BASEBALL AT THE BREAK
Two carry the mantle in ML Baseball
LUT WILLIAMS
BCSP Editor
(As Major League Baseball enters its 2007 All-Star break, the Black College Sports Page takes a look at the two black college players plying their trade in the Big Leagues.)
Milwaukee second baseman Rickie Weeks and San Francisco Giants outfielder Fred Lewis, both from Southern University are the only two former black college players on current Major League rosters. And each is carving out a unique story.
Weeks, the highly touted phenom drafted second overall in the 2003 amateur draft by
the Brewers, is struggling coming off 2006 season-ending surgery on his right wrist. Going into
the All-Star break, Weeks, in his third full
season with Milwaukee, had just one hit in his last 25
at-bats and just two hits in his last 35 at-bats and
has seen his average dip to .221.
The surgery, to repair a tendon that was slipping out of place, ended his 2006 season after 95 games. Weeks hit .279 last season with 8 home runs and 34 runs batted in. That followed a 2005 season where he also battled wrist injuries while playing in 96 games, hitting .239 with 13 HRs and 42 RBIs.
He had a stint on the disabled list earlier this season when scar tissue from the surgery was causing soreness. He came off the disabled list on June 18. After beginning the season batting leadoff, Weeks is not batting eighth.
According to Brewers manager Ned Yost, Weeks' recent numbers are deceiving.
"He's got zero luck right now," Yost said in a report this week from the Brewers' website on mlb.com. "He cannot find a hole. I thought Rickie had good at-bats [Friday] night, he's just got nothing to show for it. I like Rickie in that eighth hole a little bit."
Weeks' struggles contrast greatly with the Brewers' other young charges who are fuelling a turnaround of the moribund franchise. First baseman Prince Fielder (29 HRs, 70 RBIs) and shortstop J.J. Hardy (14 HRs, 54 RBIs) are having breakout seasons while leading the franchise to the top of the National League's Central Division.
And while he has struggled at the plate, there has been a marked improvement in his defense. Through 59 games last season, Weeks had 20 errors. Through the same number this year, he has just six.
Lewis, drafted one year earlier than Weeks in the second round (66th overall) of the 2002 draft, is gaining his own bit of notoriety with the Giants.
Considered one of the Giants top ten prospects before his April call-up, Lewis is hitting .280 as a sometime replacement for budding home run king Barry Bonds in left field. It is the connection to the ever-interesting and always controversial slugger on the brink of breaking baseball's most hallowed record that has thrust Lewis into the limelight.
When he does not start at another outfield position, the 6-2, 190-pounder will often replace Bonds in left field or pinch-run for him in late innings or give him a day off when necessary. Recently, that has been quite often.
"I love being this close to history," Lewis said in a recent (July 7) story on the relationship between the two in the New York Times . In the story, Lewis talks of being in awe of Bonds when they first met but how he now sees him as a big brother.
In only 42 major league games, Lewis has already made a mark. He hit for the cycle in just his fourth major league game and became the first rookie since the Giants moved to San Francisco to hit two grand slams in a season. His combination of speed and power is likened to Bonds in his youth.
The NY Times story says a sign of the youngster's relationship with the legend is when Bonds asked Lewis after he hit a grand slam on July 4th after hitting for the cycle on Mother's Day, "Are you just going to hit on holidays?"
Perhaps it is no coincidence that both Weeks and Lewis played collegiately at Southern under longtime coach Roger Cador. Over a three-year period, 2001-2003, Cador had three players taken in the top two rounds of the draft. Weeks (2003) and Michael Woods (2001) were taken in the first round, with Lewis (2002) in the second.
Over the last decade, Southern has been the most dominant baseball team in the Southwestern Athletic Conference, and, along with Bethune-Cookman of the Mid Eastern Athletic Conference and Savannah State, among the black college programs to make some noise on the national scene. The Jaguars have won 13 SWAC titles in Cador's 22 years and made four NCAA appearances.
Weeks was a two-time Southwestern Athletic Conference player of the year who led the nation in hitting in 2002 and 2003 and the nation's player of the year in 2003. Lewis was also an all-SWAC selection in 2002 after hitting .406.
© 2007 Azeez Communications, Inc.