Daniel Nava is off to a red-hot start this season, which makes it hard to believe that he once considered walking away from baseball.
“Yeah, I did, a couple of times,” Nava said when asked if he ever considered retiring, according to WEEI.com.
Nava’s baseball journey has been interesting to say the least. Nava went undrafted out of college, and he then played in the Golden Baseball League before finally joining the Red Sox organization in 2008. At that point, he bounced around the system until his big league debut in 2010. From there, he went back-and-forth between the majors and the minors, even spending all of 2011 at Triple-A Pawtucket.
Now, Nava seems like a big league mainstay. The 30-year-old leads the Red Sox with a .357 average through Boston’s first 17 games. He also has four home runs, 14 RBIs and a sudden flair for the dramatic. The thought of him stepping away seems outlandish, but he reportedly considered retiring when he went undrafted and then again prior to the 2012 spring training.
“I got there early and when I realized I wasn’t going to big league camp but everybody else was,” Nava reportedly said. “It was then I felt I needed to be realistic and that I might be done here. If you’ve got guys below you going to big league camp and you’re not going to big league camp, you have to look at things and be realistic. They might not have any plans for me in the future.”
The Red Sox eventually had plans for Nava, though, and he’s answered the call ever since. We’ll see how long his torrid pace keeps up, but a versatile switch-hitter is undoubtedly a major league commodity.
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