MLB's Top Seven Most Hyped Starts

Two of the worst days of the sports season are the first two Tuesdays of the baseball season—your team has its Opening Day or home opener and immediately has a day off the next day. It’s more of a tease than anything.

At the same time, it makes you wonder what in the world you do during the offseason when there isn’t something to have on television for three or more hours a day. 

Something else to remember about the start of the baseball season is that everything is amplified—if a guy hits 12 homers in April, it’s going to be a heck of a lot more remembered than if he does so in July. The same goes for winning and losing streaks, multi-homer games, and basically any other long streak or outburst.

For proof of that, the following guys are still remembered in some cases for their great starts, and only because they were that—starts—rather than finishes.

7. Jason Marquis

Thanks to a ridiculous Cardinals offense, Marquis was the first pitcher to win 10 games in the National League in 2005. It did a nice job of hiding the fact that Marquis is one of the most frustrating pitchers to watch in the history of baseball. He may have the most bizarre career of all time.

He comes to the Cardinals in 2004 and makes the playoffs three straight years. His last season, despite being in the rotation all season, he doesn’t make the postseason roster. For the next two years, he pitches decently for the Cubs, makes the playoffs both years, and doesn’t make the playoff roster. Last year, he makes the playoffs again with the Rockies.

So that’s six straight years of playoffs, three teams, two of whom left him off the roster, and three fanbases who couldn’t stand him and honestly don’t have that horrible of stats to back it up with.

One thing is safe to say—he won’t be left off any Washington Nationals playoff roster this year.

6. Carney Lansford

On June 4, 1989, Lansford was still hitting .400, and The Sporting News had him on the cover with the headline, “A .400 Hitter?” No. He hit .336 for the season.

A guy could hit .400 from June to September, and it would barely register nationally if he was hitting .336 in April, but hitting .400 the first two months will get you on the cover of magazines.

5. Sam Horn

A strong finish to the 1987 season made Horn—he and his 1988 Topps card—hyped coming into the year, but he hit .148 with two homers in ’88 and ’89. Then, playing for Baltimore, he returned with two home runs on Opening Day 1990. His Topps card skyrocketed! Sam Horn was back!

He actually had 37 bombs over the course of the next two seasons, but by 1995, he was completely out of baseball.

He does have his name attached to probably the most famous website based on a specific team, so that’s something.

4. Geronimo Berroa

In his first full season in the majors (1995), Berroa got off to a huge start in April. It led to one of the great hyperboles in history, as the Baseball Tonight crew discussed his qualifications for the Hall of Fame.

Nowadays, with 900 sports radio stations and seven trillion blogs, such drivel is commonplace, but for it to occur when there was only ESPN is even more impressive.

In a related story, Ruben Sierra once proclaimed that he too was headed to the Hall of Fame.

3. J.T. Snow

Snow hit around eight homers in the opening month of his rookie season. He had the look that instantly made him young people’s favorite player across the country—the smooth swing, the sunglasses look, initials as a first name, the same last name as the guy who sang “Informer,” which will licky boom boom now.

By the end of the season, he had barely doubled his home run total, seen his average fall to .241, and lost the Rookie of the Year to Tim Salmon. He still ended up with a decent major league career though, with many solid seasons, six Gold Gloves, and becoming known as the person who saved Dusty Baker’s son’s life.

2. Chris Shelton

Shelton just about shut the Internet down from fantasy owners trying to pick him up in April 2006, when he hit nine homers in the first 13 games of the season. He hit seven more the rest of the season and was already back in AAA by the end of July to make room for Sean Casey.

1. Tuffy Rhodes

He hit three homers on Opening Day 1994 and then hit five the rest of the season. It also accounted for almost 25 percent of his career total.

He did go on to break the all-time record for home runs in a season...in Japan.

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