WHITE LIGHTNING : Angel Rookie Outfielder Likes to Run, Hates to Walk

To know what Devon White is like, it helps to know what Devon White doesn’t like.

Walks, for instance.

“I’d rather strike out on a ball in the dirt and run to first than walk,” White says. “I hate to walk. Guys get on me about swinging at bad pitches, but I couldn’t care less. I want to put the ball in play and you can’t do that without swinging the bat.”

White also doesn’t like batting leadoff. Why?

“Because you have to walk and do all that stuff,” he says.

White wants to run, which brings up another pet peeve: getting the red light while leading off first base.

“I’m used to running a lot,” says White, whose 21 stolen bases are fewer than he would like to have. “Right now, I’m playing for Gene Mauch, and here you’re told when to run. In the minor leagues, I was on my own.

“I like being on my own. Sometimes there are days when my legs are feeling nice and loose and I feel like I can steal any base I want to. Other days, your legs don’t feel so great, but the manager doesn’t know that. He expects you to steal a base right then.

“On those days, you just do the best you can.”

If White had his way, he’d be a free-swinging, force-the-action, off-and-running rookie. An Angel with dirty trousers. A man who’d never met a 3-2 count--because he’d never have to wait around long enough to let three wide ones go by.

Rick Down, a batting instructor with the Angels, calls White “a Bible hitter--’Not a thing shalt pass.’ ”

Mark McLemore, White’s roommate and close friend, says the most predictable pitch in baseball is a 3-2 delivery to White. “You know he’s going to be swinging,” McLemore says.

White simply shrugs and smiles. “I’m aggressive,” he says.

One might guess as much by checking White’s 1987 Angel statistics. On the down side: 92 strikeouts and 22 walks in 102 games. On the up side: 18 home runs, 64 RBIs, 24 doubles and a .284 batting average, even though he swings from the heels.

If White is playing with a double-edged sword, he’s getting the best of it so far. He has been inflicting heavy damage while coming away with only a few nicks and cuts.

“Right now, he’s swinging at a lot of pitches he’ll learn to lay off later in his career,” Down said. “But his aggressiveness also enables him to take care of any pitcher’s mistakes. He’s always ready to hit the ball.”

By standards set long before him, White, 24, is having a rookie-of-the-year season. Unfortunately, for him, he’s not the only one. To the north, Oakland’s Mark McGwire continues to mount his assault on Roger Maris’ home run record. In Detroit, catcher Matt Nokes has strong-armed the Tigers into a pennant race. Kansas City has two-sport letterman Bo Jackson and a .300-hitter in Kevin Seitzer.

Outside of Southern California, White is known as that fast, slick outfielder with the peculiar first name. Devon? Isn’t that an old Elton John song? Or Devo, as his Angel teammates call him? You mean that weird rock outfit from Akron, Ohio?

Even in Anaheim, White gets lost in the shuffle. Call it Wally fallout. The town that went wacky for Wally Joyner in 1986 has been mainly polite with White. To many Angel fans, Joyner was the rookie to end all rookies--even if another, with similar credentials, has arrived.

Like Joyner, White has been a power-hitting surprise, already having surpassed his previous minor league high of 14 home runs in one season.

Like Joyner, White fields his position with flair and aplomb.

Like Joyner, White made an instant impact on the Angel offense. After the first half of his rookie season, Joyner was hitting .296 with 19 home runs and 64 RBIs. After the first half of 1987, White was hitting .292 with 17 home runs and 50 RBIs.

He leads the Angels in hits with 119 and is second in runs with 71.

Yet, unlike Joyner, White did not make the American League All-Star team as a rookie starter. White has no endorsement contracts. And remember Wally World? Around Anaheim, there isn’t even a White Front.

“It doesn’t bother me,” White says. Yet, when a reporter recently asked him about the publicity gap between him and Joyner, White replied: “I have no idea why it’s like that. Why do you think?”

Said the reporter: “Well, Joyner had a lot of dramatic home runs and hit most of them during the first few weeks of the season.”

White: “I don’t think that’s it. Mark McGwire hit just as many home runs early and he didn’t get as much publicity (as Joyner).”

White looked up and smiled slowly. “Maybe it’s just the name,” he said.

Or maybe White isn’t demographically correct for Orange County. Orange County is predominantly white. So is Joyner. White is black.

White said he hoped he hasn’t been snubbed on account of his race.

“I don’t like to think of things that way,” he said. “I’m not from Southern California, so I don’t really know.”

White analyzed it this way: “I’m not as lucky as Wally Joyner. He has a little more connections here. Maybe it’s living in Southern California and doing all that Disneyland stuff. That brought him a lot of recognition.

“But I’ve played with other guys that got more recognition, even though I might have been the better player. It’s nothing new. It doesn’t bother me to the point where it affects my play. I try not to think about it.”

Joyner has his own theory. First, he disputes the contention that he received more publicity in 1986 than McGwire has in 1987.

“I got off to a hot start and overshadowed everybody else,” Joyner said. “That’s what Mark McGwire is doing now. He’s why you don’t hear that much about Matt Nokes or Devon White.

“People are front-runners. They want to know everything about Mark McGwire. He’s taking up all the space in the papers. There’s no room for anybody else.”

Personality and first impressions may also have something to do with it. Wally smiled a lot and had the kind of face mothers wanted to pinch. White comes across as intense--quiet, expressionless, attending to business as business.

