Who is Kevin Rivers and how did he end up with the No. 1 OPS in the Northwest League?

I didn't know, either.

And now that I've spent some time, I'm still not quite sure.

But, for now, it is a Cinderella Story that might even turn into something.

== Road to Rindge ==

Rivers comes from Bristol, CT. Someday, decades from now, volunteer actors wearing authentic 1980s-period sportcoats will portray Chris Berman and Dick Vitale at the Birthplace of Cable Sports National Historic District. But it is not known as a baseball hotbed except for the video highlight variety. At Bristol Eastern he was all-Connecticut and led his team with 9 home runs.

This led him to the Division II Franklin Pierce University Ravens. A very good D-II program, it appears, but still, D-II is where you go when you don't have a good D-I offer and you haven't been drafted out of high school.

Rivers was solid at FPU (in Rindge, NH), playing every day and putting up a .314/.386/.505 line that was good for second-team all-Northeast 10 status as a LH OF. But nothing jumps off the page at you, and he wasn't even the best hitter on his team.

But Franklin Pierce his ownself was a dark horse candidate whose credentials didn't match up with flashy names like Martin Van Buren. So maybe . . .

== Road to Everett ==

So on draft day 2009 Kevin Rivers may have been keeping his phone handy. Or not. Anyway, they went all the way from Stephen Strasburg to Mr. Irrelevant and no Kevin Rivers.

But he got a shot as a non-drafted free agent. Not the international free agent -- but rather the kind that's a free agent because everyone got 50 chances to choose ballplayers and nobody picked you.

The non-drafted free agents are so that they have filler players for the guys that they hope to develop into better filler players for the real prospects.

Somebody in the Mariner universe liked Kevin Rivers enough to give him a chance to play pro baseball, so he went to Peoria and played in 16 games in 2009:

52 AB, 12 H, 5 dbl, 2 HR, 8 BB, 18 K

.231/.355/.442

Skimpy as that may have been, it was enough to bring him back for another year. More importantly, the AZL hitting coach thought he saw something.

As Scott Steinmann told the Bristol Press: He thought Rivers had "a decent stroke" and "a decent hitting eye."

So Kevin Rivers the D-II non-drafted kid had worked his way up to "decent."

== Road to 1.022 OPS ==

Steinmann apparently did something right with the kid with the "decent" skills:

Steinmann had the chance to work with Rivers on his hitting mechanics, with a concentration on his lower half and how he positioned his legs.

“Kevin is very receptive to learning,” Steinmann said, “and he really took to the adjustments we made. He has strived.”

So he got his shot to move up to Everett, and he came right out of the box red hot, with 17 H and 9 BB in his first 13 games (7 K) for a June line of .370/.474/.587.

Then in July -- 27 walks in 28 games (30 K). Plus 30 hits and 11 XBH (5 dbl, 1 tpl, 5 HR).

July line: .303/.453/.525.

Cooling off? No. August brought 29 more H, 17 more BB, 10 more XBH (21 K): .359/.456/.566

With only the Northwest League championship series left, Rivers has 80 H and 60 BB in 241 AB. He has struck out 62 times. Season line:

71 G, 241 AB, 80 H, 28 XBH (13 dbl, 4 tpl, 11 HR), 60 BB, 62 K, 5 SB, 3 CS

.322/.466/.556 -- 1.022 OPS (first in the Northwest League).

== Road to Fluke-dom? ==

Could be. Lots of guys have flashy years and fall by the wayside.

Is he old for the league? Maybe, yeah, but if so, not by much. He just turned 22, but that seems about average for the league (avg. age for Everett 22.1) and he is by no means the oldest guy on the leaderboard.

Are the Ms high on him? Seems like limited buy-in so far. Mickey Wiswall, a 2010 draftee, got a call to Clinton after putting up solid numbers at Everett. Rivers didn't. When Raben and then Poythress went on the DL at High Desert, they reached down for young hotshots Ji-Man Choi and Julio Morban, not Rivers.

But he certainly has earned the chance to keep going and see what he can do. Getting on the radar is half the battle, and maybe a bunch of light bulbs really did go on all at once. Either way, it's a pretty good Cinderella Story so far.

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Terrific

That's an absolutely great breakdown of a basically unknown (non) prospect before this year.

