v.5, no. 1 (March 25, 1998)
GREENS LEAVES: News and Notes from the Moline Baseball Club
They reversed February and March this year in the Midwest, this part of it anyway. In the Quad Cities, until this week you'd have been hard pressed to find a baseball fan who believed in his cold, cold heart that a new season was just days away. But down in Homestead, Florida, the Moline gang has been tossing, hitting, running, cramping, and complaining for a few weeks now. And maybe by the time Suzy Bogguss throws out the first pitch at the home opener April 4th, El Ni�o will make herself at home in the heartland as she did all winter.
Still, spirits are warm and optimism high in the Greens training camp. Even the curmudgeonly Rolf Samuels thinks the team has a chance to return to the championship again this year. "Well, hell," he admits. "We've got the starting pitching about as good as we're ever going to get it, and our hitters are coming into their primes. All we need is a little luck." Samuels backed off when asked if the Greens would win the division. "No, I didn't say that. I just said we're good enough that we could win. But history is full of lots of second-place teams who can say the same thing. And that's all we ended up being last year, remember, just another second-place team."
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Assistant Scouting Director Joshua Logan said that he and Scouting Director Fate Norris were "pretty pleased" with the results of the annual Shoeless Joe League supplemental draft earlier this month. "Considering that we gave up our only extra pick in acquiring [John] Valentin," explained Logan, "we did well to pull down some of the young men we were shooting for."
Of the six draftees, only LHP Scott Eyre looks to help the club quickly, but that's how Norris and Logan had it figured. "You draft your pitchers," explained Norris, "And you just hope is what you do." Norris said that Eyre had a few things going for him that made him a good fit for the Greens: he old enough, born 1972, so he's past the age when he's most vulnerable; he has already had his requisite major arm injury; and he's a left hander with some life yet on his fastball. Norris recalled Eyre from earlier in the decade when he posted some stellar numbers in low A ball. "Then, like so many pretty A ball boys, he hurt his arm." Not until last year was Eyre fully recovered, and, if he does not throw as hard as he did when he fanned 154 in 144 innings back in 1993, he still mixes a decent fastball with a good curve and shows fair control. "He doesn't have ace potential," concedes Logan, "But he could be a solid middle-of-the-rotation starter, which is a good find for the end of the fourth round."
The other 1998 enlistees infuse the farm system with youth. All are position players, and all are still teenagers save for first rounder Cesar King, who turned 20 only last month. "You can't coach tall, you can't teach fast, and you can't beat young," explained Logan. This was a draft of high-ceiling players by design. Because the major-league club is deep and young, Norris and Logan could afford to take such high-risk gambles. King will play regularly in AA at 20, and Jimmy Rollins (3rd round) and Darnell McDonald (2nd round) have a good chance to do the same next year. Logan won't predict as fast a path for Jose Nunez (5th round) and deep-flyer Drew Henson (6th round), but both players have enough tools to make it possible. "Don't ask where any of these kids are now," protested Logan. "That's the wrong question. Ask where they might be in two years because that's what this draft class was about. That and getting a pitcher from somewhere other than the low minors." Asked about potential draftees Rick Ankiel, Buddy Carlyle, Ryan Anderson, and Grant Roberts, Logan smiled and nodded sagaciously. "I wish them all the best of luck because, I guarantee you, a good fastball in A ball isn't enough. Just ask Brien Taylor."
Both Logan and Norris saw their own pitching careers halted by arm injury, so they speak from bitter personal observation as much as aggregate years of scouting experience. Baseball history is scattered with such stories. If it isn't a Smokey Joe Wood losing feeling in his arm, it's Monty Stratton losing a leg in a hunting accident or it's Herb Score or Jock Casey getting blasted off the mound. Once in a blue moon the hurler finds new life as a position player. But Stan Musials are rare. Mostly, pitchers become damaged goods. At that point even the best advances in sports medicine can't turn them into the flamethrowers they once were.
It's not just pitchers who are vulnerable to injury, as Dickie Thon would tell you. And Ray Chapman, if he weren't dead. And Damon Rutherford, if he weren't dead and a fictional character. Baseball may not be a contact sport but, as Greens Archivist Shirley E. Johnson puts it, "it's no Sunday walk in the park along the river down there by where those little black kids like to feed the ducks" either. Even though the full report by the John Deere Committee on Bean Ball Incidents remains a confidential document, locked safely in the vaults of the Greens Archive, Johnson said that she has assembled a comprehensive bibliography of baseball injuries, which is available for borrowing or copying. It contains "some powerful articles and some pretty sick pictures."
Johnson, who helped assemble materials for the Deere report, said she first became interested in the subject of baseball injuries through her own experience at a Big River Alliance game in La Crosse, Wisconsin, many years ago. "I was visiting an aunt of mine, and she suggested that we go to over to Traders' Park. The [La Crosse] Stations were playing the Nauvoo Martyrs, and there was a lot of bad blood on both sides; I don't know on what account." The tension on the field found its way into the stands, and things quickly got out of hand. "People were throwing all kinds of stuff--hot dogs, souvenir baseballs, bobbing-head dolls, tea cups. It was terrible." Johnson and her aunt fled from the mob but not before the Greens' Archivist was clipped on the elbow by a teacup. "I'm not saying that I was a pitching prospect up to that point," she says now. "But I was pretty active in the Ladies Librarian League, and I could pitch a little." After the accident, Johnson lost the snap on her breaking ball and gravitated towards a life of passivity and mere observation. By the time the arm was surgically repaired in 1991, Johnson had settled on a life of compiling bibliographies, stockpiling newspapers, and collecting porcelain figurines. It was too late to go back. "All of which goes to show," Johnson said, "that you never know what's going to happen when you go out to the ball park."
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The Big River Alliance that Johnson recalls lives on today. It's not the hotbed of religious fervor that it was in 1961, but it still features some "good old country hardball," as Fate Norris put it. Norris announced that this season the Greens would switch their rookie-ball affiliate from Minoqua of the Land O' Lakes League to New Boston of the Big River Alliance. "Minoqua is just too damn far away. And it gets all cluttered up with FIBs during the summertime." New Boston is much closer to Moline, which will allow both minor and major league coaches easier access.
Norris also announced the managers of this year's Green affiliates:
LEVEL LEAGUE TEAM MANAGER
AAA Continental League Winnipeg Pelters Arquimedez Pozo
AA High Plains League Topeka Threshers Cesar King
A Grain Belt Association Waterloo Boys Jimmy Rollins
R Big River Alliance New Boston River Rats Jose Nunez