I’m always conscious that this is a general baseball site so I don’t want to concentrate too heavily on my Oakland A’s, but Jack Cust’s story is too good not to mention. <\/p>\n
Cust has bobbed around various organisations since being picked by Arizona in the first round of the 1997 draft. He’s often been tipped as a favourite among statheads, not least due to his excellent plate discipline, yet when even the stat-minded Oakland cut him loose at the end of the 2005 season it seemed that his chance had passed him by. The Padres picked him up and he spent 2006 in Triple A, only receiving three Major League at-bats that year to go with none in 2005 and just one in 2004. Cust look destined to stay in his Triple A purgatory until a spate of injuries left Billy Beane searching for some cheap temporary replacements at the start of May. Alongside various promotions from their own Farm system, the A’s plucked Ryan Langerhans from Atlanta and then quickly sent him to Washington for Chris Snelling and Cust was given a second chance in Oakland. <\/p>\n
Seven games into his latest shot at the big leagues, it looks as though he is determined to make this opportunity count. In twenty-six at-bats, Cust has smacked six homers, drove in fourteen runs and is hitting .346\/.469\/.1.077. With my A’s cap on and my sentimental side showing through, I would love to see Cust continue along similar lines for the rest of the season. Of course, twenty-six at-bats is a very small sample size and I can hear many people shouting \u00e2\u20ac\u0153regression to the mean\u00e2\u20ac\u009d at me. He’s on a charge and it’s very unlikely that he will keep this up, but there is reason to hope that he can hit well enough to be productive and to finally stick in the Majors.<\/p>\n
Whatever happens, he will always have Sunday 13 May 2007 to remember. Cust continued his fairy tale by hitting a walk-off, three run blast against the Indians. So long as it’s your side on the winning end of the situation, it’s always great seeing a player rounding third while his delirious team mates are crowding around home plate waiting to mob him. In this case it was extra special because you can imagine Cust sitting in the club house after the game and having a quiet moment of reflection. All the years of hard work, sacrifices and disappointments probably came to mind alongside the endless encouragement and hope given to him by family and friends. We always tend to concentrate on the well-paid prima donas and the guys who make the game look so easy, but there are plenty of people who love the sport and who toil tirelessly for years in the minors only to see their Major League dreams slowly fade away. <\/p>\n
Few would bemoan Jack Cust from having his moment in the sun. He’s certainly earned it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m always conscious that this is a general baseball site so I don’t want to concentrate too heavily on my Oakland A’s, but Jack Cust’s story is too good not to mention.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[553],"class_list":["post-165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mlb-2","tag-mlb-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=165"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4308,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165\/revisions\/4308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}