The Tale of the Forgotten Moose

Randy Milligan has become fairly anonymous as time has gone by (via Patrick Dubuque).

Randy Milligan has become fairly anonymous as time has gone by (via Patrick Dubuque).

The date: Aug. 11, 1994. The game state: top of the seventh, one out, runners on second and third. The visiting Expos are getting shut out by Zane Smith and the Pirates. Randy Milligan is at the plate; at age 32, he’s been relegated mostly to pinch-hitting duty, but today he has the start at first base. It’s been a rough season, but he’s facing his former team in a big moment. A hit at a time like this can fix the memory, turn a season around. Maybe even a career.

Milligan grounds to the pitcher, who throws out an overambitious Wil Cordero at home, killing the rally. The Expos lose the game, 4-0. It is the last plate appearance of Milligan’s career.

Milligan didn’t know this at the time. No one did. The next day, the players carried out their threat to strike. Weeks, then months, then a World Series vanished. And when it returned the following April, Milligan was gone.

Most kids who saw Milligan thought the same thing: “common.” That’s the parlance for the bulk of baseball cards that are worth nothing more than pennies: the middle relievers, the utility infielders, and the unheralded rookies who make up the bulk of a 792-card baseball set. They’re the cards kids flipped past looking for the Will Clarks and Don Mattinglys. Now and then, a baseball card company will forgo the commons and give collectors nothing but stars, but strangely, these sets rarely did well. It turns out you need the worthless cards to make the stars valuable.

It’s not as though the numbers on the back of Milligan’s cards were going to impress anyone at the time: a .261 career average, 70 home runs, six teams in eight years. No bold numbers, no italics — he never led the league in anything. He was the kind of player who started for bad teams and never played for good ones, the human representation of systemic failure. If your team was starting Randy Milligan, something had gone wrong.

Teams did their best to solve the problem. The Mets traded Milligan to Pittsburgh, who gave him 100 plate appearances before shipping him off to Baltimore for an A-ball reliever. The Orioles were rewarded with a fine season, and in turn rewarded him by giving his starting job to Glenn Davis.

If this was a blow to his ego, Milligan refused to show it. Instead he responded gracefully to the media and spent spring learning to play left field. He admitted that the experience terrified him, and fans were no less wary, but the dismal Orioles had no one else and needed his bat in the lineup. The noble experiment went for naught, however, as their star first baseman quickly went down for the first of many times, and Milligan found himself back in his usual role of stopgap.

Eventually, Baltimore gave up on Davis and promoted a young David Segui. This time, there was no left field position waiting. Milligan was cut, and so began his journey on the narrow road through the north, through Cincinnati, Cleveland, Montreal, and theoretically on into the Yukon.

Two-thirds of everything in baseball is disappointment: at-bats, teams, players. Milligan is part of that remainder, a single name in an almanac. The only memorable detail in his career is a statistic in which he ranked fourteenth: his career walk rate, 17.2 percent, slotting him a little below Mickey Mantle and dead even with Mark McGwire.

Milligan’s keen batting eye was recognized. Orioles manager Johnny Oates considered the lumbering first baseman for the leadoff spot, though this too was scuttled when Brady Anderson seized the role. But if walks were understood ten years before Moneyball, they were far from being appreciated. With the Expos twenty years ago, Milligan was the last player to get his pay cut through arbitration — as he had $35,000 shaved off his previous salary — despite the fact that he posted a 133 wRC+. He had more money taken from him, and perhaps his only chance at glory, when the baseball strike hit and the league-leading 1994 Montreal Expos were wiped away.

Even considering the minor tragedies of his career, Milligan’s story isn’t unique in being underappreciated. But Moneyball came out a long time ago, and one would think that the modern champions of the base on balls would have their day in the retrospective sun. Instead, Milligan’s Wikipedia page is somewhat disappointing:

Randall Andre Milligan (born November 27, 1961 in San Diego, California) is a former first baseman in Major League Baseball who played from 1987 to 1994. He is currently a scout with the Baltimore Orioles. Milligan is nicknamed “Moose.”

That is all. it seems like a poor epitaph for a noble, if not necessarily heroic, career. Nor is it an outlier: the usual stalwarts of information, Baseball Almanac and Baseball Reference’s Bullpen, shed little more in the way of light. Twenty years later, Milligan remains an enigma.

While thinking about Milligan, research offered me two contrasting examples of a baseball player’s legacy.

