AJ Pollock is a class act that made the Dodgers a better team

LOS ANGELES — There will be more to say about Craig Kimbrel another day. Today, I’m just feeling a little more sadness. AJ Pollock has become the latest of our World Champions to exit stage right. This latest move means that since that wonderful night in October barely 18 months ago, eleven Dodgers have left the organization. And just this Spring in rapid succession. Corey. Kenley. Matt. Mariachi Joe. And now AJ. But this last one hits me maybe the hardest, maybe because it was the least expected.

But make no mistake, AJ Pollock will be missed. Especially in the last two seasons, he really cemented himself deep into the hearts of Dodger fans. I know in the end he was a free agent we picked up on the free market in 2019 after an All-Star start to his career in Arizona. And, he never quite reached the heights of his best years as a Diamondback. Injuries really held him back in 2019, limiting him to only 86 games. In 2020, he contributed, but was still not quite himself.

And even though he battled through a couple of injuries in 2021, I felt like we were finally seeing AJ as a Man in Full: .297 batting average, 896 OPS, 21 home runs. And, after being somewhat maligned as a defender in his previous seasons with the team, he played an excellent left field, memorably robbing a couple of home runs during the season (Sorry, Manny!) It was a quietly great season, often overshadowed by the megawatt names elsewhere in the lineup.

But more than his play on the field, I’ll miss his personality. He wasn’t loud or flashy, but he was just straight-up a good dude, and you could see that his teammates responded to his innate decency. And, when his wife and he went through the trial of baby Maddi being born three months premature on the cusp of a global pandemic, you couldn’t help but root for the guy and his family. To come so close to losing a child had to have been weighing on him heavily in those days. And yet, he still showed up to play. In a way, the pandemic might have been a blessing to him, as it allowed him and his wife Kate to be with Maddi round the clock for a few months until baseball came back in July. But the Pollocks never doubted that their baby would fight her way through it. ESPN’s Buster Olney reported it this way:

A.J. texted friends: Pray for us. Pray for Maddi. Pray for Kate. He told the Dodgers’ chaplain, and the chaplain of his former team, the Diamondbacks, and the power of good will was mustered. The avalanche of response moved him. When you’re going through something like that, he would say later, you feel the sincerity of others, how genuine they are. “I think that was the time we realized, OK, she’s been blanketed in prayer,” Kate said. “She’s going to be OK. “I never even really questioned it.” AJ said later, “I just had this feeling that everything was going to be OK.”
Buster Olney, ESPN

And as Maddi got stronger, you could feel that a burden was lifting off of AJ’s shoulders. To know that Maddi is now a healthy and happy two-year old, doing all the normal things a girl her age will do is perhaps my most cherished memory of Pollock’s time here in LA.

I know baseball is a business, and I know that the front office is just trying to put the Dodgers in the best position to win another World Series, but for now, I don’t care about that. For now, I’m just feeling a little sad that such a good guy won’t be around.

May AJ Pollock thrive in Chicago. May he play out the rest of his career injury-free, and maybe, someday not too long from now, may he be able to take his darling Maddi on his knee and say, “Once upon a time, Daddy was a Dodger. And a World Series champion. And it was… glorious.”