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Posted: Wednesday May 05, 1999 01:29 PM

Kelly's Heroes  

Tom Kelly, loyal Minnesotan and the low-budget Twins' veteran skipper, tries to make a winner of a club with 10 rookies

By Jeff Pearlman and Stephen Cannella

Allen, who hit just eight homers in Double A last year, already hit three in the majors in '99 John Biever

It wasn't like this four years ago, when leftfielder Marty Cordova would enter the Twins' clubhouse, dart to his locker, get changed and pray not to be noticed. That was back when a rookie in Minnesota was not only rare but also a target. "Kirby Puckett, he set the tone," says Cordova, the 1995 American League Rookie of the Year. "He used to say rookies were made to be seen, not heard." Now, however, says Cordova, Twins rookies have more of an attitude. "I guess they can," he adds. "Look at all of them."

It's hardly a positive sign of the times that the Twins are carrying 10 first-year players. In fact, many would say it's emblematic of everything that's wrong with the major leagues. Low-budget team with $19 million payroll needs to save bucks. Low-budget team eliminates vets. Low-budget team gets slaughtered.

One catch: Minnesota, 10-15 through Sunday, offers so much that's good for the game. Torii Hunter, the rookie centerfielder, still wakes up every morning and smiles. Why? "I smile every time I can put on a Twins uniform," he says. Leftfielder Chad Allen, a .262 Double A hitter last season, calls people "Sir." Cristian Guzman, a 21-year-old shortstop, runs the bases as if being chased by a starving cheetah. And how can you not love righthander Joe Mays, 23, an undistinguished minor league starter who has emerged as manager Tom Kelly's primary long man? "I was lying in bed last night," says Mays, who was 0-0 with a 5.25 ERA through Sunday, "and I thought, Man, you're in Minnesota, playing for the Twins, pitching against the best hitters in the world. It gives me chills!"

Kelly, the 13th-year Minnesota skipper who led the Twins to World Series titles in 1987 and '91, also gets chills -- of a different kind. Before the season Los Angeles general manager Kevin Malone asked Kelly if he would be interested in the Dodgers' managerial vacancy. It could have been the perfect gig -- high salary, unlimited talent, major market. Kelly, however, considers Minneapolis his home. Besides, he says, "there's something to be said for loyalty." Even to a team averaging 15,703 fans per game? "The city has been good to me. I want to be good back." Hence, he's as much babysitter as manager, hoping his town will learn to embrace his tykes. "The hardest parts are the little things I used to take for granted," says Kelly. "When to take the extra base, hitting the cutoff man. We've missed an astounding number of signs so far."

The centerpiece of these new Twins is Hunter, a Gerber-faced 23-year-old who dazzles one minute and drives Kelly bonkers the next. Against the Red Sox on April 26, Hunter hit a fourth-inning grand slam to lead Minnesota to a 6-2, come-from-behind victory. Two days later, also against Boston, he failed to tag up and advance from second to third on a fly out. "Torii's high, high maintenance," says Kelly. He's also high impact: Through Sunday, Hunter was batting .222 with 13 runs batted in but had already run into the outfield wall a handful of times in the Twins' first 25 games. He, along with fellow rooks Allen (.236, three homers, eight RBIs), third baseman-DH Corey Koskie (.302, 12 RBIs) and first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz (.273), provide Minnesota with enthusiasm for now and hope for the future. "It's so much fun now, being around the guys you come up with," says Mays. "Imagine how great it'll be when we win."

Leyland Takes Charge:  
Rocky Start In Colorado

Barely a month into his first season as manager of the Rockies, Jim Leyland has been through the ringer. On April 19 Leyland, who guided the Pirates to three consecutive division titles between 1990 and '92 and the Marlins to the '97 World Series crown, sat slumped in his Coors Field office. His new team had just completed a molar-grinding, three-runs-in-the-ninth win over the Expos -- one night after getting spanked for 20 runs by the Braves. Said Leyland through a haze of Marlboro smoke, "I'm going to look like Don Knotts and Telly Savalas all rolled into one by the time this season is over."

Leyland was more relaxed last weekend in Pittsburgh -- perhaps because, with Colorado in the midst of a 13-game road trip, he could count on two weeks away from the bizarro baseball world of Coors. It may also have been because he was back in the city where he enjoyed his first big league success and where he still makes his home. Most likely, though, Leyland was just happy to be settling into a groove. Sunday's 8-5 loss at Three Rivers Stadium may have been the Rockies' second in three games against the Pirates, but it marked the first time all season that Colorado had played as many as six days straight. The Rockies, who began the year as a dark horse in the National League West, had a 9-10 record in April, during which they played the fewest games in the majors and had unscheduled off days for reasons ranging from rain to snow to the Columbine High shootings. "We need to get out on the field," said Leyland.

Colorado's offense has been as spotty as its schedule. In their five appearances at Coors the hitters scraped out a sea level-like total of just four dingers. They also lost three games in which they allowed four runs or fewer, something they didn't do for the first time last season until May 7.

Leyland, a master communicator and motivator with previous teams, seemingly has yet to get a handle on -- or begin to shape -- Colorado. "It's been a longer process than I thought," he says. "In spring training I was just hanging around, trying to get a feel. Just now I'm starting to say a little more, because I feel like I know the players better."

"I think he's still learning about us," says Rockies outfielder Dante Bichette, who was hitting .274 with just two homers through Sunday. "When he gets to know the team and the personnel a little better, I think he'll start to manage more and more."

