Jacoby Ellsbury

Jacoby Ellsbury is a major league baseball player who became an All Star and a member of two World Series Champions as a center-fielder for the Boston Red Sox from 2007 through 2013. Ellsbury's mother is a full-blooded Native American of Navajo descent, and he is an enrolled member of the Colorado River Indian Tribes. When he made his debut with the Red Sox on June 30, 2007, the then-23-year-old became the first Navaho to play in the major leagues. Ellsbury's finest season was achieved in 2011, when he came in second in the Most Valuable Player voting after posting career highs in average (.321), runs (119), hits (211), doubles (46), home-runs (32), runs-batted-in (105), on-base percentage (.376) slugging (.552), OPS (.928),and total bases (364). He might have been named MVP had the Red Sox not undergone a record-breaking collapse in the month of September that year. He, himself, played through the fiasco at a very high level. He did not repeat his performance in 2012, being hobbled by injuries that limited him to 74 games. He also missed almost the entire 2010 season to injuries, and suffered a compression fracture in his foot in the 2013 season that cost him some games. Ellsbury, the premier lead-off hitter in baseball when healthy, played through the injury and the Red Sox won their second world championship in the seven season he played for them. However, his history of injuries meant that the Red Sox did not make a sustained, serious effort to sign him to a contract extension. After becoming a free agent at the end of the 2013 season, Ellsbury signed a $153 million, 7-year contract with the New York Yankees, the Red Sox's hated rivals.