Chris Brown Shows Giant Potential : Third Baseman Is Hitting .326 While Battling Attitude Rap

With five weeks left in his second major league season, Chris Brown of the San Francisco Giants remains in contention for the National League batting title.

His manager, Roger Craig, believes that as Brown goes, so go the Giants. How far will Brown eventually go? Craig thinks that Cooperstown is a distinct possibility.

Brown was the choice at third base on the 1985 Topps’ rookie all-star team. He was National League Manager Whitey Herzog’s reserve selection for the 1986 All-Star team. Quietly but surely, Brown has emerged from the shadow of a former Crenshaw High School teammate named Darryl Strawberry.

Now, in fact, Brown’s future seems shadowed only by his own personality, style and approach.

Malingerer? Lackadaisical? Difficult with the media?

Brown has been described at times as all of those.

In fact, only a few days ago, Craig and General Manager Al Rosen conducted the latest in a series of meetings with Brown concerning hustle, work habits and concentration.

“Chris has so much natural ability that I think we may expect too much of him,” Craig said in reflection the other day. “We forget at times that he’s only in his second season.”

In his first season, angry teammates questioned his willingness to play despite minor injuries and eventually began calling him the Tin Man because of a suspected lack of heart. Even so, Brown appeared in 131 games and hit .271 with 16 home runs and 61 runs batted in.

He batted .340 with runners in scoring position and led the league’s regular third basemen in fielding percentage, making only 10 errors in his 120 games at the position.

A lot of people were impressed. Some weren’t.

“He makes me sick,” teammate Joel Youngblood said of Brown’s tendency to bow out when hurt.

The clubhouse joke was that the pitching staff had more complete games than the third baseman, whose reputation had preceded him. In five minor league seasons, Brown never appeared in more than 103 games. He once scratched from a Dominican Winter League game because he had “slept on his eye wrong.”

This spring, after diving for a ball during infield practice, Brown lay in the dirt, clutching his face. Said a cynical teammate: “A fly must have landed on his neck.”

Brown has since missed 20 of the Giants’ 127 games, primarily because of two legitimate shoulder injuries. He injured the right shoulder careening into a Dodger Stadium dugout in pursuit of a foul popup. Then he hurt the left in a collision with catcher Mike Heath of St. Louis. He has continued to play despite lingering discomfort.

“We razzed and ridiculed him a lot last year about playing in pain, and I think Chris was hurt by it,” pitcher Vida Blue said. “I don’t know if he’s been trying to prove to us that he can play with pain, but he’s definitely been gutting it out, which is the way it has to be. We really need him.”

Brown is batting .326.

Only Tony Gwynn at .343, Tim Raines at .332 and Wally Backman at .331 have higher averages in the National League. Some lists still show Hubie Brooks at .340, but the Montreal shortstop is out for the season with an injury and will not reach the 502 plate appearances necessary to qualify for a batting title.

In the 28 years that the Giants have been in San Francisco, only Willie Mays, who hit .347 in 1958, ended a season with a higher average than Brown’s .326.

The batting title?

“I’ve never said that I couldn’t win one but I’ve never gone out and tried to win one,” Brown said. “I’ve always felt that I could hit .300 but that hitting .280 in the major leagues was an accomplishment in itself.

“It would be nice to win, but it would be nicer to catch Houston and win the division. I’m not thinking about individual goals right now. If we were 20 or 30 games behind, it would be different. Maybe it will be different if I still have a chance with a week or two to go, but right now I’m thinking only about the team.”

The right-handed Brown is 6 feet 2 inches and 210 pounds. He has the characteristic build of a powerhouse third baseman but has compiled the .326 average with a lot of singles to center and to the opposite field in right. His home-run production has dropped from 16 to 7, and he has only 47 RBIs despite a .381 average with runners in scoring position and a .385 on-base percentage, the league’s fifth best. Brown has been advancing runners one base at a time.

“Somewhere along the line this year, I decided to cut down on my swing and hit for a higher average,” he said. “I don’t consider myself a home-run hitter yet and I felt that I could help the team more by striking out less and driving in runs with singles and doubles.”

It always seems to come back to the injuries.

Brown acknowledged that he has had a lot. His view is that they result from aggressiveness. He said that he can’t stop people from talking but that he wished they wouldn’t judge the book by its cover.

