Long before Theo Epstein took his curse breaking talents to Chicago, helping to exorcise the demons of the Cubs’ past as the organization secured its biggest W in a century, it was two young pitchers who were supposed to fulfill that promise. I could write separate pieces on Kerry Wood and Mark Prior, but to me they’ll always be linked together in history, so it feels right to have them go as a tandem.

Kerry Wood donned the Cubbie Blue first. He was the first pitcher off the board in the 1995 draft, taken with the fourth pick behind other future major leaguers Darin Erstad, Ben Davis, and Jose Cruz. It’s not surprising that scouts liked Wood; Baseball America was correct in another respect: how quickly he would make the majors despite being a pitcher drafted still two weeks before his 18th birthday:

Wood has an exceptional arm. Not only is the velocity on his fastball equal to that of any pitcher in the draft, but it has heavy, late boring action. His curve also has a tight rotation, giving him two well above-average pitches that he throws with a minimum effort. Scouts say Wood is so advanced that he should be ready for the big leagues faster than all but one or two college pitchers.

This turned out to be almost exactly correct. Two advanced college pitchers, Brett Tomko and Matt Morris, debuted before Kerry Wood did. Indeed, BA’s report only missed the very nitpicky fact that Ariel Prieto (25 at the time), and two low-round relievers, Mike Judd and Jeff Wallace, also beat Wood to the bigs. The Cubs were not pleased when, two days after the team took Wood in the draft, Grand Prairie coaches let him pitch both games of a doubleheader, throwing a total of 175 pitches. Regardless, Wood’s path to the majors was relatively unimpeded and after two full seasons in the minors, he was called up at the start of the 1998 season. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone likes to compare young, phenom centerfielders to Willie Mays and/or Mickey Mantle. Mike Trout is, of course, the most deserving, but people have also made those comparisons to Ken Griffey Jr., Ronald Acuña Jr. and Juan Soto, Andruw Jones, Josh Hamilton, and many others.

In many cases, these types of comparisons are either early, ambitious, or downright wild. Josh Hamilton was only Mickey Mantle in terms of his personal struggles; Ed Rogers was just a bit worse than Alex Rodriguez. At one point, though, the Mays/Mantle comparisons were fresh, and long before it became a cliche, a young outfielder named César Cedeño was compared to Mays by by future Hall of Fame manager Leo Durocher.

Durocher was not one to be overly sentimental; Cedeño’s early performances did evoke Mays. At age 21, Cedeño broke out for the Astros, hitting .320/.385/.537 (wRC+ of 163) while winning a Gold Glove as a center fielder, his first of five. Rather than falling prey to the dreaded regression to the mean, he basically did that again the following season, hitting .320/.376/.537 (wRC+ of 155). There were obviously no wins above replacement stats to look at in 1972, FanGraphs and other sites like it being decades away from existence, but we can look back at Cedeño’s phenom years with even more certainty about his place in baseball’s pantheon than they could at the time. Read the rest of this entry »

Ken Griffey Jr. is not a typical candidate for a ZiPS Time Warp. Over his 22 years in the majors, from his time as a rookie phenom in 1989 to his sleepy denouement in his return to Seattle, we accumulated as many memories of Griffey as he did accolades. And unlike Eric Davis and possibly Joe Mauer, the earlier subjects of this series, Griffey’s injury struggles in his 30s did not rob him of a spot in Cooperstown; he was elected easily on his first ballot with 99.3% of the vote.

But we could have gotten even more baseball from Griffey than we did.

In the 80s, when fans talked about “Ken Griffey,” they were still talking about Ken Griffey père, then a veteran outfielder whose career featured stints with the Reds, Yankees, Braves, and Mariners, who was wrapping up his Hall of Very Good career. But by the 90s, it was Junior’s turn. When sportswriters of that decade named batters who could challenge Hank Aaron‘s home run record, Griffey was typically the protagonist, not the eventually successful Barry Bonds. Just as Juan Soto and Ronald Acuña Jr. are phenoms for young baseball fans today, Griffey was the start for younger Gen-Xers like myself and for older millennials. Junior always felt special, a player drafted out of high school with the first pick of the 1987 draft, the son of a famous player, an outfielder blessed with the coincidence of being born in Stan Musial’s hometown, on Musial’s 49th birthday. Read the rest of this entry »

If we didn’t know it was real, Joe Mauer’s career with the Minnesota Twins might strike us as being more like a fairy tale than an actual story. That is, until August 19, 2013. That was when Mets first baseman Ike Davis hit a foul tip that hit Mauer square in his helmet.

The moribund Twins, coming off a 69-93 season, had the first overall draft pick in 2001 for the second time in franchise history. The first time the Twins had the No. 1 pick, they drafted Tim Belcher, who didn’t sign when the team wouldn’t pay the going rate for a top selection. Minnesota also failed to sign their second round pick, Bill Swift; none of the players they actually did sign ever played a game in the majors. Read the rest of this entry »

On a purely objective level, Eric Davis had a solid major league career. He played parts of the 17 seasons in the majors, hit 282 homers, and collected 1,430 hits. Davis received MVP votes, made All-Star appearances, and earned three Gold Glove awards. Of a group of three childhood friends consisting of Davis, Darryl Strawberry, and Chris Brown, he’s the one who came out of baseball seemingly the least affected by personal setbacks and tragedy. Davis is still involved in Major League Baseball and has worked with underprivileged kids, something he knows about having grown up in South Central Los Angeles.

But as accomplished a player as Davis was, he was capable of being more. Like another All-Universe athlete from the 1980s who made the majors, Bo Jackson, baseball wasn’t Davis’s best sport in his youth. At John C. Fremont High School, he was considered a basketball player before a baseball player, but at the time, baseball had the quickest path to playing professionally. While the NBA’s policy disallowing anyone to play in the league within four years of high school was struck down by the US Supreme Court, no high schoolers made the NBA between Darryl Dawkins and Bill Willoughby in 1975 and Shawn Kemp in 1989.

Unlike some of his contemporaries, what kept Davis from approaching a Cooperstown career wasn’t personal or legal troubles or a lack of talent; it was a flurry of injuries. From a knee injury suffered as a rookie while sliding to the torn rotator cuff with the Cardinals, Davis was a veritable encyclopedia of maladies. (For a comprehensive listing of his dings and scrapes – and for a great look back on Davis’ career – be sure to check out Norm King’s SABR Bio of Davis.) Some of them were of the ordinary variety, such as an assortment of leg injuries that cut short almost every one of his age 24-28 peak seasons, a broken collarbone diving in the outfield, and multiple shoulder ailments.

Others were less typical, as when Davis lacerated his kidney and ended up in intensive care and endured a month-long hospital stay. Spinal problems, which ruined his 1994 long before the strike ended the season, initially led Davis to announce his retirement at age 32. Just a year after his extremely successful 1996 comeback with the Cincinnati Reds (.287/.394/.523, 26 homers, 3.4 WAR in 129 games), he was diagnosed with colon cancer. Davis spent the second half of the 1997 season recovering from having a portion of his colon, along with a tumor the size of a baseball, removed but still returned to the Baltimore Orioles and hit .327/.388/.592 in his last real full season in the majors. By this point, he was a part-time right fielder/designated hitter, with his days in center field wisely consigned to the past. Read the rest of this entry »