Game of the Day (4/20/91)

Tigers 2, White Sox 1 (12). Detroit's Walt Terrell, a nearly-33-year-old right-hander winding down an almost-2000-inning career with his second stint as a Tiger, took on Chicago's Greg Hibbard, a 26-year-old lefty whose previous two seasons looked promising, but who would soon enter a pretty sharp decline largely due to an utter dearth of strikeouts.

Game of the Day (4/19/91)

Pirates 5, Cubs 4. Chicago started Danny Jackson, who is one of the more fortunate journeyman pitchers in baseball history; he pitched in the postseason five times, for five different teams, and came out of it with two rings. (In the '85 playoffs, Jackson's Royals trailed 3-1 in both the ALCS and the World Series; Jackson posted complete game victories in both Game 5's, and the Royals came back to win both series.) Pittsburgh's starter, Vicente Palacios, threw less than 20% as many major league innings as Jackson, but that was largely because much of his career was spent in the Mexican League. Baseball-Reference has a fairly interesting short bio of him here.

Game of the Day (4/18/91)

Brewers 4, Orioles 3 (11). Baltimore's Jeff Ballard was just 27 years old when this game was played, but had under 200 innings remaining in a big league career that had seen him join a rotation for the first time at 23. It wasn't an enviable fate - unless you were Milwaukee's Mark Knudson, who was 30 and had under 50 innings to go before the finish line.

Using Slam Scores: Difficulty of Final

Last time out, we used Slam Scores to evaluate which players might be overrated or underrated by conventional wisdom. This time, we’ll be… doing something almost identical, actually, but in a different way. It’s easy to find the players who’ve won the most Grand Slams, but it’s rare that anyone puts systematic consideration into the question of who was beaten in the process of winning them.

So let’s find out – which players have faced the toughest slates of opponents in Grand Slam finals?

Game of the Day (4/17/91)

Mariners 4, Twins 3 (11). Minnesota's Kevin Tapani and Seattle's Scott Bankhead were both 27-year-old right-handers (Bankhead about 8 months older). Bankhead entered the '91 season with over 600 career innings pitched, over 3 times as many as Tapani had thrown to this point. From '91 on, Bankhead had just over 270 innings remaining in his arm; Tapani, meanwhile, had over 2000 to go.

Game of the Day (4/16/91)

A's 8, Angels 5 (11). California's Mark Langston was a veteran left-hander in the middle of a long and excellent career, and was embarking on a season in which he would receive Cy Young votes. Oakland's Joe Slusarski was making just the second start in a career that would eventually include exactly as many starts as Langston's 1991 season (and fewer than his opponent would make in four other individual years).

Game of the Day (4/15/91)

Indians 1, Red Sox 0 (13). Cleveland started 24-year-old right-hander Charles Nagy, who was spending his first full season in the rotation for the team he'd stick with for over a decade. Boston countered with 32-year-old southpaw Matt Young, who was pitching for his fifth major league team (plus two minor league squads) in six years. I'm sure there have been plenty of matchups between pitchers in more widely varied circumstances, but this one has to be at least 90th percentile in that respect, right?