Project: 2010

Randy Johnson – Starting Pitcher 113.1
1988-2009
4135 IP, 303-166, 3.29 ERA, 4875 K
1995, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 Cy Young, 10 All-Star Games
Johnson has become a patron saint for young pitchers with dominating stuff who haven’t quite turned the corner. At age 30 Johnson had made 186 Major League starts and sported an impressive 81-62 record with a big strikeout rate, a solid ERA and a massive flaw in the control department. He wasn’t a bad pitcher, more like a solid #2 guy who could dominate a game, then come out next week and walk 7 and lose 8-6. Then something clicked. In fact, if you erase everything before the age of 31 I think Randy Johnson is still an easy Hall of Fame choice. In his 30s Randy Johnson was simply unbeatable. He was a massive, ugly, intimidating beast of a man on the mound. Lefties batted .199 off of him, and hit just 25 HRs off of him in 2104 plate appearances. If he’d learned how to pitch earlier I don’t have any doubt he’d have had the greatest career of any pitcher of all-time.

March 31: Texas Rangers at Houston Astros

It would be incorrect to say that the Texas Rangers and the Houston Astros are franchises moving in different directions. Rather, you might say they are mirror images of each other. The Rangers, who made back-to-back World Series in 2010 and 2011, are a team perhaps past their peak, whereas the Astros surely have a brighter future than their current mess. But while the Rangers have just lost their second star to the Angels in as many off-seasons (first C.J. Wilson, then Josh Hamilton), and the Astros have been stockpiling prospects, the Rangers are the ones with the top-ranked rookies (Jurickson Profar and Mike Olt) while Houston is long on youth, but short on star potential.

Project: 2009

As far as I’m concerned the 2009 World Series didn’t happen, so let’s just jump to the 2009 cohort.

Project: 2008

The year Tampa Bay finally turned in a quality season. Also, not to be forgotten, the Phillies ended a dry spell with their third World Series championship. The series was actually a memorable one, with the deciding Game Five suspended in the sixth inning for two days.

Project: 2007

We’ve already covered Boston winning the World Series in an earlier segment, so let’s skip over those boring guys. Instead let’s take a look at the up and coming team of the future in 2007 – the Cleveland Indians. The Indians had a successful season in 2007 – winning the central division by 8 games and tying the Red Sox for the best record in the American League. They would go on to push the eventual champs to the brink in the ALCS before blowing a 3-1 lead in that series.

Project: 2006

In keeping with theme so far of “the World Series and what it meant” in these yearly recaps I thought I’d tie in the recent playoff expansion. Any tinkering with a playoff system involves discussions of what the point of an elimination tournament is in the first place. Obviously a 162 game regular season is a far better way to determine how good a team is, so the playoff format provides something else – entertainment value. Any playoff expansion or retraction has to come to some sort of decision on how to balance these interests. One factor in this equation is how often the system spits out a clearly inferior team as champion.

Project: 2005

Bill James, in his masterpiece of modern non-fiction The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, notes that while Graig Nettles played some of the best third base ever seen in the 1976-1977 playoffs, hardly anyone noted it.  He attributed this to the fact that Brooks Robinson had done the same thing in the 1970 playoffs and essentially the slot in cultural memory for “guy who makes great plays at third” had therefore already been filled.  Nettles was applying for a job that had already been filled.

Project: 2004

In the spring of 2012 Baseball-Reference.com changed their Wins Above Replacement formula, which for 99% of the world was a complete non-event, but for some of us forced a drastic re-assessment of our life priorities and value systems.  For me personally it complicated my spreadsheet of every significant baseball player since 1900.  But, working on such a spreadsheet is half the fun, and it needed some tweaking anyway, so I was glad for the excuse to re-hash all that hard work.  As a result I’ve been working my way up from 1900 to the present day, rating players as they retire and creating my very own version of a Hall of Fame.  I thought I’d spare everyone the first 104 years of the project and limit myself to commenting on the latter years (since my memories of the 1949 season are kind of hazy these days).  So I thought I’d begin with the 2004 season, because why not?  It was a fun season, and I think most of us can recall the main actors at the time.