FanPost

My irrational love for Mike Hessman

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The day was June 25, 2004. The Atlanta Braves had come to Camden Yards for a rare interleague game. The Orioles brought out youngster Daniel Cabrera to pitch, who at the time was a twenty-three year old rookie who didn't have a lot of service time at the AAA level. Cabrera would wind down his career in his mid-thirties playing for the Chunichi Dragons in Japan before he finally decided to hang it up. He played his last major league game at the age of twenty-eight.

In the happy summer of June 2004, all of that was ahead of him. He didn't have any notion that he would lead the league in losses as part of a 93-loss team in 2007, or that he would lead the league in walks twice. He also couldn't have known that he would play more AAA games in his thirties than in his twenties. He only knew that he had a home start against one of baseball's better franchises, the Atlanta Braves.

The Braves in 2004 would finish first in the NL East under Bobby Cox- a common occurrence for the team. They did it with an ace of Russ Ortiz and a journeyman pitcher named Paul Byrd. Byrd got the start on June 25th, which was a Friday. In 2002, he had been a good starter for the Kansas City Royals. The Braves signed him in December 2002, anticipating that they would have a strong pitcher on their roster. That was when difficulty arose.

On June 1, 2003, Byrd had to undergo Tommy John surgery after not making a single start for the Braves during the regular season. It would take him a full year to recover. He came back in the middle of the 2004 season. In first start back that year, he pitched seven scoreless innings against the Cleveland Indians. He only needed 91 pitches to do it. Everything appeared to be going according to plan. The patience of the Atlanta Braves organization was starting to pay off.

The starts at first base for the Braves that year were mostly given to forty-six year old Julio Franco, who attributed his continued production to his healthy eating habits. There had been an article that year claiming that Franco got on Adam LaRoche's case for eating a candy bar one time. In 2004, LaRoche started some games while Franco started others. There was, however, a third first baseman on the team, one that had spent a lot of time waiting for his chance. His name was Mike Hessman.

Hessman was twenty-six years old in 2004. He had started playing professional baseball at the age of eighteen with the GCL Braves. He had spent seven years in Atlanta's minor league system before getting called up in 2003. Then he was sent down again to Richmond in 2004 where he had the best season of his minor league career to that point. Since he had done well with the major league club the previous year, the Braves called him up. He could play a variety of positions: left field, third base, first base, and right field. He wasn't a defensive all-star at any position, though he did well enough to keep his job.

Mike Hessman was primarily a power hitter who struck out a lot. Nobody in the major leagues was thinking that he was the second coming of Braves favorite Fred McGriff. Nor was he ever going to replace Chipper Jones at third base. He wasn't going to intrude on the platoon that Franco and LaRoche had locked up. J.D. Drew had left field locked down that year; Drew finished sixth in the NL MVP voting. The most likely scenario in calling Hessman up was to get him being productive on tape so that they could trade him to another team.

The problem was, Hessman had a very strange approach to batting. He flopped his bat around like it was a dead fish. His approach looked limp. He didn't look like a natural hitter. He was also right-handed; that didn't help him as a first-baseman. Most career first basemen are left-handed- the idea being that they won't have to reach around their bodies to tag someone coming up the first base line if necessary. The only right-handed first basemen that last are those who can really hit.

Hessman didn't hit that year. In fact, he hit only 0.130- a number that would doom him to another three years in the minor leagues, this time at the Detroit Tigers' AAA affiliate, the Toledo Mud Hens. However, on that fun summer's day of June 25th, no one knew what the future held for Hessman either. As far as anyone could tell, he was just a warm body filling a spot.

The ballpark that day was pleasant. My father, his wife, and I all made the trip to Baltimore from Pennsylvania. We parked in a parking lot and took a tram or a train or somesuch thing to within walking distance of the park itself. As my father explained it, parking in the city was a bitch. He didn't want to have to pay the high price of stadium parking only to have to spend a full hour figuring out how to get out of there.

