Ruppert Can Teach Reggie Thing or Two

Ruppert Jones of the Angels stepped into the batters’ box in the third inning of Sunday’s game with the Red Sox, cocked his bat the way he usually does--Orlando Cepeda style--and ripped into one, projecting it on an arc so high, a real angel could have reached down and caught it.

It fell to earth just beyond Anaheim Stadium’s right-field fence for a home run, Jones’ 13th of the season, giving the Angels a 2-1 lead and giving Jones the club lead in four-base hits.

Reggie Jackson did not take this sitting down.

First, he got up off the bench and gave the man a whack on the back, one slugger to another. “Roooopert Jones!” he said.

Then, in the very next inning, Jackson got up off the bench, stepped into the batters’ box, cocked his bat the way he usually does--Reggie Jackson style--and mashed a two-run tater to deepest right-center field.

Jackson lingered along the first-base line to ogle the ball, oblivious to the possibility of it merely hitting the top of the wall. When it left the premises, he rounded the bases, reaching home plate in slightly less time than Lindbergh took to cross the Atlantic.

Reggie’s homer re-tied him for the team lead.

But Ruppert Jones did not take this sitting down.

Next time up, in the sixth, Jones not only hit another one, he hit a farther one. This wallop went to dead center field. The ball chased Boston’s Steve Lyons to the outer limits and cleared the wall in the vicinity of the 404-foot marker. Gary Pettis on a trampoline couldn’t have caught it.

Jones now had 14 home runs, had the club lead again and had the Angels in heaven, because with Sunday’s success they were four games ahead of the closest challenger in the American League West.

Oh, by the way: Jones also had two walks and a frozen-rope single Sunday, and has reached base 10 times in a row. Wouldn’t want to leave out the little things.

“Just hitting a baseball is a big thrill,” Jones said later, “because it’s so difficult to do. I still think it’s one of the hardest things to do in sports. The balls keep coming at you, various speeds, various movements--just to be able to hit one is a good feeling.”

And this man can hit one. One of the best bargains of the baseball season has turned out to be California’s relatively inexpensive signing of Ruppert Sanderson Jones, the guy who voluntarily left the World Series champions, the Detroit Tigers, to sign with the Angels as a free agent.

It takes nerve to leave a championship team, but Jones has no regrets. Already, he has hit two more home runs than he did for the Tigers. Furthermore, his 14 homers and 39 runs batted in have come in 178 at-bats, compared to 13 homers and 42 RBIs in 275 at-bats for the left-handed hitter he had to replace in the Angels’ lineup, Fred Lynn.

“Detroit’s loss,” Reggie Jackson said after Sunday’s game, “is our gain.”

As with that other R.J., power is the name of Ruppert Jones’ game. Of his 49 hits this season, 23 have been for extra bases.

“It’s about time,” said Jones, whose average has risen from .231 to .275 in nine games’ time. “I was so cold for a while, something good had to happen eventually. I was hurting the team.”

Ruppert Jones is a hired bat. This is his sixth big league team. He has been an All-Star twice and an almost-gone more than once. One of the worst teams in baseball, the Pittsburgh Pirates, gave Jones a tryout last spring, watched him in Grapefruit League games hit in the high .300s, then told him sorry, can’t use you.

It turned out the Pirates didn’t need Ruppert Jones the way the Supremes didn’t need Diana Ross.

The Tigers picked him up; he picked them up. Jones supplied some of the power that Darrell Evans and Larry Herndon had been expected to provide. But once the World Series dust had settled, “The Tigers made me an offer that they basically thought was fair. The money wasn’t the issue. Other things were.” Other things like performance bonuses, which the Tigers, by Jones’ reckoning, were not prepared to give.

What the Tigers did give him was a diamond ring, the kind all world champions get. Except, as it turns out, some of the Tigers got top-quality diamond rings and others, including several players, got low-cost rings, depending on the individual’s arbitrarily assessed value to the club.

“Yeah, I heard that,” Jones said. “Somebody told me to go have it appraised.

“But the way I figure it, I got one. I’m not gonna wear it, so what’s the difference? I just put it in a safe.

“I’m not gonna hock it, either,” he said.

At which point Reggie Jackson called out “Roooopert Jones!” from across the room. Just to let him know he was still around.