Forgettable All-Stars Of The 80's And 90's

There have been thousands of major leaguers over the course of history. Only a select few are chosen to be All-Stars, to represent their teams on a national stage at a meeting of the game's elite. Then there are these guys.

Beneficiaries of hot starts and (more importantly) the one-player-per-franchise minimum, these players lived the dream of being sent in in the 8th inning to replace the real stars. I've picked one lineup from the 80s and one lineup from the 90s; the only requirement for membership is that they all actually were named to at least one actual All-Star team.

1980s Team
C - Dave Engle (Minnesota, 1984). Chosen not so much for his offense (.266, 4 home runs) as his deft ability to handle a pitching staff that included a young Frank Viola, as well as the immortal Mike Smithson, John Butcher, and Rick Lysander. Coaxing that crew to a .500 season is no small feat. Honorable mention to Rich Gedman, who not only stiffed me out of an autograph when I was a kid, but had a swing so loopy that the Red Sox considered handing him a sand wedge to hit with (or, more accurately, to miss with.)

1B - Wally Joyner (California, 1986). Wally actually had a solid rookie season, and it's tough picking a forgettable All-Star first baseman, since the talent pool is actually there. But Wally never made it back to the Midsummer Classic, which should tell you something. Bonus points: my friend Adam actually got him to sign an autograph as "Wally 'Shiny' Joyner" thanks to a (totally fictitious) story about some reason Adam called him that on his rotisserie team.

2B - Johnny Ray (California, 1988). Johnny was a capable infielder for the Pirates, but could never crack the Sandberg/Herr stranglehold on the All-Star game. Finally, Pittsburgh took pity on him and shipped him off to California (for Billy Merrifield and Miguel Garcia). The AL infield was a little easier to crack, and Johnny finally got his moment of glory with a respectable .306 average for the season.

SS - Kurt Stillwell (Kansas City, 1988). Kurt had seven home runs at the All-Star break in 1988. Considering he hit 34 in his storied career, that's no small feat. Where are they now? Kurt's "Lil Slugger" robot made an appearance on Comedy Central's "Battlebots", where it got crushed into parts and muffed an easy double-play ball.

3B - Chris Brown (San Francisco, 1986). We hate to mock the recently-deceased (Chris died in a house fire near Houston last December). But Chris channeled all his baseball into the first half of 1986, hitting around .350 for a few months. Then he tailed off, developed a reputation as a fragile ne'er-do-well, and was out of baseball by age 28. There's a lesson there, somewhere.

LF - Ruppert Jones (San Diego, 1982). Some people remember Ruppert as the first pick by the Mariners in the 1976 expansion draft. Some remember him for his titanic, if infrequent, home runs. I remember him because, before every pitch in the 1986 ALCS, he opened his mouth wide enough that he could have eaten a hoagie in 3 bites.

CF - Jerry Mumphrey (Houston, 1984). Talk about utterly forgettable. He had a name that sounded vaguely Muppetlike, and a career batting average of .289. Even his Wikipedia page (don't get too excited; every former Major Leaguer has one) doesn't list anything except a vague collection of statistics. If he came up to you in a diner and told you he was a former All-Star, you'd probably move to the next stool.

RF - Glenn Wilson (Philadelphia, 1985). The mid-80s Phillies are a forgettable-players-buff's dream. Glenn Wilson. Juan Samuel. Shane Rawley. Don Carman. Von God-bless-him Hayes. What a lineup of almost-good players. Wilson gets extra points for making the '85 ASG and looking more like "Weird Al" Yankovic than a major-leaguer should. He did have 102 RBI in 1985, so it wasn't a total pity pick.

SP - Ken Schrom (Cleveland, 1986). I'm vaguely troubled by the idea that a pitcher could have made the All-Star game in my card-collecting heyday, and I don't even have a mental picture of him. 1986 was a banner year for Ken; he went 14-7 with a 4.14 ERA and led the A.L. with 12 induced sac flies (I love the Internet). Five years later, he was nearly the ace of the slow-pitch beer league in his hometown of Grangeville, Idaho. (Not true; he's actually the VP of Marketing for the AA Corpus Christi Hooks and has a working email address on the team's site. Please don't tell him about this.)

RP - Bill Dawley (Houston, 1983). Contrary to popular belief, a totally different person than St Louis' Ken Dayley, as this collection of baseball cards will attest. He saved 14 games as a rookie (second on the team to Frank DiPino, who appeared in 97.3% of the packs of Topps cards I bought in 1986), so I guess he earned his moment in the sun.

