Bryan LaHair

Bryan LaHair spent three seasons in Major League Baseball and 14 years in the professional ranks, including two seasons with the Chicago Cubs.

I'm pretty sure most of us around here remember LaHair, who famously won the first base job over Anthony Rizzo at the start of the 2012 season. We'll dig into that campaign shortly, but first a quick recap of how we got to that point.

LaHair was drafted in the 39th round of the 2002 MLB Draft by the Seattle Mariners out of Saint Petersburg College. From there, he gradually climbed the minor league ranks, first making it to Triple-A in 2006. That's where he would spend the better part of the next six(!) seasons, only getting brief stops at the big league level in 2008 (with the Mariners) and 2011 (with the Cubs).

At the conclusion of the 2009 season, LaHair chose not to re-sign in Seattle, recognizing better opportunities surely awaited him elsewhere. He signed a minor league deal with the Cubs in January 2010, though he remained stuck in Triple-A for most of the next two years, winning the Pacific Coast League Most Valuable Player Award and Joe Bauman Home Run Award in 2011. He finally got the call to Chicago when rosters expanded in September, garnering 69 plate appearances and slashing .288/.377/.508 in his cup of coffee.

Thus, we arrive at 2012. At that point, LaHair was practically the poster child for the "Quadruple-A" player, as someone who routinely crushed Triple-A pitching but couldn't get over the big league hump. However, under pressure from new President of Baseball Operations Theo Epstein, manager Dale Sveum named LaHair the starting first baseman out of spring training, and he rewarded the team with an All-Star campaign... technically.

Look, LaHair was good in 2012. In fact, in the first half of the season, he slashed .286/.364/.519 with 14 home runs (and 30 RBIs, lol). That's really solid production, especially when you consider that every other first baseman in the National League not named Joey Votto was hurt at the time (David Freese had to play first base in the All-Star Game that year because of how thin the depth was). But, in hindsight, he did not deserve to be an All-Star. He wasn't even the Cubs' "mandatory" selection, since Starlin Castro was named to his second consecutive consecutive Midsummer Classic that year. The Cubs were 33-52 at the break and had a literal 0% chance of making the playoffs at that point. Did they deserve two All-Star representatives? Probably not, but the fact that LaHair's career all but ended afterward at least makes him one of the coolest stories of an otherwise forgettable season in Cubs lore.

In the second half of that season, LaHair hit just .202/.269/.303 with two homers, eventually losing his job to Anthony Rizzo and getting banished to right field. In what would end up being his final big league at-bat, LaHair hit a walk-off single against the Houston Astros in the final game of the 2012 season.

LaHair kept playing after that, including stints in NPB, MiLB, and various independent leagues, but he never made it back to the bigs. He retired in 2018 and is now a coach in the minor leagues.