Yankees Mag: Playing to Win

For most people, the love of baseball is instilled over years, passed down from generation to generation. But for some, that love of the game seems almost innate, something they must have naturally inherited.

Hudson Valley Renegades shortstop George Lombard Jr. is among the latter, born into the world of baseball. His father, George Sr., was a Major Leaguer for six years, with stops in Atlanta, Detroit, Tampa Bay and Washington, D.C., and is currently the bench coach for the Tigers. And while his father’s playing career was nearing its end when George Jr. was born in 2005, the 19-year-old has been around the game his entire life.

Taken by the Yankees with the 26th overall pick in the first round of the 2023 MLB Draft out of Gulliver Prep in his native Miami, Lombard has begun to see his career progress through the ranks of the Yankees organization. With an Aug. 6 promotion from the Single-A Tampa Tarpons to the High-A Hudson Valley Renegades, the No. 3-ranked Yankees prospect (according to MLB Pipeline) is looking to make the most of the opportunities in front of him and is focused squarely on the one thing he loves doing most: competing.

***

Being around baseball -- or anything for that matter -- for so long can create a complacency, a sort of “been there, done that” feeling that could leave a person jaded with the whole thing.

But not Lombard.

From a young age he became a sponge, soaking up all the knowledge he could in order to find out what it would take to play the sport he loves at the highest level possible. The thing he noticed most was that to play the game of baseball, you need to commit and have the mindset that every day is another opportunity to get better and work on your game.

“From a really young age, seeing what it takes just to be able to put in the work every single day, staying consistent with your mindset and with your work, it’s a good point of view to have, especially getting to see that at the age I did,” Lombard says, adding that being around big leaguers from the time he could barely walk also taught him the importance of “being able to slow the game down.”

What Lombard developed growing up was a passion for competition. Like his father, who committed to play running back at the University of Georgia before being drafted out of high school by the Atlanta Braves, George the younger fed that competitive edge by playing multiple sports all through his time at Gulliver Prep. A soccer and baseball standout, Lombard always knew he wanted to end up on the diamond. But through soccer, he saw another way not only to compete, but also to develop his athletic talents and form skills that could aid him throughout his career in baseball.

“I think it transformed my athleticism, my speed, agility and things like that,” Lombard says. “It gives you all of the relationships. You have different friends on soccer teams and baseball teams, so that’s another cool part of it. It’s just another competitive thing to throw in that I just couldn’t get enough of.”

Those tools -- athleticism, speed, agility -- helped make Lombard a natural at shortstop. He not only had the physical tools, but also the mental fortitude necessary to play one of the hardest positions on the field.

“It’s a great position to play. There’s a bunch of different challenges, but even with all of them, I wouldn’t trade anything for it,” Lombard says. “All around, both being an athlete and making a bunch of different plays that you have to make at shortstop and then also knowing the game, kind of being a leader on the team, taking control. Baseball IQ is a big part of being a shortstop. There’s a lot of things that go into it, but I love it, and it’s the reason that I’ve played it my whole life. It’s definitely my favorite position.”

***

Soon after the 2023 Draft, Lombard’s journey within the Yankees’ farm system began in the Florida Complex League at the Rookie level of Minor League Baseball. It was not long before Lombard was assigned to the Tarpons for the rest of 2023. Since then, his progress has been steady. He homered in his Spring Training debut to kick off 2024, and he returned to Tampa with an attitude that drew the admiration of coaches as the standard for what a player should be.

“I’ve had George now for two years almost,” says Tarpons hitting coach Tom DeAngelis, who worked with Lombard before the August promotion. “When he got drafted last year, I had him in the FCL, and then … this year as well, and seeing how much he’s progressed in just one year has been really impressive.

“He goes about everything the right way. He’s kind of a model player that a lot of people should look at as the way you want to shape a baseball player.”

Through 81 games with Tampa, Lombard posted a .232 batting average with five homers and 37 RBIs. The speed of the game is usually the biggest adjustment for any rookie coming into the professional level of any sport. Lombard’s experience with the game from a young age has helped with his progress, which is impressive given the level he was playing at a little over a year ago.

