Indy Vet Vince Perkins Well Positioned With Cubs While Pickoff Artist Derrick Loop Joins Padres

It isn’t that position players cannot work their way through a farm system and reach the major leagues, but Independent Baseball pitchers succeed with much greater frequency.

Among the newer faces this typist has come across who seem to be intriguing candidates for major leaguers to give a long look at some time in 2010 it once again is moundsmen who stand out.

I am not going to go so far as to predict here in late January that I can tell you who the break-through Indy players will be this season, but I will offer up two hurlers who have positioned themselves as reasonable candidates.  It might not happen in April, but one hurler has inched himself well up the ladder and the other has more than a little going for him even if it takes somewhat longer.

Further along is right-hander Vince Perkins, who used time in the Atlantic and Northern Leagues productively and has a non-roster invitation to the Chicago Cubs’ spring training camp in Mesa, AZ. Lefty Derrick Loop, a product of the Golden League, has positioned himself in an attempt to use his devastating pickoff move to eventually succeed with a new organization, the San Diego Padres.

Perkins Gives Major Assist to Wally Backman

Vince Perkins has been in major league camps four previous times with Toronto and Milwaukee, but much of the time he was damaged goods, dealing with an elbow that eventually required Tommy John surgery.  The elbow hurt as far back as 2004, then got worse when he was with Team Canada in the 2006 World Baseball Classic.

Now 28, Perkins says his velocity came back quickly.  He did not satisfy his third major league organization, though, and the Chicago White Sox let him go at the end of spring training in 2008.  A week later he reported to Camden, NJ of the Atlantic League, where he had a 7.97 earned run average over seven appearances.  Part of the problem, he explained from his Labelle, FL home, was “still a matter of (not) trusting my arm.”

So 6-foot-5 Vince Perkins took a break of several weeks “to see if I wanted to continue”.  He was doubtful.

Perkins also had an angel, of sorts, on his side.  Joliet, IL was managed by former major league second baseman Wally Backman.  “He was hard nosed, but fun to play for,” Perkins praises.  Backman, who will manage the New York Mets’ farm club at Brooklyn, NY this season, would invite major league teams out to see Perkins pitch, as he rang up a 3-0 record and 2.43 ERA in seven Northern League appearances.  “He was very helpful,” the pitcher says.

One of the teams Backman invited was Chicago’s north side team, the Cubs. They signed Perkins after the season, and he rewarded them with a 7-2 record, five saves and a 3.02 ERA in 53 relief appearances last summer, most of it at Triple-A Iowa.

A self-described sinker ball pitcher (“I try to get ground balls”), Perkins now gets a chance to show the parent Cubs what he can do.  “I think they are expecting me to come in and win a spot (in the bullpen),” Perkins said.  “I think I am one of the arms they are looking at”, and it could be either right away or later in the season.  “The stuff has always been there if I throw like I can,” he added.  This time he is far enough removed from surgery to trust his arm.

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Derrick Loop Takes His Pickoff Move to the Padres

When a pitcher picks 17 runners off base in a season, he gets attention.  Throw in 82 strikeouts with only 24 walks and 56 hits allowed in 71.1 innings and the fact he is a 26-year-old left-hander and it means he has not yet peaked.

This is what Derrick Loop did last summer, pitching primarily in Class A and briefly at the end in Double-A.  He was finishing a two-season stint in the Boston Red Sox organization with the combined 4-3 record, 18 saves and a 1.89 earned run average.  And he says his pickoff total was 17, which is more than impressive when one realizes the Chicago White Sox’s Mark Buehrle led the major leagues with only eight.

Loop has moved on to the San Diego farm system, realizing the Padres are not nearly as deep with prospects as the Red Sox are.

Loop was drafted in the 23^rd round by Cleveland in 2006 after four years at Cal State-Los Angeles, but he got only one year when the Tribe cut its farm system back.  “I learned I needed to work harder,” the Lake Mathews, CA resident confided this week, and the opportunity to put the new attitude to work came about only days after the release from Cleveland when Alex Carbajal, Loop’s pitching coach in college, gave him an opportunity in Chico, CA, where Carbajal held a similar job.

The 6-foot-3, 220-pound hurler put together an 8-5, 3.82 season with the Outlaws, helping them to a Golden League championship, then really blitzed league hitters so impressively in six appearances (3-0, 1.53 and a 1.87 batting average) early the next season that his contract was sold in the middle of a game to Boston.  Loop added another six victories that ’08 campaign in the California League, and still never took a loss.

He sounds supremely confident, though, because of his cut fastball that he feels he can spot on both sides of the plate to confuse both left and right-handed hitters.  That superb pickoff move won’t hurt, either.

Gagne, Scheppers in the News

Non-roster invitations to major league camps for Independent grads have been coming in so slowly we can only confirm 11 to this point although both Philadelphia and Colorado are showing some interest in former Cy Young award winner Eric Gagne, who went 6-6, 4.65 as a starter for Quebec in the Can-Am League last summer.

Touted Tanner Scheppers (St. Paul, MN, American Association) will be in Texas’s big league camp as will veteran catcher Eliezer Alfonzo (St. Paul) with Seattle and first baseman Brian Myrow (Winnipeg, Northern League) with Pittsburgh.

(This is an excerpt from the column Bob Wirz writes on Independent Baseball.  Fans may subscribe at www.WirzandAssociates.com, enjoy his blog, www.IndyBaseballChatter.com, or comment to RWirz@aol.com.  The author has 16 years of major league baseball public relations experience with Kansas City and as spokesman for two Commissioners and lives in Stratford, CT.)