During the 2005 season, he surfaced in Tampa Bay for 43 games and later with San Francisco for 19 more. Sanchez was never the same and 2005 was his last year in the Bigs.
When I saw Paul Lo Duca's 2001 numbers my jaw dropped. He posted a .320-71-25-90 line in only 460 ABs, but what might be more impressive his mere 30 strikeouts. Ryan Howard did in about 15 games what Lo Duca did over a full season.
I knew Lo Duca had a few really good offensive seasons, but that line is one of the best for a National League catcher and it's not even close.
What's even better about the 2001 season is the player above in the NL batting race is Rich Aurilia. His season is even better than Lo Duca's. He went .324-114-37-97 and he led the league in hits with 206.
His monster season came the same year as Barry Bonds belting 73 bombs. I searched all over the web to see if Aurilia had done the clear and the cream with his good old pal Barry, but I couldn't come up with anything concrete.
Basically all I could find was a bunch of blogs accusing him of it because of his massive power increase and then sudden drop of production. His name didn't appear in the Mitchell Report once.
Any Giants fans out there if you could point me somewhere to either clear his name or call him guilty let me know. After seeing his numbers I'm interested in whether this guy was truly clean.
One of the things that makes baseball so great is how quickly guys enter the spotlight and how they disappear even faster.
Quick completely unrelated random baseball quote I love explaining why baseball is better than football comes from former pitcher Bob Lemon, "Baseball players are smarter than football players. How often do you see a baseball team penalized for too many men on the field?
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