Milwaukee Brewers: Rob Deer the king of K before it was cool
Former Milwaukee Brewers outfielder Rob Deer was swinging from his heels and missing long before this practice wasn’t frowned upon, time to give him his due.
Rob Deer played in an era of baseball known for its stolen bases, hit and runs, small ball and manufacturing runs. He played for the Milwaukee Brewers when the team was still an American League team and promoted fundamental baseball.
Rob Deer was in his prime in the late 1980s and was known in baseball circles, for one thing, swinging and missing. Now it wasn’t the comical swinging and missing Bugs Bunny popularized by inducing some poor fellow to take three hacks at the “slow ball” and make a u-turn to the dugout. Though odds are if Deer were headed to the plate, he was getting a true result, a home run or a strikeout.
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Seven of his eleven years in the league Deer received over five hundred plate appearances and four of those years he led the league in strikeouts. Don’t get me wrong, Rob Deer was not a horrible baseball player who only struck out. He wasn’t. Where he was a career .220 hitter he did have over twenty home runs in eight straight seasons.
The late 80s wasn’t really the time where power-hitting only players made their money. Yes, Mark Reynolds led the majors in strikeouts from 2008-2010 though that was more of a time when players were paid more to be specifically long ball hitters. Reynolds was not looked down upon for all the strikeouts, he was ushering in the feast or famine way of baseball which we are so accustomed to nowadays.
Reynolds being a career .236 hitter with three hundred more strikeouts than games played would not have been a welcome player in the 1980s. The same could be said about Richie Sexson. He came along in between the era of “hitting for average over home runs” and “let’s have our home runs and strikeouts in bunches.”
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Former Milwaukee Brewers outfielder Rob Deer was ahead of his time is all I’m saying. Had he been a player in the league now, he’d be hitting forty bombs a year and be getting paid tens of millions of dollars, never mind the strikeouts that came with it.