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The Next Babe Ruth?

There is nothing like making a bold, exaggerated statement to get people to read your article, if only to discredit it. The fact of the matter is that there are maybe two other players alive who ever even garner such a comparison, so in many ways the wild accusation is a compliment in itself. I have been touting Micah Owings since he came up last year and have been astounded by his at-bats and am glad to see the attention he is recieving now. Link to ESPN’s front page article.
For a quick recap of just this last week:

• Micah pitched on Saturday and went 4-4 at the plate, but rolled his ankle on a standup double and left the game in the fifth which led to a dig into our bullpen and a 13-inning loss agains the Padres. But still 4-4 at the plate his pitch count was low enough that he would have gotten one more at-bat.
• On Wednesday, still with a swollen ankle, the D-backs are down by two and have a runner on first and they decide to pinch hit Micah Owings and the rest left the Astros stunned. First pitch, he belts an opposite field homerun, tying the game and leading to a D-backs rally to win.

Couple of good stats: Micah has a OBP of .450 and SLG of .632 an average of .421.

Great quote on the danger he is at the plate by Astros catcher Brad Ausmus, “We rarely go over a pitcher in our meetings when we talk about how to approach the opponents’ hitters. We went out of our way to discuss him and to talk about how to pitch him because we knew he could hit and knew he had power. We were well aware of it. That being said, he still hurt us.”

ESPN gave him the Super Sub Award for April you can read the rest here but this is  a taste.

“Only one human could possibly have won this award this week — the one, the only superhuman force that is Diamondbacks pitcher Micah (The Bambino) Owings. If you haven’t seen the game-tying two-run pinch home run Owings whomped Thursday, after the Astros actually changed pitchers when he was announced as the hitter, you need to navigate over to the video portion of this site and catch it. But here’s what this homer represented: Owings was the first pitcher to hit a pinch homer since Brooks Kieschnick in 2004. He was the first starting pitcher to hit a pinch homer between starts since Don Robinson in 1990 (and just the second in the last 37 years). And, as ESPN’s amazing research department points out, Owings now has a higher career slugging percentage (.671) than Ted Williams (.634), a higher career OPS (1.044) than Albert Pujols (1.042) and roughly the same career on-base percentage (.373) as Hank Aaron (.374). So needless to say, he can come off our bench and hit any time.”Micah starts tonight against the Mets with his bad ankle and is just going to take it easy around the bases, probably by just putting it over the fence so he can pull a Kirk Gibson gimp around the bases. In all seriousness, this guy is going to explode and I just want everyone to recognize that I was on the bandwagon first.

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