
It's amazing how much mileage MLB teams get out of lefthanded pitching. Take somebody like Pete Schourek, for example. He did very little to distinguish himself during his career, ending up a career 11 games under 0.500 with an ERA in the mid-4.00s. And yet he still lasted 11 seasons and made $14,000,000. It's bothersome.
To his credit, Schourek did have a single season of note, in the strike-shortened 1995 campaign for the Cincinatti Reds. Schourek quietly let the Reds to the second best record in the National League and a first round dismantling of the Los Angeles Dodgers. In the context of the extremely offensives Nineties, one could argue that Schourek's 1995 campaign was one of the finer seasons for a lefthanded starter of the decade: 18 wins, a 1.067 WHIP, a 3.5:1 strikeout-to-walk ratio. He was durable, versatile and positively on point the entire season.
Then he fell apart, a combination of injuries and reality. He won a mere 25 games the rest of his careers, with only the Red Sox seeming fit to keep him around for more than a season. Schourek actually started the fourth and deciding game of the 1998 ALDS against Cleveland, pitching a solid 5.1 scoreless inning before the game was blown in the 8th during an ill-fated Tom Gordon/Dave Justice showdown that tipped to the Tribe.
It was a nice swan song for the lanky lefthander, who muddled his way through a few more seasons before getting dumped by the Sox in late summer 2001. On talent alone, Schourek easily could've had a John Smiley-esque career but if nothing else, his breakout 1995 cemented him as a footnote instead of an afterthought.
BTW that 1998 Red Sox squad featured one of the more star-studded pitching staffs of the Nineties and yet it was a pretty pedestrian group overall. These seven pitchers combined for 25 All-Star Games (appearances in brackets) and yet half of these fellas were out of MLB within a year or two...
Bret Saberhagen (3)
Dennis Eckersley (6)
Derek Lowe (2)
Greg Swindell (1)
Pedro Martinez (8)
Steve Avery (1)
Tim Wakefield (1)
Tom Gordon (3)
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