Friday, March 2, 2012

Remembering Kevin Maas

I actually had the Starline poster, but I couldn't find a good picture of that.

It often amazes me how some people can get so attached to prospects, and get so mad when a prospect is traded. Even if the return makes sense, as I believe getting Michael Pineda for Jesus Montero makes a ton of sense, there are still many people with ill feelings towards the deal. This makes me think that maybe I'm the fool for liking a trade. But then I think of guys like Kevin Maas.

Over Kevin's last 278 games in the minors, before he made his MLB debut in late June of 1990, he hit 59 HR (good for a 162 game average of 34) to go along with an OBP of .390. I couldn't find anything that states he was a top prospect, but I'm sure there were some Yankee fans that were expecting this guy to take over 1B for Donnie Baseball.

He was called up to the Yankees, from AAA Columbus, on June 29th against the Chicago White Sox. Maas was 1-3 in the game (a single), to go along with a strikeout. Although he hit an RBI single in his 2nd game, Kevin's first HR didn't come until July 4th in Kansas City. And things took off from there.

Kevin set a MLB record by reaching his 10th HR faster than anybody in history (72 at bats). He was also the fastest in history to 13 and 15 HR. By the end of the 1990 season Maas had hit 21 HR in only 79 games, and finished 2nd in Rookie of the Year voting to Sandy Alomar, Jr of the Cleveland Indians. If you want to know just how psyched he had people, check out this quote from BaseballEvolution.com...
A funny thing happened last season. After several seasons of thinking about it, we finally decided to create an award to honor Kevin Maas’ place in the annals of baseball history. Kevin Maas, as our generation will remember, looked like the next Lou Gehrig for one summer in 1990 before making baseball fans around the country feel stupid for having bought the hype.

Well, no sooner than we'd created the Kevin Maas Award, it was pointed out that this was actually two great awards: an award for a rookie who we would be stupid to expect to see a duplicate performance from, and an award for a player whose performance was so out of character with the rest of his career that we would be stupid to expect him to duplicate it.
"The next Lou Gehrig". Yeah, you read that right. I loved Don Mattingly, so to assume anybody could truly replace him is putting a lot on a guy. But to say he looked like the next Lou Gehrig is putting gigantic expectations on a guy.

So what did Kevin end up doing? Well, in 1991 he put up a line of .220/.333/.390 with 23 HR. You might say that although all three triple-slash categories went down (his SLG went down big-time) his HRs actually went up. Yeah, but they went up thanks to having played 69 more games in MLB. In 1992 he hit .248/.305/.406 with 11 HR in 98 games. And things just went downhill from there, until he played his final MLB game in 1995 (he held on in the minors through 1997, but retired after that).

Was Kevin Maas over-hyped? Absolutely. But does that mean Jesus Montero, Manny Banuelos, or other big prospects are over-hyped too? Yeah... possibly. But, that doesn't mean Jesus nor Manny can't become really good MLB players either. I'm just using Maas as a reason why I don't get nearly excited about prospects as some people. And I'm also pointing out that leaning hard on prospects for your team's future success is not the smartest thing to do. Mixing home-grown players along with free agents is the way to go, and the austerity budget hopes to do just that (along with save a butt-load of money).

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Sorry for the Capatcha... Blame the Russians :)