What to do now that the Super Bowl is over and spring training still hasn’t arrived? Here at MLB FanHouse, we Mind the Gap.
Once, when Tony La Russa was managing the Oakland A’s in the early 1990s, he said that if he had a team of nine Mike Bordicks, his teams would make the playoffs every year.
He was trying to explain how much he valued Bordick, but in that one sentence, La Russa, now the Cardinals’ manager, summed up what winning baseball is all about.
Bordick, primarily a shortstop in his 14 years in the big leagues, was an All-Star once, in 2000 as an Oriole. He got one — count it — MVP vote in 1992 with the A’s during his only .300 season.
What Bordick brought to the table was incredible defense and knowledge of the game that that limited his mistakes in all phases of the game to an absolute minimum. He once went 110 games at shortstop without making an error. Those qualities made everybody around him a better player.
As we look toward the opening of spring training camps in Florida and Arizona in the next week or so, we here at FanHouse were wondering just who the difference-makers are — players who, though not superstars, can, if they reach a certain level of Bordick-ness, positively influence the pennant race.
So we’ll dip into our Harry Potter-autographed Sorting Hat to see if we can figure out who those players might be this year.
National League Central
Cubs: Ted Lilly, starting pitcher. Four times has a Lilly team made it to the postseason. On none of those teams was Lilly the ace, not even in 2008 when he won a career-best 17 games. Ryan Dempster had as many wins and an ERA a full point better, and Carlos Zambrano was making a name for himself. But Lilly at his best chews up innings, wins more than he loses and makes a good team better.
Reds: Aroldis Chapman, starting pitcher. Let’s face it — nobody knows enough about this guy to be able to accurately say if he’ll have any impact on the NL Central in 2010. What we do know is that he can touch 100 mph, that he’s left-handed and that most scouts love his stuff. If he can somehow make a quick adjustment from Cuba to the U.S. he could have as much impact as any first-year player in the game.
Astros: Hunter Pence, right fielder. Although he was an All-Star last year, Pence takes a back seat, albeit slightly, to Houston’s offensive leaders, Carlos Lee and Lance Berkman. But with Miguel Tejada no longer in the picture, the Astros need Pence to not just hit homers (25 last year) but to drive in runs with those homers. He was fourth on the team with 72 RBI last year, but at age 27 he should be coming into his own and be able to carry the Astros for a week or two at a time. Maybe right into the postseason.
Brewers: Corey Hart, right fielder. Hart seemed ready to be the third 100-RBI man in the Milwaukee lineup heading into last year after knocking in …
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