Word: pitcher
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Imagine two young men debuting in the same baseball season, winning the Rookie of the Year awards for the American and National Leagues, toiling 19 summers in and out of the sun, and arriving at the definitive milestone of their positions on the same afternoon. For a pitcher, that means 300 victories, in the 116-year history of baseball the province of just 17 men, now including Seaver, 40. Leading up to the moment, he acted cool and professional. Only afterward would he admit, "It was like I was pitching my first major league game." The morning before...
...played golf." Finding himself in New York now was another incredibility to Seaver. "Tom is really still a Met," Mets First Baseman Keith Hernandez insisted the next day as Seaver's former New York teammates bellied around a television set (equitably enough, in Chicago). Baseball's particular prodigy, Pitcher Dwight Gooden, 20, had just won his eleventh consecutive game to break a club record that Seaver fashioned 16 years ago. "It's especially great coming today," said Gooden. "This is something I'll always remember." Seaver was about through beating the Yankees, 4-1, when returning to the dugout after...
...City Royals Baseball Academy, White was raised in the shadow of the old ballpark at Second and Brooklyn, but not to be a cleanup hitter. "When I hit a home run, I'm as surprised as the next guy," he said after smashing a resounding one for wonderful young Pitcher Bret Saberhagen in a 6-1 celebration. As Pendleton supplied a counterpoint to Brett, White is the flip side of airborne Cardinals Shortstop Ozzie Smith, except White's style is to avoid notice, to be so good that nobody sees he is there, and incidentally to get in front...
Landrum also had an opposite number, though a teammate in this case, the pitcher in whose cause he hit that home run, twice-traded but miraculously redone Lefthander John Tudor, 31. A tip from an old high school teammate is the delightful explanation for his resurrection from journeyman to 21-game winner, though the expanse of the Busch Stadium outfield, not to mention the outfielders themselves, must have had something to do with it. No matter how splendidly he pitches, Tudor seems to have difficulty enjoying it. While Landrum kept singing, "Boy, you should have seen the dugout vibrating; something...
Neither of these teams approaches the stature of the 1927 New York Yankees, but each has more than enough arms and fewer than enough bats to leave some nice anomalies on the record. Buddy Biancalana's passel of hits could be a mystery for the ages. Pitcher Jackson was fanned five straight times and rejoiced: "I tied a record for that?" In the fifth game, the winning team struck out 15 times. Cardinal Reliever Todd Worrell, 26, a late bloomer of two months' standing in the major leagues, struck out the only half-dozen batters he faced. This matched...