What was happening when Barry Zito and Tim Hudson were last teammates
Barry Zito and Tim Hudson will take the mound against each other Saturday, a matchup of former teammates sure to have baseball purists fawning over what could have been. The two haven’t been teammates for a long time now, with the Oakland Athletics trading away Hudson (and Mark Mulder) after the 2004 season.
The last time Zito and Hudson suited up together as A’s teammates was on Oct. 3, 2004, a season in which Oakland finished second in the AL West. It’s been almost 11 years, and you may not remember everything about Oct. 3, 2004, so let’s take a look back at what our world was like on that day:
- Barack Obama was an Illinois State Senator
- The No. 1 movie in the country was the animated film Shark Tale
- The Detroit Pistons were the reigning NBA champions
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- Kanye West had only released one studio album—The College Dropout
- Mike Trout was only 13 years old
- LeBron James had not started his second season with the Cleveland Cavaliers
- The Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert would not start for another 54 weeks
- Six days earlier, Jay Leno announced Conan O’Brien would take over The Tonight Show in 2009
- Five days later, the Jimmy Fallon-led movie Taxi would be released to overwhelmingly negative reviews
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- The Boston Red Sox had not won a World Series in 86 years
- Alex Rodriguez of the Texas Rangers was the reigning AL MVP
- Sammy Sosa played his last game for the Chicago Cubs
- The reigning MLB World Series champions were the Florida Marlins
Basically, Saturday’s Zito vs. Hudson matchup is the equivalent of two twins who’ve been separated their entire lives meeting through a chance encounter at a Parisian cafe. Or something like that.
