Sunday Notes: David Cone Tackles a Challenging Career Quiz

Last summer, an article titled Mark Gubicza Tackles a Challenging Career Quiz ran here at FanGraphs. In it, the Los Angeles Angels broadcaster did his best to answer matchup-specific questions from his playing days —- he pitched in the big leagues from 1984-1996 — such as which batter he allowed the most hits to, and who took him deep the most times. Along with taking a stab at the answers, Gubicza shared entertaining anecdotes about some of the hitters that were mentioned.

He isn’t the only pitcher-turned-broadcaster I challenged with (a version of) the quiz. Later in the season, I sat down with David Cone who, much like his 1980s-1990s contemporary, had fun stories to share.

I first asked the New York Yankees broadcast analyst which batter he faced the most times. Cone failed to come up with the correct answer, first guessing Will Clark (76 plate appearances), and then Juan Gonzalez (57), to who he recalled surrendering several gophers.

The answer is Roberto Alomar, against whom he matched up 93 times. What does he remember about facing the Hall of Fame second baseman?

“The thing that stands out — and he was a teammate of mine, too — is that Robbie was one of the best at picking up tipped pitches,” Cone told me. “Maybe a pitcher was doing something with his glove, and you kind of knew that Robbie would see that. But a lot of times he was using it as a bluff. Alex Cora does it to this day. You want the pitcher to think you have something on him, which gets into his head. It’s psychological warfare, and Robbie was the best at that.”

The batter with the most hits against him?

“Milt Thompson was really tough on me,” recalled Cone. “He was a good inside-out hitter, so I had a hard time getting him out with my off-speed pitches. His style was a bad matchup for me, so that would be my guess.”

Close, but no cigar. Thompson had 18 hits (in just 50 at-bats), one fewer than Dave Martinez.

Cone nailed Gonzalez as the batter who took him deep the most times (six) with little hesitation.

“He took a lot of people deep, a lot,” said Cone. “He was just incredibly strong. If you made a mistake, he did not miss it. I think I struck him out a fair amount of times, as well (11 Ks in 57 plate appearances), but if I hung a slider or missed up in the zone, he made me pay.”

Asked whom he fanned the most times, Cone whiffed badly by guessing Chris Sabo. The former Red went just 3-for-19 against him, but struck out only eight times. Cone then brought up Scott Brosius (3-for-25 with 11 strikeouts) as a possibility, albeit with a caveat that he probably didn’t face him enough.

The answer is Jose Canseco, Carlos Delgado, Travis Fryman, and Juan Samuel, all of whom he punched out 18 times.

“I used to throw a lot of sliders to Canseco,” Cone recalled. “One time I threw a two-seam fastball and drilled him in the ribs. I was wondering if he was going to come out to the mound. He didn’t — I was thankful — and then we ended up becoming teammates with the Yankees. I remember looking at him in the clubhouse thinking, ‘He remembers. He’s still pissed. Are we going to have an issue here?’ Once you’re teammates that stuff is past history, but I still stayed away from him.”

Cone couldn’t come up with the batter he issued the most free passes to, but he did have memories of the player in question.

“That’s a lot of walks,” he said upon learning that he issued 15 of them to Rafael Palmeiro. “I faced him when he was a rookie with the Cubs and I was with the Mets. We went to Japan together on an All-Star tour. Right after that, he was traded to Texas. I remember calling him and telling him good luck. I also told him that the Cubs had made a mistake. I thought really highly of his ability.”

One of the teammates Palmeiro had in Chicago is the player to whom Cone issued the most intentional walks (3).

“Wow,” Cone replied upon hearing that it was Andre Dawson. “Breaking into the league with the Mets, Andre was the most intimidating person I saw. If I looked over from the mound when he was on deck, I would see him staring at me. Every time. He had this hard, concentrating stare. He never took his eyes off the pitcher when he was on the on-deck circle. You could feel him staring at you. He was intense.”


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RANDOM HITTER-PITCHER MATCHUPS

Eddie Stanky went 4 for 8 against Bill Macdonald.

Ted Kubiak went 5 for 7 against Jim Barr.

Elrod Hendricks went 5 for 11 against Lindy McDaniel.

Solly Drake went 5 for 11 against Johnny Antonelli.

Lee Maye went 5 for 11 against Barney Schultz.

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Thomas White was born and raised in Massachusetts, so a Super Bowl question was in order when I spoke to him on Thursday afternoon: Will his mood be affected by what happens on Sunday night?