Several weeks ago, I wrote a short article about a baseball player from the 1950s named Carlton Willey. I found Willey’s name in an old book; otherwise he was another common, a pitcher who hung around the majors, like Milligan, for eight years. The response to the piece surprised me. Readers from Willey’s hometown found it and commented on his fame; some even knew him personally. He was a legend in his little world, and his life story has become a perfect example of the SABR biography, an interesting glimpse into a single, small story within baseball.

Meanwhile, I gathered information about fourth-outfielder and one-time World Series hero Endy Chavez for a FanGraphs+ caption. Chavez’s Wikipedia page is nearly two thousand words in length. By the time he retires, it will be as long as Poe’s Cask of Amontillado. It provides an exhaustive description of his collegiate, minor league, and big league accomplishments, and is impossible to read. Every possible Endy Chavez factoid is there, buried beneath each other, dwelling below the bottom of the page.

Milligan receives the adoration of neither the past-leaning romantic writers of previous generations nor the forward-thinking analysis of today. He was not garrulous enough to achieve celebrity, nor quiet enough to stir curiosity. His nickname was quickly reassigned. He symbolizes nothing: the teams he played for are forgotten, and their small victories erased by time. There was no banner created for him in his hometown, no birthplace museum. San Diego, where he grew up, already has plenty of heroes.

If there’s a unifying theme to the articles that mention Milligan, it’s his search for that hometown. The tale is almost tragic: every article refers to him being traded, or being trade bait. After his first season in Baltimore, despite his humble salary, Milligan created a charity to fund a struggling Little League in an impoverished inner-city Baltimore neighborhood. Milligan and his wife ReNee wanted to do good, but at the same time, they wanted to create a sense of being home. Milligan spent his offseasons worrying about who would maintain the charity once he was traded.

And he was traded, of course. There’s no mention of the charity beyond that point. Milligan was forced to pack up and move on, leaving his adopted home behind. It’s only fitting that after his baseball career, he became that wayward soul of the baseball world — a scout.

Still, this is baseball. For every baseball player, from Albert Pujols to Joe Shlabotnik, there’s a boy out there who grew up idolizing him. Maybe they share a birthday; maybe he hit a home run on that boy’s first day at the ballpark. You’d think that someone from one of those six cities would want to tell Milligan’s story, or at least summarize it for Wikipedia.

There tends to be a divide in baseball history, conveniently split between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the prior being a shadowy realm of glovelessness and gambling, of a history assembled through yellowed newspaper clippings and last names in box scores. A hundred years from now, I think, the turn of the millennium will be seen as another line in history. Baseball has always thrived on its permanence, and the internet has multiplied the amount of information we can retain. Future generations will look back at this era, with its lack of accessible video footage for every pitch and plate appearance, and wonder how we understood the game at all.

In its tightly contained universe, baseball is a bundle of physical laws and causations, endless streams of data and scores. The explosion of data in modern baseball has been an unqualified benefit to our understanding of the game and our attempts to improve it. Each piece of data drives us toward more data, further and further in. Who wouldn’t want to know exactly how far each player leads off the bag at first? How infield chatter affects a pitcher? The microscopic powers of the Phiten necklace?

But no matter how much we analyze it, at some point we have to bring that analysis off the field and into ourselves; at some point, baseball has to relate to something. For most people, it’s for it’s own sake: the World Series, the fantasy championship. But we have to account for and find value in those lost seasons between. At that point, whatever numbers we choose, whether it’s Jack Morris’s wins during the eighties or Randy Milligan’s on-base percentage, tell a story about the game and how we live through it. And each story, like Endy Chavez’s Wikipedia page, needs an editor.

Randy Milligan, and the things that he did as a baseball player, have little importance for you or me. He’s not a hero in the dramatic sense, just one of the chorus. But it’s not only the stars who deserve stories, nor should readers only find interest in success. Art arises just as easily — perhaps more easily — out of failure and struggle. In some cases, at least in Randy Milligan’s case, it’s the lack of story that is the story, the fate of the common. And in a way, it’s that obscurity that makes Milligan — just a name in an almanac — so compelling. Enough for a paragraph, if not a full article.