Through Sunday, Colorado, sparked by lefthander Brian Bohanon's surprising 4-0 record and rightfielder Larry Walker's three-game, 15-RBI binge, had won three out of five and, with nine homers in that span, was showing signs of awakening from its lumber slumber. Not a moment too soon: Rockies fans had gotten antsy waiting for Leyland, who became the highest-paid manager in the game when he signed a three-year, $6 million contract last October, to work his magic and kick-start a team that fell out of the National League West race by the All-Star break last year. It didn't help that the players who batted third in the order hit .133 with just three RBIs in the seven games that Walker spent on the disabled list to start the season. Still, it had to be a bit shocking for Leyland to hear boos at Coors in April. "Expectations here are high, and they should be," he says. "The fans have been patient, and now they want results. We need to win something for them."

The Book on Glavine:  
Too Sharp to Cut It

In his new how-to book, Baseball for Everybody, Braves pitcher Tom Glavine reminds readers that when faced with failure, "you start making changes and you start succeeding." While writing those words, Glavine, the National League Cy Young Award winner in 1991 and '98, surely never imagined his credibility with his Little League-aged target audience would be tested so soon. He opened this season with an 0-3 record before getting a complete-game 5-4 win over the Pirates on April 28.

With his 5.19 ERA through Sunday approaching the jacket price of his book, Glavine scurried back to the drawing board. The problem, as he sees it, wasn't his control; in fact, with just nine bases on balls in five starts, he had issued nearly one fewer walk per nine innings than he had last season. Rather, explains Glavine, he'd thrown too many hittable strikes -- and they were being hit. Glavine surrendered 41 hits in his first 342/3 innings, including 10 for extra bases. "Every mistake I've made I've gotten hurt by," he said last Saturday.

Glavine thinks that those mistakes -- one of which was transformed into Marlins pitcher Livan Hernandez's first major league home run on April 23 -- resulted from mechanical problems. Rather than landing his front foot roughly even with the outside corner (to a righthanded batter), he was stepping a few inches toward the middle of the plate. The result was that he wasn't throwing across his body as he used to, and his 89-mile-an-hour fastball and darting changeup had lost their movement. "My pitches were staying flat; they weren't sinking or moving the way I wanted them to," said Glavine.

How does someone with two Cy Youngs and four 20-win seasons suddenly lose his motion? Blame the umps -- or at least all the talk in spring training about the umpires' making changes in the strike zone. Glavine, who, when successful, starts hitters with a pitch that's an inch off the plate and moves farther out as an at bat goes on, has long been a poster boy for pitchers who benefit from generously wide zones. The talk of a new, tighter zone spooked him. "I haven't noticed that much of a difference in the way games are called," he says, "but I subconsciously felt that, Hey, I've got to get some pitches over the plate more. That's why I started stepping toward the plate more, and then I just got into some bad habits. Regardless of how they call strikes, I can't afford to pitch down the middle."

Reds righthander Brett Tomko, 0-1 with a 7.76 ERA in five starts, was banished to Triple A Indianapolis last week after a tiff with the Cincinnati coaching staff. Pitching coach Don Gullett had told Tomko to work the Phillies inside on April 28; instead, Tomko pounded away at the outside, as he had done all season. The result: four Philly homers in four innings. The Reds think Tomko (13-12; 4.44 last season) has been taking too much pitching advice from Phillies' ace Curt Schilling, whom Tomko befriended during an All-Star tour of Japan last fall. Said Gullett to a reporter from the Dayton Daily News, "I told Tomko when we sent him down, 'You're not Curt Schilling. We wish you were, but you aren't.'"

Have the Rangers lost their focus? Once just happy with a playoff-worthy record, Texas now seems way too intent on matching the Yankees. Before spring training, Rangers owner Tom Hicks sent a letter to each of his players saying that while winning the American League West would be dandy, the goal was to outgun New York. So what's happened? By blowing a ninth-inning lead on April 27, Texas suffered its 23rd loss in its last 30 games against the Yanks. The Rangers split the next two games, and now have lost their last 12 series with New York, dating to July 1996. That includes 10 in the regular season and two in the playoffs. "We want to get to the point where we can beat them," Texas general manager Doug Melvin says. "We can't just keep saying, 'We played them close.'"...

Before he signed with the Brewers last Thursday, Hideo Nomo had an early-week tryout with the Indians. Says one Cleveland source, "He had nothing." Milwaukee disagreed. After Nomo went seven innings without allowing a run, while striking out seven, in a minor league start on Sunday, the Brewers said he would be called up to start on Friday ...

The 24 players on the Reds' Triple A Indianapolis roster have an average age of 28.76 years. The 25 players on the Reds' roster have an average age of 27.95 years ...

Though righthanded reliever Mel Rojas has devolved from future superstar with Montreal in 1990 to superbust with the Cubs, Mets and Dodgers, Tigers general manager Randy Smith hasn't lost hope in the newly acquired middle reliever -- even after Rojas allowed 11 runs in 1 2/3 innings against the Mariners on April 29. "Mel has some problems," says Smith, who's paying a small share of Rojas's $4.5 million salary this year (L.A. is stuck with the rest), "but there's talent there. Besides, he's not that big of a risk for us. If he does well, we're happy. If not, we tried." ...

Shortstop Pat Meares , who agreed to a contract extension last Friday that will keep him with the Pirates through 2003, knows how to make a good impression in a new town. The deal could have been done sooner, but Meares, who joined Pittsburgh as a free agent in spring training and started the season on the disabled list with a sprained wrist, felt funny about signing while hurt and asked general manager Cam Bonifay to delay negotiations until he got off the DL ...

McGwire-Sosa fever seems to have broken. Through Sunday, the Cardinals and Cubs were seventh and 10th, respectively, in National League road attendance ...

A food company, Grist Mill, has released Albert Belle 's Slugger Cereal. Eat it or else.

Issue date: May 10, 1999

 

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