A PRIZE CATCHER : ‘Sophomore jinx’ Not in Vocabulary of Padres’ Santiago

A little Q and A with Benito Santiago, who speaks either the best or worst English in the Padre clubhouse. Depends on the question.

Q: Where is your rookie of the year award?

A: “I haven’t received it yet. I think I might get it on opening night in San Diego. I’ve thought about that. It would be nice.

Q: When you get it, where are you going to put it?

A: “It’s going on my wall, in Puerto Rico, right up there next to the television set. I’ve already got a place picked out.”

Q: What about the sophomore jinx?

Pause.

Grimace.

Shrug.

A: “No comprende.”

For one simple reason, the Padres do not expect a lousy second year for their precocious sophomore catcher.

A prerequisite for suffering through any sophomore jinx, after all, is understanding the words sophomore and jinx.

Santiago doesn’t understand. He could. But he doesn’t.

“Benny understands whatever English he needs to understand,” said Sandy Alomar, Padre third base coach. “This spring he is so confident, so relaxed, he is not even thinking about having a bad year. When he says he doesn’t understand a sophomore jinx, I believe that.”

Benito Santiago, The Second Year. If it sounds like a show all its own, around an otherwise-routine Padre clubhouse, sometimes it is.

He is still just 23, still attached to his rural Puerto Rican roots, still scowling and brooding to those who don’t know or try to understand him.

Yet this year he is different. He smiles. Sometimes he sings. He laughs when teammates joke with him about his loose, often slipping grip on the English language. He jokes back, and somehow they always seem to understand the joke, and always they laugh. With Santiago smiling so big and trying so hard, it is impossible not to.

“He shares himself more,” said teammate Joey Cora. “He worried so much last year about so many things, he finally said to hell with it and is now being himself.”

Last season, his daily sweatsuits had no names on them, and those three gold chains around his neck clanged together like millstones. Today the sweatsuits are designer, and those chains look fashionable.

“You can just tell by the way he carries himself,” outfielder Shane Mack said. “He’s matured.”

Last season, when he arrived at the mound to talk to Padre pitchers, he mumbled to them. They mumbled back. Today he motions with his hands and grabs their shoulders, and they understand each other perfectly.

“Baseball English,” said pitcher Greg Booker. “He speaks great baseball English.”

Last season, at the plate, he worried about striking out, worried about not drawing enough walks, worried about being typecast as a typical Latin swing-hard.

Now, after hitting in a rookie-record 34 consecutive games last year, after walking 16 times and striking out 112 and still hitting .300, people actually admire the way he swings.

“I don’t see how he’ll ever have trouble hitting the ball,” said new pitching coach Pat Dobson, seeing him for the first time. “As much as he hacks, he’s bound to hit something.”

Yet for every bit of himself he is giving, he also keeps some hidden. Part of being different from last year is that he is wiser.

“He has learned about opening his mouth when he is not sure what he is saying,” said Padre outfielder Carmelo Martinez. “He has learned how to keep from getting hurt.”

When he recently had trouble with his contract negotiations--he eventually signed a one-year, $170,000 deal--he became so confused that finally he would not discuss it.

Only recently has he said, “Looking at what Mark McGwire got (American League rookie of the year, $250,000), I see the Padres are paying me like I was a so-so player. That’s fine. I will keep doing my best, and in 1990, when I get arbitration, it will be my turn.”

When he chooses, he speaks better English this year--”I’ve heard him say tough phrases, like ‘this afternoon,’ that I couldn’t believe,” said Sandy Alomar Jr.

But he also can speak worse English. And sometimes he speaks not at all, to people he doesn’t know or recognize. He recently turned down three straight interview requests in Phoenix and has promised to turn down more.

The club has asked that Santiago instead refer all unknown reporters to the team’s publicity people, who then will introduce them to Santiago in hopes of making the catcher feel more talkative and comfortable.

“I got tired of saying something, and then reading in the newspaper that I said something else,” Santiago said. “I got tired of history changing. So I’m not going to talk unless I really feel like it or really have to talk.

“That way, there is no pressure. There are no worries. There is just baseball. Last year there was a lot of bull. This year, just baseball.”

Which bring up perhaps the most important point about a sophomore jinx.

For this season to be more trying, more difficult than last season . . . that will take some doing.

