Mike Rabelo up for more than a cup of joe
posted in 2007 season, players |It looks like rookie catcher Mike Rabelo is up in the big leagues for more than just a cup of coffee, as all the news on Vance Wilson sounds bad. He can’t throw the baseball. Well, that’s not technically correct. He can throw the ball, but very lightly, not at the level required of a catcher. He has pain in his elbow, describing it as a pinched nerve. Originally slated to make the trip to Kansas City with the team, Wilson instead stayed behind in Detroit for further tests. Danny Knobler reports today on his blog that doctors still do not know what’s wrong, so he’ll be seeing specialist Dr. James Andrews in Birmingham, Ala. — a renowned Tommy John doctor. It doesn’t necessarily mean surgery, but it’s probably not a good sign.
So it’s probably a good team to look closer at the 27-year-old Rabelo, who actually came up last September. My first stop was the catchers page at Talking Tigers — an excellent minor league blog by Matt Wallace that will soon be moving to the Most Valuable Network.
Rabelo seems to have a low walk rate, but his on base percentage in 2006 in both AA-Erie and AAA-Toledo was a decent .361 and .350, respectively. Combined with his slugging, he was in the mid to upper .700s. That’s not too bad at all for a catcher. He still doesn’t have a lot of power, but his ISO for the year was around .150. (Pudge is a career .170 but fell to .137 last season.)
He is a switch hitter, according to the MILB profile, , but a trip to MinorLeagueSplits shows me he hit lefties a lot better than righties at both levels.
Of course, catching a staff in the minors and putting up decent batting numbers is a lot different than doing it in the majors, so we shouldn’t expect Rabelo in his limited at bats to repeat his 2006 performance. Getting on base a few times and not screwing up is really all that’s asked of him when Pudge takes a day off.
What makes Rabelo interesting, from a personal standpoint, his how fast he rose through the system in the past year, even though he was still at the AA level after being drafted in 2001. In fact, he started 2006 as the backup catcher in Erie, Jason Beck reported. He called it “surreal” in the Free Press.
The article adds that Wilson has a lot of confidence in his stand-in, and Rabelo has a fair amount of experience with the pitchers he’ll be catching thanks to three years in the major league camp for Spring Training.
Hopefully his storybook year continues in however long he spends in the Tigers uniform. Pudge is hard to get out of the lineup, but as an aging catcher, he’s going to need his breaks along the way whether or not he wants them.