Bevacqua Is Given Little Chance to Stick With Padre<i> s </i> : Time Is Running Out on Baseball Career of a One-of-a-Kind Journeyman

The San Diego Padre team bus is leaving in an hour, and Kurt Bevacqua has things to do. First, he calls the wife. She’s in a beauty pageant this weekend, and he wishes her the best. Then he packs his glove, his uniform, his bubble gum, and lastly, packs his briefcase. He’s off.

It’s two hours to Tucson, so he can work on the way. These days, he publishes a baseball newspaper, and he needs more advertising to keep it afloat. In Yuma, recently, he even was found delivering his own papers.

“What the hell is a publisher for?” he said.

Lately, he has been spending more time on business. His briefcase overflows with memos. He’s busy making advertisement proposals to breweries.

“I have a lot of spare time to work anyway,” he said. “I could do those proposals on the bench if I wanted.”

That’s because he has been spending more time on that bench, too. The Padres invited him to spring training as a non-roster player, but as far as they’re concerned, he’s a nonentity. He became a free agent this winter, couldn’t find a team to take him and when he wanted to come back to the Padres, the new collective bargaining agreement stated that he couldn’t sign with his former team until May 1.

The Padres let him come to Yuma anyway, but the writing’s on the clubhouse wall. Last season, during an organizational meeting, Padre staffers were discussing players, and most of them were criticizing Bevacqua. Dick Williams, then manager, said: “Well, he’s in the lineup tonight.”

Someone pretty high up in the front office said: “Oh good. Remind me to take my aspirin.”

So, unless there’s a miracle, unless the Padres or some other team gets desperate, Kurt Bevacqua is done. He’s gone.

“At least I’ll have a paper route,” he said.

He was joking, of course. Kurt Bevacqua, who says, “I think everyone thinks more highly of themselves than they should, but some just show it more,” thinks very highly of himself. He says he is not pondering retirement. He is not pondering, period.

“I can say, truthfully, that I don’t think I’ve ever been--how can I word this--smart enough to realize my career could end at any minute,” he said. “There were probably other times when I was two weeks away from ending my career, but I didn’t think about it.”

Think about this: He probably has three weeks left.

After 14 seasons, he will finish a career .236 hitter.

“I’ve got a lot of things I can do,” he said. “Uh, you want to know what they are?”

Seriously, he has options. A few years back, he says Padre President Ballard Smith asked him if he’d like to manage in their system.

“Maybe I turned them off a little when I said I’d be interested, but not in the minors,” Bevacqua said.

He considers Smith’s offer a standing offer, however.

He could always be a broadcaster. Cox Cable, a San Diego firm that televises Padre home games, contacted him over the winter and asked if he’d be interested. Since he still was interested in playing, he said thanks, but no thanks.

He did get another phone call this winter, from a Del Mar man who wanted to start a financial service for athletes. He wanted Bevacqua to represent his players. Sorry, but he had enough problems representing himself.

This winter, he wanted to play. For the first time in his life, he lifted weights. Word got out among Padre players. One said: “How old is he, 38? Good time to start.”

Said Bevacqua: “Hey, it’s never too late to do anything. I could’ve done it a long time ago, but I’m not into body building. I’m into baseball. . . . “But baseball is a funny game. People in baseball tend to help the people who don’t need help. Where do you think Deacon Jones (Padre batting coach) was during the whole Atlanta fight (in 1984)? Standing right next to Tony Gwynn.”

Bevacqua has been helped by a computer this winter. Eager to come to camp fitter than fit, he was put on a diet by consulting this computer. Give the computer information about your build and life style and it tells you what to eat.

Mainly, Bevacqua has cut down on sugar. He says he’s probably in the best shape of his life.

And the gall of the Padres. This winter, Andy Strasberg, the team marketing director, asked Bevacqua if he would like an invitation to this year’s old-timer’s game.

“I wasn’t sure if he was serious or not,” Bevacqua said, “but I told him to stick it where the sun don’t shine.”

Watch for Bevacqua to start at second base.

If all else fails, he knows he’ll have to retire. And what will this bring? Well, he blew his $42,000 World Series check on a bad investment.

“The company went under,” he said.

He used to have interests in a La Costa limousine service.

“Oh, I entered a lawsuit against them last winter,” he said. “They didn’t fulfill part of an obligation they promised.”

If all else fails, there’s his wife, Carrie, a former Playboy Club bunny, who is in the running for Mrs. California honors.

“Maybe, we’ve got the beginning of one career (his wife’s) and the end of another (his),” he said.

It looks that way.

“Hey, if there’s anyone who can conform to something--retirement, for instance--it’ll be me,” Bevacqua said. “I’ll probably make more money out of this game.”

His salary last season was $140,000, far below the major league average ($371,00).

