Do You Recall...Joe Roa?
A Google News Search for the term "Joe Roa" turns up only two stories of note, in which both stories use his name as a snide euphemism for the Phillies' institutional lack of quality starting pitching. It's hard to believe, then, that five years ago the man pictured above was the Next Big Thing in the Phillies rotation.
His Phillies statistics--9o 2/3 IP, 4-6 record, 4.47 ERA--proved that he wasn't even the second coming of Robert Person. No, it was Joe's success in the minor leagues that first put him on the radar of Phillies fans.
It's only appropriate that the best picture I found of Joe has him in his Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Red Barons uniform. I vividly remember reading the Phils' minor league blurbs in the newspaper during the spring and summer of 2002. One name kept popping up in the single-paragraph recaps--Joe Roa.
To read these tasty little nuggets, you'd think that Joe was the Sandy Koufax of the International League. At first, it was a curiosity--Joe Roa racks up a few wins, goes to 4-0, 5-0, 6-0. Then it started to get serious. When Joe finally got to 10-0, I wondered to myself, "Who is this guy? He sounds fantastic!" By the time he was called up to the Phillies' major league roster, he was 14-0 with a 1.86 ERA.
You could say that there wasn't anywhere to go but down, but it's not as if he was going to light Philly on fire anyway. 2002 was that great season of metaphor for that ever-present Phillies Apathy, where they finished the season at 80-81 because they decided that making up a late-season rainout just wouldn't matter at all. Nope, I believe Joe Roa's destiny was to be the hurler's equivalent to Crash Davis.
The only other thing I remember about Joe also has a cinematic connection: the guy was a dead-ringer for Glenn Close's Alex Forrest character in Fatal Attraction.
First off, I always thought he kind of looked like a pre-op tranny; that is, he looked very feminine yet very masculine at the same time, mostly in the face. The picture doesn't really do it justice, but he had the longest eyelashes I'd ever seen on a ballplayer. His cheeks were in perpetual blush and it seemed like most of the time he had Carrot Top eyebrows.
The second part was this inexplicable vindictive streak that he had. Every time he pitched against an organization that had either traded or released him, he would give interviews saying that he relished the chance to make teams "pay" for not recognizing his prodigious talent. This initially made me uneasy, especially when the Phillies granted Joe his release during the 2003 season and faced him a few months later at San Diego. Before the game, Joe gave his usual spiel about payback.
The result? Joe surrendered 5 runs on 6 hits and 3 walks in 3 1/3 innings in his only start as a Padre.
For his (quite literally) insatiable lust for vengeance, I fondly recall Joe "Fatal Attraction" Roa.
Joe Roa Statistics [Baseball Reference]
Box Score of the "Payback" Game [Baseball Almanac]
Fatal Attraction [IMDb]
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