After 11 seasons with four teams, Andrelton Simmons officially announced his retirement on Tuesday via an Instagram post by ISE baseball. Simmons, 34, last appeared in MLB in July 2022 as a member of the Chicago Cubs.
He started his career with the Atlanta Braves, who selected Simmons in the second round of the 2010 MLB Draft out of Western Oklahoma State College. He made his MLB debut with Atlanta two years later in '12, when he hit .289 in 49 games. Simmons formally introduced himself in '13, as he won his first career Gold Glove and finished in 14th place in the NL MVP voting after hitting 17 home runs (a career high) with 59 RBIs.
That performance led to Simmons inking a seven-year, $58 million extension with Atlanta that set a new record for players who had less than two years of service time.
Simmons netted his second career Gold Glove in 2014 and hit .265 in '15, but he was traded to the Angels that offseason as the Braves dipped into a rebuild. Simmons' best season with the Angels came in 2017, when he hit 14 home runs, collected 69 RBIs and hit .278. He was also worth 20 outs above average, which helped him net his third career Gold Glove. He earned down-ballot MVP votes for the second straight year in ‘18 (.292 average, 75 RBIs) along with winning his fourth Gold Glove.
He struggled with injuries in 2019 and 2020 (he hit .271 in 133 games across those two seasons) before spending the '21 campaign with the Twins and the ‘22 season with the Cubs. The Curacao native played for the Netherlands in the 2023 World Baseball Classic, where he went 2-for-11. He tallied a .263 batting average across more than 4,400 at-bats in his 11-year career.
Simmons finishes his career with 201 defensive runs saved, which is the highest career total of any shortstop in MLB history. He had four seasons with a DRS value above 20 and will go down as one of the best defensive shortstops in MLB history.