Rookie Ryan Zimmerman was born on September 28, 1984. Julio Franco, who debuted more than two-and-a-half years before Zimmerman came into existence, was born on August 23, 1958. Franco is essentially twenty-six years older than Dutch.
It occurs to me that you could put together a pretty good all-star team comprised solely of players whose ages are less than or equal to the difference between Franco's and Zimmerman's ages (which we'll just round up to twenty-six):
1B: Albert Pujols*
2B: Rickie Weeks
SS: Felipe Lopez*
3B: David Wright
LF: Adam Dunn
CF: Grady Sizemore
RF: Miguel Cabrera*
SP: Dontrelle Willis*
SP: Jake Peavy*
SP: C.C. Sabathia
SP: Mark Prior
SP: Brett Myers
CP: Chad Cordero
* 2005 All-Stars
And that's not including numerous guys who would either be relegated to supporting roles or left off the team, including:
- Mark Teixiera
- Hank Blalock
- Bobby Crosby
- Ryan Howard
- Jhonny Peralta
- Three-fifths of Oakland's rotation (Harden, Haren, and Blanton)
- as well as tons of other guys about whom I didn't think too hard.
To put it another way, you could take that difference in age and then take that figure's difference with the age of Mariners' phenom Felix Hernandez, and you'd get a first grader.