MLB history: Forgotten stars of the current AL West teams

In the second of our series about stars lost in MLB history, we take a look at the current teams that make up the American League West.

As major league baseball’s owners and their players union finally debate the terms of opening the current season, this is the second in a Call to the Pen series about stars forgotten by MLB history. Today, we take up the American League West, and begin with an important contributor to the 2002 World Champions of baseball and complicated team names:

Scot Shields, Angels of Anaheim

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The challenge is: Name the last member of singular World Champion Angels squad of 2002 to leave the team.

Correct: Scot “One T” Shields owns that distinction, as well as a rarer distinction in 21st century MLB history. He is a player who retired with at least ten years in the major-league game with his only team. He was the last ’02 ring winner when he retired after the 2010 season.

However, he is included here because he was also one of those semi-obscure players who produced when it mattered — that is, in 2002, when the Halos beat the San Fran Large Persons 4-3 in the World Series.

That’s not to say Shields produced in that Series – he really didn’t – appearing in only one game and being shelled, but he did help the Angels get to the postseason, and guys who do that, especially relievers who aren’t closers, are easily forgotten.

In 2002, he was a young player bouncing between the triple-A Salt Lake Stingers and the Angels, as he had done the previous year. A slender player, Shields was surprisingly durable, once throwing 261 pitches in a 16-inning inning college game. He didn’t return to the minors after June 14 of the Angels championship campaign.

Throwing a sinking fastball and a slurve, he started, relieved, and closed for Anaheim, and he pitched particularly well during the championship season before that one appearance in the Series when he gave up two homers while getting five outs.

He posted a 2.20 ERA in 29 games, covering 49 innings. He had the second-best WHIP figure (1.061) on the entire pitching staff after Brendan Donnelly (1.027), another reliever.

Shields went on post three more sub-3.00 ERA campaigns in a career that ended after his age-34 season. His overall ERA was 3.18, and he had four workhouse years for his team from 2005 to ’08 when he appeared in 287 games with three sub-3.00 ERA seasons. A very nice little place, a minor star’s place, in MLB history.

John Olerud, Mariners

According to legend, apparently incorrect, John Olerud was so obscure he was forgotten by Rickey Henderson after he played with him on the Mets, and then, was introduced to him again after Henderson was signed by the Mariners.

The story had to do with Olerud wearing a batting helmet while playing the field, which had been recommended to him after he suffered from a brain aneurism when he was a college player. Henderson allegedly didn’t recognize him as a former teammate despite the helmet.

Olerud was, in fact, a very, very good player, but one likely floating around only vaguely in the average fan’s consciousness: “Which team did he play for – the Mets, the Jays…?” In fact, Olerud played for five teams in his 17-year career and was a significant part of the wildly successful 2001 Seattle Mariners.

That team won an insane 116 games. For his part, Olerud contributed 95 RBI, 32 doubles, and a .302 average to that effort, scoring 91 runs. In MLB history, the Mariners’ 116 wins is at the top of the heap with the 1906 Cubs. (We’ll skip over the team’s performance in the playoffs in ’01.)

As a fielder, Olerud was right on the league average for first basemen that season — .993. For his career he was two points higher than the league average.

The tall, strong first baseman stayed in the Pacific Northwest for four-plus seasons.  In his four, full M’s seasons, 2001-’03, he hit .289, driving in 383 runs. In that stretch he also won three Gold Gloves and was an All-Star once.

How do you win the Gold Glove three times in four years while driving in nearly 400 runs, but make the All-Star team only once? Play for the Mariners.

Brad Peacock, Astros

OK, I know, if you’ve been reading this piece, you’re chomping at the bit for the Astros selection because a) the team has only been in the AL seven years, and b) the club has disgraced itself by cheating. Moreover, who’s actually forgotten?

Each of a crowd of talented players in Houston has pulled, individually, a minor “Barry Bonds move” (it should be a term) by screwing up a reputation that would likely have been wildly impressive if clean.

And yeah, these were individual choices.

So, it’s clear the AL-Astros forgotten star needs to be a pitcher, someone who never demonstrably benefited from some jackass banging on a trash can.

The winner, then, is Brad Peacock, a player whose profile is far lower than Dallas Keuchel’s, for example.

In the controversial 2017 championship year, Peacock, a big right-hander, was a sterling 13-2 with an AL-excellent 3.00 ERA on the nose.

Of course, Peacock is not really forgotten; he’s still active, still throwing five pitches, and presumably will pitch this season if there is one.

In 2017, his ERA didn’t rise above 3.00 at any point until August, and after that point was pushed back down in September. The guy lost two games all year. Granted, he had some cheating fire-power behind him, but still, Brad Peacock is one ballplayer in Houston whose name may not be Mudd in MLB history.

Endy Chavez, Rangers

No doubt some readers are saying right now, “Endy Chavez?! A lost star?? Of the Rangers? Wasn’t he all over the place?”

Few fans, surely, could give the number of teams Chavez played for. (The correct major league number is either seven or eight, depending on whether one considers Washington the same team as Montreal.) The speedy outfielder was a career journeyman, to be sure.

However, weirdly, Chavez actually had something of a star turn with the American League Champion State Cops in 2011, something even the most inebriated gambler in Las Vegas would not have bet on. This is because nearly two years earlier, Chavez suffered an injury that might well have ended his career, erasing the last three years of it.

Playing left field for Seattle June 19, 2009, Chavez collided with his shortstop, hyperextending the outfielder’s right leg to the point that he tore both his ACL and MCL, as well as partially tearing some of his lateral meniscus.

But after a lengthy, rigorous rehab process, he was in the Rangers camp in 2011 as a non-roster invitee. The previous season he had managed to play in only eight games with teams in Texas’ minor-league system.

Starting the season in triple-A again that year, Chavez joined the Rangers in May, eventually contributing a .301 batting average, 37 runs scored, and 27 RBI in 83 games. Texas went 49-34 in those contests, and the 33-year-old had 24 multi-hit games among them. Particularly notable were his 3-for-5 game against Tampa Bay May 30, when he homered and drove in two runs, and a 4-for-4 game against Cleveland three days later that included a triple and an RBI.

Texas won both those contests.

As a result of pushing his way through rehab for a “devastating injury,” Endy Chavez added an AL championship ring and three more years to his personal MLB history.