1997 v. 2003: Second Basemen

Today we will start the third segment of the Florida Marlins 1997 v. 2003 World Series segment. Lets take a look at the two second basement from those teams today, Luis Castillo and Craig Counsell.

The ironic thing about this question is that the Marlins starting second baseman to begin the 1997 season was actually Castillo. However, after a season filled with struggles for the youngster, the Marlins decided to demote Castillo and made a trade for Counsell. On July 27, Craig Counsell was traded by the Colorado Rockies to the Florida Marlins for Mark Hutton. Counsell of course became a Marlins hero in the World Series after hitting a sacrifice fly in the ninth inning to tie the game. He then scored the game winning run on a base hit by Edgar Renteria.

In 2003, Luis Castillo and Juan Pierre provided one of the best 1-2 punches in all of baseball. Castillo earned his second all-star appearance and won his gold glove in 2003. Luis Castillo was a major part of the whole Steve Bartman incident. Castillo was at the plate and was fouling pitch after pitch off to keep his at bat alive against Mark Prior. The incident down the left field line took place, and Castillo drew a walk from there and the infamous inning took place. I am not going to spend anymore time talking about the whole Steve Bartman right now.

We will now took a quick look at a comparison of the two players right now statistically:

Like when we compared the two first baseman, the statistics are not even close between the two. A lot of this might have to do with the fact that Counsell played so many fewer games. In case you were wondering, Castillo’s WAR in 1997 was -0.6.

Voting will open up today and be open until Sunday night. I will post the results on Monday and on Tuesday we will start the short stop segment of our series.