Hearty congratulations to Alexis Rios, our 2003 Batter’s Box Blue Jays Minor League Player of the Year.
Alexis Rios had a simply spectacular 2003 season with New Haven in the AA Eastern League. His exploits have been recounted over and over again here at Batter’s Box, and are fully summarized over at Rios’s Blue Jays Farm Report page. Rios was the MVP of the Eastern League, a finalist for Baeball America’s Minor League Player of the Year, and won the Eastern League batting title. Rios led the Ravens to the EL’s Northern Division crown.
Rios’s numbers were terrific all around. His .352 batting average and 181 hits were not only the best in the Eastern League, they were the top figures in all of AA. His .402 on-base percentage and .521 slugging percentage placed him in the top five in his league both categories. In the meantime, he patrolled centerfield with great efficiency.
2003 proved to be a magnificent explosion onto the national stage by Alexis, one that he continued in winning the RBI crown in the Puerto Rican Winter League, where he hit an eye-popping .348/.392/.684 for league champions Caguas, and finished second in both batting average and home runs. The winter league season began after our vote, but it showed that the confidence of the Batter’s Box readers was far from misplaced - he hit more home runs in a 39-game winter season than he did in 127 games at New Haven. There can be no doubt that Rios is still improving, still growing.
Despite his amazing season, picking Rios was not necessarily obvious. Though he received a majority of the votes cast, Rios was part of a very strong field of candidates, including second-place finisher Guillermo Quiroz, Rios’s teammate at New Haven and one of the game’s top catching prospects. The names in this vote bode well for the team’s future.
Voting Breakdown
Alexis Rios, New Haven 56%
Guillermo Quiroz, New Haven 19%
Vito Chiaravalloti, Auburn 6%
David Bush, Dunedin/New Haven 6%
https://www.battersbox.ca/article.php?story=20040218034208999