Beltin'!

The beer in his hand and the bereaved expression on his face give Todd Helton the appearance of a man at a wake, which, in a way, he is. Helton, the Colorado Rockies first baseman and the hottest batter in the major leagues during April and May, is sitting in front of his locker in the Coors Field clubhouse, his feet propped up on a black suitcase full of dirty laundry from a recent road trip. To hear Helton tell it, the suitcase might as well be a casket containing his timing and mechanics. Poor Todd has just gone hitless for the third straight game against the Chicago Cubs, during which his batting average has sunk from a league-leading .418 to a banjo-hitting .388. "It's like they're throwing 120 miles per hour every time I go to the plate," he laments. "I'm just not seeing the ball."

So clueless and adrift was Helton that he had only nine hits (including a pair of home runs) in his next 12 at bats in a three-game series last weekend against the Pittsburgh Pirates, nudging his average to .415 and reclaiming the major league batting lead. Last Saturday, Helton's solo homer in the ninth, a 413-foot shot to right off Pirates lefty reliever Jason Christiansen, gave the Rockies a 7-6 win. "You've got to make quality pitches, or he'll beat you," says Cubs catcher Joe Girardi, "and he may beat you anyway. Look at his numbers"—which also included 15 homers, 47 RBIs and a .793 slugging percentage—"those are Little League numbers."

Rockies manager Buddy Bell was amused by a report of Helton's breast-beating. "All the great players are tough on themselves," he says. "That's just going to make him better." In only his third full big league season, Helton, a 26-year-old Tennessean, stands on the cusp of becoming one of the game's best players.

He's already one of its best stories. How many guys in the Show have played quarterback in the Southeastern Conference? Before signing with the Rockies, who drafted him eighth overall in 1995 and gave him an $892,000 signing bonus, Helton spent three years on Rocky Top, playing two sports at Tennessee. In football, as a junior he started three games in '94, throwing for 110 yards and a touchdown in the Vols' 41-23 victory over Georgia in Athens. Then he suffered a partially torn right medial collateral ligament against Mississippi State. When Helton went down, onto the field to replace him jogged a gangly freshman with a big upside—a lad by the name of Manning. For all practical purposes, the injury and Manning's arrival gave Helton the final push toward a career in baseball. "I got along with Peyton great," says Helton, a lefty who smiles as easily as he hits to the opposite field. "We still talk once in a while." You could say things have worked out for both of them.

You see the quarterback in Helton as he charges a bunt and throws to second. "He makes that throw like he's making a jump pass over the middle," says Cubs manager Don Baylor, who skippered the Rockies from 1993 through '98. You see it also in Helton's obsession with videotape. Ever since his first full major league season, in '98, when he hit .315 with 25 homers and 97 RBIs, he has reviewed his every at bat, scribbling observations in a notebook. "I started doing it to learn more about the pitchers," he says. "But I ended up learning twice as much about myself. I'd say, 'Jeez, I've made 15 outs in the last four days rolling over the ball'—patterns I wouldn't have picked up on if I hadn't written them down."

First-year general manager Dan O'Dowd arrived in Denver last September with a blueprint and a flamethrower: Only nine players remain from last year's Opening Day roster. Having inherited a last-place collection of cliquish, apathetic underachievers, O'Dowd has transformed the Rockies, who at week's end were 25-22 and in third place in the National League West, into what he calls a group of "grinders with talent." The player who best embodies this plugger's ethos is Helton, a pickup-driving workaholic who married his college sweetheart, the former Kristi Bollman, in the off-season. They honeymooned at the Rockies' baseball fantasy camp. "She's, uh, very understanding," says Helton, who remains unaffected by his wealth. (He's earning $1.3 million this season, the second year of a four-year, $12 million pact.) He owns neither the pickup—it's a trade-out from a local dealership—nor the four-bedroom suburban house that he rents from St. Louis Cardinals closer and former Rockie Dave Veres.

Why not build your dream house, Helton was asked before a recent game. "He doesn't have a dream house," said Rodney Helton, a former Alabama linebacker who feels free to answer for his little brother. "He's kind of focused on one thing."

It's this laserlike focus that has enabled Todd to methodically erase one question mark after another during his brief pro career. A player once thought to lack power, he hit 60 homers over his first two full big league seasons. Coddled as a rookie by Baylor, who kept him out of the lineup against tough lefties, Helton through Sunday was batting .400 against southpaws this year. Dogged by poor starts in 1998 and '99, Helton spent last winter doing power cleans, squats, plyometrics "and a bunch of other stuff I'm terrible at" with a Knoxville trainer named Charles Petrone. Net result: By mid-May, Helton was approaching the neighborhood of .400. "If he keeps improving at this rate," says Rockies righty reliever Jerry Dipoto, "we're going to have another Roy Hobbs on our hands."

Truth is, Helton resembles Robert Redford less than he does character actor Bill Paxton, who played the sadistic older brother Chet in Weird Science (and who uttered in that role the timeless line, "You're stewed, buttwad!"). While it may look natural, Helton's sweet swing is the product of years of practice. Most nights during grade school, junior high and high school, after finishing his homework, he would hit balls into a net in the family garage under the watchful eye of his father, Jerry, who had jerry-rigged a tee from the hose of an old washing machine.

As a senior at Knoxville's Central High, Helton was selected in the second round of the 1992 draft by the San Diego Padres, but he stayed home to play football and baseball for the Volunteers. While a football scholarship was his meal ticket, his passion was always for baseball. Many was the autumn afternoon that he would excuse himself from films or meetings, sneak down to the batting cage and take his cuts. Tennessee baseball coach Rod Delmonico recalls the day during walk-on try-outs that Helton, a freshman, grabbed a bat and started driving ball after ball out of the park. Says Delmonico, "Our equipment manager, who was feeding the pitching machine, came to me all excited, and said, 'Did you see that guy hit? He was pretty good!"