“You’re facing guys throwing 85 to 90 mph,” DeAngelis says of high school baseball. “Now, he’s seeing anywhere from 90 up to 100 mph every day. He played the elite of the elite in travel baseball and all of that, so he was exposed to it, but I think the day-in and day-out is probably the hardest challenge for guys.”

Where Lombard has really shined has been on the basepaths, where he has been an absolute terror. Through the first week of August, Lombard was second in the Florida State League with 30 stolen bases and was caught just four times.

“Learning how to steal bases, learning the technique behind it, learning when to do it, I think that’s helped me take it to another level where I’ve been able to get a few bags, and hopefully we can just keep improving upon that every year,” Lombard says. “There’s a lot of things that I had never really known about stealing bases -- specifically on the technique side of it -- that have helped me a ton that I have learned here with a bunch of the coaches in this organization.”

Stealing bases with such a high success rate can be challenging. Having been caught a meager four times is something he is proud to hang his hat on.

“It’s one thing that I’ve kind of taken pride in this year,” says the 6-foot-2, right-handed teenager. “I want to have a good enough feel to know when is the right time to go, not just going whenever and getting thrown out a bunch, but making sure I’m going in the right situations to minimize those outs on the bases. It’s a thing that we’ve worked on a lot over the past year and I look to continue improving upon.”

Defensively, Lombard has impressed coaches with his consistency from the shortstop position. His awareness, patience and his versatility have made Lombard a quality defender that coaches think will go far.

“I believe he’s a big league defender,” says Tarpons manager James Cooper. “He has that internal clock. He knows when to speed up; he knows when to slow down. There are some other intangibles he has: the way he reads hops, the way he pays attention to hitters and the way he pays attention to how the pitcher’s stuff is working that day to use that as an advantage to help him get a better read on a guy’s swing, whether he may be late or on time or even early.”

When you couple those physical tools with the intangibles, you have a player that coaches know they can count on to set the tone on and off the field. Lombard’s skill set also includes being bilingual -- his mother, Judy Prado Lombard, is a longtime Spanish-language television executive in Miami -- which has been an asset early in his career.

“That is a valuable tool to have in this industry that we’re in right now,” Cooper says. “With him being able to speak Spanish and with the Hispanic background, he’s able to have conversations with all walks of life in locker rooms. And I think when a leader can relate to many different races in the locker room and he fits in like he’s one of the boys -- whether he’s with the Black players, the white players, the Hispanic players -- guys look up to guys like that. I think that’s why this locker room was as peaceful as it was, because it had a pillar like George Lombard in it.”

***

On a hot summer Saturday in Brooklyn, Lombard is going through his paces -- fielding ground balls and taking part in batting practice -- as the Renegades get ready for a matchup against the Brooklyn Cyclones at Maimonides Park in Coney Island. It’s hard to tell that he’s the newest member of the Renegades squad as he garners praise from coaches and jokes around with teammates. Just four days earlier, Lombard was doing the same thing a lot of Americans were doing on Aug. 6, when he got the news about the change in his career trajectory.

“We had an off-day on Sunday because we got a lot of rain, so I was in my apartment watching the Olympics,” he said. “Our manager, Coop, called me and told me he had good news for me: I’m heading up here. I had to get my stuff together, and I flew up the next day.”

For the first time in his professional career, Lombard has left his home state of Florida. While there has been an adjustment period, he is taking it day by day and focusing on the opportunity at hand.

“Thankfully, I kind of got a similar experience last year when I went from Rookie ball then to playing with the Low-A team,” Lombard said. “So, it’s similar. Obviously, this is a little more travel, a little farther from home. It’s obviously an adjustment, like always, but you get used to it and you kind of look for ways to slow the day down and slow the process down.

“I’m just having fun and playing to win every single day.”

Robert Hudson is a publications assistant with Yankees Magazine. This story appears in the September 2024 edition. Get more articles like this delivered to your doorstep by purchasing a subscription to Yankees Magazine at www.yankees.com/publications.