MLB history: Forgotten stars of the current NL East teams

In MLB history, plenty of stars are known to baseball historians, but how about the lost stars of specific clubs, important pieces at least briefly: The NL East.

MLB history is now so deep, it is relatively easy to find “lost” stars if one goes back a bit in time, but how many had starring roles now almost entirely forgotten except by professional baseball historians? Setting out to find such players, we started with the teams currently in the NL East and began with a player who may be best known (by almost no one now) as the one player his team wouldn’t trade for Ty Cobb…

Elmer Flick, Phillies

More from Call to the Pen

• Philadelphia Phillies, ready for a stretch run, bomb St. Louis Cardinals
• Philadelphia Phillies: The 4 players on the franchise’s Mount Rushmore
• Boston Red Sox fans should be upset over Mookie Betts’ comment
• Analyzing the Boston Red Sox trade for Dave Henderson and Spike Owen
• 2023 MLB postseason likely to have a strange look without Yankees, Red Sox, Cardinals

That was Cleveland, Flick’s last team, that wouldn’t trade him for Cobb, but the diminutive outfielder began his career with the Philadelphia Phillies, and is still third on the team’s all-time list for batting average with a .338 figure for four years (1898-1901).

Ordinarily, it might be tempting to exclude a player like Flick who played the majority of his career for the team in question before the foul strike rule (1901). However, Flick went on to become a Hall of Famer, and in fact, the NL’s decision to implement the foul strike figures into this reckoning.

Flick’s initial pieces of MLB history were eye-opening as he hit .302, .342, and .367 in his first three years, beginning at the age of 22.  Then came the rule counting the first two fouls as strikes, a stop-gap to a weird skill some players were developing – slapping fouls on pitches that might be called strikes until one more to their liking came along.

It was an early drag on the game’s pace.

In 1901, then, a lot of batting averages dropped. Billy Hamilton, another Hall of Famer and Phillies star, dropped 46 points between 1900 and ’01, and the new rule may very well have contributed to his decision to retire. His final average with Boston in the first year with the new rule was only the second time in his career he hit below .300.

Flick’s average also dropped, but only from his scorching .367 to .333. And he still managed to collect 180 hits in 138 games, the exact number he’d played in the year before when he gathered 200 safeties.

Originally a catcher as an amateur, Flick became an outfielder for the Youngstown Puddlers of the Inter-State League in 1896 because the team already had a good catcher. He admitted in interviews that he wasn’t much of an outfielder at first, quoting his manager in Youngstown: “The manager told me that as an outfielder, I wasn’t so hot…then he added: ‘But you can sure sting that ball.’”

However, in Philadelphia he improved, using a speed advantage to play a shallow right field, where he sometimes threw out runners at first on “singles.” Flick became a true star in Cleveland, though, leading MLB in triples twice after leading in RBI with the Phillies in 1900. This may be why he is somewhat more forgotten in Philly.

A player who sometimes turned his own bats on his father’s machine shop lathe in Bedford, Ohio, Elmer Flick was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1963.

Forgotten stars of the current NL East teams

Fred Tenney, Braves

Although Fred Tenney played for the franchise that became the Boston Braves in 1912, he played all of his career for the team first technically known as the Red Stockings, but widely called most of his career the Beaneaters, a name given them by sportswriters in 1883.

Ten of Tenney’s 17 years in MLB were played after the introduction of the foul strike rule, so he is arguably a modern player.

Moreover, he is credited with the introduction of at least three realities in MLB history that are most definitely considered modern. Tenney is credited by SABR.org with the start of the 3-6-3 double play, as well as the practice of playing well away from his base as modern players handle that position the majority of the time now.

Finally, as a smallish player, he seems to have been the first player at his position to stretch towards throws coming from other players, perhaps as a result of his size. The Chicago News reported in 1896: “Tenney’s way is far different from that of other first basemen. He reaches his hands far out for the ball, and stretches his legs so that he is farther out from the bag on every throw than any other first baseman in the league.”

A matter of quiet amazement then, apparently.

Like Flick, Tenney started as a catcher, and a left-handed one at that, but his throws were erratic, and he moved to the outfield, then finally to first. He settled in there despite his 5-foot-9, 155-pound size. (He was long gone from professional baseball before the original home run explosion in MLB history fueled by Babe Ruth and allegedly juiced balls in 1920.)

It was not an expectation then that all MLB first basemen are the size of the current Braves star at that position.

Tenney was a fine hitter as well as a fielding innovator, posting a lifetime batting average of .294 with seven marks over .300 (five before the foul strikes). His two highest modern marks were .315 and .313 in 1902 and ’03. In all, he had 2231 career hits.

He could run a little as well, stealing 285 bases in his career, and gathering 77 triples.