To some, this can be intimidating. It was to McLemore, who met White when both played in Peoria in 1983.

“My first impression was, ‘This guy is mean ,’ ” McLemore says with a laugh. “I had to room with him that year. I didn’t choose to.

“But once you get to know him, you know that’s not him at all. He has a good sense of humor and speaks what’s on his mind, no matter who it is. He just doesn’t open up very easily. That’s just the way he is.”

White adopted his “game face,” as a kid back home on New York asphalt, when basketball was the game and a jury of your peers judged you by the way you moved to the hoop.

“Basketball was No. 1 where I grew up,” White said. “In the schoolyard crowd, everyone knew everyone else by how they could play. They’d expect a certain level of game from everybody.

“If you didn’t do well or lost a game, people would be calling you names--’You stink.’

“It was intense. We’d play games and everyone in the neighborhood would show up. They’d be crowded around the court, right in your face.”

White learned the moves. He learned the look. He stared right back and put the jumper down. It proved to be valuable training, he said.

“When I first came up, I thought I’d be scared, looking into the stands and seeing all these people,” he said. “My first at-bat, I was a little tense. But after that, it was just playing ball. It was like playing basketball at home, with everybody watching you. It was nothing new.”

Said McLemore: “I’ve never seen him intimidated. In ’83 or ‘84, the Cubs sent a couple of big league pitchers to the minors on rehab. The first time Devon faced both of them, he took them deep.”

Through the first four months of the 1987 season, White has gone deep 18 times. So far, that is his most remarkable accomplishment.

When White joined the Angels, he was expected to steal bases. He was expected to field, occasionally in spectacular fashion.

He wasn’t expected to hit home runs.

In his first two minor league seasons, White totaled 10 extra-base hits. In 1981, he hit zero home runs. In 1982, he hit one. His best minor league home runs totals were 14 at Edmonton last season and 13 at Peoria in 1983.

Now he has 18. As Doug DeCinces said, “I don’t think anybody anticipated that out of him.”

Even White himself.

“The home run output has been surprising,” White said. “It’s not surprising that I hit them; it’s surprising that I hit so many so early.”

Down credits the quality of big league pitching for the jump in White’s power numbers. Pitchers here stay closer to the strike zone, Down says, and White swings at anything near the strike zone. It’s an equation that’s bound to produce more home runs.

But another factor is an explosive batting stroke that makes White look like “a young Henry Aaron,” according to Down.

“Look at his bat speed. Look at his size,” he said. “He’s tall (6-1), he has long arms and that gives him leverage. He gets good extension and hits with his whole body. It’s a power swing. If you look, you’ll see that a lot of his home runs have not been of the cheap variety.”

Defensively, White has had to adjust as a rookie. A center fielder throughout his minor league career, White had to adjust to right field so he could play in the same outfield with a Gold Glove center fielder, Gary Pettis. Then, when Pettis went bad at the plate, White had to reacquaint himself with center field. Now, he may play both positions in the same game.

White has had to adjust to playing in pain. He has played his rookie season with a sore throwing arm doctors attribute to tendinitis. White attributes it to too much off-season weight training.

“I was lifting weights about two weeks after the playoffs and I guess my body was still tired,” White said. “I was trying to bench press and I hurt the back of my shoulder.”

Aching arm and all, White still leads the Angels in outfield assists with nine, including two that won games.

The first was in Seattle April 13. After hitting the lead home run in the top of the 10th inning, White raced to the right-field foul line, snared a line drive by Alvin Davis and then, still in full stride, fired to first base to get Jim Presley for the final out.

“It looked like he was trying to hit his man downcourt with the outlet pass,” Mauch mused.

The second was against Detroit July 12, when White charged a single by Tom Brookens and threw out Nokes at the plate. The Angels went on to win, 5-4.

“That’s the play I remember the most,” White said. “I look forward to charging balls and throwing somebody out at that plate. The one in Seattle, all I had to do was lob the ball in. I like to charge and come up throwing.”

All of this has made an impression among the Angels, if not the rest of baseball.

Said Joyner: “He’s like Bo Jackson--a great athlete, a raw talent. He’s very exciting to watch and, right now, he’s showing everybody how he can play. But he’s going to improve--with every game and every year.”

Said DeCinces: “He has what I call an extremely bright future. He’s made such a drastic physical improvement in one year. If he can improve mentally as much as he has physically, he can go from being a good major leaguer to one of those in the upper realm.”

And said Down: “The question now is, ‘What can he do?’ I won’t be surprised if someday we see his name in the Hall of Fame. Now I know that’s an awful burden to place on a guy, but we’ll see how he handles it.”

What does White say about it?

He doesn’t like it.

“I really overlook a lot of that,” he said. “Everybody’s saying, ‘He’s going to be a superstar.’ I kind of look at them like they’re crazy.

“George (Hendrick) tells me all the time--all I got to do is show up at the park and I’ll be a superstar. I don’t see how people can even make predictions like that. It feels good, but I don’t really want to hear that. It might make me go out and try to do too much.”

White will probably have to put up with it, though. Do something once and people want to see it twice. Do something twice and then there are expectations.

White imagines it’s something he can live with. There are worse things one can ask of a man.

Like not swinging on the next 3-2 fastball that misses the outside the corner of the plate.