Darrin Beene is entering his seventh year at The News Tribune, having covered the Tacoma Rainiers in 2005 and Major League Baseball for two years before that. Beene, a former assistant sports editor at The News Tribune, also worked for the Los Angeles Daily News and Los Angeles Times. He lives in the South Sound with his wife and two children.
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Jim Parque always felt like a major leaguer, even when his left arm didn’t.
Injuries derailed his once promising career but now the Puyallup resident and owner of a baseball training facility is going to give it another go. Parque agreed to a one-year, minor-league contract with the Seattle Mariners on Friday.
“My arm came back,” said Parque, who turns 31 on Thursday. “I don’t know why but obviously time had a big part to do with it. Coming off surgery I don’t feel like I had an opportunity to heal properly and I rushed back too soon.”
Parque went 31-34 with a 5.42 ERA in six seasons with Chicago White Sox (1998-2002) and Tampa Bay Devil Rays (2003). He had surgery to repair a torn labrum on May 15, 2001 but said he was never right after the procedure.
“Even on the good days it was a dull throb,” Parque said.
The end – or so Parque thought – came in 2004 when he retired from Triple-A Tucson after going 3-2 with a 6.30 ERA. He returned to his Puyallup home and focused on running his baseball facility.
He said a hitter in one of his camps made a crack about Parque being a “has-been” last summer during a workout so he stepped on the mound and began firing fastballs in the low 80s. More importantly, his arm didn’t hurt like it once did.
He dedicated himself to a winter of working out and trying to regain his arm strength. In December Parque scheduled a workout in Southern California as several teams – the Anaheim Angels, Texas Rangers, Cincinnati Reds, Colorado Rockies and Oakland A’s – were interested in what he could do.
The scouts were impressed. “The consenus was I would be stupid not to give it another try,” he said.
Parque, who was a “sandwich” pick between the first two rounds in 1997 and a member of Team USA in the 1996 Olympics, knows he’ll never throw 92 mph again like he did in his All-American days at UCLA. But he’s consistently hitting 85-88 mph and he said his curve is back, too.
“That’s pretty good for January,” he said. “I am real confident that I can get back to my pre-surgery form.”
If added to the major-league roster Parque would get $450,000 and the chance to earn more in performance bonuses.
