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.