Brendan Donnelly and Charles Dickens

There are those rare players who, in an understated sort of way, come to embody an era in baseball history. They are not hulking giants in the mold of Ruth or DiMaggio, but rather the laymen whose career arcs seem to brush against the day’s defining story lines. Like a Dickensian protagonist, these characters have a symbolic anonymity, one that makes their careers compelling in a tale-of-the-times sort of way. Brendan Donnelly, who retired this past Wednesday after nine major league seasons, was one of those players.




Taken in the 27th round of the 1992 amateur draft out of Mesa State College, Donnelly didn’t break into the Major Leagues until 2002. Despite a decade of erratic performance on the farm, the thirty-year-old rookie enjoyed immediate success at the big league level as an Angels’ reliever. Along with Mike Stanton of the Yankees, Donnelly headlined the first generation of specialized setup men, turning that position a permanent roster fixture. Joaquin Benoit, Rafael Soriano, and Ryan Madson  owe their careers (and inflated contracts) to the success of players like Donnelly. The leer emanating from behind his trademark goggles branded eighth inning specialists with a celebrity generally reserved for closers. It is a sad irony that Donnelly, a 2003 all star selection, walks away from the game at a seminal moment for the bullpen role he helped codify.

There is, however, a darker side to Donnelly’s man-of-the-moment metaphor. His appearance in the 2007 Mitchell report forever connected him to the performance enhancement scourge of the early-to-mid 2000s. Donnelly later offered a fairly typical half-admission of guilt, claiming that he only purchased one shipment of anabolic steroids from infamous clubhouse distributor Kurt Radomski and never actually used the drugs. Regardless of the story’s veracity, Donnelly’s fall, among others, reinforces the prevailing skepticism stitched onto baseball’s steroid era. Donnelly wasn’t the first 27th-rounder to enjoy big league relevancy, but his rocket ship career seems altogether dubious in the context of his era. An irrefutable nagging suspicion hovers over every player in Donnelly’s time who either surpassed their amateur expectations, or achieved late-career success disproportionate to their past accomplishments. For Donnelly the facts of his case are irrelevant, he’s simply too ancillary to receive any full-scale vote of guilt or innocence. So in a sense, his two-part verdict is already sealed:  

Brendan Donnelly overcame tremendous odds to realize big league success and spearhead a strategic shift in managerial philosophy.

Brendan Donnelly pitched and prospered in an era where such too-good-to-be-true tales, often were, just that.

Further reading:
FanGraphs
MLB Trade Rumors