Willie Wilson Runs Just as Well Without Carrying a Football

You can see right away what’s wrong with Willie Wilson as a baseball player.

It’s a terrible waste, all that physical perfection. He’s miscast in his profession.

Four hundred football coaches look at him and want to cry. If ever there was a perfect tight end, Willie James Wilson was it, and what he’s doing in a baseball uniform and a World Series instead of a helmet and a Super Bowl is something for the gods of sport to answer for. It’s like Dolly Parton in a nunnery.

Look at him as he stands there, all 6-4, 200-odd pounds of him, big hands, quick feet. He should be in a backfield, not an outfield. Notre Dame drooled for him, Penn State would have gone to court for him. Why he has a mitt in his hands instead of a football is considered a crime against nature by any football coach in the convention.

When he first came into baseball, every catcher in the league was on the side of the coaches. They wished he’d opted for football, too.

“He’s a football player, all he can do is run!” they snarled as they watched him steal everything but their shoes.

What he did to the home run should be prosecutable. Before Willie Wilson, a home run was a gopher ball, a pitch you hit in a high, soaring trajectory over a distant fence. Willie Wilson’s home runs were hit off good pitches, and they found their way to the outfield on the bounce. Sometimes, they were within a hair of being double-play balls, but when Willie got through flying around the bases, they were inside-the-park circuit clouts where he would come into home standing up before the outfielders could even get a good grip on the rolling ball.

Thirteen of the 21 home runs Willie Wilson hit in his career never left the playing ground. He absolutely perfected the ground-ball home run.

He led every league he was ever in in stolen bases. If he was perfect for football, he was pluperfect for the grand old game of baseball. He was a switch-hitter. One year, he got 100 hits right-handed and 130 hits left-handed. Either total was a good season for an ordinary ballplayer, and no one ever got that many switch-hitting before.

The late Fresco Thompson of the Dodgers used to have a stock question for prospects who came to his office torn between baseball and football as a life’s work. “What do you want?” Fresco used to ask sweetly, “a career? Or a limp?”

Willie James Wilson didn’t want to be able to tell when it was going to rain by the swelling in his knees. So, he made the Kansas City Royals instead of the Green Bay Packers the cream of their division.

But, in baseball, the limp is sometimes where it doesn’t show--and can’t be fixed with a crutch.

This happened to Willie James Wilson in, of all times, 1980. He had had one of those years even a bubble-gum card can’t hold. He hit .326, got 230 hits, stole 79 bases and went to bat 705 times, more than anyone in the history of baseball. It was ticker-tape stuff. The team followed him to the pennant.

Then came the World Series. And for once, Willie Wilson wondered if he had wandered into the wrong sport.

He struck out 12 times in that Series. He batted .154. He made the last out with the bat on his shoulder.

He brooded. He had had a Ty Cobb year spoiled by a pratfall on national television. “I was too young to handle it. I went into hiding. It haunted me for years,” he admitted the other night as he sat in another World Series press room.

Willie Wilson had a limp in his psyche. The cure he sought was not prescribed by any reputable orthopedist.

Willie Wilson found his relief in an infamous white powder. Willie was the most famous and successful of the Kansas City Royals’ baseball players who went to prison in 1984 for cocaine-buying, and Willie, the other night, would not rule out the possibility his dabbling in the drug stemmed from his attempts to deal with the trauma of losing the 1980 World Series.

“Then, in 1982, when I won the batting title as I sat on the bench while Robin Yount (who lost the title to Wilson by .009 of a percentage point) couldn’t get any hits, it was like I had been the one who got him out.”

The federal stretch in Fort Worth, Willie Wilson thinks, made him able to deal with the pressures of baseball, the pressures of life.

“Everything used to seem negative, I seemed to see everything as my fault until I suddenly saw I wasn’t a victim. I was the one doing it. I was able to put things in perspective, then, to sort out the important, in a sense to laugh at what used to make me want to hide. Sometimes it takes a long while to grow up.

“You have to forgive yourself, and when you do, you find people can forgive you, too. It’s harder to forgive than to criticize, but it takes a better person, too.”

Wilson came to terms with his addiction conviction in such an adult way that he is almost the only major athlete willing to make non-commercial spots on television today, imploring youth not to make the same mistakes he made.

The 1985 World Series is not going to drive Willie Wilson to consider any monastery in Tibet. The Willie Wilson on view here bears no resemblance to the confused ex-football player who was plunged into (in his own mind) disgrace in Philadelphia in 1980.

When Willie Wilson came to bat with two men on and two out in the second inning of Game 5 of the World Series here Thursday night, he already had seven hits in the tournament and was no longer the tight end or wide flanker slumming in this summer sport. He was a poised, canny veteran, sure of himself and serene with himself, and a very tough out from either side of the plate for any Cardinal pitcher.

He picked out a Bob Forsch slider and deposited it on a line against the right-center-field fence. He went into third base standing up with Triple No. 22 this season (his 21 in the regular season leads the league).

That was the ball game. It put the Royals back in the tournament. Those runs were enough to decide the issue, but in the eighth inning, he showed wide-receiver speed under a bomb hit to center field by St. Louis’ Ozzie Smith. He caught the ball over his shoulder one-handed, 414 feet from home plate.

A hundred and fifty pro football scouts looking on probably went out and kicked the door or yelled at the dog. Kansas City is alive and well in this World Series because an All-State football player from New Jersey opted for a sport where, when you catch a ball, there aren’t three or more 250-pound weightlifters lying on your knees or sitting in the middle of your back. The Kansas City Royals have their own Galloping Ghost. Willie Wilson was made for baseball, too.