered a contract. He spent the remainder of 2025 without an MLB organization.
That kind of exit from a roster does not happen by accident. Teams across baseball had evaluated Verdugo’s recent production and decided he did not fit their needs, even as a bench player or depth option.
The Padres deal that ended before it started
The San Diego Padres signed Verdugo to a minor league contract in March 2026. It was a low-risk move. A chance for Verdugo to rebuild value in the minors and potentially earn a big league look if his performance justified it.
He did not break camp with the Padres. He did not appear in any minor league games. The shoulder injury surfaced and the path forward collapsed. According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, Verdugo will undergo season-ending surgery. The Padres released him shortly after.
It is unclear whether the shoulder issue had been developing before he signed or whether it emerged during spring training. Either way, the result is the same. Verdugo has gone from playing Yankees postseason games in 2024 to being a released minor leaguer facing surgery in 2026.
A career that promised more than it delivered
Verdugo began his professional career with the Los Angeles Dodgers. He was a second-round pick and showed enough promise to be included in one of the most significant trades in recent Red Sox history. The Yankees would later acquire him from Boston in a separate deal.
In February 2020, the Red Sox sent Mookie Betts and David Price to the Dodgers. Verdugo came to Boston as part of the return package. Being included in a Mookie Betts trade carried its own kind of pressure. Yankees fans would later wonder if the Red Sox got the better of that exchange by a wide margin.
He handled it reasonably well in Boston. He batted .270 over his career across 856 games. He posted a career slash line of .270/.326/.406. Those are respectable numbers for a corner outfielder. They are not the numbers of a player who commands premium contracts.
The trade to the Yankees was supposed to be a fresh start. The Yankees were a bigger stage. A chance to produce in October. Instead, 2024 became the year his decline became undeniable.
What comes next for Verdugo
The surgery will sideline Verdugo for the remainder of 2026. Shoulder procedures vary widely in recovery time and outcome. Depending on the nature of the injury, returning to big league form can take anywhere from several months to well over a year.
The harder challenge is not physical. It is organizational. Teams have already passed on Verdugo twice in consecutive offseasons. He will return from surgery as a 30-year-old with a .585 OPS in his most recent MLB season, a -0.3 bWAR and a shoulder procedure on his medical history.
That profile makes it difficult to project a convincing path back to a 25-man roster anywhere, let alone back to a Yankees-level organization. It does not make it impossible. Baseball has seen players rebuild careers after worse circumstances. But they need a team willing to bet on it.
For Yankees fans, Verdugo’s story is a reminder of how quickly a player’s value can erode. He was a known quantity when he arrived in New York. He was useful in stretches. He played in the postseason in a Yankees uniform. But the second half of 2024 revealed cracks that two subsequent seasons have only widened.
His career numbers still show a competent major leaguer. The recent trend shows something different.
What do you think?
