Knudson: All-Time Mountain West Baseball Team
FacebookBy Mark Knudson, The Mtn. Insider
February 18, 2011
Like all the other sports in the Mountain West Conference, baseball competition will look a lot different in the coming seasons. This is the last year the historic BYU program will be part of the MWC and a season later, we lose powerhouse TCU but add 2008 College World Series champion Fresno State.
So in advance of what could be an historic 2011 season, let’s take a look back at some of the greatest baseball players produced by the current MWC schools. These guys might argue with people that think they don’t play great baseball in the mountains.
Starting pitchers: We can throw out a nice threesome of stand out big league starting pitchers. Begin with a guy who threw an Opening Day no-hitter and pitched what was very possibly the best-pitched World Series game ever, Jack Morris, a BYU product and World Series MVP. Before he became the manager of the Padres, Bud Black was a standout pitcher at San Diego State and in the major league and finally, let’s bet on the future and tab the mercurial Aztec Stephen Strasburg as our third starter. He’ll miss this season, but the party’s just getting started for him.
As far as the relief pitchers go, we’ll pick a rightly and a lefty to finish games. Our rightly is two-time World Series winner and three time All-Star Rick Aguilera, another BYU product. For the lefty, we’ll dip into the distant past and go with former Colorado State star Felix “Tippy” Martinez, an All-Star and World Series champ with Baltimore.
There are too many standout infielders to pick just four, so we’ll have multiples that give our bench some great depth. At first base, there are three guys who had outstanding big league careers. Greg Brock was a terror at the plate for Wyoming and then for the Dodgers and Brewers. Another Aztec, Mark Grace, collected the most hits of any player in the 1990s with the Chicago Cubs, and before his son, Prince, started hitting a lot of homers, Cecil Fielder, who played at UNLV, hit them a long way for the Detroit Tigers (including a couple monster shots off yours truly).
At second base, we’ve got a guy who didn’t play a lot of baseball at BYU but played in the big leagues before deciding basketball was a better gig for him. Still, Danny Ainge was a very good infielder as was Wyoming product Jeff Huson who played all three infield spots for the Rangers and Orioles. Add in current BYU skipper and former Cubs and Expos stalwart, Vance Law, who also played multiple infield positions, and you have a pretty solid middle infield.
Huson played a lot of shortstop, as did another Aztec, Bobby Meacham, who was a legend on Montezuma Mesa. He played six seasons in the big leagues, mostly for the New York Yankees. He’s been a major league coach since 1993.
We’ve got an unbreakable tie at third base; there’s no real way to choose between these two guys: Yankees World Series hero Graig Nettles (San Diego State), a six-time All-Star and two-time World Champion and Gold Glove winner and the pride of UNLV, Matt Williams, who starred for the San Francisco Giants and Arizona Diamondbacks. He was a five-time All-Star and a World Series winner as well.
The outfield has to start with Hall of Famer and San Diego legend Tony Gwynn, of course. That’s a given. After that, UNLV product Ryan Ludwick, now with the Padres, would fit the bill and we’ll add in Wyoming product Art Howe, who played a lot of positions during his career, most of it with the Houston Astros.
And even though he’s yet to reach the big leagues, there hasn’t been a finer catcher to come out of a MWC school than Johnny Bench Award winner and College World Series hero, TCU All-American Bryan Holaday. We haven’t heard the last of him.
The face of baseball in the Conference will be changing, but the legacy left by guys like these is everlasting.
ALL TIMES MOUNTAIN