So it was that we were walking as we approached the park. I had my Detroit Tigers hat on. I had, within the last year or two, decided to like the Tigers when they hired Alan Trammel as their manager. I saw them as a bad team trying to get better. They really were trying too. I started learning names like Jeremy Bonderman and Gary Knotts. I had sympathy for guys that were run out there before they were ready because the organization didn't have anyone else available. Still, they tried their best. I could respect that.

I wasn't really interested in either the Braves or the Orioles. The Braves were my father's team. He had been following them since he was a child. Having grown up in South Carolina, there wasn't any other major league baseball team in his area that was worth his attention. Even during the bad old years of the 1980's, he stuck with them. His patience was rewarded by fifteen years of constant winning under Cox that won't likely be duplicated anytime soon.

There was a guy out in the parking lot schilling programs. In those days, before the internet had really got going full swing, people still relied on print media to a large extent. I had to read the paper every day to get the scores. I had a subscription to a baseball digest magazine, one that had articles about old players I didn't know about and printed out a list of statistics at the end of every year. Those year-end magazines got worn to pieces as I looked over and over again at the tiny little numbers printed in black ink that I have since come to learn are given a lot more credence than they should.

The program itself is a decent idea, albeit one whose time has now passed. However, having no interest in either team (but rather being more interested in a day at the park with my father), I told the salesman, "I already know who's playing." Of course I didn't. It just felt like a neat thing to say.

On paper, the game would have looked like a pitching duel. Seeing the game in person, even if from a distance, it was clear that Byrd struggled mightily against a strong Orioles lineup that featured Miguel Tejada, Rafael Palmeiro, former Braves catcher Javy Lopez, and the unlikely hero of the day, Larry Bigbie. Byrd was mostly able to pitch out of trouble until the seventh inning when he had been left out there too long.

On the other side of the ball, Daniel Cabrera was quietly dominant. He didn't look like he had anything special going. He wasn't racking up a ton of strikeouts. He just wasn't allowing all that many hits. That was unusual for someone facing a Braves lineup that had so many productive stars in it. Being effective against any team was also unusual for Cabera, as his season had been unremarkable up to that point. He had come into the game with a 3-3 record and a 4.02 ERA. No start of his before that or after that in 2004 made him look like anything other than a struggling finesse pitcher.

When Cabrera sealed the game away by getting Chipper Jones to fly out in foul territory to Larry Bigbie, I stood up and gave him a standing ovation. Even though he was in his home park in Baltimore, most of the other fans in attendance didn't want to do that. I reckon now that most of them were all older folks who were used to a starter getting twenty or more complete games every year. I was not old; I was young then. To me, a shutout was impressive.

Having become a Tigers fan and having seen Mike Hessman in person was the closest I would get to seeing any Tigers live- except for the games in Harrisburg, PA I sometimes attended when the Erie Seawolves came to town. As such, he soon became my favorite ballplayer. I rooted for him. I cheered him on when he did well. I even found it in my heart to forgive his dead flopping fish batting approach.

In 2011, Hessman had an abortive failed attempt to make it in the Japanese baseball league with the Orix Buffaloes. He then returned as a minor league free agent for several years until, at the age of thirty-seven and back with the Mud Hens, Hessman broke the minor league record for homeruns with his 433rd blast over the wall. The previous record had stood from 1937 until 2015.

If Hessman's odd, unusual career is any indication, that record will stand for quite a while longer. Most baseball players give the game up when it becomes clear they don't have what it takes to be in the majors. Most players aren't that strange AAAA player who is too good for AAA yet not good enough for the show. Above all, most players don't have Hessman's workman-like attitude of going in and trying his best every day even when all his other opportunities have been exhausted.

If there is a minor league hall of fame, Hessman should be in it. Believe me on this one- I got to see him in person. He was a good ballplayer, even if the numbers he put up didn't always reflect that.

This is a FanPost and does not necessarily reflect the views of the <em>Bless You Boys</em> writing staff.