We’re all guilty of overestimating the capabilities of young players, particularly after they deliver a strong rookie season. After all, if they already show they can more than handle their own over the first extended look at the sport’s highest level, then surely they’ll be even better with more experience, right?
Except it doesn’t always work that way. Elaborate scouting reports are compiled. Weaknesses are exposed and exploited. Injuries sap fastballs and curtail bat speed. The hunger to reach the top rung ebbs ever so slightly and dulls a crucial competitive edge.
Sure, studs like Albert Pujols and Mike Trout make it look easy, but for most players, the battle to keep pace with the best in the business is a constant grind. Even those who flash enough talent to earn accolades as the sport’s top rookies often find themselves fighting the headwinds to remain relevant in subsequent seasons.
That’s not to say that the two recently crowned Rookie of the Year winners, Paul Skenes and Luis Gil, will soon be in danger of losing their big league roster spots. Still, they might want to take a few lessons from these six former RotY recipients who quickly fizzled from the limelight following their sizzling debuts.
Mark Fidrych
For those who weren’t there, it’s difficult to explain the sensation that was Mark Fidrych in 1976. He talked to baseballs. He hunched over the mound to groom it to his liking. Like a puppy overjoyed to see its owner, he rushed to teammates who just made a play. Most important – he was really, really good. After languishing in Detroit’s bullpen for the first few weeks of the season, the Bird delivered a two-hitter in his first start and went on to reel off eight straight wins, a run punctuated by a complete-game effort against the Yankees on Monday Night Baseball in late June. Fidrych was named the AL starting pitcher for the All-Star Game, and by the end of the year, he was the easy choice for its top rookie after compiling 19 wins to go with an MLB-best 2.34 ERA and a whopping 24 complete games. But the ever-energetic hurler tore his knee while unnecessarily leaping for a fly ball the following spring, marking the beginning of the end of the magical ride. Although he was as good as ever for parts of the ’77 and ’78 seasons, a shoulder injury that was eventually diagnosed as a torn rotator cuff hampered his all-important right wing, and just like that, the Bird had flown.
Butch Metzger
While most of the baseball world was fixated on the curly-haired wonderkid in Detroit, Butch Metzger was proving an outstanding find for San Diego in the summer of 1976. The right-hander tied an MLB record by winning his first 12 decisions (dating back to 1974), set a rookie record with 77 appearances and led San Diego with 16 saves, a performance that netted him co-NL Rookie of the Year honors with Cincinnati’s Pat Zachry. Traded to St. Louis early in ’77, Metzger saw his overall numbers drop but still nearly matched the previous season’s total with 75 appearances. It was an impressive two-year show of durability, and, in hindsight, almost certainly far too much of a workload for a young pitcher. Metzger stumbled to a 6.51 ERA over a half-season with the Mets in ’78 and never made it back to the Show, ending his once-promising Major League career after just 293.1 innings.
(For the record, Zachry nearly earned his own entry on this list after failing to reach the heights of his quality debut season, but we can move on from 1976…)
Joe Charboneau
Much like the Bird four years earlier, “Super Joe” Charboneau arrived in Cleveland in 1980 with an out-of-the-box personality that quickly made him a fan favorite: Tales abounded of his frat-boy-like exploits of eating cigarettes and opening beer bottles with his eye socket, and before long, area residents were singing along to the local radio hit “Go Joe Charboneau.” Of course, the antics would merely have been an amusing and/or annoying sideshow had the young outfielder not produced, but Charboneau packed quite a bit of thunder in his bat: He homered in both the regular season and home opener, launched a titanic blast into the third deck of the left field grandstands at Yankee Stadium in June, and finished the year with a rock-solid triple crown line of .289-23-87 to nab top rookie honors. However, Super Joe wasn’t immune to the debilitating effects of a back injury suffered in Spring Training in 1981, and he never regained the form that made him a darling of the Cleveland faithful as a precocious rookie. He did retain the volatile personality, though, leading to his release from the organization in 1983 after flashing the middle finger to fans at Double-A Buffalo.
Pat Listach
Handed a starting job shortly after incumbent Brewers shortstop Bill Spiers opened the 1992 season on the disabled list, Pat Listach literally ran with the opportunity. He went on to steal 54 bases, then second in franchise history, and batted .290 with a .352 OBP to keep Milwaukee in the playoff hunt until the end and beat out fellow speedster Kenny Lofton for the AL’s top rookie honors. But those same legs that carried him to prominence at the start of his big league career soon betrayed him, as Listach battled through hamstring problems through much of a disappointing 1993 season, before a bad knee limited him to just 16 games in ’94. Shifted to a utility role in ’95, Listach showed enough speed to swipe 25 bags in part-time play in ’96, but that wasn’t nearly enough to overcome the low average and lack of thump. After getting into 52 games with Houston in 1997, Listach stuck it out for one final minor league season with Cleveland and Philadelphia before calling it quits.
Bob Hamelin
A fan base will always fall for the decidedly non-athletic-looking lug who makes the surprising leap to stardom, and that’s exactly what happened with Bob Hamelin in 1994. Sporting a set of thick glasses and a build normally found on a beer-league softball team, the Hammer became a legit middle-of-the-order force for the Royals with a .282/.388/.599 slash line and 24 home runs in just 312 at-bats. Sadly, a promising season in Kansas City went up in smoke with the players’ strike, and with it went Hamelin’s reign as an unlikely folk hero. A poor start under new manager Bob Boone resulted in Hamelin’s banishment to the minors for much of 1995, and he was cut loose after clubbing just nine homers in ‘96. The burly basher also failed to stick in Detroit despite producing a quality .270/.366/.487 line over 318 at-bats in ’97, offering little hope of continued big league employment when his average sunk to .219 with Milwaukee the following year.
Ángel Berroa
A decade after the Hammer’s rapid rise and fall, it was déjà vu all over again for Royals fans. This time the flash came from Ángel Berroa, who did a bit of everything en route to a .287 batting average with 92 runs scored, 52 extra-base hits, 21 steals and an MLB-leading 264 putouts from shortstop in 2003. While those numbers were enough to earn the most votes from a strong AL rookie class that included Hideki Matsui, Rocco Baldelli and Mark Teixeira, there were already flaws in his game that became more apparent during a rocky follow-up season. Along with the downturns in just about every major statistical category, Berroa also saw his already meager walk rate drop from ’03 to ’04, while his inconsistency at shortstop led to an MLB-worst 28 errors in just 133 games. Although Berroa rebounded somewhat in ’05, a poor season in ’06 spelled the end of his days as a Major League regular, making him another cautionary tale for the hot shot rookies convinced of the inevitability of their stardom.
Thanks to the SABR Bio Project as well as Baseball Reference and its extraordinary research database, Stathead, for help in assembling this piece.
Tim Ott
Tim's early yearnings for baseball immortality began on the dirt and grass of the P.S. 81 ballfield in the Bronx. Although a Hall of Fame career was not in the cards, his penchant for reading the MLB record book and volumes of history tomes led to an internship with MLB.com in 2002. Tim fulfilled an array of roles over the next nine years at the company, from editorial game producer to fantasy writer and editor and reporter for MLB-related promotions. While a busy freelance writing career has since taken him in other directions, Tim has always kept baseball in his heart, and is happy to be back to observing and reflecting on our great pastime.