HE’S BACK HOME ON THE RANGE : Cardinals Put Cowboy Roger Back in Saddle

So ol’ Roger Craig, suddenly with a lot of time on his hands, will saddle up Amos, his favorite horse back at the Humm Baby Ranch in the mountains northeast of San Diego, and just ride. No destination needed.

If he’s lucky, Craig will not run across stray coyotes, rattlesnakes or Harvey, the 350-pound chief of the Santa Ysabel Indian reservation who always invites Craig for cocktails and dinner. Craig, at this point, needs all the solitude he can get.

“To me, there’s nothing like getting on a horse to go out alone and ride,” Craig said. “It’s great mental therapy to be by yourself and just go see what’s on the other side of the mountain.”

He will have plenty of time now to ride and think.

Craig, manager of the San Francisco Giants most of the year and gentleman rancher the rest of the time, can ponder such questions as how his team lost two straight games to the St. Louis Cardinals after taking a 3-2 lead in the National League championship series and also why he pitched to Jose Oquendo with first base open and the pitcher up next in Game 7.

But before riding into the sunset for the winter, Craig said he would not have changed a thing and that he still is proud of and satisfied with his team despite the two-game pratfall that sent the Cardinals to the World Series.

Giant management, too, has to be satisfied with Craig, who needed only two seasons to turn a team that lost 100 games in 1985 to Western Division winner in 1987. Despite the playoff loss, Craig’s accomplishment is impressive. He and Buck Rodgers of the Montreal Expos are the leading candidates for National League Manager of the Year, something of little concern to Craig at this point.

Asked his plans after Wednesday night’s loss to St. Louis in Game 7, Craig said he would take a day to clean out his rented home in the Bay Area and then head to his 41-acre ranch in the hills and assume the life style of his alter ego, Cowboy Roger.

“Most people may not think 41 acres is much, but it is big for Southern California,” Craig said. “I got somebody to carve ‘Humm Baby’ (the Giants’ rallying cry) into a big oak tree outside the gate. But nobody up there knows what it means.”

Craig, 56, who looks like a cross between Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Durante, has assumed many personas over the years.

He was a solid, if unspectacular, pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers and other teams in the 1950s and ‘60s. He was hailed as the champion of the split-fingered fastball as pitching coach of the 1984 World Series champion Detroit Tigers.

Now, Craig has been widely characterized as a shrewd manager who can steal the other guy’s signs from the bench and do everything but hit for his team, which was shut out over the final 22 innings of the playoffs.

“Roger Craig is the most unbelievable person I’ve met,” Al Rosen, the Giants’ general manager, said after Wednesday night’s loss. “He’s done an incredible job. He’s the best manager we could have had.”

Then, there is this other side of Craig.

Although he grew up in suburban North Carolina in the ‘30s and ‘40s, the son of a shoe salesman, Craig always has pined for the outdoors. Craig said he has read every book Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey have ever written. He doesn’t hunt. He doesn’t even fish. He just likes being there.

“I think I would have loved to be on the wagon train when they first headed out west,” Craig said. “Maybe I should have lived 100 years ago.”

After pausing, he added a comment that Shirley MacLaine might find interesting: “Maybe I was around.”

Even Craig has to laugh at that idea. But he does love his modest spread in the Volcan Mountains, near Julian. The best part about it, Craig said, is that Interstate 8 is about 55 miles away.

“We’re building a log cabin up there right now, my son and I,” Craig said. “Actually, it’s pretty big. We call it a log mansion.”

When he became manager of the San Diego Padres in 1978, Craig commuted each day from Alpine, near El Cajon. He moved to the Julian area when he retired after the Tigers’ 1984 World Series win and bought the Humm Baby ranch, although it hadn’t been named that yet.

For a while, Craig said, he lived in a mobile home or just in the back of his pickup truck while working on his cabin. He liked the life but missed baseball and did not hesitate to return when Rosen called late in the 1985 season.

