Twenty years ago, the Detroit Tigers traded an aging slugger to the first-place Baltimore Orioles, to be the final ingredient in the O's magical worst-to-first season. His name was Keith Moreland, and he was dog meat.
I was one of the 50,865 people who watched him come off the bench to go 0-for-3 with two feeble strikeouts in a 13-inning loss to the second-place Red Sox. Even from far away in the overflow bleachers behind the bullpen, we could see that he was fat and slow and helpless. Eventually, after weeks of complaining about playing time while being a humiliating failure in the heart of the lineup, he literally quit on the team, leaving them in Toronto with one game left, after the Blue Jays had mathematically eliminated them.
So on August 17 of this year, the Orioles traded veteran slugger Aubrey Huff to Detroit. The Tigers were in first place at the time, 3 games up on the White Sox and 6 1/2 ahead of the Twins. They were adding a bat they thought they needed, and Huff was finally getting his chance, after more than 1,300 games in the majors, to take his name off the list of active players who'd never been in the postseason.
Maybe there's a reason he was a fixture on last-place teams. Already bad for the Orioles, he got worse for the Tigers, putting up a .189 / .259 / .302 line--an echo, carrying across two decades, of the .215 / .243 / .280 Moreland recorded in Baltimore. And tonight, after one of the great last-week collapses in baseball history, the Tigers ended up in second place. Now we're even. Huff came off the bench once, got hit by a pitch, and sat back down for a pinch runner. Once again, the playoffs will go on without him.