Patrick Dubuque is a wastrel and a general layabout. Many of the sites he has written for are now dead. Follow him on Twitter @euqubud.
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Bill
10 years ago

Moose was always one of my favorite players while he played for the O’s. I never understood while the O’s kept trying to replace him with Glen Davis. They had him signed and he had just put up consecutive excellent season when they made the awful trade for Davis. To put this in a modern light, Paul Goldschmidt put up a wRC+ of 156 last year. This is about what Moose put up in 1990. What would people think if the Diamondbacks went out and traded three of their best prospects for Edwin Encarnacion and told Goldy to play right field?

maguro
10 years ago

I thought this was going to be about Bob Moose.

Dennis Bedard
10 years ago

There are a thousand Milligans littering the pages of Retrosheet. My favorite in this genre was Jim Gosger. A mediocre journeyman whose claim to fame was (according to Bouton in Ball Four) hiding in a hotel room closet while his roommate made love to a groupie and then popped out of the closet at the most inopportune time to add his own color commentary to the occasion. Or something like that. It has been 30 years since I (re) read the book. Studying the careers of these types of players is what makes baseball so fascinating, sort of a reflection of the ups and downs of life in general.

Bradley Woodrummember
10 years ago

Great article, Patrick. Thanks for sharing it!

Eric
10 years ago

Randy Milligan was the celebrity guest at the opening of a recycling center near our home in Baltimore County in what I’m guessing was 1990. My dad and I walked up to the center and were the only people there to meet Randy. He was incredibly gracious with his time. He talked to us about what kinds of pitchers he liked to face. He said hard throwers. For some reason I remember him specifically mentioning Nolan Ryan. Either Mr. Milligan was mistaken, or I’m misremembering something from when I was eight years old, because he only managed a .000/.133/.000 against Ryan, striking out eight times in 15 plate appearances. Anyhow, because of this interaction, I’ll always have a great fondness for Moose. Thanks for the article.

Bill Reynolds
10 years ago

Randy Milligan is quite honestly my second favorite baseball player of all time, behind only Eddie Murray, the man he succeeded at first base for the Orioles. Milligan’s career was borderline tragic. He had a great deal of potential; at AAA Tidewater in 1987, he hit .326/.438/.595 in 136 games. But he got no real MLB playing time until two years later, in the Orioles’ wonderful “Why Not?” season of 1989. He was the second best hitter on that team, close behind Mickey Tettleton, but Frank Robinson still insisted on giving a fair amount of playing time to the useless Jim Traber at first. In 444 PAs, Milligan hit .268/.394/.458. He was ninth in the league in WPA. Finally in 1990 he got the full-time 1B job. He was a good fielder, and was among the league leaders in HR and RBI through July. Then, on August 7, having put up a 261/.408/.494 line to that point, he crashed into Oakland’s Ron Hassey on a play at the plate. I don’t remember what the exact injury was, but he was out until the final weekend of the season. If he had not gotten hurt, he might have finished with over 30 HRs, some real eye-catching numbers, and would have been among the leaders in OBP. Instead, the Orioles made the worst trade in franchise history to get Glenn Davis for 1991, a totally unnecessary deal when they already had the solid Milligan at first. And of course the price they paid for Davis was outrageous: Curt Schilling, Steve Finley, and Pete Harnisch. As this article so poignantly retells, Milligan was gone from Baltimore two seasons later, and gone from MLB before 1995. He lives on in my memory, though.

In September 1989, I went to a game at the old Memorial Stadium with a sign that said “Where’s Milligan?” (Traber was in the lineup that day.) Every time Traber came to bat, I held up the sign. A young woman came over and asked, in all seriousness, “Who’s Milligan?”

Detroit Michael
10 years ago

Had to check it out. Randy Milligan’s career walk rate is higher than Daric Barton’s.

Eric Garcia
10 years ago

Excellent article. My personal example from the group of players we might call the “magisterial mundane” is Luis Medina. I remember going to Colorado Sky Sox games in the late 80s with only an eye for Medina. It seemed as if he hit a home-run every single at bat–I honestly don’t remember him doing anything else. Then one day my dad told me he got called up to play for Cleveland. I don’t think I understood at the time what that meant. According to his Wikipedia page, slightly more detailed than Milligan’s, he never played for the Sky Sox again after his call-up. So what it actually meant was that I’d never see a Luis Medina home run again. I didn’t know that at the time, either.

