C’s Alumni Update – Fields Hitting His Stride With Buffalo

Roemon Fields has an eight-game hitting streak with the Buffalo Bisons.

2014 Vancouver Canadians outfielder Roemon Fields has revived his hopes of roaming the fields of the major leagues in the near future. The 26 year-old Seattle native was promoted to Buffalo April 29 from New Hampshire despite a tough start with the bat. He hit just .237/.274/.305 with the Fisher Cats but he was successful in all seven of his stolen base attempts.

Fields played sparingly at first with the Herd and was 0-for-9 before getting his first single May 7.  That marked the start of an eight-game hitting streak and he has been on-base in nine of the 10 games he has played so far. The 5-foot-11 left-handed hitter has managed to post three two-hit games in his last four, including this effort that featured a pair of stolen bases on the road against the Lehigh Valley IronPigs May 11. He had a perfect day at the plate with a 2-for-2 performance, a walk and a sacrifice bunt the next day before going went 2-for-2 again Sunday with two stolen bases. That gives him a slash line of .379/.438/.414 with two doubles, a triple, five runs batted in and four steals in five tries.

Roemon Fields stole 48 bases in 2014 to set the Vancouver Canadians single-season record in the franchise’s short-season history.

Fields is trying to recapture the mojo he had in his first two professional seasons that saw him make the climb from Vancouver in 2014 before climbing up the ladder to Dunedin, New Hampshire and Buffalo in 2015. There was speculation that the Blue Jays were going to call up Fields as their designated speedster (like Terrance Gore of the Kansas City Royals) during the stretch drive towards their first AL East Division title since 1993. Instead, Fields went to the Arizona Fall League to finish out the 2015 season and was rated the Blue Jays’ 13th best prospect by Baseball America.

Fields spent the entire 2016 campaign at Double-A and did not progress with the bat as hoped by scuffling to a .227 batting average and .591 on-base-plus-slugging percentage. Still, he swiped 44 bases – four short of his career high with Vancouver.

Fields signed on with the Blue Jays as a free agent in August of 2013 after not being drafted. He had been working at Lids and as a mail man before being noticed by Jays scout Matt Bishoff at the World Baseball Challenge tournament in Prince George, BC. It took the convincing of one of his baseball coaches and his brother to give baseball one more try after playing for Yakima Community College in Washington and Bethany College in Kansas. His grandmother also played a role in getting Fields back on the diamond. In fact, Roemon’s name is a combination of his grandmother Rose and his mother Monica.

Now Fields is trying to combine getting on base more to go along with his stolen base prowess. Part of the problem has been his inability to make hard contact. Fields had a line drive rate of over 21 percent in Vancouver but has not come close to that since as it has hovered in the 10-17 percent range instead. He has shown the ability to make contact at least by keeping his strikeout rate below 20 percent and putting the ball on the ground 50-60 percent of the time to use his speed to get on base.

With his speed and defence, Fields can at least carve out a role as a fourth or fifth outfielder in the majors but if he can contribute more with the bat, a starting role is not out of the question.