My name is Arne Christensen and I run the website at 1995mariners.com that heads up Bleeding Blue and Teal’s blogroll.  A few days ago I was browsing through a database archive, checking out Mariners articles from that year, and noticed some items about Raul Ibanez as a minor league catcher in 1995, playing for the Riverside Pilots in A-ball. I thought I’d put them together as a tribute to Raul’s early years as we await word on where he will go in 2009.

This past season Raul was a favored target of fans analyzing the Mariners shortcomings on defense, but I have to wonder if the fact that he’s a convert from catcher to outfielder explains much of his lack of speed as a left fielder. Raul’s never been much of a base stealer, even back in the mid-’90s: in 1995 he was only good for four steals at Riverside.

He actually started out in the Miami high schools as an outfielder, then got switched to catcher after Seattle drafted him. Back in ’95, the Tacoma News Tribune explained the reason for the switch: “Left-handed, power-hitting catchers are highly coveted by the front office brass and Ibanez is just that.” And yet he was converted to the outfield again during the winter, presumably because Dan Wilson was blocking his path to the majors.

To say Raul tore up the California League in 1995 is an understatement: he had 108 RBIs in 95 games, with a 1.012 OPS and 52 extra base hits. He was named Mariner minor-league player of the year.  Some more data from that year: he won four player of the week honors and hit .419 (13-for-31), scored nine runs, hit two triples, three home runs and drove in 16 runs in a single week in late August, and had 29 RBIs in two weeks in the second half of August.

So the question about 1995 is: why did he stay in A-ball for an entire season? He dominated the league throughout the year, and in 1996, after switching to the outfield, spent only 19 games in AA before moving up to Tacoma.

The funny thing is that near the end of the ’95 season, Jim Skaalen, Mariner coordinator of minor-league instruction, said: “You’re going to find a place for him. He hits lefties, he hits righties. He has no fear at the plate. Better than anybody else in our organization, he goes up with the expectation to hit the ball hard and far every time. And if he doesn’t, he’s some kind of teed off. . . . If he doesn’t double, homer or absolutely smoke something, he’s not happy. And that’s what it takes to be a successful major-league hitter.”

We know about the controversy over why Piniella didn’t play him more in the late ‘90s, when the Mariners could have had an Ibanez-Griffey-Buhner outfield. Instead, after the 1997 season the M’s nearly sold him off to Ichiro’s team in Japan, the Orix Blue Wave, as this article relates.

While sending you over to Baseball-Reference to check out his minor league stats I’ll add that in August 1993, with the Bellingham Mariners, Raul batted three times in one inning: the M’s had 20 batters, scored a Northwest League record 17 runs, and had 10 singles, a double, a home run, a hit batter and four walks. Raul had two of the singles and one of the outs.