The little first baseman was also feisty when he needed to be, once getting into a fight with Pittsburgh manager Fred Clarke. “Clarke called me names, then I twisted his nose, and he kicked me in the stomach,” he claimed. He got a ten-game suspension, and as a star was thought to be a candidate to jump to the newly-formed American League.

He stayed with the Beaneaters, however.

Fred Tenney’s significant place in MLB history is also bolstered by his four years in Boston when he was the team’s player-manager (although the team was fairly lousy all four years).

The remaining, current NL East teams, of course, are newer teams than the Braves and Phillies, so their forgotten stars may not be as thoroughly forgotten as players from the early 20th century. We’ll start with…

Forgotten stars of the current NL East teams

Warren Cromartie, Nationals

The Nationals pose an interesting problem in trying to find lost stars in MLB history. The current Washington franchise was, of course, the Expos first, is not really that old a club (starting in 1969), and while they were a Canadian club, they became best known as a fertile ground for players who became big stars elsewhere.

Most serious fans know about the tall, left-handed pitcher, the father-star of the currently rising star in Toronto, and the guy whose nickname was “Rock.”

The player who had perhaps the most interesting, but somewhat forgotten career for the franchise, though, was Warren Cromartie, and he actually played within the last 40 years.

Cromartie was an everyday player and a very good one for the first high-water mark in Expos history, the 1980 and ’81 seasons when the team lost the NL East championship by one game to the Phillies, then in the following, strike-divided year, knocked off the World Champs from Philly in the “divisional series” before losing to Los Angeles on a walk-off homer in the fifth game of the NL Championship series.

In 1980, Cromartie played mostly first base, with two games in left field; in ’81 he split time between first and right. He hit .288 and .304 those two seasons and made only 14 errors in almost 2200 chances, the vast majority at first in ’80. He made no outfield errors in those two years.

In the nine years, he was in Montreal between 1974 and 1983, Cromartie hit .280, with 222 doubles and an OPS of .737.

But to quote Verbal Kint, “And like that…he’s gone.” After his age-29 season. He had back problems in ’83, as well as a dispute with manager Bill Virdon over a temper tantrum he threw after a loss. He became a free agent at the end of that season as well.

Cromartie took his services to Japan, where he played for the Yomiuri Giants, and for five of the next seven years hit over .300, topping out at .363 in 1986 with 37 home runs.

Then he came back to America, where, in his final season, at the age of 37, he hit .313 for the Kansas City Royals.

All in all, Warren Cromartie put together one of the weirdest stellar careers in professional and MLB history.

Forgotten stars of the current NL East teams

Kevin Brown, Marlins

Kevin Brown, you’re likely saying, didn’t he pitch for the Rangers? He did indeed, for eight years, as well as for the Dodgers for five. However, between those two long stays making up the majority of Brown’s 19-year career were two stellar years in Miami.

And in the second of those two years, the right-hander won a World Series ring with the cobbled-together, veteran Marlins team.

More from NL East

• Philadelphia Phillies, ready for a stretch run, bomb St. Louis Cardinals
• Philadelphia Phillies: The 4 players on the franchise’s Mount Rushmore
• Stock Up, Stock Down: Mariners, Padres, Giants, Phillies
• Disconnect between Philadelphia and national media is embarrassing
• New York Mets: The 4 players on the franchise’s Mount Rushmore

Brown was a pitcher for whom the phrase “nasty stuff” might have been coined had it not already existed. He was a guy who threw hard, and his 91-96 mph fastball tailed downwards sharply. He backed up that pitch with a slider in the high-80s and a split-finger offering.

When he arrived in Florida after one year with Baltimore, he was at the peak of his career at age 31. Then, going 17-11 in 1996, he led baseball with a 1.89 ERA and 0.944 WHIP, an impressive piece of recent MLB history indeed.

In the Marlins world championship year, his ERA slipped – all the way to 2.69. He went 16-8, throwing a one-hitter and a no-hitter during the campaign. In game six of the NLCS, he threw a complete game while suffering from the flu to defeat the Braves.

And after the season, he became the first $100 million-dollar man, signing a contract with Los Angeles reportedly worth $20 million more than any other team was offering. The deal included air travel allowing his family to follow him in person.

He continued to force batters to pound the ball into the dirt if they managed to hit his pitches at all until he was 40.

At retirement, the two-year Marlins star posted a 211-144 record. He had appeared in six All-Star games. Unfortunately, he was a one-and-done Hall of Fame candidate, getting only 2.1 percent of available votes in 2011.

He was likely held back by having been named in the Mitchell report as allegedly buying HGH once, and many consider his one of the worst snubs in Hall voting history.

No one, however, can say he took any time off for the Marlins. And no one can say he wasn’t one of the dominant pitchers in recent MLB history. I wonder how many casual fans would name him either fifth or sixth on the 1997 Marlins, though.