Shared memory, down to the sentiment.
Jody Reed was also a favorite of mine. I will still wear #3 in his honor. His career choices playing a part in Pedro eventually landing in Boston only reinforces my feeling that Jody Reed should be in the Red Sox Hall of Fame
Along the same lines, we all remember the Bagwell trade as a disaster but a few years ango I checked his numbers during our playoff run that year and Larry Anderson was quite good for us down the stretch that year, pitching 22 innings in 15 appearances, striking out 29 percent of hitters with a walk rate of only 3.5 percent, and a 1.23 ERA. Tho he stank in the playoffs so maybe I am misremembering his greatness?
But he was useless in the playoffs, and then left as a free agent.
He had a ridiculously awesome first month (368 / 453 / 590 / 1.043 as of May 8), then slumped for about 3 months into early August (232 / 331 / 341 / 672) before finishing strong (337 / 435 / 477 / 912). Good season though.
Right, good but not great. I think my memory of that year is somewhat clouded by his excellent postseason.
Yeah, in general it was just a fun team / season. And oh how he went back on those popups!
I have about 20,000 cards still in my garage, with about 6 thick binders with them all laid out, and there are SO MANY “rated rookies” that I saved because they were supposed to be good. I have so many Kevin Seitzers and Gregg Jeffries because they were going to obviously break Pete Rose’s record.
One great game, with the only exception being that moon shot Cecil Fielder hit off him, right? Wasn’t Morton relatively local too, from CT?
My memory isn't perfect, but I do seem to remember that the announcers were making a big deal about Morton being a local kid.
I always wondered why Morton never got another shot in Boston. As a 22 year old rookie lefty in '91, he had fifteen starts - seven good to decent, five meh, and three horrific. A second look now shows that he followed that with a 2-12 campaign in Pawtucket. But on the '92 team that was clearly going nowhere, wouldn't they be better served giving starts to youngsters rather than the ancient Danny Darwin and Joe Hesketh? Those Hobson teams were mismanaged in every possible way.
He was also among the 3 or 4 young-ish prospects who each got 5-8 bad starts in 1994 before the strike, along with Gar Finnvold, Chris Nabholz, and Tim Van Egmond. (I'm guessing Gammons probably hyped them up like a new generation of young pitchers in the spirit of Clemens/Hurst/Boyd if not better).
When I was young, I remember asking my cousin and uncle what made a good baseball player. Like how could I tell if they were good by looking at the back of their baseball card.
He's being dinged by OPS+ quite a bit for the 1999 offensive environment... a .391 OBP feels pretty good (ended up better than Mo Vaughn's!), and the .435 SLG doesn't seem bad for a middle infielder. But an .826 OPS was 85th in baseball in 1999... in 2024 it would have been tied for 25th.
Benzinger is famous in our house because he really LOOKED like a "Todd". I even showed my wife his baseball card, just his head, and asked her to guess his name and she guess Todd
He was. Besides having gotten off to a very good start with the Sox in 1999, he was coming off a genuinely great 1998 season with the Royals, which would turn out to be his career year (119 OPS+, 5.3 bWAR, 13 triples). Duke gambled that at age 30 he'd have a few more quality years left, but unfortunately he just had the one.
I might be a little off on this, but what I remember about the week(s) before the strike was Duquette emptying out Pawtucket of anyone that had a major league contract because if they were in the majors they didn't have to get paid once the strike started.
Wasn't there a "Offerman will replace mo's obp" hot take (on that duquette statement) in the media at the time???
I remember Frohwirth from Chris Berman’s nickname for him, “Todd Which Hand Does He Frohwirth”
As simplistic as OBP is by today’s advanced metrics, it was pretty bold to hear Duquette cite something other than the classic counting stats when addressing this personnel move. I don’t personally recall hearing a GM cite even that before in the press. Duke had his flaws, but he was ahead of his time in a lot of ways by consulting with Mike Gimbel (as well as scouting for players in Asia more aggressively than most). I recall Duke took a lot of heat from old time baseball folks when it came out he was consulting with a statistician ever since his time in Montreal.
Juan Pena is always my answer to a slightly different question, which is: who were you absolutely sure that, without injury, would have been a star.
I recall that Gimbel was a water meter reader and the press thought that it was HILARIOUS that Duquette would talk to him. Shaughnessy and Glenn Ordway and the like used to kill him for that.
Gimbel was also a a werido. Wasn't there keeping alligators or something? None of it invalidates his statistical work, of course. But it's not like we haven't used weirdness to knock a different Sox statistician, a sword-wielding one.
