Petrick or Pet Rock?

Jason Michael Barker

Nothing specific today, but there are a few minor things worth noting heading into this third weekend of the baseball season...

The Rockies placed Scott Servais on the disabled list Wednesday, which would normally be filed under "so what?" when it comes to transaction analysis. It was the accompanying transaction that's worthy of mention, however -- to take Servais' place, the Rockies recalled Ben Petrick from AAA Colorado Springs. Petrick, if you recall, is Colorado's top position player prospect and figured to be the team's starting catcher before they signed both Servais and Brent Mayne.

Rather than go with a cheap young player with a potentially dangerous bat, the Rockies decided Petrick still needed to work on his defense behind the plate and his game-calling skills in AAA. Defense aside, Petrick's bat is ready for the majors. His career minor league numbers stand at .256/.360/.466 with good plate discipline to boot, and he hit a robust .312/.403/.606 at Colorado Springs last season.

Servais was serving as the right-handed half of a platoon with Mayne, and it just so happens that Petrick is a right-handed batter as well. He and Mayne would make a fine platoon, and if he hits well enough over the next two weeks Scott Servais might find himself toiling in AAA for the remainder of the season.

In another bit of transaction news, the Cardinals sent former superstar-to-be Alan Benes to AAA Louisville. I was a bit surprised that Benes cleared waivers, but perhaps no teams bothered to put in a claim figuring that St. Louis would just pull him back off waivers if they did. It's a kind of sad how his career has gone downhill since a fine 1997 campaign that's now just a distant memory -- he missed the entire 1998 season and most of last season after shoulder surgery, managing just seven innings at four different stops along the way.

He isn't as young as I thought he was, having turned 28 in January, and this may be faint praise, but he doesn't have much mileage on his arm after missing basically the last two seasons. If he could manage to regain most of what he had before the surgery, he could be a good number three starter for some team for a few years. The more likely scenario is that he'll bounce around for a few years, stringing together a couple of nice seasons working out of the bullpen somewhere.

In my look around Tuesday night's boxscores earlier this week, I mentioned John Rocker's first appearance in passing but didn't pay much attention to the Phillies-Braves game itself. Fortunately for all of us involved, a reader pointed out something I should have taken note of -- Luis Rivera, Atlanta's latest young pitcher success story.

Chuck writes:

You mentioned John Rocker in your 4/19 column. You should have mentioned Luis Rivera. He finished the game and got the win. You might want to keep an eye on the kid. He could be a good one. He's another one of those young Latin players, like Rafael Furcal, who seem to be unusually mature given their ages.

Thanks for the reminder, Chuck. Rivera is just 21, having made the jump from high-A ball last season where his work was limited by blisters. He was very impressive in the 66.2 innings he did pitch, however, allowing just 45 hits and 23 walks, with 81 strikeouts and a 3.11 ERA. His stuff, including a 96 MPH fastball, a good curve and a change-up, is for real. So far this season, he has yet to allow a run in four appearances, with three hits, four walks and four strikeouts in six innings.

In some ways the blisters may have been a good thing for Rivera and the Braves, in that they kept his workload down without being as serious as an arm injury, and of course they shouldn't be of much concern in the long run. How is it that the Braves keep pulling pitchers like this out of their hat, while some teams would kill for a lone stud pitching prospect?

Finally, a friend of mine in New York (let's call him Seth) passed along something he heard on the Mets' broadcast the other night. The commentators were discussing home runs, and the stat came up that since Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle did it for the Yankees in 1961, no team with a 50-homer hitter has won the World Series. The implication here is not that home runs are bad, per se, but rather that relying on them is a bad thing. This is why there are all those people out there preaching such things as "clutch hitting," "small ball," and "speed wins ballgames."

Seth continued: "Obviously, there could be numerous other factors leading to all these teams demise -- lack of pitching, no depth in the batting order, etc., but it seems that one 50-homer player should have won a series since 1961."

Maybe, maybe not.

While it certainly seems that way, is it really strange that it hasn't happened? To figure this out, I first looked at all the 50-homer seasons since 1961. And guess what? There haven't been all that many, just 14 in the 37 years since 1961 in which a World Series has been played (don't forget about 1994!). Without doing any complex calculations, I'm willing to chalk this one up to dumb luck and a small sample size of 50-homer seasons

Feel free to chime in with any thoughts of your own, but just be sure they don't include the words "situational" and "hitting."

about the author

Jason Michael Barker keeps looking for those X-Files conspiracy plots that keep kids like Petrick in AAA and jinx the careers of Alan Benes and those 50 homer guys. Send evidence of alien tampering to jmb@strikethree.com.