1990s Team
C - Tom Pagnozzi (St Louis, 1992). Nothing against Pags, who had a pretty solid career and won three Gold Gloves. But the dude hit .253 lifetime, which isn't what a casual observer would think of as Star-worthy. In his one All-Star at-bat, pinch-hitting for Doug Jones, he flied out to Ruben Sierra in right. That one sentence right there is gold for forgettable All-Star lore.


1B - Ron Coomer (Minnesota, 1999). Remember when I said it was harder for first basemen to make the All-Star team, because the bar is set higher? How do you then explain Coomer, who parlayed his .263 average and 16 home runs (that's for the year, mind you; not the first half) into a trip to the Ted Williams veneration on the field at Fenway? And half of that was at 3B. Let's just chalk it up to the one-All-Star-per-team rule.

2B - Mickey Morandini (Philadelphia, 1995). Maybe his All-Star bid was a result of his good defense and scrappy play. Maybe it's because he turned an unassisted triple play in 1992. (Hey, it was either that or throw it to the erratic Kim Batiste). Maybe it's because he was the skinniest guy on the robust '93 Philly NL Championship squad. But I like to think it's because he won MLB's Steve Buscemi lookalike contest for five years running.

SS - Jeff Blauser (Atlanta, 1997). The day Ozzie Smith started to go downhill was the day every other National League shortstop started to shave every day and actually make it a point to look at where the All-Star game was going to be when the schedule came out. Blauser, a good-if-dull part of the Braves' good-if-dull late-90s run, will always be remembered (by me) as one of those Braves infielder who always looked like his batting helmet was three sizes too big.

3B - Scott Cooper (Boston, 1993 and 1994). It's probably a good thing that I left New England for a couple of years in the mid-90s. Otherwise, I would have probably spent a lot of time ruing the fact that between the Boggs/Clemens/Greenwell era and the Pedro/Manny/Varitek era, there were a couple of seasons where Scott Cooper was the team's sole ASG representative. He was traded to the Cardinals before the '95 season; his plane actually never made it to St. Louis, but the Cards never noticed.

LF - Felix Jose (St Louis, 1991). You can always tell a forgettable player by how many teams he played for over the course of his career. Felix spent time with the A's, Cards, Yankees, Royals, and Diamondbacks, where he thrilled fans with his switch-hitting and the nagging feeling that his actual name might have been Jose Felix. And I put him in left even though he mostly played in right. That's just how damn versatile the man was.

CF - Henry Rodriguez (Montreal, 1996). I'll admit it - I saw a couple of SportsCenter highlights that convinced me for a while that Henry might be the best home run hitter named Henry since Aaron. His numbers in 1996 (.276/36/103) were actually very solid, but he struck out like a house on fire, and the fact that Expo fans threw "Oh Henry!" candy bars on the field in his honor probably had more to do with Montreal losing its team than anyone will admit.

RF - Dante Bichette (Colorado, 1998). John Denver made millions off his song "Colorado, Rocky Mountain High", but I'll bet no one owed more to the Centennial State than Dante Bichette. In 1998, 17 of his home runs were at home, and 5 on the road. Caveat: I personally saw Bichette hit a batting-practice home run swinging with one arm at Comiskey once, so obviously it wasn't all Coors-powered. But his name really doesn't come up among the all-time greats unless you're discussing medieval Italian poetry.

SP - Jose Rosado (Kansas City, 1997). Jose went 9-12 with a 4.69 ERA in his All-Star season. For Kansas City in the late '90s, that was Walter Johnson-esque. Three years later, he blew his rotator cuff and was out of baseball. In the '97 Classic, he struck out Bagwell and induced a double-play ball from Mike Lieberthal, though, which is a hell of a lot more than I've accomplished with my life.

RP - Roger Pavlik (Texas, 1996). True, Roger was a starter. But when you're making a team up of dubious All-Stars, you can't leave Pavlik off the roster. He was the #2 starter on a division winner, which ain't bad, but to this day, he's still only a household name in his own household. He went 2 innings in his All-Star appearance, memorably striking out Ellis Burks, who advanced anyway because strike three was a wild pitch. Good night, Roger, wherever you are.

(Michael is running the show today; ordinarily he can be found running BunkoSquad.com or watching Arrested Development reruns.)