There remains one player in major league baseball who is older than me. One. Bartolo Colon. And he’s only older than me by a couple of months. There is another guy born the same year as me still playing: Ichiro. I’m older than him by a couple of months, but 1973 is still representing. Just barely. It won’t be long now until every single ballplayer is my junior.
Everyone thinks about that from time to time. Our baseball mortality or whatever dramatic thing we want to call it. We all know by now that we’re never gonna make it to the bigs. Most of us knew it when we were still kids. But there is some sort of . . . feeling we all get when we look at a ballplayer who is our age. There’s no element of “I could do that” to it. But maybe a touch of “if things were different, I could’ve been you.” This is much easier for those of us who don’t know how genetics work, of course.
Today Will Leitch of Sports on Earth has a handy post for those of us who think about this stuff. It’s a list of the best baseball players born in each and every year from 1973, when the dinosaurs roamed, until 1996, which will officially be operative this evening as Julio Urias takes the mound for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
I hope the list doesn’t depress any of you. If it does, I’ll try to come up with a similar one for cardiologists or research professors or something. A lot of us are still younger than those folks. Even if we have just as much a chance of being them as we have of being the left fielder for the Chicago White Sox or whatever.
