The Top 40 VORP list continues with the player that accumulated the 21st highest VORP total as a member of the Minnesota Twins, Eric Milton.

Eric Milton was a left handed starting pitcher with the Minnesota Twins from 1998-2003. The major prize of the Chuck Knoblauch trade, Milton was thrust into the starting rotation as a 22 year old rookie. Milton showed promise and stuck in the starting rotation for the rest of his Twins career. However, he never really became the pitcher that a lot of Twins fans may have hoped for. The Twins eventually traded Milton to the Philadelphia Phillies after the 2003 season, netting Carlos Silva and Nick Punto, as well avoiding Milton’s $9,000,000 2004 salary. The sixth starter and eighth pitcher overall on the TOP 40 VORP list, Milton was a good, but not great starter. I was a fan of Eric Milton and he is one of the top 21 players, but I was thrilled when the Twins moved him. Such is the life of a baseball fan, I suppose.

6’3 220 LBS. Bats Left and Throws Left. Born 1975 in State College, PA.
Member of the Twins from 1998-2003 Uniform #41 (1998-99) #21 (2000-03)
VORP as a Twin: 149.9 Rank: 21st

Eric Milton was drafted out of the University of Maryland in the first round of the 1996 amateur draft by the New York Yankees. Milton pitched one season in the minors with the Yankees and semi-famously acquired a tattoo of the New York Yankees logo on his pitching shoulder. Of course, Milton never pitched for the Yanks and he had to get the second tattoo with a Twins logo.

Milton came up with the Twins in 1998 and made an auspicious debut, pitching six shutout innings to beat the Kansas City Royals. Johnny Damon, the first batter that Milton ever faced, singled, but Milton, obviously, got out of the inning. Six days later, Milton again beat the Royals, allowing one earned run in 6 2/3 innings. He came back to earth the next time out when Seattle rocked him for seven runs on eight hits in 2 2/3 innings. Milton had a promising rookie season for a 22 year old, but of course not the type of season that we’ve seen from players like Scott Erickson or Francisco Liriano, for example.

The 1998 Twins weren’t very good, posting a 70-92 record. It would get worse. The 1999 Twins were a dreadful 63-97. Only in the 1982 season has a Twins team lost more games. It was a sad time for the franchise, but Eric Milton had his best season, VORP-wise, as a Twin. He was just 7-11, but he had a 4.49 ERA in a 5.07 ERA league. Milton posted a 43.4 VORP.

On Saturday morning, September 11, 1999, I was driving back from the East Coast trip and as I got to the Twin Cities, I turned onto WCCO, forgetting that it was a Gopher football game day, meaning that the Twins were playing a morning game. By the time I turned on the radio, the game was over. Eric Milton had pitched a no-hitter, striking out 13 and walking just 2. True, the California Angels hadn’t exactly sent out a murderer’s row, but during a season about which there wasn’t much to cheer, a no-hitter was big indeed. The bigger thing was that the 23-year old Milton was an effective pitcher on a team with few effective players. (Actually, the Twins pitching was relatively close to average, the Twins offense was the worst in the league.)

Milton seemed to plateau right at his 1999 performance. At 23, it would have been reasonable to expect that Milton would continue to improve. Frustratingly, he didn’t. Which is not to say that he wasn’t effective. In 2000, Milton was 13-10 with a 4.86 ERA, posting a 108 ERA+. That’s not exactly great, but he threw 200 innings with a better than league average ERA. That’s a positive result for a 24 year old pitcher. After the 2000 season, the Twins signed Milton to a four year, $21.15 million contract, a formula the Twins have used repeatedly deal with players who have become arbitration eligible (think Mauer, Hunter, Santana, etc.) The Milton deal paid him $2.150 million, $4 million, $6 million, and $9 million in successive years.

Of course, the 2001 season was the year that major league baseball came back to Minnesota. The Twins were enjoying the fruits of the Knoblauch trade, with Milton and Cristian Guzman making the All-Star team and hey, even Brian Buchanan was getting some burn. The Twins were an unbelievable 55-32 at the break before fading to a second place 85-77 finish. Milton had a 15-7 record with a 4.32 ERA and 40.6 VORP.

In 2002, the Twins broke through, as we’ve documented many times already. Milton’s numbers were about the same as in 2000, except that he suffered an arm injury after a three hit shutout in which he was allowed to throw 137 pitches.

In 2003, Eric Milton had pre-season knee surgery and missed most of the season. The Twins went out and signed Kenny Rogers during spring training to replace Eric Milton, which had the effect of keeping Johan Santana in the bullpen for a large part of the season. Milton pitched in three games in September, but for the most part, the season was a lost one.

In the off-season, the Twins, faced with a potentially burgeoning payroll and some difficult decisions pulled off a pair of brilliant trades. One of those trades inspired a very gracious website. The other wasn’t quite as spectacular, but nevertheless turned out quite well. The final year of that four year deal was paid by the Phillies and the Twins got a couple of effective years out of Carlos Silva. In addition, the surprising contribution of Nick Punto in 2006 was another nice dividend from that trade.

Since then, Eric Milton has signed an enormous contract with the Cincinnati Reds and responded with a horrendous 2005 season (-24.3 VORP) and a mediocre at best 2006 season (10.2 VORP). There have been several players in this list so far who played a relatively short time for the Twins and left to fall off dramatically elsewhere (friends, David Ortiz won’t be on this list). Milton is another of those players. He’s given his best seasons to the Minnesota Twins. Milton is still relatively young – he’s going to be 32 in August, but I think it’s safe to say that his best days are behind him.

Eric Milton was a part of the great resurgence of the franchise at the beginning of this century. He came to this team as part of a trade that really helped the franchise back to prominence and he left in another trade that was also pretty helpful for the Twins.