Actually, Rosen probably had trouble reaching Craig, who said he didn’t get a telephone until recently and that mail was delivered infrequently. “But I’ve always had a (satellite) dish,” he said.

“What I’d do--even last year--was ride down to the general store every two days or so and call the office to see if they needed me,” Craig said. “I think I made a mistake this year. I’ve put a phone in, so people are going to be calling.”

Part of the allure of his mountain retreat is that hardly anyone knows Craig as the manager of the Giants. He can go down to the general store in Julian or up to the Indian reservation and not be bothered with questions about Jose Oquendo.

Although the Humm Baby oak carving seemingly invites baseball fans, Craig says he isn’t bothered. Well, he sometimes is bothered by Harvey, the Indian chief, but it has nothing to do with baseball. Harvey will let Craig ride on the reservation, providing Craig will sit and visit a spell.

“Harvey doesn’t know who I am,” Craig said. “He’s a great guy. You ride by his trailer, and he must have 2,000 beer bottles lined up. You try not to get too close to Harvey, because he’ll visit at all hours of the night.

“Once, there was this lady in town who was dying. She was real religious, and she gave Harvey all her mules, chickens and rabbits. I think Harvey ate ‘em all.”

Craig said the only killing he will do is in self-defense. That apparently irks Harvey, who apparently would like some choice entrees from Craig in exchange for the privilege of riding on the reservation.

“You’ll never see me shoot a deer or anything like that,” Craig said. “I’ll only shoot something if I had to eat it. But I do take a gun with me on my rides, and I’ll tell you why.

“One time, in 1985 when I had retired, I ran into a rattler. Now, if you’ve never heard a rattler, it sounds like electrical wires buzzing. I looked down, and its head was about (a foot) off the ground. I didn’t have time to get my gun, but I picked up this big rock.”

And he threw a strike. Presumably it was a split-fingered fastball that nailed the snake. Craig didn’t elaborate.

But as much as he would like to forget about baseball during his winter sabbatical, Craig finds himself thinking about it while resting on peaks or grooming horses back at his stable.

During the winter of 1984 and through most of the summer of 1985, Craig was busy in the mountains but he admitted that part of him missed baseball.

“After the first of the year up there, I find I really start wanting to get back to baseball, to spring training,” he said. “In 1985, I went to Vero Beach for a reunion of the ’55 Dodger team. I knew then I would miss the atmosphere. After that, I went to Lakeland for three days to visit the Tigers but I felt like an intruder, so I left.”

It took a phone call from Rosen late in the 1985 season to bring this mountain man back to civilization, if that’s what you could call the state of the Giants during that period.

“I’ll never forget Roger’s first day in spring training (in 1986),” Rosen said. “He started telling these guys who were so used to losing that they were going to win. He told them he could see a championship in the future.

“A lot of guys had heard this before, but by the end of the meeting, everyone was sitting up and listening to him in rapt attention. It was pretty impressive.”

Craig implemented several strategies and systems, including the positive-thinking approach that Humm Baby represents. The Giants finished 83-79 in Craig’s first season, then won the West this season with 90 victories.

“People thought I was crazy, sure,” Craig said. “But I’ve always been a positive thinker. I learned that from my dad. He raised four kids on less than $40 a week and he said you could do anything if you wanted it bad enough.”

As badly as Craig wanted his team to advance to the World Series, it did not happen. But as he did the last two winters, Craig will have videotapes of Giant games sent to him, pony express. He will invite his country neighbors by to have a look at the results of his other occupation.

Craig said that both he and the Giants will be back next season. He’s already tried this retirement business once, and it wasn’t to his liking.

“I read somewhere recently that Sparky (Anderson, the Tigers’ manager) wanted to manage another 15 years so he could break somebody or other’s record,” Craig said. “Well, you won’t see me doing that. I will do this until I don’t feel like it anymore. Or until I really want to live in the mountains and grow grandchildren.”

Or until Harvey starts asking what went wrong in the last two games of the ’87 playoffs.