No One From My Century Plays Major League Baseball Anymore

If you’d like to feel very, very old today, have this. MLB opening season with 0 active players from 1900s

MLB is the first of North America’s four major professional sports leagues to not feature at least one player who played in the previous century, per Walker.
Only two players who appeared in games prior to the year 2000 were active last season. One was future Hall of Fame third baseman Adrian Beltre, who debuted with the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1998 at the age of 19 and announced his retirement in November.
The other last player from the 20th century was Bartolo Colon, the beloved former Cy Young winner who was the oldest active player last year. He first reached the big leagues in 1997 with the Cleveland Indians.
In an interesting twist, Colon and Beltre were teammates with the Texas Rangers in 2018.

The Texas Rangers: Where dreams go to die.

I didn’t realize this before reading it, but we’re also marking the end of another era here because Bartolo Colon was the last active player to have played for the Montreal Expos. The only person left who can claim any sort of ties to them now is Ian Desmond who they drafted in 2004 but who never got to play there.

Oh, and the Blue Jays are about to make some age-related history of their own. When Elvis Luciano pitches in his first regular season game, he’ll be the first MLB player to have been born in the year 2000. Jesus.

Happy opening day if you don’t count Japan. And a happy death to the Kitchener Rangers day as well, I hope.

I’m looking forward to another season of baseball in spite of my Jays fandom. I have no idea what to expect this year. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that I expect nothing. So if they can come out the other side above .500, I’ll call it a win.

I really don’t know what this team is. It got a little younger which is probably good, but it’s going to take a while to figure out exactly what that means. At least there’s some prospect excitement on the horizon once we’re finished exploiting the service time loophole …I mean making sure that the young talent is the best it can be, so we’ve got that to look forward to.

It’s going to be interesting and maybe a little painful at times, but I can’t wait to get started. Me and perhaps a herd of moose will be happily watching this afternoon. The only thing that could make it any better would be actual baseball weather in place of this chilly, rainy shit we’ve got going on now. I want to sit on my porch, dammit!