“I think I was a prospect in this game once,” he said. “Yeah, once. It was in the spring of 1971. The Reds tried to make me a third baseman and got me on a weight-gain program and switched me from second to third. And I had a good spring, but didn’t make the club. Sparky (Anderson, the manager) said he had to go with the guys he’d won with. I thought he was full of it, and, being my cocky self, I asked to be traded. I was. To Cleveland. They put me in Triple-A, called me up, and I’ve been a suspect from then on.”

He has been traded six times, sold twice and released twice.

Said Tim Flannery of the Padres: “I’ll miss him. To me, he’s like watching a movie. Very entertaining.”

His glory was that 1984 World Series against Detroit. Williams, although Bevacqua had hit only .200 during the season, made him the designated hitter for the series. There were gasps. So he batted .412 and hit the game-winning homer of the only Padre win.

“The World Series of 1984 was the ultimate,” he said. “ . . . It was the most fun I’ve ever had. I look back and it seems like it lasted three minutes. It’s a shame. I wish I’d had a guy with a camera following me around. I don’t even have that game (that he won) on tape.”

What will he miss the most about baseball?

“The main thing I’ll miss will be going up to the plate with the game on the line or hearing somebody in Dodger Stadium tell me I (stink) or someone in San Diego telling me I’m great,” he said. “And I’ll miss the letters you get from kids. Every time I get a letter from a kid who wants to grow up just like me, I write back as soon as possible . . . and tell him to do no such thing.”

For what will he most be remembered? The time he won the major league’s bubble-gum blowing contest with an 18 1/2-inch bubble?

“Bleep the bubble-gum contest,” he said. “When people say that, I get peeved.”

What’s the craziest antic he’s pulled?

“Probably hitting .412 in the World Series and lasting as long as I have,” he said. “I could’ve made more money on myself than people could’ve made on the Patriots last year. They beat the spread 14 times last year--now, I’ll get a call from Peter Ueberroth. Well, I heard about this in a paper, not in Las Vegas. If you put 10 bucks on the Patriots’ first game and had let it ride, you would’ve won 180 grand. If you bet 10 bucks on my career back in ‘67, you’d have more money than Fernando (Isn’t it Ferdinand?) Marcos by now.

“Let’s face it. Who would’ve thought? I was a secondary-phase, 460th-round draft choice. After the draft, it took me eight minutes to find my name on the list. My signing bonus set the Reds back years. It was exactly $500. Who would’ve thought I’d play in the big leagues 13, 14 years?

“No one. Except me. I’m the kind of guy who pulls for Mississippi Valley State. . . . They had no clue against Duke. They just threw the ball up there and ended up scaring the hell out of Duke.”

Bevacqua has scared the hell out of everyone. Once, he caught baseballs thrown off the top of the Imperial Bank Building in San Diego, 14 stories up. More than once (more like a million times), he has hung upside down from a bathroom stall to get his blood flowing better.

He is not ready to get normal, to get a real job. He has challenged the Major League Players Assn., asking it to waive the rule that keeps him from signing with the Padres until May 1.

He hasn’t heard from the players association.

But even if the association wanted to make a concession, the Player Relations Committee would have to agree to it, too. That’s not likely. Still, Bevacqua expects to see Donald Fehr, the director of the players association, in a player meeting later this month.

As Bevacqua keeps saying, he just wants to play ball.

“How many guys have played baseball 20 years? Hal McRae is playing ballgames with his son in Kansas City now. That’s a hell of a career he’s had. And that’s my goal. I want to be in the same lineup as Tony.”

Tony, Bevacqua’s only son, is 7.

“I’m a never-say-die guy,” the elder Bevacqua said. “If I were in the electric chair, I’d think it would short circuit. If I were in the gas chamber, I’d hold my breath. Hell yeah. Wouldn’t you?

“I don’t think it’s over. I can play another two, three years. So how stupid am I? I’ve got a good body. I’ve never been injured, and I know what my job is, and I think that’s important. I’m struggling to make this club, and I still look upon myself as one of the top pinch-hitters in baseball. So what’s wrong with my head?”

A question people have been asking for years.

But the years are up.

Why does he put himself through this needless spring training and set himself up for the inevitable fall? It’s the money, only the money.

“I’d love to be able to say: ‘Bleep you!’ ” he said. “If I were in a financial situation where I could do that, I’d be the perfect type of guy to do that. There was this guy here who the Padres traded. A pitcher named Mark Lee. They traded him to Pittsburgh, and he was sent to the minors. He was pitching the last inning of the season. He got two outs, and he quit. He just walked off the mound.

“He’s my idol.”

Speaking of idols . . .

“If there’s one thing in my baseball career that I reflect on, it’s going back to when I was a kid. Every year, we’d play stick ball--myself and Tommy Snyder. We’d use a whiffle ball and a broom handle as a bat. And I know there were kids doing that all over the world, going through the World Series lineup and saying, ‘I’m Mickey Mantle or Gil Hodges or Pee Wee Reese.’

“Well, after the 1984 World Series, I just know there was a kid playing stickball in this world who was saying ‘I’m Kurt Bevacqua.’

“But come to think of it, there probably wasn’t.”