As my friend PC said on our fantasy league’s message board, you know you are getting old when guys you had on your fantasy team are passing away because of heart attacks. Sadly, this is very true and sadly, Major League Baseball lost another personality this month.
Lima passed away yesterday
Earlier in the month, Major League Baseball lost Hall of Famer’s Robbin Roberts and Ernie Harwell and now they have lost former Houston Astros’ pitcher Jose Lima.
Lima passed away at his home in Los Angeles yesterday after suffering a heart attack. He was 37-years-old at the time of his passing. While Lima wasn’t a HOF’er like Roberts and Harwell, he was an All Star and did finish fourth in NL Cy Young voting in 1999.
I think Lima will be remembered for two things.
First, he will be remembered for his “Lima Time” years in Houston. After not enjoying much success in Detroit, he was involved in the nine-player trade that sent him to Houston and that is where Lima enjoyed his most success.
In his second and third years in Houston, Lima went 37-18 with 3.64 ERA. Lima really loved pitching in the spacious Astrodome as he went 18-8 with a 2.74 ERA at home over those two years. It seemed like Lima would throw that changeup and batters would always hit the ball 390 feet to left center for just a long out.
However, Lima did throw almost 480 innings those two years and was never the same afterwards. He went to back to Detroit and then Kansas City, but never enjoyed the same success he did in Houston in 1998 and 1999. That is until he landed in Los Angeles in 2004.
The second thing Lima will be remembered for in my mind was how he came out of nowhere to win 13 games, including going 7-2 from July to September to help the Dodgers make the playoffs. Lima was on such a role that he tossed a complete game shutout against the St. Louis Cardinals in Game 3 of the NLDS.
After the Dodgers acquired Vicente Padilla last year, I compared Padilla to Lima. A comparison that wasn’t so far off as Padilla threw seven shutout innings against those same Cardinals in the NLDS.
Lima for his career was 89-102 with a 5.26 ERA, nine complete games, and 980 strike outs in 1,567.2 IP. He pitched for the Tigers, Astros, Royals, Dodgers, and Mets in his career.
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