Writings on baseball by Matt Barnard and Dan Stein.

 
Goodbye, De Wain Lee Stevens
My first memory of Lee Stevens is of his 1991 Topps baseball card. For the first time in my card collecting career (I got really into Topps cards during the 1987 season, when I was four - I'm not really sure how that happened), Topps decided to vary the layout of their cards: while some were in the standard, vertical format, the '91 set also included horizontal cards with a nice panoramic view. If memory serves me correctly, Stevens's card was the first I saw of this new design.

Of course, that card depicted the man we know as Lee when he was a 22-year old first baseman with the then-California Angels, coming off a dynamic .214/.275/.339 season in 67 games at the major leauge level. He'd been a first round draft of the Angels in 1986 and had put up pretty decent numbers in the minor leagues before getting his shot in the bigs. He only played 18 games the following season (1991), followed by a .221/.288/.349 showing in 1992 over the course of 106 games and 345 plate apperances. After that, Stevens slipped from my consciousness, bouncing around from the Expos organization (where he was traded by the Angels for the retiring Jeff Tuss and ultimately, Keith Morrison) to the Blue Jays (where he signed as a free agent, destined only to make it as far as AAA Syracuse) back to the Angels and then to Japan, where he played two years with the Kintetsu Buffaloes before returning home.

No, he was not destined to reemerge until some four years had passed since his last major league action, when he joined the Texas Rangers organization and tore up AAA, winning MVP honors while playing with Oklahoma City. As a result, Stevens was called up and appeared in 27 games for the Rangers in late 1996. His .231/.291/.449 line was enough to secure a place on the 1997 version of the team, where he would remain as a semi-regular through the 1999 season. In early 2000, Stevens was a part of the three-way three first baseman trade involving Brad Fullmer and David Segui, winding up traded to Montreal for the second time in his career. Okay, I really don't feel like doing this anymore...he was traded to Cleveland mid-way through last season (2002, if you're reading this archived at some point in the future) in the Bartolo Colon deal with a whole bunch of players much better than he ever was like Brandon Phillips, Grady Sizemore and Cliff Lee.

This year he signed minor league contracts with the Devil Rays and Brewers, arguably the worst organizations in baseball (certainly among them), and couldn't cut it. So he's retiring. And apparently, his first name was (is) De Wain. Or is it De? The full name is De Wain Lee Stevens...I'm going to go out on a limb and without doing any research at all, I'm going to say that with his retirement, he leaves a De Wain-less MLB. And for that, I will miss him. Because that is a really weird name.

(A lot of the statistical information in this entry and in a lot of the others is taken from the invaluable baseball-reference.com and way more sports (mostly for minor league stats). I don't mention these all the time because I assume that you all use the same or similar resources and they're linked on the left side of this page...but that's where it comes from.)
posted by VZW Watcher at 11:10 PM -