This announcement wasn’t meant to arrive in the middle of spring training in 2025. Not at all. Lucas Luetge’s goodbye to baseball was supposed to happen long before now. Before the Yankees ever came calling. Before he ever wore pinstripes.

Before he was repeatedly summoned to frustrate Andrew Benintendi or to cover the final three innings of a fairly routine win, picking up an unexpected save in the process. His farewell message was intended to go public well before any of that unfolded.

But Luetge wasn’t ready to make it official back then.

Last Thursday, Luetge took to Instagram to reveal that he had finally made peace with his journey, announcing that he was officially retiring after a storybook late-career resurgence.

The left-hander pitched for the Yankees in 2021 and 2022, but when he took the mound at Yankee Stadium on April 3 — in a game still very much undecided — he officially ended a 2,170-day gap between big-league outings. Mariners, 2012-2015. Yankees, 2021-2022. And everything in between.

Ex-Yankees lefty reliever Lucas Luetge calls it a career

Luetge showed promise as a rookie in Seattle in 2012 (3.98 ERA, 38 strikeouts across 40 2/3 innings), but faltered a bit the following year and eventually lost the front office’s trust. By 2015, his only MLB appearance came on April 25, when he tossed 2 1/3 scoreless frames. After that, he was mostly confined to Triple-A, where he logged 62 1/3 innings in 2014 and another 50 the next season.

Seattle moved on. So did the Angels, who technically added him to the MLB roster for a brief stint in 2016 but never let him pitch. He floated through the clubhouse like a ghost on loan. The Reds and Orioles also gave him a look, but nothing stuck. In 2018, Tommy John surgery knocked him out entirely. The Marlins, Diamondbacks, and A’s all passed during the COVID season. In 2020, he was stuck at the alternate site, pitching in eerie silence. Most of the time, he was healthy. Teams just kept choosing someone else.

Then the Yankees called in 2021. Luetge came to camp as a longshot — and left as a lock.

Over the next two years, Luetge beat the odds and held his roster spot, delivering ERAs of 2.74 and 2.67 across 72 1/3 and 57 1/3 innings, respectively. His role shifted to lower-leverage spots in 2022 as his WHIP climbed from 1.134 to 1.395, but he remained a reliable presence, both on the mound and in the clubhouse, adapting to whatever the team needed.

It’s always tricky to find a pitcher who can effectively guide a big lead to the finish line in games that aren’t technically over. The better a pitcher performs, the more likely they are moved into tighter spots. If they struggle, they can’t be trusted with any lead at all. Somehow, Luetge balanced that act perfectly, handling the awkward innings with ease.

After the 2022 campaign, the Yankees saw the writing on the wall and traded him to Atlanta in exchange for Caleb Durbin, who later became a key piece in the Devin Williams trade. Luetge kept battling, throwing 13 2/3 innings for the Braves before spending the following summer with Boston’s Triple-A Woo Sox.

Now, however, the battle is done — and it ended in triumph. As Luetge shared in his retirement note, “Every step of this journey has been a lesson in perseverance, faith, and love for the game.” And while his playing days are over, those lessons will last forever.