The Decade’s Best: No. 5 Kyle Roller

Kyle Roller
Bourne 2008 & 2009
DH/First Baseman
East Carolina

When I started working on this list, I knew Kyle Roller would make the cut. I figured he’d be somewhere in the 20s, maybe a little higher. He had one solid summer and one great summer, but for whatever reason, I didn’t feel like it was enough to let Roller crack the top-10.

Then I delved deeper into the numbers. They go like this: .342, 10, 38, 24, .644.

Those numbers are all way up on the decade’s leader-boards. For everybody else, numbers like that don’t go together. For Roller, they do.

And you absolutely can’t ignore them.

He may have been playing in a league that was a little light on pitching and he may not have generated the most buzz of all the hitters on this list, but Roller had the best offensive season of the decade in the summer of 2009.

It’s fresh in our memory now — and maybe that’s why I tend to take it for granted — but it will most certainly stand the test of time. It was an amazing summer.

When it started, Roller wasn’t even ticketed for Bourne. He’d played there in 2008 but he was eligible for the draft and figured to go relatively high. When he lasted until the 47th round — there are 50 — he made his way to Bourne.

If he wanted that first part of his summer to go differently, he couldn’t have scripted the rest of it any better.

Roller was consistent from the moment he arrived. Bourne put him in the clean-up spot, and he steadily emerged as the league’s best hitter. As the summer wore on, he got better and better. On the third-to-last day of the season, he drove in six runs. By then, the numbers were staggering — Roller hit .342 with 10 home runs, 38 RBI and 24 extra-base hits. He led the league in homers, RBI, extra-base hits, slugging and runs scored. He was an easy choice for the MVP award.

In the playoffs, he was just as good, if not better. In leading the Braves to their first-ever league championship, Roller went 7-for-14 with eight RBI. He slugged an astounding .786 and earned playoff MVP honors. That made him the only player in the decade to win both MVP Awards.

I guess it was fitting; Roller stands alone in a lot of ways. Roller is one of six players in the decade who hit double-digit homers. Apart from him, only one other player hit over .300, and Roller, of course, was way over .300. His 33 RBI rank sixth, his .644 slugging percentage is good for second and his 24 extra-base hits are the best mark of the decade.

When you realize that Roller also had a pretty good summer in ’08 — .270 with 14 extra-base hits — it becomes clear: we were looking at a Cape League great.

Even if we didn’t fully appreciate him at the time.

After the Cape

Roller didn’t sign with Oakland and has returned to school at East Carolina.

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