wezen-ball: Predicting the Next “Team of the Decade”

or…Gregg Olson: The heights of career starvation.

The team that he seems to land on is a good team, and one with little room for debate. Some might wonder, for example, about Roger Clemens (he’s as worthy as Pedro, I suspect) and whether Barry played enough in the decade to warrant inclusion, but that’s all pretty minor. When you break it down position-by-position like that, the choices become pretty obvious.

Are the choices as obvious looking forward, though? As you can imagine, these “Team of the Decade” articles are pretty common every ten years (the most amazing thing about Rob’s and Matt’s pieces are that they remind us that it’s already time for us to come up with yet another one… not that I’m complaining!). I remember it happening in 1999 (when we also had the “All Century Team”), and I know for a fact it was happening in 1989-90 and even earlier. We’ve all heard it countless times in reference to Jack Morris and his HOF candidacy, after all.

What’s more rare than the retrospective “All Decade Team”, though, is the predictive “All Decade Team”. In the 1990 Sporting News Baseball Yearbook, the editors do both. After coming up with their own “All 1980s Team”, they take it a step further and try to predict who will be the “All 1990s Team”. The article was published in January/February of 1990, so it’s impossible for them to be spot on. Neither of the two catchers of the decade, Ivan Rodriguez or Mike Piazza, for example, were even in professional baseball yet. Plus, the editors seemed to be a little too impressed by the 1989 rookie class. Still, there’s enough there worth looking at, so here we go: