Max Muncy
"Max Muncy's career didn't begin with a scouting report — it began with a release form, a waiver claim, and a non-guaranteed contract nobody expected him to keep."
Before he ever wore Dodger blue, Max Muncy had been cut loose by the Oakland Athletics and had to sign a non-guaranteed minor-league contract just to keep playing professional baseball.
As the Dodgers have added star after star — Ohtani, Betts, Freeman — Muncy remains one of the few holdovers from before the roster became a superteam, giving him a rare vantage point on how fast the organization's identity has changed since 2018.
The 'DFA-to-All-Star' arc gets repeated as a quick trivia line, but it understates how precarious that period actually was — a non-guaranteed contract meant he could have been released again at almost any point before he ever proved himself in Los Angeles.
アメリカ野球では、他球団に一度戦力外(DFA)にされた選手が、保証のない契約でチャンスを掴み直し、後にワールドシリーズを制する主力選手になる——という展開が実際にある。日本球界では選手が完全に戦力外通告を受けた後に別球団で主力へ返り咲く例は稀で、マンシーのキャリアはアメリカ独特の『再挑戦の物語』を体現している。
The waiver wire process that defined Muncy's career — a team giving up on a player entirely, another team claiming him for nothing — is distinctly American. Leagues like Japan's NPB and Korea's KBO don't have an equivalent open, public mechanism for one team's discard to become another's core player; it's worth remembering how unusual that structure is even to international viewers of MLB.
Max Muncy is the Los Angeles Dodgers' third baseman, a native of Midland, Texas, who was designated for assignment by the Oakland Athletics before Los Angeles claimed him off waivers in 2018. What followed was one of the more improbable rebuilds in recent baseball — a player written off by one organization becoming a fixture on a championship roster.
| Year | Team | G | AVG | HR | RBI | SB | OPS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | LAD | 134 | .252 | 27 | 70 | 2 | .845 |
| 2025 | LAD | 100 | .243 | 19 | 67 | 4 | .846 |
| 2024 | LAD | 73 | .232 | 15 | 48 | 1 | .852 |
| Career | — | 1154 | .232 | 241 | 674 | 20 | .831 |
Source: MLB Stats API · regular season
Not the Body You'd Draw Up
Listed at 5-foot-10 and 215 pounds, Muncy does not have the long, lean frame typically associated with a middle-of-the-order power hitter. He is built more like a recreational softball league's best player than a Gold Glove-caliber infielder — compact, thick through the shoulders, unremarkable in a lineup photo. That mismatch between appearance and production has become part of the way broadcasters and beat writers frame him: a player whose game reveals itself only once the ball is in the air, not in the batter's box walk-up.
The Long Way to Los Angeles
Muncy was born in Midland, Texas — a west Texas city built around the oil industry, a landscape of flat horizon and small-town Friday night football, culturally distant from the coastal glamour of Dodger Stadium. He made his major league debut with the Oakland Athletics in April 2015. By the end of the 2017 season, Oakland had designated him for assignment — a roster move that, in plain terms, meant the organization no longer wanted him on its 40-man roster and was willing to let any other team claim him for nothing. The Dodgers did, in 2018, and signed him to a contract with no guaranteed money. He had, by any reasonable read of that moment, very little leverage and very little certainty.
When a team designates a player for assignment (DFA), it removes him from the 40-man roster, and any other team can claim him off waivers — often for nothing in return. It's one of the more unsentimental mechanics of American professional baseball, and it's the transaction that technically ended Muncy's time with Oakland and opened the door to Los Angeles.
A Career Rebuilt, Not Just Resumed
What happened next has been told and retold in Dodgers coverage as one of the organization's signature reclamation stories. His emergence in 2018 arrived alongside a broader shift across baseball — teams and hitters re-evaluating swing mechanics and pitch selection in ways that rewarded exactly the kind of hitter Muncy became. The specifics of how he personally retooled his approach are, largely, his own story, recounted only in pieces across interviews over the years rather than laid out in full. What is verifiable is the outcome: a player non-tendered and passed over became a regular contributor on a Dodgers roster that would go on to reach multiple World Series.
A Champion Twice Over, Rarely the Headline
Muncy has been part of Dodgers rosters that won the World Series in 2020 and again in 2024, spanning the franchise's transformation from a talented-but-snakebit contender into a roster stacked with some of the sport's biggest global stars. Through that transformation, Muncy has remained something closer to a constant than a headline — present for both championship runs, but rarely the face of either. That positioning, a productive veteran playing alongside players who draw far more attention, is its own under-told story about how championship rosters actually get built: not solely through marquee free agent signings, but through players like Muncy who were found on the discard pile.
Turning 36 in a Different Dodgers Era
Muncy turns 36 in late August 2026, a stage of career where questions about role, health, and longevity become unavoidable for any infielder. He has already outlasted the version of the Dodgers organization that took a flier on him in 2018; the roster around him now looks almost nothing like it did then. What comes next for Muncy is less a question of whether he can still hit — that record speaks for itself — than what kind of presence a player with his particular history occupies on a team increasingly defined by star power he never had when he arrived.
A non-guaranteed contract means the team is not obligated to pay the player if he's released before the season starts. Signing one, as Muncy did with the Dodgers, is typically a sign of a player with little negotiating leverage — a detail that underscores how far from certain his second chance actually was.
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Max Muncy Gear — Official MLB ShopThis profile was written by AI (Claude Sonnet) using publicly available sources. Interpretations and cultural notes are AI-generated and may not reflect the views of the player, their team, or MLB. This page contains affiliate links.