Midwest League Profile

Joey Meyer

Remember Joey Meyer? Really heavy fellow, DH'd and played first base for Milwaukee for a couple years, in the late 1980s? Joe won the Midwest League Triple Crown in 1984....

Joe Meyer signed with the Brewers after the 1983 season, so the 1984 season at Beloit was his first professional outing. He started slowly, but recovered rather nicely:

    avg   g  ab  r   h  2 3 hr rbi bb so sb
   .320 128 475 73 152 22 0 30 102 46 94  0

Baseball America appointed him MWL Player of the Year and called him the league's tied-for-tenth-best prospect. (He was tied with Luis Polonia.) Joe, Mike Birkbeck, and Chris Bosio led their team to the divisional championship (86/54; .619); manager Tom Gamboa was the league's Manager of the Year.

Three repetitions:

The Brewers moved Joey to El Paso for 1985. The Diablos dominated the Texas League but got wiped out in the playoffs; Joey improved his homer and RBI totals but teammates Billy Joe Rabidoux and Juan Nieves walked off with the trophies.

1986 in Vancouver. Joey plated 98 RBIs but wasn't quite so dominating; his team led the PCL in wins but couldn't win the playoff.

The Brewers moved their AAA affiliate to Denver for 1987. Meyer had another excellent year, as did his team; again, they failed in the playoffs.

After all that, his two-year big league career has to be called a disappointment. If you've got Glenn Braggs and Rob Deer and B.J. Surhoff, you probably don't have room for Joey Meyer.

Joe, a Hawaiian, played a few years in Japan after the Brewers released him.

This profile originated as the November 28, 1998, Midwest League Tidbit on the Midwest League Mailing List.