Name: Wilson Alvarez
Rank: 25
Position: P
Years With White Sox: 1991-1997
Five days after making his major league debut for the Rangers, Wilson Alvarez was acquired by the White Sox, along with Scott Fletcher and Sammy Sosa, for Harold Baines and Fred Manrique on July 29, 1989. After spending the next 2 calendar years in the minor leagues, Alvarez returned to the big leagues and made his White Sox debut on August 11, 1991, throwing an unlikely no hitter against the Orioles at Memorial Stadium. With nowhere to go but down from there, he made 8 additional starts for the White Sox down the stretch, finishing the year with a 3-2 record and a respectable 3.51 ERA.
After tossing nearly 300 innings the previous year between winter league, Triple A, and the big leagues, 1992 saw Alvarez work mostly out of the bullpen, getting only 9 starts out of his 34 appearances. He posted a career high 1.674 WHIP, giving up 65 walks in just over 100 innings. This led to an unfortunate 5.20 ERA, despite a 5-3 record.
In 1993, Alvarez managed to break in to the rotation full time. Despite leading the league with 122 walks, he finished second in the AL with an ERA of 2.95 and ended up with a 15-8 record as the White Sox won the AL West title for the first time in a decade. He was the winning pitcher in Game 3 of the ALCS, holding the Blue Jays to a single run while throwing a complete game.
Alvarez improved in 1994, earning his first (and only) All Star nod and cutting his walk total nearly in half. Part of that, of course, was due to the player strike that ended the season in August, and he finished the year with a 12-8 record and a 3.45 ERA. When baseball returned in 1995, Alvarez struggled to regain his groove, finishing with a losing record for the first time and an ERA of 4.32.
1996 saw a nice bounce back for Alvarez. While his ERA was still an elevated 4.22, he tied his career high with 15 wins and set career highs for innings pitched and strikeouts. He continued to impress in 1997, putting up a 9-8 record with a 3.03 ERA by the end of July, when, with the White Sox a mere 3 games back in the standings, he, along with Danny Darwin and Roberto Hernandez, was sent to the Giants for Brian Manning, Lorenzo Barceló, Mike Caruso, Keith Foulke, Bob Howry, and Ken Vining in what would become known as the White Flag Trade.
Alvarez’s numbers in a White Sox uniform, both for games I attended and overall, were:
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For the third consecutive year, the NL pennant was captured at Wrigley Field. Unfortunately, this year it was the Dodgers that will be moving on, winning the NLCS 4 games to 1 against the Cubs and bringing the game-attending portion of the 2017 season came to an end. I made it to 49 games this season, my largest total since 2010. I did manage to add one new stadium this year, along with trips to 3 others that I had been to before. Here are the final standings for those games and the 20 different teams I saw in person, through both the regular season and the playoffs.
