New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
A New Haven Ravens’ run to remember
Twenty years later, players look back on magical run
New Haven Ravens shirts and hats were not hard to find as the loyal supporters made their way to their seats on a night that would add another chapter to the historic legacy of Yale Field.
Four straight losing seasons including a pair of last-place finishes in the Eastern League’s North Division set the stage for one improbable summer of winning. It was the night of Sept. 15, 2000 that the journey would culminate with the Ravens’ lone Eastern League championship.
True to their nature, it was a rough and tumble battle right to the final pitch when smoothfielding future Major League shortstop Ramon Vazquez backhanded a grounder off the bat of Rusty McNamara and threw to first base for the final out to give the Ravens the 4-2 win and the franchise’s lone Eastern League championship after taking three of four games from the Reading Phillies.
Greg Wooten, the 2000 Eastern League Pitcher of the Year, could only chuckle when asked to reflect back on the Ravens’ memorable season that ended in glorious fashion.
“I think it was just a fun summer, just a great group of guys and coaches,” said Wooten, who was 17-3 in the regular season and 2-0 in the playoffs helping the Ravens win both postseason series after dropping the opening game.
“It makes me feel old to think it was 20 years. I am coaching my son now in club baseball and he is just a freshman now going into high school so I guess it makes sense that it was 20 years, definitely very good memories, when I look back. New Haven was a great experience.”
Some of the 3,083 in attendance at the clinching game probably could have been found about two miles away at Quigley Stadium when the West Haven Yankees won four EL titles from 1972-79 or when the West Haven A’s were champions in 1982.
The Ravens came close to a championship in 1995 before falling in five games to Reading. Five years later they sealed the
deal.
What a ride it was.
The 1999 Ravens, the first as the Class AA affiliate of the Seattle Mariners, had a promising group of young starting pitchers led by Ryan Anderson, the No. 7 overall prospect by Baseball America heading into the 1999 season, and Gil Meche, ranked 78th by Baseball America.
After stumbling to a
65-77 record, the 2000 New Haven squad returned pitchers Brian Fitzgerald, Brian Fuentes, Kevin Gryboski, Joel Pineiro, Aaron Scheffer, Denny Stark, and Brian Sweeney to go with catcher Jim Horner, infielders Brendan Kingman, Juan Thomas and Vazquez, and outfielders Dwight Maness and Jake Weber. Adding 10 players who were members of the 55-85 Lancaster Jayhawks of the Class-A California League didn’t give the casual fan much reason to believe the thrill of victory would find its way back to New Haven.
It didn’t take long for those venturing out to Yale Field to realize that there was a different vibe with this group.
The Ravens won their season opener for the first time in the franchise’s first seven seasons and took the home opener even after manager Dan Rohn and Horner were ejected. They would finish six games ahead of a Norwich Navigators team with 20 future Major League players on their roster to clinch the second playoff spot out of the EL’s North Division.
There was no question who the star of the 2000 Ravens was. Wooten, the soft-spoken 6-foot-7 righthander from Eugene, Oregon, went 17-3 with a 2.31 ERA in 26 starts. He won both of his postseason starts as well.
“I felt like towards the end of the year, we had a very good chance to do something special,” said Wooten, now vice president and wealth management adviser for Merrill Lynch’s Pierce, Fenner & Smith Inc. in Phoenix. “It seemed like we always found a way to win. We had a good pitching staff, some timely hitting and good defense. Of all the teams I’ve been on, most of the players, we got along very well as a team, and I think that proved to be a [key to the] success for our team, made us more efficient as a team.”
Wooten’s success wasn’t that surprising considering he went 10-4 with a terrible Lancaster team but it got to the point when it became newsworthy when the Ravens didn’t win one of Wooten’s starts.
“That gave me confidence because I had my best year ever as far as pitching goes, that hey, ‘I have what it takes to get up there [to the Major Leagues],’ ” Wooten said. “I got on the 40-man roster that year which was a big accomplishment for me.”
Wooten embraced his summer living and playing in the New Haven area.
“My wife and I were living out there, she had never really been out to the East Coast and I hadn’t either, so the days off going into New York were good memories,” Wooten said. “All the traveling in New Haven, seeing the different parts of the East Coast,
New Haven was great and we enjoyed living there. The fans treated us great, we even had some fans come out to Tacoma our next year. We came out of the dugout to talk to them and they said they enjoyed watching us there in 2000 and made the trip to see us.”
Wooten was the headliner, Fuentes and Vazquez were the ones who enjoyed the most success at the Major League level, but the player who best typified the 2000 Ravens might have been Sweeney.
The New York native believed he was in danger of being released by the Seattle organization coming off a tough 1999 season when he had a 5.07 ERA while pitching at three different levels including 23 games in New Haven. If he thought that was difficult to handle, the 2000 season brought a whole different set of challenges.
His mother and aunt died during the course of the 2000 baseball season so he had bigger things to think about than untimely walks, game-deciding extra-base hits, and locating his pitches.
“Earlier in that year my mom passed away and I wasn’t in a good place,” said Sweeney, the bullpen coach for the Cleveland Indians. “The year before, New Haven was very below average for me. They brought me back, I pitched OK. I was on the phantom DL, my mom passed away, they brought me back down to New Haven and I think I saw the writing on the wall, actually. I think I was pretty close to them letting me go and unfortunately my aunt passed away. It was my summer of tragedy and in all honesty, Benny Looper [the Mariners’ former director of player development] and the Seattle group just felt horrible for me and they kept me around.
“I was on the phantom DL without an injury for over a month because there was no space for me to pitch. It wasn’t until the end of July, [Ravens’ pitching coach] Steve Peck saw that I wasn’t in a good place and we are doing a bullpen [session] and he said, ‘Are you going to be ready to pitch if we need you?’ It kind of gave me a spark and it was soon after that when I jumped back on the roster. In a little over a month’s time, I was able to close out that special season in New Haven. In my career, that is a memory that is never going to go away, that year with that team and that moment in time when I was able to help that team seal up a championship.”
Sweeney not only helped New Haven win the title but he was the one on the mound for the final out closing the deal after Fuentes struck out 11 in five innings followed by strong relief appearances by Jason Turman and Brian Fitzgerald. It was the final act for a bullpen which allowed only three earned runs in 17 1⁄3 innings in the eight postseason games.
“That year, there was so much that came to that point, there was so much other stuff that before that final inning,” Sweeney said. “It was just a culmination of a year of personal disappointment and tragedy for me to finally get an opportunity to do something special in the game and having that presented to me by the manager. Rohnie trusting me to get these last outs to win a championship ultimately turned my baseball career around.”
Wooten is in a fantasy football league with Greg Connors, who played a career-high 123 games with the Ravens during the 2000 season, and Stark. Sweeney considers Connors one of his closest friends, still remains in contact with Peck and runs into other members of the 2000 Ravens still involved in professional baseball as either coaches or scouts. It is not any particular game that they reflect upon when they cross paths.
“We cared about one another,” Sweeney said. “The support was pretty amazing all around. If somebody was hurting, we hurt together. We fought, we won and we lost together. That kind of chemistry, it doesn’t happen often and to develop that at any level is really huge and learning experiences that I take into my coaching career as well.”