“I don’t think so,” replied the highly-regarded pitching prospect, who is traveling down to the Miami Marlins’ spring training facility tomorrow. “My dad and I were talking the other day about how we’d been hoping the team could get nine wins this year [and] we’d be happy with that. So, the fact that we’re in the Super Bowl… I think we’re all just going to enjoy the ride. The offense needs to play a whole lot better if we’re going to win, but we’ll just enjoy watching it.”

I informed the southpaw that my editor grew up in the Pacific Northwest and is a diehard Seahawks fan; Meg Rowley would likely answer the same question quite differently.

“Oh yeah,” responded White. “You’ve got to have some expectations. I mean, now that we’re here, we’re going to win. I’m going to go crazy. But if it doesn’t work out…”

We’ll hear much more from White — on pitching, not football — during our forthcoming Prospect Week.

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A quiz:

A total of 53 pitchers have been credited with 200 or more wins in the expansion era (since 1961). Only one of them didn’t finish his career with a winning record. Who was it? (A hint: He played 26 seasons, 13 in the American League, and 13 in the National League).

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NEWS NOTES

Josh Beckett and Dontrelle Willis have been chosen as the newest members of the Marlins Legends Hall of Fame. Last year’s inaugural class comprised Luis Castillo, Jeff Conine, Jim Leyland, and Jack McKeon.

Buck Martinez announced on Friday that he is retiring after a multi-faceted career that spanned nearly five decades. A big-league catcher for 17 seasons (the last six of them in Toronto), Martinez went on to manage the Blue Jays in 2001 and 2002, then to call more than 4,000 of the team’s games as a play-by-play announcer and color analyst.

Rick Renick, an infielder/outfielder who played in 276 games for the Minnesota Twins across the 1968-1972 seasons, died on January 31 at age 81. The London, Ohio native logged 122 hits, one of them a home run off of Mickey Lolich in his first big-league plate appearance.

Ron Teasley died on February 3 at age 99, leaving 101-year-old Bill Greason as the lone living Negro Leagues player. A Detroit native who attended Wayne State University, Teasley played for the New York Cubans in 1948 after first serving in the U.S. Navy. He went on to teach and coach in the Detroit Public Schools system.

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The answer to the quiz is Charlie Hough, who went 216-216 from 1970-1994. Frank Tanana came close, finishing just north of .500 at 240-236.

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As was the case with Wilbur Wood a few weeks ago, Mickey Lolich’s recently-reported death merits more than a paragraph in News Notes. A left-hander who toed the slab for the Detroit Tigers from 1963-1974 (he later pitched for the New York Mets and San Diego Padres), Lolich was a veritable workhorse, averaging 41 starts and 312 innings over one six-year stretch. Most notable was his 1971 campaign, when he went 25-14 with a 2.92 ERA over 376 (!) innings. Suffering no ill effects from that eye-opening workload, he proceeded to go 22-14 with a 2.50 ERA over 327-and-a-third innings the following season.

His most impressive efforts arguably came over an eight-day stretch in October 1968. Pitching against the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series, Lolich logged three complete-game wins, the last of them in Game 7 when, — on two-day’s rest, no less — he out-pitched Bob Gibson in a 4-1 Tigers victory.

Lolich, who was 85 at the time of his passing, ranks third in Tigers franchise history with 207 wins, and first in games started (459), shutouts (39), and strikeouts (2,697). Moreover, his K total is fifth-most among left-handers in MLB history.

When I interviewed him some years ago, he said the following about his prodigious innings loads in the 1970s: “The dinosaurs are dead, and I’m a dinosaur.”

R.I.P. Mickey Lolich.

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When I talked to him at the GM Meetings, Tampa Bay’s Erik Neander acknowledged that some of his organization’s more promising prospects had disappointing seasons in 2025. One of them, Brayden Taylor, was featured here at FanGraphs just a few days ago. That’s not to suggest there weren’t strong performances as well. I asked the president of baseball operations for examples of guys who stood out down on the farm.

“I would certainly highlight Theo Gillen for what he did as a [2024] first-rounder out of high school,” Neander said of the 20-year-old outfielder who put up a 149 wRC+ and swiped 36 bases in 39 attempts with Low-A Charleston. “Nathan Flewelling is another guy who doesn’t get a lot of attention. He’s a young catcher who we drafted [also in 2024] out of Canada and sent to A-ball this year. He finished the season in High-A, so the progression he made was very encouraging. He’s a pretty special guy. He has potential on both sides of the ball, and makeup that sits on top of all of it.”

A native of Red Deer, Alberta who turned 19 in November, Flewelling had a 127 wRC+ between the two levels in his first professional season. He and Gillen will both be ranked highly when our Rays list is released this spring.