Michael Hughes
10 years ago

I am still annoyed at the Pirates for underutilizing Milligan in ’88, then dumping him after the season. The Pirates were badly lacking in right-handed bats that season, and hit only .230/.300/.343 vs. left-handed pitchers. They brought in Milligan to platoon with Sid Bream at first base, and he was doing pretty well, with a 124 OPS+. All that did was earn him a demotion to AAA after 103 PAs. I guess they only looked at the .220 BA in those pre-Moneyball days. I was not surprised that he produced with the Orioles, and not surprised that he continued to be disrespected.

duker
10 years ago

June 9th 1990, Randy Milligan had a hell of a game: 3 for 3 with a walk and 3 HRs.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/BAL/BAL199006090.shtml

Rick Tinsley
8 years ago
Reply to  duker

I was at that game. A die hard orioles fan that was the only game a got to see that year as I lived 3 hours a way. It was a long drive home but well worth it to see the Yanks get blown out and to see Moose hit three home runs!

David Evans
10 years ago

I was at that game on June 9, 1990 at old Memorial Stadium when Milligan hit those three HRs. I keep score and he hit them off of the Yankees (Chuck Cary and off of Andy Hawkins). Cary did not make it out of the first inning. The first time I have ever seen three HRs in a game.

John Paschal
10 years ago

Beautifully written piece, Patrick. Great job.

Marc Schneider
10 years ago

These are the kinds of baseball articles I enjoy much more than some sterile sabermetric analysis. Obviously, there is a place for both, but I sometimes feel that sabermetrics makes baseball watching a job rather than fun.

Graham Clayton
10 years ago
Reply to  Marc Schneider

Marc,

I agree 100% with you. I prefer knowing about the human side and characteristics of ballplayers (and athletes from other sports), rather than just concentrating on their “numbers”. In any sporting competition, the journeymen/women will always outnumber the “stars”, so they should be noted and remembered as well.

Kelly
10 years ago

Great article. Randy was the first first baseman I ever knew and like all the ’89 O’s, he’ll always be special. That team was the start of my now 25 year love affair with baseball. Thanks for rekindling a few of the memories.

Nate Milligan
9 years ago

I, really do not have a comment. I am trying to get in touch with Randy Milligan to see if we are related. I am in the process in doing the Milligans’ Family Tree. I understand that Randy had roots in Louisiana and that is where my father came from before coming to New York where I was born. My father died when I was 3 months old back in 1950 and I do not know any other Milligans but my siblings. My father name was George Milligan and he had some siblings who I never met and they to are deceased I think by now .I do know my father had a brother named Joe/Joseph Milligan. So ,if anyone can get this message to Randy please give him my name and e-mail address. You can also give him my phone number which is 845-453-3658. Thank you. Nate Milligan

joel frank
9 years ago

As a longtime Met fan I knew of Randy from being the draft pick. Several years ago and now living in Syracuse my son and I took in a AAA Chiefs game. They were facing Norfolk. When we were at the box officenter I saw his name on a list. Later I saw a guy behind home plate eating sunflower seeds and using a radar gun. I encouraged my son to move up a fee rows and see if that was Randy. It was and he invited my son to sit with him and share sunflower seeds. I was close enough to hear them talk about prospects and life as a scout. My son asked him for a signed ball. Several weeks later a package arrived for him. The promised signed ball, some signed baseball cards and a thoughtful note. A very classy guy. Memories for a lifetime. Baseball like it oughta be!

Brian Johnson
8 years ago

Nice, write up Randy Milligan my uncle! The best story about him was his trials and tribulation coming up threw the minor league system. Him making it to become a professional baseball player was my grandmother’s(Ester Cook) greatest dream come true for her son. We all lived in a small 2.5 bedroom house in the San Diego Neighborhood of South East San Diego. The one great quality about my uncle is his determination to be better than what his peers where into at that time which was mostly drugs and gang activity.

Randy “Moose” Milligan first love was Football as he was a quarterback for San Diego High School. He had a better eye for Baseball than Football.

He lived a dream and lifestyle that he earned from being a hard worker, committed to excellence and a firm believer in himself when others doubted him.

Oldest Nephew!

Christopher G.
8 years ago
Reply to  Brian Johnson

Brian,

Randy and I played football together at SD High and were tight as brothers in high school. Randy/I/ DeeAnna went to Diego together, I’m his first daughter’s godfather. You were a little man back then and we met at the house on L st… I remember your grandmother(Mrs. Cook) well. I moved to the SF Bay area for university after high school and saw Randy when he was in town.
My wife and I will be in DC next week and would like to reconnect. My e-mail is globalpro.888@gmail.com and my profile/pic is on linkedin.com. I would appreciate it if you can give Randy my contact info and we can reconnect while we’re on the east coast. Dinner’s on us! CG