Brock Doing Fine, Still in the Majors

A baseball player never knows what to expect from a new season, in a new town, in a new league.

Maybe he will be reborn. Maybe this will be his last chance. Maybe the next stop is the insurance business. Maybe he will miss the bright lights of the big city. Maybe he will hate the stupid crickets in the country. He never knows.

The one vision that does dance inside his head is that of his old ballclub, not being able to do without him. In his sleep he can picture them suffering, desperate to fill the gaping hole in their world, not unlike the aftermath of a broken romance, when each person imagines the other, lonely and crying out the lost love’s name in the night.

Greg Brock ought to be feeling some serious satisfaction about now. One recent morning he awoke, checked out the baseball standings, and saw that the Los Angeles Dodgers, the team that had divorced him, were 0-5 and in last place.

At the top of the standings in the other league, meanwhile, sat the Milwaukee Brewers, Brock’s new love, unbeaten and for some reason unbeatable through 13 games, as happy as kids in a tree house.

Brock wasn’t crowing, though.

“The Dodgers are a real good team,” he said. “I didn’t see anything significant out of that start.”

He had not severed the ties completely. Part of Greg Brock still was, and always would be, the struggling slugger of the Dodger organization who never did turn out to be the next Steve Garvey, the guy who sent Garv packing, the kid who tore up Albuquerque but never quite got the hang of Los Angeles.

Was living in Milwaukee any easier, any less a life in a fishbowl?

“I think Milwaukee is a great town with great fans,” Brock said. “But I’m not going to say that it’s going to be any easier, because it’s still the major leagues. You still have to play. You still have to perform.”

Come on, though. It’s not any easier?

Brock smiled.

“It is when you start out 13-0,” he said.

Fourteen games into a new season in a new town in a new league, Greg Brock is a happy guy. Content, anyway.

He is getting to play nearly every day. He is free of great expectations. Nobody figured on him to be anything very special because nobody figured on the Brewers to be anything very special.

And besides, all they gave up to get him was Tim Leary, a well-traveled pitcher. You don’t expect much from a package bought at a discount.

The young Milwaukee manager, Tom Trebelhorn, was speaking recently of the nucleus of his squad, of how he hopes the younger players will take their cues from seasoned old pros such as Cecil Cooper, Robin Yount, Paul Molitor, Jim Gantner and Greg Brock.

“Brock?” someone asked.

“Sure, Brock. Why not Brock?” wondered Treb.

“He hasn’t been around that long,” the someone persisted.

“Hey, he’s 30 years old,” the manager said. “He’s been through a championship series. He knows what it’s like out there. You look at the stat sheet. Look at the fact that I’m playing him at first base every day. That’s a good indication how I feel about Greg Brock.”

In those first 13 games, as the Brewers broke from the blocks to one of the fastest starts in baseball history, all Brock did was hit .349 with four home runs. Just for grins, take out a pocket calculator, punch a few buttons and figure out that at this rate, Brock will finish the season with 50 big knocks. Nobody in either league has hit 50 since George Foster in 1977. Such calculations mean nothing, of course, and if you intend to stretch Brock’s through the course of a whole season, you might as well do the same for teammate Rob Deer, who already has seven homers.

Yet, Brock has always been capable of such numbers. One year at Albuquerque he hit 44 homers in only 480 at-bats, which more or less snapped the latch on Garvey’s bags.

The knock on Brock gradually got to be that he took too many pitches, that instead of swinging that ax of his at the tree, he kept standing there waiting for the damn thing to fall.

The very year that he hit all the homers at Albuquerque, Brock also walked 105 times, and the more he played, the more he stayed in a Darrell Evans sort of rut, homering, walking or whiffing, with little else in between. Brock gave every pitched ball a good eye. The Dodgers wanted him to give every ball a goodby.

At least his load has been lifted, now that the Dodger organization has kissed Brock himself goodby.

“I’m comfortable here,” he said Monday night at Comiskey Park, after his two-run homer had helped the Brewers extend their run to 13. “Especially because there’s a lot of hitters on this club. They’ve got me sandwiched in between Cooper and (Glenn) Braggs, with Molitor and Yount ahead of us. All they have to do is hide me in there somewhere.”

The 400-foot clout at Comiskey left a clubhouse visitor, checking details, wondering if this had been, indeed, his first time up at the park.

“First time in every American League park,” Brock said. “Except Anaheim.”

He had played in a couple of Freeway Series exhibitions there, back when he still thought that his future was with the Dodgers, back when he didn’t know anything about Milwaukee except that Laverne and Shirley used to live there.

Brock doesn’t mind living there at all now. It’s still the majors.