Well, that didn’t take long: The return of Jason Marquis

Jason Marquis is back in business.

He’ll take the mound tonight for the San Diego Padres as they host Matt Cain and the San Francisco Giants at Petco.

Marquis is back in the National League where he spent all of his Major League save for his brief stint with the Minn. Twins who released him last month after a very rocky start.

The Padres are the sixth team in the last five years for the 33-year-old righty and eighth since he debuted with the Atlanta Braves in 2000.

At 19-38, the Padres have the worst record in the Majors. Marquis is the 10th pitcher to start for them this year.

A little history: In 1961, after 60 years in which the Majors consisted of 16 teams, two new franchises joined the American League, followed by two more in the NL in 1962. Before then there were 400 players on the roster at any one time (save for September call-ups, when the roster expanded to a possible 40 men per team, a practice that began in 1910). Roger Maris hit 61 home runs in ’61 and the traditionalists complained that the pitchers on the new teams were inferior, that the talent pool was diluted, which explains why Maris (but no one else, other than perhaps Mickey Mantle) did so well.

What would these folks say now, with additional expansions in 1969, 1977, 1993, and 1998, adding another 10 teams (and an additional batch of “inferior” players)?

So given this info, would Marquis have been one of lucky ones who would have made it back in the day? One of these days I’ll take a look at the top 160 M.L. pitchers to see if he makes the cut, going on the assumption that there are still 16 teams with a pitching staff of 10 apiece. I might even be generous and add an additional two per team for a total of 192, although the staffs of old rarely carried that many hurlers.

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