Cody Bellinger has rung the bell plenty in Major League Baseball already. He is one of four current Yankees to have won an MVP Award, along with Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton and Paul Goldschmidt. But Bellinger has already done something that neither Judge, Stanton nor Goldschmidt have done in their well-honored careers: He’s won a World Series, with the Dodgers, in 2020.
Now he will get another chance to win one with the Yankees, and be remembered, the way a lot of the members of the current team will be remembered if they’re part of the team that puts the Yankees back on top for the first time since 2009. That’s how it works in the Bronx. If Bellinger is just very good but New York wins it all, he will be remembered as a great Yankee.
I believe he came back to the Yankees for multiple reasons. For one thing, they were offering him the best deal, a five-year, $162 million deal with opt-outs. For another, there wasn’t a seven-year deal out there with anybody else, no matter how hard his agent Scott Boras pushed for one. On top of all that? Bellinger found out something Juan Soto had found out with the Yankees the season before: Hitting anywhere near Judge is really nice work if you can get it.
Bellinger, who has played in Los Angeles, Chicago and now New York, has to know what the rewards will be like if he does win it all with the Yankees. He has to see how things worked out for CC Sabathia once he got to Yankee Stadium and became the ace of their pitching staff the last time the Yankees won the World Series. CC is in the Hall of Fame as a great Yankee, and soon will have his number retired at Yankee Stadium. There are a lot of teams with a lot of history in baseball, of course. The Yankees just have more history than everybody else.
If they win World Series No. 28 -- whenever they do -- it will feel as big as anything any Yankees team has ever done, because of all the waiting since the last one.
Here is something Bellinger said upon signing his new Yankees contract: "I had an unbelievable time putting on this uniform. Yankee Stadium, the fans, the organization, the culture that these guys have created in this locker room -- it really is special".
Bellinger -- whose father Clay once played for the Yankees -- also said this: "I owe it to the [Steinbrenner] family and to the Yankee organization to go and get my best foot forward. And ... try and win a championship.”
They have been trying -- and grinding -- for a while. Just in the last decade they have made it to the ALCS four times, and finally made it back to the World Series in 2024 before losing to the Dodgers in five games. So they have been knocking on the door. Maybe this is the year when they finally kick it in. If they do, Bellinger will almost certainly be a big part of it.
Bellinger has won before. So has Max Fried with the Braves. Gerrit Cole made it to the Series in 2019 with the Astros and returned in '24, but then fell short the way everybody else did. Cole was on the mound in the top of the fifth inning of Game 5 when the Yankees were blowing a 5-0 lead on the night when they were trying to send the series back to Los Angeles. That was when Judge dropped a routine fly ball, Cole didn’t cover first and Anthony Volpe botched a grounder in the infield -- just like that, the Yankees were falling toward next season.
Now they are back. Bellinger is back with them. This is Act Two for him with the Yankees, in what must already feel like the third or fourth act of his baseball career, even though he’s still just 30 years old. It was in 2019 that he hit 47 home runs for the Dodgers, knocked in 115 runs, batted .305 and was named NL MVP. The Dodgers won it all in the COVID-shortened season of 2020. But Bellinger dislocated his right shoulder high-fiving teammate Kiké Hernández after a big home run, and would require offseason surgery for a torn labrum. In 2021, the former MVP batted .165 and looked as if he had forgotten how to hit.
He finally came back, though, with the Cubs in 2023: 26 homers, 97 RBIs and a .307 average. But when his average dipped 41 points the next year, he was traded to the Yankees. Now here he is, after being such a terrific outfielder for the Yankees, mostly in left field, and showing he could hit left-handed pitching as well as anybody around. He also showed up big at Yankee Stadium, hitting .302 in 80 games there, with 18 home runs and 55 RBIs. He fit the team, fit the place, gave the Yankees all they could have hoped for after losing Soto to the Mets.
Bellinger has won before with the Dodgers, an iconic franchise in its own right. Now he tries to win again with the most iconic franchise in the history of sports. After such a wild ride in his career so far, he tries to take one to the Canyon of Heroes.