Rivers has been a little lucky as well as a lotta good. His BABIP is .413, which is not gonna hold...but in the minors, BABIP is higher for almost everyone than it is in the bigs. Defenders are worse, so more balls get through. If you drop his BABIP to a minor-league reasonable .330 he's a .900 OPS hitter in a hitter's park, and pretty neutral thus far against righties and lefties. His eye is terrific, basically 1:1. His strikeouts are a little high but if he can walk that much it's perfectly fine.

And his game is still growing. Unfortunately for him I don't think our park would do him any favors, but he should roll all over the Cal League. Still, Rivers wasn't even selected to the All-Star team. Most everyone thinks it's a fluke.

But is it possible that it's not? A division II guy who made it to the bigs is Mike Aviles, SS for the Royals. The Royals were brutal to him but he's persevered. Rivers is gonna have the longest road possible though - he plays a non-glove position which will require him to REALLY hit, not kinda-hit. Pitchers come out of nowhere. Scrappy glove guys might make it work. But an undrafted slugger? He's gonna have to prove it everywhere he goes.

Maybe he has unearthed some Nick Swisher skills, but Nick was a first rounder who flew through the minors and was in the bigs at 24. One level down for Rivers, several more to go. I wish him all the best.

Sometimes a high BABIP in the

Sometimes a high BABIP in the low minors can be a sign of a guy who is too good for the league. Looking at his monthly splits hes never had a BABIP lower than .375. Given that LD rate is really unreliable in the minors, I think hes probably going to be high BABIP wherever he goes although hes going to lose 50 points easy as he moves up.

The K rate is a bit high which is usually a bad sign in the low minors, but since Rivers' BB rate is so high as well, we're probably talking about a bunch of "called strikeouts". A bunch of BBs and called strikeouts usually pan out in the higher levels if the hitter's pitch recognition skills can catch up with the better pitching.

The only real way of finding out if Rivers' pitch recognition skills are going to translate to the higher levels is to promote him and give him an everyday job. High A seems like a good spot for him in '11.

High A won't tell us anything.

That's where marginal hitters go to become Babe Ruth.

If we get out of High Desert

If we get out of High Desert it won't be as bad. The Cal League is always hitter-friendly, but when we were playing at San Bernadino/Inland Empire it wasn't killing pitchers or making hitters look too Ruthian.

Our current park is just ridiculous, that's all. The Mavericks almost moved to the Carolina League a couple of years ago, and I don't think they're getting a new park in the High Desert area, so I don't know how much longer we'll have a presence there.

But if we stay in High Desert, that's exactly where I want Rivers going berzerk. I'd love for him to be a trade piece, and flattening his numbers in the cold of the MWL is not gonna help. Put him in the desert and let him rack up some inflated numbers if we haven't gotten out of there in 2011. It may not show whether he can hit long-term, but it's not a bad option as far as his value is concerned.

Definetly. Chavez would be

Definetly.

Chavez would be decent trade bait this year. Kind of wish they sold high on Liddi last season.

Actually

Apple Valley (a neighboring town in the High Desert) has plans to build a new stadium with the hopes of acquiring the Mavericks. Those plans have stalled a bit with the standard home owner concerns about noise and traffic congestion, there's still a decent chance that it gets done, though likely not before the start of the 2011 season.

As far as Kevin Rivers deserving attention, I would say the same is true of Kevin Mailloux, though he is a couple years older (and certainly too old for the league) he's put up equally impressive numbers (3rd in the league for OPS(with a reasonable BABiP of .318), 1st in HRs, 2nd in 2bs) while playing the more valuable position(s) of 3rd Base (as well as having been drafted at 2nd Base if I'm not mistaken). The main question regarding Mailloux when he was drafted, and the reason he was drafted so lowly (45th round despite consecutive season OPSs above 1.000 for Division I Canisius) was a belief by scouts that Mailloux's (this is if I remember correctly as the site I read originally is proving difficult to find now) pitch recognition was and would continue to be inferior despite a good approach at the plate, and without Halman like power, was a longshot to be anything other than organizational filler. As of tonight, he has been promoted to Clinton, so I suppose he's caught a little bit of attention, or maybe he'll just be filling in for newly minted uber prospect Nick Franklin.

::sheepish::

Now I feel embarrassed to put up my usual shtick. That was a smokin' article even by your standards, Spec.

Follow-on forthwith...

Hyperbole

While a few marginal hitters go on to have great seasons at HD, I have to point out that the majority of hitters who do well there aren't "marginal". You HAVE to have a good batting eye regardless of the environment. Bad batting eyes will still be bad at HD.

Lonnie