“It’s an injustice to talk about a person when you don’t know him,” he said. “I came up last year, and people didn’t know me. I’m quiet, a loner. I kind of move at my own pace. I kind of operate in slow motion. Maybe it looks like I’m lackadaisical, but I’m not. It’s the way I was taught. I care. I’m sensitive. I mean, it hurts when people say I’m dogging it.”

Craig has been trying to tell Brown that he shouldn’t give people any reason to say it.

Last Saturday, for instance, Brown was at first base with two out when a shallow fly ball fell untouched among a group of New York Mets who were unable to gauge the wind at Candlestick Park.

Brown was thrown out in a rundown between third and home. Craig thought Brown should have scored and, in no uncertain terms, told him so in their latest meeting.

“We tend to go the way he goes, and that’s what I keep telling him,” Craig said. “I want him to be a leader. I keep stressing his value to the club. I think he recognizes what he means to the team, but I don’t think he knows how good he can be.”

Craig said that Brown is probably the quickest big man he has ever seen in the field and that he should eventually hit 25 to 30 home runs a year while consistently challenging for a batting title.

You’re talking about a guy who says he is simply protecting his privacy when he frequently tells the Bay Area press corps to “take a (bleeping) hike” and who may not care about individual statistics but has had several shouting matches with reporters over official scoring decisions.

“Some players are like that,” Craig said.

Why Brown should be isn’t clear.

Brooks Hurst, his coach at Crenshaw, couldn’t explain it either but said he knew that Brown would have problems as a pro because of that inexplicable attitude.

“He was a contradiction,” Hurst said. “He was the type competitor who would throw his body at the ball during a game but would not practice because of the slightest injury.

“He was intense and intelligent. The only problem was getting his head on straight. When the chips were down, I didn’t want anyone else up there.”

Brown grew up amid the temptations of drugs and gang life but said he skirted both.

Brown said he met Strawberry, who was a grade behind him, in Little League. They remain friends, although Strawberry was recently quoted in the Oakland Tribune as saying that Brown’s playground reputation was that of a crybaby.

Brown said he had never really envisioned himself playing professionally, that he was too busy playing, period. Why go to Dodger Stadium when he could generally watch two or three games on the tube? Willie Mays, Frank Robinson, Brooks Robinson and Willie Stargell were among his idols.

Brown said that at Crenshaw, he and Strawberry tended to push each other, helping put a school known for basketball on the baseball map. Brown’s teams won league championships his junior and senior years, finishing second in the City Section in his senior year, when he hit .454 with 16 home runs.

Has he been getting the job done?

“Yeah,” Blue said. “If I was the Giants, I’d just leave him alone except to monitor his attitude and let him know the game should be fun. He doesn’t look like he’s having any fun.”

Brown may look that way, Blue suspects, because he’s still wrestling with his potential. Like Jack Clark before him, Blue said, Brown doesn’t realize yet that he can be more than a good player, that he can be “a dominating player making a million a year.”

All of that, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. At 25, Brown sits at his locker, reluctant to share much of what’s inside the book.

“I try to do the best I can,” he said. “If people can’t accept that, if they don’t like the way I go about it, I can’t help that. I can’t stop them from expressing their opinion. I don’t think there’s another third baseman who can do all the things I can do. I believe it, and others have said it. I think I’ve made good progress in two years.”

ACTIVE PLAYERS FROM INNER-CITY HIGH SCHOOLS The Giants’ Chris Brown, who played his high school baseball at Crenshaw, is having a banner season, as are several other major leaguers who are products of inner-city high schools. Here’s a partial list of former inner-city prep players currently in the major leagues, with their 1986 statistics through Wednesday’s games.

Pos Player Team High School HR BI Avg OF Chili Davis Giants Dorsey 9 60 .274 OF George Hendrick Angels Fremont 10 35 .267 OF Chet Lemon Tigers Fremont 6 34 .247 OF Darryl Strawberry Mets Crenshaw 19 73 .266 1B Eddie Murray Orioles Locke 12 60 .305 SS Ozzie Smith Cardinals Locke 0 42 .272 3B Chris Brown Giants Crenshaw 7 48 .326 C Floyd Rayford Orioles Manual Arts 2 8 .142