Prince regains throne with Rangers
Veteran slugger leading candidate for AL comeback player of the year award
HOUSTON— A veteran American League slugger was gone from the scene last season. His return, as a force at designated hitter in the middle of his lineup, has lifted his team into playoff position. He is enjoying the game again and has even been a clubhouse leader.
And he is the best choice for the American League comeback player of the year Award.
He is Prince Fielder of the Texas Rangers.
As important as Alex Rodriguez has been to the New York Yankees, Fielder has been just as vital to the Rangers, who entered the final week of the regular season with a 11⁄ 2- half-game lead in the AL West after Monday’s game. Fielder is hitting .307 with 23 homers and 95 runs batted in.
This is the player the Rangers believed they were getting before the 2014 season, when they traded sec- ond baseman Ian Kinsler to the Detroit Tigers and assumed the final seven years of Fielder’s contract (with financial help from the Tigers). This is the player Fielder feared he might never be again, after surgery in May 2014 to fuse two discs in his neck.
“There are doubts,” Fielder said after driving in two in Friday’s victory. “You have neck surgery, you don’t know where you’re at. You worry.”
His prognosis was encouraging, Fielder said, and there was a powerful NFL precedent in Peyton Manning, who came back strong from a similar procedure in 2011. But Fielder still had to do the work, endure a summer without baseball and the drudgery of rehabilitation.
Rodriguez used his time off, he has said, to rest a body ravaged by age and injuries — and altered, at times, by repeated use of performance-enhancing drugs. He returned in a better frame of mind. Fielder did, too, with much less attention.
Before spring training, Fielder told the Dallas Morning News he had become bitter with the game, a feeling that had festered since 2009, when he was criticized by fellow players after a choreographed home run celebration as a Milwaukee Brewer.
Fielder ended a game against the Giants with a home run. His teammates waited for him at the plate, and when Fielder arrived, he raised his arms in triumph as the players fell together like bowling pins around him. It was clever and fun, but the Giants took offense. They hit him with a pitch the next spring.
Fielder moved on to the Tigers as a free agent before the 2012 season, helping Detroit win a pennant but failing to drive in a run in the next year’s AL Championship Series. He had already felt some tightness in his neck and shoulder by then and was shut down after 42 games, and only three homers, with Texas last season.
“Even from spring training last year, he came in here and it was disappointing. He got injured and he was kind of quiet,” Rangers closer Shawn Tolleson said. “This year, from spring training, you could just tell he had a different presence in the clubhouse.”
Fielder bonded instantly with Texas’ new manager, Jeff Banister, who coached for the Pittsburgh Pirates when Fielder played in the National League Central. He told Banister he had always noticed his intensity in the dugout, and had tried to match it.
Fielder hit more than 30 homers in each of his last five seasons with Milwaukee, through 2011, and has not done so since. But Banister said he had become a more sophisticated hitter. The .304 average would be the second highest of Fielder’s career.