But if walks were understood ten years before Moneyball, they were far from being appreciated. Orioles manager Johnny Oates considered the lumbering first baseman for the leadoff spot, though this too was scuttled when Brady Anderson seized the role. Milligan’s keen batting eye was recognized. The only memorable detail in his career is a statistic in which he ranked fourteenth: his career walk rate, 17.2 percent, slotting him a little below Mickey Mantle and dead even with Mark McGwire. Milligan is part of that remainder, a single name in an almanac. Two-thirds of everything in baseball is disappointment: at-bats, teams, players. Milligan was cut, and so began his journey on the narrow road through the north, through Cincinnati, Cleveland, Montreal, and theoretically on into the Yukon. This time, there was no left field position waiting. The noble experiment went for naught, however, as their star first baseman quickly went down for the first of many times, and Milligan found himself back in his usual role of stopgap.Įventually, Baltimore gave up on Davis and promoted a young David Segui. He admitted that the experience terrified him, and fans were no less wary, but the dismal Orioles had no one else and needed his bat in the lineup. Instead he responded gracefully to the media and spent spring learning to play left field. If this was a blow to his ego, Milligan refused to show it. The Orioles were rewarded with a fine season, and in turn rewarded him by giving his starting job to Glenn Davis. The Mets traded Milligan to Pittsburgh, who gave him 100 plate appearances before shipping him off to Baltimore for an A-ball reliever. Teams did their best to solve the problem. If your team was starting Randy Milligan, something had gone wrong. ![]() He was the kind of player who started for bad teams and never played for good ones, the human representation of systemic failure. ![]() No bold numbers, no italics - he never led the league in anything. 261 career average, 70 home runs, six teams in eight years. It’s not as though the numbers on the back of Milligan’s cards were going to impress anyone at the time: a. It turns out you need the worthless cards to make the stars valuable. Now and then, a baseball card company will forgo the commons and give collectors nothing but stars, but strangely, these sets rarely did well. They’re the cards kids flipped past looking for the Will Clarks and Don Mattinglys. Most kids who saw Milligan thought the same thing: “common.” That’s the parlance for the bulk of baseball cards that are worth nothing more than pennies: the middle relievers, the utility infielders, and the unheralded rookies who make up the bulk of a 792-card baseball set.
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