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Kutter Crawford started 33 games for the Red Sox in 2024, then missed all of last season due to knee and wrist injuries. I recently asked the right-hander if watching games from his couch gave him a different perspective on his craft.

“Definitely,” Crawford replied. “From the dugout, you can’t really tell where the ball is over the plate. When you’re watching on TV, you can see how pitchers are sequencing and trying to set guys up, going inside, then tunneling an off-speed [pitch] off the fastball inside. So, yes, watching the game from that perspective, I have learned a lot more about pitching — the benefit of tunneling and sequencing. The importance of all of that stuff.”

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A random obscure former player snapshot:

Mike Kinnunen pitched in 48 MLB games — 21 for the Minnesota Twins and 27 for the Baltimore Orioles — and didn’t get a decision in any of them. That’s a record. No other hurler has made as many big-league appearances without having a win, a loss, or a save on his career ledger.

A Seattle-born southpaw who played collegiately at Washington State University, Kinnunen put up a 5.23 ERA over 51-and-two-thirds innings across his time in Minnesota (1980) and Baltimore (1985-1986). He also put up with a lot of losing, albeit with other hurlers getting the L next to their names in the box score. In games where Kinnunen toed the rubber, his teams registered a record of 5-43.

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LINKS YOU’LL LIKE

A season-ending error changed Orion Kerkering, who is now embracing the challenges ahead. Matt Gelb wrote about it at The Athletic.

MLB Pipeline’s Jim Callis, Sam Dykstra, and Jonathan Mayo teamed up to give us one intriguing prospect from each team who can make a run at an Opening Day spot.

Baseball America’s J.J. Cooper gave us, in impressive detail, five things we learned from public 2026 Hall of Fame votes.

Mark S. Sternman profiled erstwhile Minnesota Twins lefty reliever “Everyday Eddie” Guardado for the SABR BioProject.

Tiffany Babb visited the site of Jackie Robinson’s childhood home, and wrote about her experience at The Fan Files.

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RANDOM FACTS AND STATS

Prior to reaching the major leagues, Hall of Famer Lefty Grove logged a record of 108-36 over a five-year span with the International League’s Baltimore Orioles. Over that same 1920-1924 stretch, his teammate Jack Ogden posted a record of 118-42. All told, Ogden spent eight seasons in Baltimore, winning 20 or more games six times (once going 31-8). He was then 25-34 over five MLB seasons.

Luis Arraez has 2,567 at-bats and 123 doubles over the past four seasons. Manny Machado has 2,566 at-bats and 121 doubles over the past four seasons.

Ed Reulbach jumped to the Federal League’s Newark Pepper on today’s date in 1915. A top-shelf pitcher for the Chicago Cubs from 1906-1909 — he went 79-25 with a 1.81 ERA across those four seasons, once throwing a shutout in both games of a doubleheader — “Big Ed” went 21-10 with a 2.23 ERA in his lone year as a Pepper.

On today’s date in 2008, the Baltimore Orioles traded Erik Bedard to the Seattle Mariners in exchange for five players, including Adam Jones and Chris Tillman. Bedard went 15-14 during his time as a Mariner. Tillman went 74-60 as an Oriole, while Jones made five All-Star teams and won four Gold Gloves.

Players born on today’s date include Keith McDonald, who holds the MLB record for most career hits that were all home runs. The native of Yokosuka, Japan (he spent his high school days in Anaheim) went 3-for-9 while appearing in eight games for the St. Louis Cardinals across the 2000-2001 seasons. McDonald also holds the distinction of having homered in his first two plate appearances, a feat equalled by just Bob Nieman, who did so with the St. Louis Browns in 1951.

Also born on today’s date was Costen Shockley, a first baseman who played in 11 games for the Philadelphia Phillies in 1964, and in 40 games for the California Angels in 1965. A member of the the Delaware Sports Hall of Fame, the Georgetown native went 28-for-42 (.197), with three home runs, including a grand slam. Shockley began his professional career with the Pioneer League’s Magic Valley Cowboys, batting.360 with 23 bombs. His teammates at the low-level farm club included fellow 19-year-old Dick Allen.

Les Mallon, an infielder who played two seasons each with the National League’s Philadelphia Phillies and Boston Braves in the 1930s, began his professional career with the Texas Valley League’s Mission Grapefruits. Also competing in the four-team Class-D circuit were the Edinburg Bobcats, Laredo Oilers, and Corpus Christi Seahawks.

The 1905 Ohio-Pennsylvania League comprised 21 teams, including the Barberton Magic Cities, Canton Protectives, Lima Lees, Steubenville Factory Men, and Washington Patriots.