Luis Medina (baseball)

Luis Main (Funky Cold) Medina (born March 26, 1963 in Santa Monica, California) is a former designated hitter/first baseman in Major League Baseball who played for the Cleveland Indians (1988–89, 1991). He batted right-handed and threw left-handed. He is currently working in the Kansas City Royals front office.

Luis Medina
Designated hitter/First baseman
Born: (1963-03-26) March 26, 1963
Santa Monica, California
Batted: Right Threw: Left
MLB debut
September 2, 1988, for the Cleveland Indians
Last MLB appearance
June 13, 1991, for the Cleveland Indians
MLB statistics
Batting average.207
Home runs10
Runs batted in16
Teams

In a three-season career, Medina was a .207 hitter (31-for-150) with 10 home runs and 16 RBI in 51 games played.

Drafted out of Arizona State University, the 6 ft 3 in (1.91 m), 220-pound Medina reached the major leagues for good in 1988 after leading all Triple-A players with 28 home runs for Colorado Springs. He also finished fourth in the Pacific Coast League with 81 RBI and hit .310, despite being disabled three weeks with an elbow injury. Medina joined the Cleveland Indians when rosters expanded in September. He hit his first two major league home runs off Tommy John at Yankee Stadium (September 7), then hit a home run which accounted for the only run in a 1–0 victory over the Boston Red Sox and Jeff Sellers, who flirted with a no-hitter through 7​1⁄3 innings (October 1). Medina hit .255 with six home runs and eight RBI in 51 at-bats following his late season promotion, but new injuries affected his playing time in the next two years. He appeared in only five games for Cleveland in 1991, his last major league season. After that, he played in Japan for the Hiroshima Toyo Carp from 1993 to 1995 and ended his professional career with Class-A Lansing in 2000. Through 2006, Medina is one of 19 Colorado Springs players to hit 20 home runs during a regular season. He is the only player to do it twice.

Medina was one of those rare players who were not primarily pitchers in major league history who threw left-handed but batted right-handed. Medina also holds the trivial distinction of having the fewest career RBI among all players with exactly 10 career home runs.

See also
  • Career statistics and player information from Baseball-Reference, or Fangraphs
  • Japanese Baseball Daily
  • Retrosheet
  • The Colorado Spring Gazette
  • The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia – Gary Gillette, Peter Gammons, Pete Palmer. Publisher: Sterling Publishing, 2005. Format: Paperback, 1824pp. Language: English. ISBN 1-4027-4771-3
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