Rob Refsnyder

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Robert Daniel Refsnyder
born Jung-Tae Kim

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Biographical Information[edit]

Playing for the University of Arizona, outfielder Rob Refsnyder was named College World Series Most Outstanding Player in 2012. He was selected by the New York Yankees in the 5th round of the 2012 amateur draft.

He was converted to the infield before the 2013 season and it was as a second baseman that he made his major league debut for the Yankees against the Boston Red Sox on July 11, 2015, going 0 for 3 as the team's 9th-place hitter. He got his first career hit the next day in the 7th inning, then hit his first big league homer in the 9th as the Yankees won, 8-6, over the Sox. In 16 games with the Yankees, he hit .302 with 2 homers and 5 RBIs. He also started the Wild Card Game against the Houston Astros but went 0 for 3.

The Yankees acquired Starlin Castro to play second base in 2016 and Rob was relegated to a utility player role, hitting .250 in 58 games. He saw playing time at first base, right field, second base and left field, and also played 54 games in AAA with the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders where he hit .316 while playing mainly second and third base. In 2017, he split the first half between Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, where he hit .312 in 38 games, and New York, where he hit only .135 in 20 games - but in only 40 plate appearances. On July 23rd, the Yankees traded him to the Toronto Blue Jays in return for minor leaguer Ryan McBroom. He was assigned to the Buffalo Bisons at first and ended up hitting .196 in 32 games for his new team. In 2018, he joined the Tampa Bay Rays, having first been claimed off waivers by the Cleveland Indians from Toronto in November, and then purchased by Tampa at the end of spring training. He continued to struggle with the bat at the major league level, hitting just .167 in 40 games.

Having failed to establish himself in a number of opportunities, Refsnyder then spent all of 2019 in the minors after being the property of two more organizations, first the Arizona Diamondbacks who signed him as a free agent after the 2018 season, and then the Cincinnati Reds who purchased his contratc the following April after he had played just 1 game for the Reno Aces. He spent most of that year with the Louisville Bats in the International League, hitting .315 with 10 homers in 85 games. That prompted yet another team to give him a look, this time the Texas Rangers, but in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, he played just 15 games and hit .200 in 30 at-bats before being released on August 24th. Now 30, he joined the Minnesota Twins as a free agent and split the season between the AAA St. Paul Saints, for whom he hit .318 in 18 games, and the Twins, where he batted .245 in 51 games.

He finally found what seemed to be a good home with his ninth organization, the Boston Red Sox, who signed him to a minor league contract on December 21, 2021. He started the 2022 season back in AAA, hitting .306 in 42 games with the Worcester Red Sox, incidentally the fifth time he had hit .300 or above in AAA out the last six seasons in which he had played regularly at that level - before being called up to Boston on June 10th (he had had a three-game look-see in April, going 2-for-5). He was finally able to earn regular playing time and reproduce at the top level the type of solid hitting he had produced in the minors all those years. He was hitting .304 and slugging .491 at the end of August, then on September 1st delivered the first walk-off hit of his career, a single off Jonathan Hernandez with one out in the 9th that scored Rafael Devers with the winning run in a 9-8 win. The hit capped a four-run rally, in a game the Sox had trailed 8-3, entering the bottom of the 8th.

Refsnyder was born in Seoul and is ethnically Korean, but he was adopted by an American family as an infant and grew up in the United States.

Further Reading[edit]

  • Bryan Hoch: "After 'whirlwind' year, it's family time for Refsnyder at Thanksgiving", mlb.com November 24, 2016. [1]

Related Sites[edit]

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