In case you missed it, a late-2000s Yankees icon announced his retirement on Monday. Phil Hughes, the team’s first-round draft pick in 2004 and one of the top pitching prospects in all of baseball by 2007, officially hung up his spikes this week, two years removed from his last major league pitch for the San Diego Padres. Hughes played seven seasons as a Yankee, spent five years with the Twins, and finished his career with the Padres, but he never quite reached the success expected of him in his prospect days.
With Hughes’s official retirement, it might mark the end of a trio of pitching prospects who were supposed to define the Yankees in the 2010s.