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1. Randy JonesWe don't even know if they'd have been good.
Also, can't argue with Randy.
** I haven't been as lurkive as usual so you may have been back for a while.
not long
i hate not being able to use capitals but i am mostly typing one-handed and getting everything to cooperate on capitals just ain't happening
i can type pretty darn fast though with my right hand. stupid left hand.
if that makes any sense
In any event be well.
EDIT: certainly no thanks needed for me :)
Does Mike Norris' drug problem count as an injury? It's a disease!
yes. i still slur too much for it to work well and it just hacks me off
I agree with you on both of these, but I kind of thought the opposite was true as well. 4 of the 10 on the list had Hall-of-Fame careers anyway. To me, the most disappointing careers hit that middle area: guy played well enough long enough to show that the Hall of Fame was a legitimate possibility, but then came up well short because of injury. Herb Score seems like the poster boy for disappointing career-ending injury to me.
Man, I would have loved to see J.R. Richard pitch. He seems almost as dominating in his day as Drew Smyly.
If they're including Brien Taylor and Campanella, you could probably fill the list with off-field stuff. Clemente, Munson, Bostock?
Combining your first paragraph (career-ending HBP) and your second paragraph (active players dying), how the hell do you not include Ray Chapman on this list?
That's only if you ignore Jim Devlin, which a lot of people do.
Regards,
Tim
The blurb on Koufax is not entirely true as he has come to baseball related events on occassion.
I was thinking of Randy Jones, the pitchers for the Padres. ERA champ plus 20 games, then CYA winner, then an injured nerve and a steep decline.
The key is that "disappointing" is a very vague term that can fit a wide variety of cases. You can argue that Nolan Ryan blowing out his arm on the mound in Seattle in 1993 was extremely disappointing, because wouldn't it have been cool to have an 48-year-old power pitcher? Or you can say that Greenberg is the most disappointing on the BBPro list, in that we know he was good enough to make to the majors but don't know anything else. We can project from his minor league record and scouting reports, but we don't know anything. With Conigliaro we know that he could hit, we know J.R. Richard was a great pitcher, we know Score (and Mark Prior and a thousand other pitchers) didn't have arms that could survive the workloads they were given. Even Brien Taylor's injury in a fight tells us something about him [edit: though I admit that's cheating in this context]. We know absolutely nothing about Greenberg as an MLB player, which is disappointing. Whether that's more disappointing than, say, Conigliaro's injury depends on what you really want to know.
Also, Jeff Gray comes to mind. Yeah, he was a setup guy, but he was a good setup guy having a crazy-great season (61.2 IP, 39 H, K/BB ratio of 4.1:1) when he just suddenly had a stroke. Poof, career over, just like that.
edit to add: Seeing Addie Joss mentioned reminds me of Austin McHenry, who hit .350/.393/.531 in his age 25 season and died of a brain tumor shortly after his age 26 season.
This guy would be a hall of famer if he hadn't been shot.
Dwight Gooden should be given some consideration. And Clemens skirted being one of these could-have-beens? How serious was that injury and surgery? It could have ended before it got started.
Deam was definitely one.
Moore reminds me of:
That reminds me of this guy
If we expand this to other sports, I think Bryan Berard could have been a really tremendous offensive defenceman if he hadn't been almost blinded by Marian Hossa (accidentally). Leaf fans love to talk about the breaks that haven't gone our way, yet somehow that never comes up. Berard made it back, but he was never anywhere near the same player.
Wear visors, kids!
EDIT: Upon looking at his career numbers, Berard was better after than I remember him being, and not quite as good before. Anyone else want to weigh in on this? Maybe my 20-year-old self overrated him.
The numbers don't show that for Score (though, who knows?) His '57 season began like the other two, only a bit better (by hits allowed, K rate, ERA, CG.) 60% of his career IP were pitched before he took the line drive. I think it much more likely (and recall reading it at the time) that a changed pitching motion caused the arm injury, perhaps a change caused by memories of getting nailed in '57, maybe a change intended to leave him in better fielding/defensive position. IIRC, he was a Bob Feller big windup/followthrough hurler during his good years.
You stay classy, San Diego.
