Dave Winfield: The Athlete Who Was Drafted by Four Sports

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 9 min read

Dave Winfield finished with 3,110 hits and 465 home runs for the Padres, Yankees and four other clubs. Follow the career in phases, with the numbers, the context and what the record cannot show.

In 1973 Dave Winfield was drafted by teams in four professional leagues: the San Diego Padres of baseball, the Atlanta Hawks of the NBA, the Utah Stars of the ABA and the Minnesota Vikings of the NFL. That last choice is the odd one, because he had not played college football. He picked baseball, reported to San Diego that summer, and, as has been widely documented, went to the majors without playing a game in the minor leagues. He played his last game in 1995, with 3,110 hits, 465 home runs and 1,833 runs batted in.

The draft story is the one people tell about him, but the career is the one that matters. Winfield was a 6-foot-6, 220-pound outfielder who could throw, run and hit with power for a long time, and the historical record (through the 2025 season) shows how long: his career ran from 1973 to 1995, with a gap in 1989 when he missed the season after back surgery. This profile follows it in phases, says what each set of numbers meant in its era, and is plain about what the database cannot tell us.

The career in one table

Two comparisons give the totals some shape. Winfield is one of 33 players in the database with 3,000 or more career hits, and at 3,110 he ranks 24th among them, between Alex Rodriguez and Ichiro Suzuki. His 1,833 runs batted in rank 19th all-time in the database, two behind Rafael Palmeiro (1,835) and two ahead of Manny Ramirez (1,831). The totals are the product of durability: 2,973 games over 22 seasons is more than 135 a year.

Origins: a Minnesota two-sport star

Winfield was born on October 3, 1951, in St. Paul, Minnesota, and attended the University of Minnesota, where he played baseball and basketball. He was both a pitcher and an outfielder for the Gophers. The Padres selected him with the fourth overall pick that June, and he was in the major leagues by June 19, 1973, according to the debut date in the database.

The multi-sport draft needs context. In the early 1970s the NBA and the ABA were competing for the same players, and drafting a famous athlete in a sport he did not play was a low-cost gamble. Winfield never played in the NBA, the ABA or the NFL. What the story proves is how athletic he was at 21, not that he had a fallback career; the Padres paid him and put him in their lineup straight away.

The San Diego years: 1973 to 1980

For eight seasons Winfield played for a Padres club that spent most of those years below .500. His totals in those seasons add up to 1,134 hits, 154 home runs and 626 runs batted in, but the shape of the years matters more than the sums. He hit 3 home runs in a 56-game debut, then 20 in 1974, and his run of All-Star selections began in 1977. He was selected every season from 1977 through 1988, twelve in a row.

Two seasons stand out. In 1978 he hit .308 with 24 home runs and 97 runs batted in. In 1979 he hit .308 again, with 34 home runs, 184 hits and 118 runs batted in, which led the National League; Dave Kingman had 115 and Mike Schmidt 114. He won Gold Gloves in 1979 and 1980, the first two of seven. He left San Diego as a free agent after the 1980 season.

The Yankee years: 1981 to 1988

Winfield signed with the New York Yankees for 1981, and the first season was a brief and difficult one. The Yankees reached the World Series that year, and Winfield, who batted .294 with 13 home runs in the strike-shortened regular season, went 1 for 22 in the Series, which the Dodgers won. It would be the first of several clashes with owner George Steinbrenner, who criticized him publicly for that performance.

The next seven seasons were the peak of his career. From 1982 to 1988, he hit .280 or better in four of seven seasons, drove in 100 or more runs six times, and won Silver Sluggers in 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984 and 1985. His Yankees totals from 1981 to 1988 were 1,287 hits, 203 home runs and 812 runs batted in. The best seasons:

• 1982: 37 home runs and 106 runs batted in.
• 1983: 32 home runs, 116 runs batted in, and 169 hits.
• 1984: a .340 average, 193 hits, 19 home runs and 100 runs batted in. Don Mattingly hit .343 that year to win the batting title by three points, and Winfield finished second.
• 1985: 26 home runs, 114 runs batted in and 174 hits.
• 1988: a .322 average with 180 hits, 25 home runs and 107 runs batted in, at age 36.

He won Gold Gloves in 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985 and 1987 while playing right field in Yankee Stadium. In terms of what the statistics meant at the time, a .340 average with 193 hits was top-three in the American League, and 100 runs batted in were a standard of production for a middle-of-the-order bat. Context matters in both cases: American League scoring in the early and middle 1980s was lower than in the late 1990s, so a 30-home-run season counted for more than the same number does now.

A hard decade in New York

The numbers above do not tell the story of how Winfield's time in New York felt. His relationship with Steinbrenner was a running conflict in the news. It involved his charitable foundation, which he had started in the 1970s, and it ended in 1990 when Winfield was traded to the California Angels. Later that year Commissioner Fay Vincent banned Steinbrenner from day-to-day control of the club after he had paid a gambler for damaging information about Winfield; the ruling is a matter of public record.

Winfield missed the whole 1989 season with a back injury and surgery, and he was 38 when he returned. In 1990 he played 132 games for the Yankees and Angels, hit .267 with 21 home runs, and in 1991 he hit 28 home runs for California with a .262 average. He was still productive at 40.

One incident from this period became a joke for a generation. In 1983, during a warm-up at Exhibition Stadium in Toronto, Winfield threw a ball that struck and killed a seagull. Toronto police charged him with cruelty to animals; the charge was later dropped. It is a footnote, but one that has followed his name.