“He is no longer the center of attention,” said backup catcher Mark Parent. “No more pressure, no more swarms of questions.

“Actually, this year should be easier.”

“Last year was like five years,” said Santiago. “Maybe 10 years. After last year, I am a veteran.”

The 1987 season began as the first one in seven years in which Terry Kennedy was not the opening-day catcher. He had been traded to Baltimore for pitcher Storm Davis, partly because management believed Santiago could more than take his place.

You want pressure? In his first 49 games, Santiago committed 14 errors and had 11 passed balls.

For comparison’s sake, Gold Glove catcher Mike LaValliere of Pittsburgh committed five errors with two passed balls. In 112 games.

“Replacing Terry Kennedy, controlling the staff as a 22-year-old, that was hard,” Santiago remembered. “It was very hard to have fun. I couldn’t understand it. Before, I had always had fun.”

In the second month of the season, Santiago finally lashed out and was quoted in the newspaper as saying, among other things, “The pitchers stink.”

Observers feel that story didn’t say as much about the pitchers as it did about him.

“He felt like he was nothing. He felt like the staff wasn’t listening to him, so he spoke,” said Sandy Alomar. “You could tell how frustrated he was.”

Santiago said that story actually taught him things.

“For one thing,” Santiago said, “I didn’t say that stuff. Why would I say that about my own staff? I look at the newspaper that morning and history has changed. And now I got to deal with it in the clubhouse.”

Thus, around the first of June, he became even more quiet, more businesslike. He would talk to Martinez and a few other friends, and that was it. He would talk only baseball.

And from that period came a baseball player. From June 5 till the end of the season, he committed eight errors with nine passed balls. He turned a first-half batting average of .273 into a second-half .324.

“I finally relaxed when I just thought about the game,” Santiago said.

Just about then came the streak. What happened over the last month of the season is still lodged prominently in his head.

Recently, in the middle of a seven-game spring hitting streak, he came into the clubhouse during a game, moaning: “Oh for three, that oh for three, it follows me, it follows me.”

Somebody asked him: “What the heck are you talking about?”

“Last year, when I broke my hitting streak, I go 0 for 3 against Dodgers,” he explained. “The next day, the last day of the season, I get two hits. I get one hit against Dodgers, I still have my streak, it is 36 games. Oh, that oh for three.”

Oh, that streak. It began Aug. 25 when he went 1 for 3 off Montreal’s Neal Heaton. It ended on the second-to-last day of the season, Oct. 3, against the Dodgers’ Orel Hershiser.

Yes, he went 0 for 3. And yes, the next day he collected two hits to push his average to .300.

The streak, which soon became more important than the games, brought Santiago out of his imposed clubhouse exile. He learned about dealing with the public. He learned about dealing with success.

One image several Padres remember is: After Santiago would answer the daily barrage of questions, when all reporters had left the clubhouse, he would walk around repeating the questions, and openly dissecting his answers. He would ask for advice on how to answer the next time.

“I get very tired of it,” Santiago said. “But it helped me.”

As did all of it. And this is how a sophomore season can actually be a lucky one.

“This is a game of adjustments, and just last year Benny made a ton of adjustments,” said Manager Larry Bowa. “All he’s been through, I bet he really hasn’t heard of a sophomore jinx.”

Now for the final, hardest adjustment: on the field, behind the plate, calling the game. He could be even better at that this year because, under the new philosophy of new pitching coach Dobson, there is less pressure to call a game.

“I don’t ever want the pitcher to come to the dugout after giving up a big hit on a bad pitch and point to Benny and say, ‘He called for it,’ ” said Dobson. “The pitcher has the ball, it’s in his hands, he essentially calls the game.”

Santiago is now free to worry only about staying with the pitcher on the preassigned game plan. His job is mainly one of encouragement and reminder.

That part is easy. All his inner questions that were answered last year, that part has come quickly.

“He comes out now and is real forceful, real strong,” said pitcher Mark Davis. “He says stuff like ‘Get the ball down,’ and he means it.

“Sometimes he doesn’t even need to come out. He will stay behind the plate and use his hands and point to an area. The way he looks, you know what he is talking about.”

“Yeah,” Santiago said with one of those smiles. “When I got to mound now, I know what I’m looking for. And the pitchers, they know I know.

“I’m older now. Everything turn around for me now. Everything.”

Sophomore jinx? Or sophomore blessing?