With the month of April (already!) drawing to a close and the noise of small sample sizes fading into the background, it’s a good time to take stock of the Major League leaderboards and note the players who have excelled to this point of the season.
Some, like Aaron Judge (.412 AVG, 1.235 OPS), are perennial All-Stars; others, like Tyler Soderstrom (.923 OPS), may be on the cusp of their first selection; and still others, like Jose Quintana (4-0, 1.14 ERA) are bucking career trends to produce superstar-quality numbers.
While all deserve credit for their impressive starts, those of us who’ve been around for a while know that a hot April can quickly be eclipsed by a string of rough performances in the weeks that follow, turning a once-promising season into a disaster. Here are five players from recent memory who came out of the gate on fire before considerably cooling or even flaming out altogether.
Eric Thames (2017)
Ah, remember the joyride that was Eric Thames in 2017? After three years of hitting the bejeezus out of the ball in Korea, the former Blue Jays and Mariners outfielder returned stateside and once again separated baseballs from their bejeezoid elements by going off for a .345/.466/.810 line and 11 jacks in his first 24 games for Milwaukee. The video game numbers could have resulted from the patient approach he developed in the KBO, or it simply could have been his preference for Reds pitchers, who served up eight of those long balls in seven games. At any rate, Thames managed to remain productive beyond the unsustainable start to finish with a .247/.359/.518 line and 31 blasts for the season. He then delivered similar numbers two years later before Covid disrupted everything in 2020, after which point he faced the normal long odds of sticking around as an aging first base/DH type.
Ubaldo Jiménez (2010)
A decade or so before every team ramped up the production line to churn out arms capable of throwing 100 mph, Ubaldo Jiménez was one of the few starters known to reach that number. And for two months in early 2010, the high-octane stuff made him baseball’s premier ace. Jiménez famously became the first Rockies pitcher to twirl a no-hitter on April 17, highlighting a month in which he went 5-0 with a 0.79 ERA. But the fireballer may have been even better in May, which saw him ring up another five wins and deliver most of a franchise-record 33-inning scoreless streak that was snapped in his first start of June. Fans may recall that Jiménez finished with “only” 19 wins despite carrying a 15-1 record into the All-Star break, although the drop-off in performance wasn’t all that drastic outside of a rough July (6.04 ERA). At any rate, this was the lone All-Star season for the long-limbed righty, who managed one more solid campaign with Cleveland in 2013 (13-9, 3.30 ERA, 9.6 K/9), before sputtering to a forgettable finish to his career with Baltimore.
Chris Shelton (2006)
There’s hot, there’s sizzling and then there’s whatever exaggerated temperature (broiling?) one would use to describe the start of Chris Shelton’s 2006 season. “Red Pop,” as he was fondly known in Detroit, became the first AL player to launch nine homers in his team’s first 13 games of a season, before closing out April with a superb .326/.404/.783 line. But Shelton also went deep just once over the final two weeks of the month, marking the start of a massive pendulum swing that brought the first baseman crashing back to Earth and, almost inexplicably, down to Triple-A in August. Although he was back in Detroit before the end of the season, Red Pop returned to Triple-A for all of 2007, and appeared in only 50 more big league games for Seattle and Texas.
Jonny Gomes (2006)
Similar to Thames, Gomes was a wrecking ball of a human being with the ability to muscle mis-hit balls out of any park. He blasted three homers in a single game during a standout rookie season in 2005, before ratcheting things up another few notches with a .305/.453/.732 slash line and 11 jacks the following April. But Gomes also played with a hard-charging intensity that was tough to maintain over baseball’s marathon season, and he batted just .191 with another nine homers before undergoing shoulder surgery in September. Gomes still went on to a commendable big league career, posting a .769 OPS over 13 seasons and earning a World Series ring with the 2013 Red Sox, though he never quite regained his Albert Pujols-like form from the beginning of ‘06.
Mark Quinn (2001)
The Royals churned out an intriguing collection of young talent at the turn of the century, and at one point it looked like Mark Quinn would join Carlos Beltrán and Mike Sweeney as a potential franchise cornerstone. The Kansas City faithful certainly harbored high hopes when Quinn batted .294 with 20 homers and 78 RBI to finish third in the AL Rookie of the Year voting in 2000, before he erupted with a .324 average, nine homers and 24 driven in the following April. But that marked the end of his all-too-brief run as an elite player, and it’s not hard to pinpoint why: Quinn took a hack on virtually every pitch within reach, to the point where he logged a whopping 241 consecutive plate appearances without drawing an unintentional walk. Quinn finished the year with a relatively quiet .269-17-60 line, and after he appeared in just 23 games in 2002, the Royals elected to move on from the free-swinging outfielder.
.
Thanks to Baseball Reference and its extraordinary research database, Stathead, for help in assembling this piece.
Tim Ott
Tim's early yearnings for baseball immortality began on the dirt and grass of the P.S. 81 ballfield in the Bronx. Although a Hall of Fame career was not in the cards, his penchant for reading the MLB record book and volumes of history tomes led to an internship with MLB.com in 2002. Tim fulfilled an array of roles over the next nine years at the company, from editorial game producer to fantasy writer and editor and reporter for MLB-related promotions. While a busy freelance writing career has since taken him in other directions, Tim has always kept baseball in his heart, and is happy to be back to observing and reflecting on our great pastime.