The late years: Toronto, Minnesota and Cleveland

The best late-career season was in 1992, and it was with the Toronto Blue Jays. Winfield hit .290 with 26 home runs, 108 runs batted in and 169 hits at the age of 40, as the club's designated hitter. He won a Silver Slugger and the Outstanding Designated Hitter Award, and the Blue Jays won the World Series in six games over Atlanta. His double in the 11th inning of Game 6 gave Toronto the lead it held to win the title, and he was given the Babe Ruth Award for postseason performance. It was his only championship.

He signed with Minnesota for 1993 and played at home in front of the fans he had grown up with. On September 16, 1993, he collected his 3,000th hit, a single against Dennis Eckersley, in front of those fans. He hit .271 with 21 home runs that season, then .252 with 10 home runs in 77 games in the strike-shortened 1994 season, and finished with 46 games for the Cleveland Indians in 1995, hitting .191. Cleveland reached the World Series that year and lost to Atlanta, which is why the database lists Winfield on the regular-season roster of a third World Series club (1981, 1992 and 1995), though he did not play in that 1995 postseason.

Winfield against his 3,000-hit contemporaries

Five other players with 3,000 hits played in the same years as Winfield, and a side-by-side table shows what kind of hitter he was. All figures are career totals from the historical record.

Three things stand out. First, Winfield and Murray are the two sluggers of the group: their slugging percentages (.475 and .476) are far above the rest, and no one else hit 400 home runs. Second, Winfield's on-base percentage is the second lowest in the table, ahead only of Yount, and he struck out 1,686 times, second to Henderson's 1,694 in this group, which is the price of a swing built for power. Third, his 223 stolen bases are fourth among the six, ahead of Murray (110) and Boggs (24), a reminder that he was a real runner in his early years, not just a big man with a strong arm.

Read this way, Winfield's profile is that of a complete outfielder of the late 1970s and 1980s: more power than Molitor, Yount or Boggs, more speed than Murray, and less patience than any of them except Yount. Paul Molitor's career profile shows the opposite mix, with more average and base running and less power, and Wade Boggs's shows the extreme of the high-average, high-walk approach.

How to use the 3,000-hit number

Reaching 3,000 hits is a measure of durability as much as skill. Winfield's route to it was unusual because he missed an entire season. At the end of 1988, aged 36, he had 2,421 hits. The remaining 689 came in six more seasons (1990 to 1995) with the Yankees, Angels, Blue Jays, Twins and Indians, a stretch in which most outfielders of his size are retired or reduced to part-time roles. He passed the mark on September 16, 1993, at the age of 41.

The arithmetic shows how close the margin was. Adding 1990 (127 hits), 1991 (149), 1992 (169) and 1993 (148) to the 2,421 puts him at 3,014 by the end of 1993, only 14 above the mark. The 74 hits in 1994 and 22 in 1995 were pure surplus. A reader who wants to understand why he made it, when many strong hitters of his generation did not, should look at that stretch: the back surgery, the return, and the willingness to keep playing at 40 and beyond.

What the postseason record says

Winfield's postseason record is the weakest part of his statistical case: 26 games, 101 at-bats, 21 hits, 2 home runs and 9 runs batted in over two postseasons, a .208 average. It is a small sample, and it includes the 1-for-22 World Series of 1981. It does not weigh heavily against a career of 3,110 hits, but it explains why he is not remembered as a clutch hitter in the way some contemporaries are, despite the 1992 double.

Honors, the Hall of Fame and his cap

The list of honors is long:

1. Seven Gold Gloves (1979, 1980, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985 and 1987).
2. Six Silver Sluggers (1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985 and 1992).
3. Twelve All-Star selections, every year from 1977 through 1988.
4. The Roberto Clemente Award in 1994, given for community service.
5. The Babe Ruth Award and the Outstanding Designated Hitter Award in 1992.
6. The Players Association's Curt Flood Award in 2024.

He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2001 on the first ballot, with 435 of 515 ballots (387 were needed), about 84 percent. His plaque shows a Padres cap, a choice that was widely discussed because of his history with the Yankees. The Hall of Fame's website has the full list of inductees and the plaque text.

What the database cannot tell you

There are three limits. First, the historical record has no wins above replacement, so the claim that Winfield was an excellent defensive right fielder rests on seven Gold Gloves, which are a vote of managers and coaches rather than a measurement. Second, it carries no Statcast data: arm strength, sprint speed and exit velocity cannot be compared with today's players. Third, the era matters. Winfield played in a period when a 30-home-run season stood out, and he spent his first eight seasons in San Diego's pitcher-friendly stadium, where his home-run totals understate his power. Anyone comparing him with 3,000-hit players from other decades should adjust for those effects.

Common questions

How many sports was Dave Winfield drafted in? Four: baseball (the Padres), basketball in both the NBA (the Hawks) and the ABA (the Stars), and football (the Vikings). He played only baseball professionally.

Did he really never play in the minor leagues? The documented account is that he went from the University of Minnesota to the Padres in 1973 and never appeared in a minor-league game.

Who has more hits, Winfield or Paul Molitor? Molitor, with 3,319 to Winfield's 3,110. See Paul Molitor's career profile for the comparison, and Rickey Henderson's and Wade Boggs's for two other 3,000-hit careers from the same era.

Is he in the Hall of Fame as a Padre or a Yankee? The plaque shows a Padres cap, although his best-known years were in New York.

Was he a good defender? The Gold Gloves suggest so, and the 1979 to 1987 span includes seven of them, but without defensive metrics the database cannot measure how good.

Where to go next

If this profile interests you, compare Winfield with Robin Yount and the other 3,000-hit players listed in the all-time leaders on this site. For the club that beat his 1995 Cleveland team in the World Series, see the history of the Atlanta Braves. Player pages are on the players section.