Email a copy of 'Jack Of All Trades: David Cone' to a friend
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By Howard Megdal | at
Email a copy of 'Jack Of All Trades: David Cone' to a friend
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ATLfanboy
Moar articles like this! Good stuff.
bjsguess
Cone was a terrific pitcher. Unfortunately, he got overshadowed by some of the best pitchers ever. 6 seasons of 5 WAR or more. 58 career WAR isn’t too shabby either.
He isn’t a HOF pitcher BUT he was consistently one of the best in the business.
venn177
I see five levels of baseball players:
Hall of Fame
All-Star
Major Leaguer
Role Player
AAAA
He was an all-star, through and through.
pageian
Cone seems like a guy who probably should be a HOF’er but didn’t quite make it. I kind of remembered him as a guy who had injury problems but looking at his stats now it doesn’t seem like he did. Maybe perception isn’t as kind to him as it should be. He seemed like a 300-game winner talent but wasn’t really close to that, more in line with a guy like Hershiser (#4 comparable on baseball-reference). Makes you wonder how guys like Oswalt and maybe Halladay are going to fare in HOF voting since they (might) end up with similar career lines to Cone.
Zack23
Hopefully by the time Doc and Oswalt are eligible for the HOF we aren’t judging individual performance on team-dependent stats
das411
This is a fantastic series, and Cone is one of those guys whose last two or three seasons probably keep people (cough cough, NY media) from remembering just how good he was in his prime…
…but Bob Klapisch pointed out something interesting in “The Worst Team Money Could Buy” about how the Mets traded Cone to Toronto for a super young and red-assed Jeff Kent and not much else…four days before the trade deadline when Jose Canseco (can he be a Jack sometime?) went from Oakland to the Rangers. Kinda makes you wonder what kind of haul the Mets could’ve scored for Cone had they shopped him for a few more days that summer…
Brian Culpin
“Jack of(f) all trades: David Cone” — I like what you did there!
kpedrok
I thought at some point you would make a reference to Cliff Lee. Not that Lee had the career that Cone had, but he has been traded when he was essentially one of the best five pitchers in the game four times.
TeamCropDusters
David Cone was one of my favorite pitchers from the 90’s. He had about 8 different pitches and could throw all of them from 8 different arm slots. A lot of people might argue this, but I think he is a HOF’er…He pitched extremely well in an era DOMINATED by hitters…
JohnPaulP
Seems pretty similar to Cliff Lee these past three years. Eventually they all end up on the Yankees I guess.
jb226
More than anything else, I think these articles are an excellent lesson in proper evaluation of prospects. Cone performed everywhere he went and yet was, essentially, traded for 11 different people. Of those only one had any sort of career worth noticing. And to put the icing on the irony cake, the team who got the player–Jeff Kent–also evaluated him inaccurately enough that they traded him away for nothing in an atrocious trade, and then THAT team traded him away as well.
Hoo boy.
I think it’s a good lesson to be reminded of considering the value teams are placing on prospects recently. A good prospect-turned-player is worth his weight in gold, but you’d best be real sure you’re actually picking the good ones–whether you’re acquiring them or trading them (or refusing to trade them).
mikeclyne
One of my favorites of all time. I think the biggest thing with Cone was he was a winner. Winning percentage of over .600 and 8-3 in playoffs, he was a big game pitcher. On top of that he won 5 rings…to me he is on par if not a little higher then Schilling on a HOF vote due to more prolonged excellence, but to me they are fairly close