A sad milestone is about to pass. With the retirement of Trevor Hoffman, a long-time closer for the San Diego Padres, professional baseball is down to just four active major leaguers who are older than I am:
- OF Matt Stairs—currently a pinch hitter for the Washington Nationals
- IF Omar Vizquel—a backup shortstop for the Chicago White Sox
- RP Tim Wakefield—a knuckleballer and bullpen pitcher for the Boston Red Sox
- SP Jamie Moyer—most recently a Phillies pitcher who had Tommy John surgery and hopes to come back with the Seattle Mariners in 2012
As long as Jamie Moyer hasn’t given up, I’ll feel like baseball is a game played by peers. His surgery last year—cutting short a pretty nice season for an old man—didn’t deter him, and unlike Hoffman, Moyer won’t retire. There’s also some hope that another Satchel Paige will come along.
Thanks to segregation, which confined most of the pitcher’s stellar career to statistical obscurity in the Negro Leagues, Paige didn’t make his major league debut until age 42, with the Cleveland Indians in 1948. Even with the late start, Paige played 17 more years before retiring as the oldest player of all time (59 years 2 months 18 days), in 1965.
The youngest professional baseball player ever was Frank Chapman, who played for Philadelphia of the American Association in July 1887, at the age of fourteen (14 years 7 months 28 days). Many historians don’t count that, though, and instead look at Joe Nuxhall‘s 1944 debut with the Cincinnati Reds (15 years 10 months 11 days) as the low-water mark for age of a major leaguer. In my lifetime, it was Ken Griffey, Jr. who started making me feel old when he opened with the Seattle Mariners for the 1989 season.
It is currently a race to see whether someone younger than my son Carter (currently 11 years 1 month 27 days) will be in the league before there is no one older than I am (currently 42 years 10 months 11 days). I’m not sure which I’m rooting for: for baseball to span two generations at the same time, or to close out my era of baseball before my son starts his.
Which would you want?