Rodrigo Lopez: Thrift Shop Find

When Rodrigo Lopez showed up at the Orioles' spring training camp in Fort Lauderdale last February, he was slated to pitch at Triple-A Rochester during the 2000 season. He was one of several minor league pitchers the Orioles had signed over the winter to bolster Rochester's weak staff.But almost from the first day he took the field in Florida, Lopez worked to change that assumption. He wanted to pitch in Baltimore, not in the International League. His diligence and his natural talent quickly won him converts in that effort. Lopez never set foot in Rochester during the year. Instead, he is the Orioles' Most Valuable Player of 2002, a pitcher whose right arm wrote a fairy tale chapter to an otherwise forgettable season for his team.

“He was really a breath of fresh air,” says Syd Thrift, the Orioles vice president for baseball operations who made the ultimate decision to sign Lopez. “It's so rewarding when you see a young pitcher come into his own. And I saw that right away in spring training. He doesn't only have outstanding talent, but he also has the right mental attitude. And he has real good pitching aptitude.”

Not many people in Baltimore had heard of Lopez when Thrift and the Orioles signed him on November 23, 2001. And with good reason. Lopez was carving out a career as one of those thousands of unheralded journeyman minor league pitchers whose names are known only to fans in places like Idaho Falls, Idaho, Clinton, Iowa, and Mobile, Alabama.

Lopez did have a brief flirtation with major league baseball in 2000. But the operative word here is “brief.” He started in six games for the San Diego Padres. His first outing was his best. In his big league debut on April 29, 2000, he held the Braves to one run over seven innings on just four hits and two walks. Although he departed with a 4-1 lead, Lopez didn't get the win. His next five outings, spread over two different stints with the Padres, were a little messier. In 172/3 innings, he gave up 23 earned runs on 36 hits for an unwieldy 11.77 ERA. He lost three of those games and was awarded no decisions in the other two. By mid-June he was demoted to Triple-A Las Vegas, headed back, apparently, on his trail to minor league oblivion.

At the very start of the 2001 season, Lopez gave little indication of how his career would be taking off in 12 months. A shoulder injury shelved him for the first two months of the season. When Lopez returned to action, it wasn't even at the Triple-A level, but at Single-A Lake Elsinore in California. He pitched in nine games from the bullpen for Lake Elsinore, giving up seven runs in 13 innings. But those statistics are a little deceiving. Six of the seven runs were unearned. Lopez' ERA as a reliever was 0.69, and on July 15 he was promoted to Triple-A Portland. While there he made eight starts and three relief appearances. Lopez began showing signs of the pitching flair that the Orioles would soon notice when he gave up two or fewer runs in five of his last six starts at Portland.

But his real breakthrough would come during the winter when he returned to pitch in his native Mexico for the Culiacan Tomato Growers.

He went 10-2 with a solid 1.49 ERA during the regular Mexican Winter League season and went on to star in the Caribbean World Series with a perfect 5-0 record that included a four-hit shut out over Puerto Rico to clinch the Series for Mexico.

Lopez was pitching for the past, present and future in those World Series games. The past, because he was trying to emulate his idol, Fernando Valenzuela, the former Dodger prodigy who also pitched for the Orioles in 1993. Lopez, who was born in 1975, had been, like most Mexicans, a soccer fan until Valenzuela came onto the scene to take Los Angeles—and Mexico—by storm in the early 1980s. Lopez became a fan, Valenzuela his hero and baseball his game at that point.

He also was pitching for the present, trying to help Mexico capture the Caribbean championship. And he was pitching for the future, hoping that his performance would catch the attention of the Orioles, with whom he had signed a few months earlier, and bolster his chances of making the team out of spring training.

Thrift loves signing unknowns like Lopez who come with rave reviews from Orioles scouts, and near the end of spring training, it appeared close to certain that Lopez would make the 25-man roster when the team headed to Baltimore. Manager Mike Hargrove, though, kept everyone—especially Lopez—in a state of suspense, waiting until the very end of the exhibition season to make it official that Lopez would be a Baltimore Oriole for the start of 2002, not a Rochester Red Wing.

The Mexican right-hander's debut as an Oriole was not particularly auspicious. He came in from the bullpen on Opening Day against the Yankees and gave up a homer, a single, two walks and two runs in an inning of work. Things quickly improved. He pitched in relief four more times over the next half month, yielding only one run and seven hits in 14 innings. With Josh Towers struggling in the rotation, Hargrove gave Lopez his first Orioles start against Boston on April 24. He was decent but not spellbinding against the Red Sox, and pitched pretty much the same way in his next start, also against the Sox, five days later, while picking up wins in both games. It was in his third start, though, on May 4 against Kansas City that Lopez showed that he was for real. He held the Royals scoreless in seven strong innings. He also beat Tampa Bay the following week, and with four wins as a starter and one as a reliever, became only the third pitcher in history (joining Ben McDonald and Rocky Coppinger) to win his first five decisions as an Oriole. Lopez, however, was just getting warmed up. He won all six starts in July, giving up only 12 earned runs in 42 earnings, lowering his ERA for the season to 2.94, ranking him second best in the American League. He was named AL rookie of the month in July and became the first Oriole in 23 years to post a 6-0 record for a month.

As the season wore down, though, so did Lopez' talented arm. He had pitched a full winter of baseball and added 1961/3 innings as an Oriole—easily the most work he'd performed as a professional. The numbers began to take their toll. August and September were his worst two months of the year. Lopez posted a 4.94 ERA in each of the final two months, after four months of never allowing more than an average of 3.93 runs per nine innings. He was 2-3 in August and 1-3 in September, to finish 15-9 with a 3.57 ERA.

Lopez still came in second in AL Rookie-of-the-Year voting to Toronto's Eric Hinske. Had he pitched better during the last two months, it's likely he would have become the Orioles' seventh AL Rookie of The Year and the first since Gregg Olson in 1989.

As it was, Lopez could add these impressive figures to his 2002 resume:

• His 15 wins were tops among AL rookies and almost twice as many as any other pitcher on the Orioles roster (fellow Orioles rookie Travis Driskill was second on the team with eight victories). The last Orioles rookie pitcher to win more games than Lopez' 15 was Mike Boddicker, with 16 in 1983.
• No other rookie in the league could top Lopez' 3.57 ERA, his 136 strikeouts or his 196 2/3 innings.
• Lopez allowed only 7.87 hits per nine innings, the seventh best mark among all AL pitchers.
• He finished the year 14-9, 3.72, in 28 starts, and gave up no more than three runs in 19 of those starts.

Lopez was deemed good enough by others in baseball to be selected as a member of the Major League Baseball All-Star team that played in Japan in eight games this November. The American team won the series, 5-3, and Lopez was the only pitcher on the U.S. team to pick up two wins. He won his lone start, pitching the opener of the series and holding Japan to one hit and no runs in five innings. He earned a second win in relief , although he was far less impressive, giving up four runs in 2 2/3 innings.

He was easily elected Orioles MVP for the season and was the only player named on every ballot cast.

Not bad for a fellow who expected to be pitching in Rochester this year.