Culture

What The World Needs Now is Rob Deer

Clayton Trutor

Rob Deer could sure knock the shit out of a baseball. The right handed slugger, best known for his stints with the Brewers and Tigers, belted at least 21 home runs in eight consecutive seasons during the not-quite-as-homerun friendly late 80s and early 90s. He placed in the American League’s top 10 in homeruns four times and finished his career with 230 round trippers. Problem was, if Deer didn’t send a pitch sailing into the upper deck, he usually struck out. During his tenure as one of the American League’s most feared sluggers, he chalked up some considerably more remarkable strikeout numbers. Deer, a .220 career hitter, led the American League in strikeouts on four occasions. In ten full seasons, he struck out over 1400 times. His 186 strikeouts in 1987 gave him the single season American League record at the time.

Sluggers from Ruth to Reggie to Ryan Howard have struggled with their strikeout numbers. If you swing for the fences, you end up failing more times than not. Historically, sluggers have made up for this shortcoming by bringing home the bacon with runners in scoring position, but not Rob Deer. Deer proved immune to this perennial obligation of sluggers. In 1992, Deer put together the most outlandish home run to RBI ratio ever: 32 home runs, 64 runs batted in. Even on a bad team, like the ’92 Tigers, this shouldn’t be possible.

Deer, in spite of his profound shortcomings at the plate, was always a hot commodity in the pre-steroids, Designated Hitting American League. After getting his start in the Giants organization, Deer bounced from the Brewers to the Tigers to the Red Sox before falling into obscurity in the mid 90s. He rarely DHed but with the advent of the position in the American League in 1973, the demand for hired-gun sluggers increased dramatically. A brand new position had been created to add clout to everyone’s lineup. The increased demand greatly outpaced the supply.

Despite lowering the mound, pitchers’ dominance of big league hitters continued well beyond its 1968 peak. Power hitting, in particular, sagged well into the 1970s. Anyone possessing this attribute drew a great deal of attention around the League. The twenty year window between the dawn of the DH and the 1994 players’ strike proved a golden age for no glove, no legs, low average sluggers. The efforts of American League teams to hoard all the power hitters available in the new free agent market forced National League teams to follow suit. Soon, they embraced their Jack Clarks and George Fosters as much as the AL teams. Before steroids, before the further watering down of big league pitching through the 1990s expansions, and before the obsession with sabermetrics, the need for raw power threats in every lineup made the Rob Deers of the world incredibly wealthy men. Reggie Jackson is certainly the greatest of their legion, but many lesser lights made a career with a similar M.O.: Steve Balboni, Ken Phelps, Gorman Thomas, Dwayne Murphy, Ron Kittle, Andre Thornton, Bob Hamlin, Chili Davis, Dave Kingman, George Bell, Dan Pasqua, Mickey Tettleton, Travis Fryman, Cecil Fielder, hell the whole ’92 Tigers team.

It wasn’t a coincidence that a player like Deer had difficulty finding work in the aftermath of the ’94 players’ strike. All of a sudden, the uptick in homerun hitting many sportswriters noticed in the strike shortened ’94 season developed into a long term trend. Long ball numbers exploded and not just for the McGwires and Sosas of the world. By the late nineties, every lineup had about seven guys capable of hitting fifteen homeruns a year. The value of a player with the characteristics of Deer sunk precipitously in the steroids-era free agent market. It’s not that the need for DHs and sluggers declined in the steroids era. Teams could simply be pickier about whom they put in that position. Batting title winners like Edgar Martinez and MVP contenders like David Ortiz were the prototypical DHs of the late 90s and early 2000s, not Steve Balboni. If everyone in the lineup constituted a power threat, the need for players who were simply power threats evaporated.

As the steroids expose industry has ratcheted up in recent years, the number of middle infielders capable of hitting tape-measure homeruns has returned to its usual trickle. Guys who looked like body doubles for the Ultimate Warrior in 2003 look like Mookie Wilson today. Consequently, big league baseball is in need of a new generation of Rob Deers. Power hitting is again at a premium. The mere fact that a guy can’t catch a fly ball, get on base more than a third of the time, or leg out a double without the need of oxygen doesn’t disqualify them from stardom anymore. The first examples of the return to Rob Deerdom are blooming in both leagues. Former steroids guy Jason Giambi has transformed himself into a neo-Rob Deer, batting around .200 for the Athletics this season while on a pace to hit 30 homeruns. Ryan Howard has emerged as one of the National League’s top post-steroids era sluggers even though he makes Bobby Bonds look like the exemplar of patience at the plate.

Forget OBP. Forget OPS. The Moneyball era is over. Swinging for the fences is a gamble, regardless of how rational Michael Lewis makes power hitting sound. Find me some free swingers who connect just enough to make the other team nervous. What the world needs now is Rob Deer.