Endy Chavez, Rangers
No doubt some readers are saying right now, “Endy Chavez?! A lost star?? Of the Rangers? Wasn’t he all over the place?”
Few fans, surely, could give the number of teams Chavez played for. (The correct major league number is either seven or eight, depending on whether one considers Washington the same team as Montreal.) The speedy outfielder was a career journeyman, to be sure.
However, weirdly, Chavez actually had something of a star turn with the American League Champion State Cops in 2011, something even the most inebriated gambler in Las Vegas would not have bet on. This is because nearly two years earlier, Chavez suffered an injury that might well have ended his career, erasing the last three years of it.
Playing left field for Seattle June 19, 2009, Chavez collided with his shortstop, hyperextending the outfielder’s right leg to the point that he tore both his ACL and MCL, as well as partially tearing some of his lateral meniscus.
But after a lengthy, rigorous rehab process, he was in the Rangers camp in 2011 as a non-roster invitee. The previous season he had managed to play in only eight games with teams in Texas’ minor-league system.
Starting the season in triple-A again that year, Chavez joined the Rangers in May, eventually contributing a .301 batting average, 37 runs scored, and 27 RBI in 83 games. Texas went 49-34 in those contests, and the 33-year-old had 24 multi-hit games among them. Particularly notable were his 3-for-5 game against Tampa Bay May 30, when he homered and drove in two runs, and a 4-for-4 game against Cleveland three days later that included a triple and an RBI.
Texas won both those contests.
As a result of pushing his way through rehab for a “devastating injury,” Endy Chavez added an AL championship ring and three more years to his personal MLB history.