Playing on a Loser, He’s Won 20 Games : The Brewers Got Bargain in Higuera

Those who have seen his act in the stands at Milwaukee’s County Stadium say that Teodoro Valenzuela Higuera Jr., age 6, has an uncanny ability to imitate batting stances and pitching deliveries.

It must be a trait he picked up from his father, Ted Higuera Sr., the Milwaukee Brewer pitcher who bears an uncanny resemblance to the Dodgers’ Fernando Valenzuela.

Dodger fans taking a quick look at the cover of the Brewers’ 1987 media guide will think their worst nightmare has been realized. It looks as if Valenzuela has been decked out in a Brewer uniform.

Higuera Sr. doesn’t cast his eyes toward the heavens during his windup and he doesn’t throw a screwball, but he is a compact, raven-haired left-hander from Mexico who carries himself with a poise that, in another time and another place, begot Fernandomania.

Also like Valenzuela, who used an interpreter for interviews through his first four seasons with the Dodgers, the 28-year-old Higuera is taking his time learning English, although he has picked up on some of the basics.

Asked through an interpreter the other day if he was disappointed that Valenzuela had beaten him by three days last September to become the major leagues’ first 20-game winner from Mexico, Higuera shrugged, laughed and replied, in English, “That’s baseball.”

He can carry on a basic conversation in English but prefers to be interviewed in Spanish.

“If I was him, I’d never learn English,” said teammate Juan Nieves, a Puerto Rican who serves as Higuera’s interpreter. “It’s a good excuse.”

That may not be bad advice, considering that if Higuera continues to pitch as he has the last two seasons, the interview requests figure to pile up.

A year removed from the Mexican League, Higuera won 15 games two years ago and was the American League’s rookie pitcher of the year.

Last year, he became the league’s first 20-game winner from a losing team since Jim Kaat was 20-14 for the 1975 Chicago White Sox.

For a Brewer team that won only 77 games, Higuera was 20-11 and finished second in the league in earned-run average at 2.79, tied for second in shutouts with 4, third in victories, and tied for third in complete games with 15.

He ranked first among the league’s left-handers in all four categories, second among left-handers in strikeouts with 207 and was second to Roger Clemens in voting for the Cy Young Award.

And, again like Valenzuela, he tends to get better in the late innings. Get to him early, it’s been said, or don’t get to him at all.

Of his 15 complete games, 13 were victories, and in those 13 wins, he gave up a run after the sixth inning only twice.

“He and Valenzuela are two peas in a pod,” former Brewer Manager George Bamberger said. “If you’ve seen Valenzuela, you’ve seen this guy.”

Higuera, whose mother’s maiden name is Valenzuela, grew up about 100 miles south of Valenzuela’s hometown of Etchohuaquila--and about 450 miles southeast of Tucson--in Los Mochis, a town of about 120,000 near the Gulf of California coast in the Mexican state of Sinaloa.

Son of a farmer and cattle rancher, Higuera said his father, Abelino, wouldn’t let him play baseball until his senior year at Los Mochis High School. Asked why, he said: “School and work on the ranch.”

Last year, Higuera told the Milwaukee Journal that his father thought baseball was “a game for hoodlums.”

He pitched only three games in high school, striking out 21 in the last one, a state playoff game.

Higuera told Fernando Paramo, sports editor of La Opinion, a Los Angeles Spanish-language newspaper, that he strengthened his arm as a youngster by throwing rocks at low-flying geese.

In 1979, five days after the death of his father, Higuera signed with Ciudad Juarez of the Mexican League. He was 20.

It has been reported that Higuera faced Valenzuela once in the Mexican League, but Higuera pitched only one inning in 1979. By 1980, when Higuera was the league’s rookie of the year, Valenzuela was pitching for the Dodgers.

Higuera said he never faced Valenzuela before last year’s All-Star game in Houston, when each of them gave up only one hit while working three scoreless innings.

The Brewers spotted Higuera near the end of the 1981 season, but it took them two years to work out a deal to buy his contract from Juarez, where in 1983 he put together a 17-8 record and 2.03 ERA and led the league with 18 complete games (in 27 starts) and 165 strikeouts.

“I thought Teddy Higuera was equal (to) or better than Fernando Valenzuela because he could throw the ball harder,” said Ray Poitevint, who was the Brewers’ scouting director at the time. “Fernando today cannot throw the ball harder than Teddy Higuera.”

The only problem was, the Dodgers had paid more than $100,000 for Valenzuela’s contract from Puebla in 1979, and Juarez was angling for a like amount for Higuera’s.

Poitevint, attempting to make inroads for the Brewers in Mexico, worked out an agreement with the brewery that owned Juarez and two other teams whereby he and Lee Sigman, another Brewer scout, would act as farm directors, scouting directors and general managers for the three teams.

In exchange for the right of first refusal on the Mexican players, Poitevint said, the Brewers act as kind of an “employment service” for the three Mexican clubs, sending as many as 18 farmhands to Mexico each summer. Mostly, they are players who have been released by the Brewers or other teams.

“It sounds goofy as hell, and I don’t even know if everybody in the Brewer organization knows about it,” Poitevint said. “What we were really doing was working out a program so we could get Teddy Higuera at a price that we could afford.”

Although three other major league teams bid more than $100,000 for Higuera’s contract, Juarez sold it to the Brewers in 1983 for $65,000, Poitevint said.

Poitevint said he normally wouldn’t have looked at Higuera, believing that a pitching prospect must be at least 6 feet tall.

But the 5-9 Higuera made him change his mind. “And yet it might take another 25 years for me to find another Teddy Higuera,” he said. “There are other pitchers with good arms, but there are very few with the inner makeup of this guy.

“I honestly believe that, because of his maturity, he could have been as successful in the majors when we first signed him as he is now.”

As it was, it didn’t take long.

After one season in the minors, Higuera began the 1985 season as the Brewers’ fifth starter.

But he started poorly, losing five of his first nine decisions. The Brewers considered shipping him back to Triple-A before pitching coach Herm Starrette convinced Higuera that, in his case, less could be more.

Believing that Higuera was shunning his 90-m.p.h. fastball in favor of four other pitches, Starrette took away his screwball and his curve, leaving him with a fastball and a slider to go with a changeup that has been described as one of baseball’s best.

Higuera was 11-3 in the last three months of the season.

Because of Higuera’s tremendous respect for Valenzuela, Poitevint said, it was difficult to convince him that his screwball was not the equal of the Dodger pitcher’s. “It became a challenge to him,” Poitevint said.

But Starrette, who is now the Chicago Cubs’ pitching coach, said Higuera took his advice willingly.

“I told him, ‘You can put that screwball in your hip pocket and use it again in later years.’ ”

When will he bring it back?

“Two years,” Higuera said.

Even without it, he’s a handful for any batter.

Extremely combative and competitive, Higuera told the Milwaukee Journal last year: “I save my smiles for off the field.”

“He’s a very determined pitcher,” Brewer General Manager Harry Dalton said. “He’s stubborn on the mound. He wants to win the ballgame, whether it takes 9 innings or 12.”

And his control is so sharp that catching him, said Milwaukee catcher Bill Schroeder, “is almost like a day off.”

For those batting against him, of course, it’s anything but.