Big Bob Hamelin's very best week

In this ongoing series -- inspired by Stereogum’s “The No. 1s” -- we’ll look back on some of the more interesting, notable, and unexpected players of the week in MLB history, an award that has been given out since 1974. While many players of the week have been written about extensively and are entrenched in baseball lore, that is not always the case.

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The Week: April 17, 1994

AL: Bob Hamelin, 1B/DH, KCR

NL: Jeff Kent, 2B, NYM

Every single year, when voters sit down to fill out their ballots for the Rookie of the Year award, the name Bob Hamelin comes up. Bob Hamelin is the mistake you want to avoid. That year, Hamelin hit 24 homers and drove in 65 runs for a Kansas City Royals team that would finish … well, I guess no team that year really “finished.” But his career after that fell off a cliff. He hit .168 in 1995 and was out of baseball three years later. That makes his Rookie of the Year award look bad. But what makes it look worse is who finished second: Manny Ramirez, who had 17 homers for Cleveland and was about to become a charismatic, quixotic superstar. In 2000, Manny would slug .697 and sign a massive contract with the Boston Red Sox. In 2000, Hamelin was cut by the Tigers after hitting .221 in Triple A at the age of 31.

Again: Hamelin is the mistake you want to avoid.

• Hamelin speaks about his all-time "worst baseball card."

But that’s not fair to Hamelin, to compare him to the fellow rookie who would end up putting up Hall of Fame numbers. (For that matter, Jim Edmonds was a rookie that year too: He finished ninth in Rookie of the Year voting.) And it ignores what it actually felt like to watch Hamelin have that season in 1994. Manny was obviously a preternatural talent: You knew the minute you saw his swing that this guy was going to run this league at some point. Hamelin wasn’t like that at all. Hamelin had to sweat. He was a big guy who played at about 250 pounds and looked it; as detailed in a terrific Athletic story by Austin Meek, he wasn’t exactly obsessed with physical fitness at the time. (“It was more the ‘play hard and have a few beers after the game’ type of thing,” he told Meek. “I remember Kansas City being a pretty good place to eat.”) This made Hamelin instantly likeable and relatable to the average fan. We might not be able to throw a 100 mile-per-hour fastball or steal 50 bases like Hamelin’s 1994 Royals teammate Vince Coleman. But sure can see ourselves downing a couple of cheeseburgers and swinging from the heels for a home run. That’s what Hamelin did. Who wouldn’t want to be that guy?

Hamelin was a more heralded prospect than you might think. He was included as a “key addition” in a New York Times preview of the season, and he’d bashed 29 homers in Triple-A the season before. His season was nearly derailed before it started. According to Meek’s story, Hamelin took part in an arm-wrestling contest in Las Vegas right before Spring Training began, heard a “pop” and discovered he’d torn his flexor tendon. The team wanted to put him in the disabled list, but he decided to push through it. It didn’t look like it would work out for the first four games of the season: Hamelin went 3-for-14 with no homers and one walk (and four strikeouts). On April 13, he hit his first home run of the season, but hardly anyone noticed: The homer came in a game that the Royals lost 22-11. (Fun players who appeared in that game: Wally Joyner, Dave Henderson—for the Royals, not the Red Sox—Gary Gaetti, Jose Lind, Mo Vaughn, Billy Hatcher, Otis Nixon and Andre Dawson.)

The big breakthrough came the next night. Aaron Sele had been terrific for the Red Sox, throwing 7 1/3 shutout innings before handing the ball over to the bullpen. (The starting pitcher for the Royals nearly matched up pitch for pitch, giving up just one run. That pitcher was … Tom Gordon, who would be saving 46 games for the Red Sox four years later.) Closer Jeff Russell came in to face Henderson, who reached on an error by third baseman Scott Cooper. Hamelin strode to the plate and got a 1-2 changeup that he deposited over the right field wall, earning the walk-off victory. People notice when you walk-off against the Red Sox, even in 1994.

That win would kick off a five-game winning streak, spurred mostly by Hamelin, who hit moon shots in Cleveland in two consecutive wins. The Royals had started 1-4 but were now over .500 thanks to their chubby rookie with the torn flexor muscle and a whole bunch of beer in his stomach. He’d win the Player of the Week award that next Monday, the only one he’d ever win. There would be more hardware coming after that. He deserved both of them. (It’s worth remembering that he also hit .282 that year to go with all those homers: His BA/OBP/SLG numbers were all higher than Manny’s.) Ramirez and Jim Edmonds had better careers. But Hamelin was right choice for Rookie of the Year that season. And it all began that week in April.

For what it’s worth, the NL winner that week was Jeff Kent, who had begun to establish himself with the Mets and had seven homers in six games that week. That week would end up totaling half his homers for the entire season, and the Mets would trade him two years later to Cleveland, along with Jose Vizcaino for Carlos Baerga. Kent would win one more Player of the Week award, eight years later, with the Giants.

Of course, we all remember how that 1994 season ended: It didn’t.

Around the world

Former President Richard Nixon suffered a stroke on April 18, 1994, and died four days later. A week later, South African held its first post-apartheid election. Also, rock star Kurt Cobain, who had shot himself a week earlier, had his ashes dedicated after his cremation.

The No. 1 song

“Bump N’ Grind,” R. Kelly.

It might be awkward now to have an R. Kelly song as the No. 1 Billboard hit from this week in April 1994, but that would be far from the last time the now-disgraced pop star would top the charts. Amusingly, the No. 4 song that week was the absurd “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm,” by the Crash Test Dummies.

When people try to tell you the ‘90s was the best time for music, remind them of that. It’s not that it was any better: It was just such a weird time that songs could ironically hit the top five. Nobody liked that song. But it was funny to us to have it be popular nonetheless. Trust me, you had to be there.

At The Movies

It was a weak weekend at the box office for new movies: The middling "Cops and Robbersons" (with Chevy Chase and Jack Palance, that immortal duo) and "Surviving the Game" (in which Rutger Hauer and Gary Busey hunt down Ice-T) barely cracked the top 10. The biggest hit was a movie still holding over from the previous month: "Four Weddings and a Funeral," which was in the process of making Hugh Grant briefly the biggest movie star in the world. He was a year away from his infamous appearance on Jay Leno’s show after his arrest, so this was the peak, right before the fall.