Promises, Promises

By Matt Himelfarb
Posted Tuesday, March 27, 2007

It’s ludicrous to the extent through which franchises install their own blueprints for long-term success. The fact is the majority of teams in rebuilding mode both then and now rarely dig deeper than the binding consensus that scouts were the bloodline of the game, despite the fact the reason most teams thought it be necessary to rebuild was a direct result of the subject’s descendants.

After all, it’s worth giving Cleveland Indians general manager Mark Shapiro the benefit of the doubt at the time going into the night of December 10th, 2001 at the Winter Meetings inside a small hotel suite in the Boston Sheraton with fourteen other men. “Grand Theft Slugger”, which Baseball America columnist Jim Callis playfully named the Indians acquisition of Aaron Myette and Travis Hafner in December 2002, from the Texas Rangers in return for Ryan Drese and Einar Diaz, was perhaps an expansion of what was to take place that night. The perception of every chubby, tobacco chewing scout was that acquiring Alex Escobar, would indeed be, “Grand Theft Auto.”

In their eyes, he was a “five-tool player”, a phrase that lends scouting a flare of precision, when all it did was merely paraphrase the “hose”, “wheels”, and all the other intangibles that Escobar carried along with him which were preordained for the phrase, “Grand Theft Auto.”

Looking back on those catchy phrases, it’s terribly ironic that while both acronyms were close in context, Travis Hafner had done everything that Alex Escobar had and hadn’t done. He had, in A-Ball in 2000, accumulate twenty-two homers, one-hundred-nine RBI’s, and thirty-four doubles, while his OBP fell three points short of .450, evident by his sixty-seven walks as opposed to just eighty-seven strikeouts.

Power number meant little to Hafner in 2002 at AAA Oklahoma, where he drew seventy-nine walks as opposed to seventy-six strikeouts. The exact level in which Escobar, in 2001 at Norfolk , compiled a .327 .OBP while striking out a staggering one-hundred-forty-six times. What Hafner hadn’t done was prove that he was a trailblazer, which led scouts to thinking he wasn’t worth their time.

At 6:30 p.m., the scout’s dreams, at least those of the New York Mets NL East foes and the Cleveland Indians, was starting to look like more and more like a reality. From the time then GM Steve Phillips interrupted an Indians front office dinner, Mark Shapiro immediately dispelled the prospect of accepting a deal earlier in the day from the Los Angeles Dodgers offer of outfielder Gary Sheffield straight-up for Roberto Alomar, knowing all-too-well the precious jewels that the Mets could offer had the chance to propel the Indians quicker than originally thought out of the quicksand of payroll the Indians currently resided in.

Shapiro and two others left the restaurant to head back to the hotel suite to look over the list of players they wanted from the Mets. It would later be ascertained by Joel Sherman in the New York Post that the Indians contemplated dealing Roberto Alomar for a package that would include Jose Reyes, but that the Indians scouts didn’t have enough info to go on.

Escobar had been called up late the season before out of necessity, where he struggled in fifty at-bats. Upon being promoted, then Norfolk manager John Gibbons was quoted as saying in a telephone interview: “As far as a kid coming up, people haven’t had this much excitement since Strawberry came up in our organization. It seems like with the very good players, they’re effortless in the things they do, and that’s what he’s got. He’s one of those guys that things come real easy for him. I guess you could say he’s a natural boy wonder.

“Boy Wonder?” Such a statement would’ve been considered feasible had it been 1998 and Escobar was playing in A-Ball at Capital City, where he hit .310 accompanied by twenty-seven HR’s and ninety-one RBI’s, all while stealing forty-nine bases, but even then he struck out one-hundred thirty-three times; a number that would dramatically increase by the time he was playing for Gibbons. Ultimately, during 2003, Escobar finally conjectured that his strikeouts were an eminent problem, so he shortened his swing, which then sapped him of his power. “Natural?”

By midnight, the deal sending Outfielders Matt Lawton and Alex Escobar, as well as pitchers Billy Traber and Jerrod Riggan and first baseman Earl Snyder to Cleveland for Roberto Alomar, Mike Bacsik and first baseman Danny Peoples is all but complete. The scouts are drooling over the fact that they’ve acquired Escobar, yet Shapiro is a little more visceral and shows sign of hedging his bets, so he decided to ask all fourteen people around the room for their opinions; future manger Charlie Manuel’s mere thumbs up echoes the beliefs of nearly everyone present.

Born right before the baby-boom generation, Manuel, now the manger of the Philadelphia Phillies, is a complete Pollyanna to the fact that power is something that’s developed by good hitters and that power hitters don’t become good hitters. Nor does he notice that Escobar’s zenith of twenty-five doubles in one minor league season and one-hundred-forty-six strikeouts at AAA Norfolk isn’t about to insinuate that either of those assets will eventually apply to Escobar once he reaches the big leagues. Most importantly, he and every other scout just imagined and imagined what Escobar would eventually become, and it didn’t take rocket science to conjecture that it would never happen.

In the end, it was a trade that didn’t work out for either team, but while Roberto Alomar’s less-than-cerebral time in New York included fretting over the Shea Stadium dimensions and lack of Latin American players in the clubhouse, only to be outdone by a slight quarrel between two-time former Met Roger Cedeno over hair-dos, it was what scouts dreamt about Alex Escobar that will always be remembered.

Unless, of course, Escobar continues to fully follow the path of another Mets' five-tool can't miss outfield prospect, Oakland Athletics' General Manager Billy Beane.

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