Tragic yes, but I recall Greenberg as a prospect and he wasn't really much of one -- I think he might have had a nice career as a 4th OF in the Henry Cotto mold, but he didn't have much power and wasn't an especially gifted hitter in general... He could run a bit, wasn't totally averse to taking a walk, and had a bit of gap power. I agree he's out of place on this list.
If you're talking ability, I'll grant you that, but Esasky wasn't a bad player.
Was Mathewson injured? I never knew that. He went downhill pretty fast but he was 33 when it happened and had been pitching 300+ innings a year since he was 20.
Pretty sure he was gassed in WWI and never really recovered.
Wally Pipp?
But then, so would Huck Flener.
Then in an unrelated incident about a month later, Pipp had his skull fractured by a practice pitch.
Maybe everyone knew that, but I always thought it was "Pipp got injured --> Gehrig entered the lineup supposedly temporarily --> Pipp got better but his job was gone"
Maybe everyone knew that, but I always thought it was "Pipp got injured --> Gehrig entered the lineup supposedly temporarily --> Pipp got better but his job was gone"
That's what I always heard.
Well, yeah, but by the time the US entered the Great War, Matty was 2 years removed from his last ML victory, and 3 years removed from his 5th to last
True, but he was done pitching by then.
EDIT: Cokes to Misirlou and Bob.
Spanish-AmericanKorean War vet.I'd put Smoky Joe Wood, Dean, Score, Conigliaro, and Fidrych at the top of my list, because they were all demonstrated Grade A talents who got cut down at an absurdly early age, when they still had many prime years ahead of them. The others were either older or unproven. Fidrych was maybe the most painful for me to see, because I was at the game in Baltimore when he first got hurt. He was coasting along with a shutout in the 6th inning when the roof fell onto him just like that, and he never recovered.
sandy sat down with joe torre for a long interview with tj simers at the nokia theater a couple of years ago. it was great.
but the article seems to be all over the map, and inconsistent.
The thing about Fidrych, is that he had an absurdly low strikeout rate, 3.5 per 9. Very, very few pitchers have had long successful careers with that low of a rate, and most of them were crafty lefties. Since 1950, only 21 pitchers had a K/( rate of 3.6 of worse and pitched 100+ IP and 100+ GS. I think either he would hve improved the K rate, which is possible, or his upside would have been Larry Sorenson or Bob Forsch. Not half bad, but not legendary.
The demise of Ray Fosse's career had absolutely zero to do with Pete Rose. A simple look at Baseball-Reference, for instance, reveals that Fosse did not miss a single game after the Rose collision, and went on to be an All-Star again the next season. Other, later injuries derailed his career.
Valid, but his colorful personality is what I'm disappointed we missed, not his upside.
Yeah, much nicer guy.
Tell that to Ray Fosse
For one thing, it's the only way his name is going down in history. For another, having someone else to blame for the demise of his career is certainly convenient. It sounds a lot better than "Well, I was just injury prone and probably not really that great anyway."
Oh, and Tony C leaned in.......
Personally, I always found Corey Koskie's injury pretty sad, but I guess that's not the same thing as disappointing (unless you're Bill Hall and one of the best highlights of your career is forever marred).
Fidrych was better at almost everything compared to Forsch or Sorensen, and in some areas it's not especially close. Fidrych's career before he totally blew out his arm is tiny, of course, but he was pretty much a study in how to be successful without striking people out.
He gave up 15 home runs in 300 innings in Tiger Stadium. He walked under 2 men per 9 innings. You couldn't run on him as he gave up 21 stolen bases in 300 innings (This is the only thing Sorensen was better at, but you could run on Forsch). He gave up 53 extra base hits in 300 innings. His BABIP for those 300 innings was .262, which was low but not so that it would jeopardize his status as a top pitcher.
So the only way you could score runs off him was through lots of singles, and predictably that didn't work out too well in 1976/77/78. I don't know whether he could sustain his extraordinary success in preventing runs via ways other than the strikeout, but he also could have gained more strikeouts as well: he was not a soft-tossing pitcher, but rather a hard Kevin Brown-style sinker, hard slider type of pitcher. If he developed a curveball or a changeup he could have picked up more strikeouts to compensate for his fall from otherworldly status in walks, home runs, XBHs.
It would have been fascinating to watch his career unfold, not just because of his effervescent personality, but because of the way he approached pitching, which I don't think we've ever really seen before or since.
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