Padres’ Chris Brown Is Gearing Up for a Full Season to Silence Critics

“Baby,” that’s what everyone in his family used to call Chris Brown.

“I wasn’t even the youngest, and I was called that,” Brown said. “I was always around the house, looking at TV, staying out of trouble. I was always the baby.”

A mama’s boy. It has been 15 years, and that’s still what his older brother calls Chris Brown.

“He was like my mother,” said Arbret Brown. “He’d stay in the house. He’d hide behind her skirts. A mama’s boy.”

Funny names. Funnier still, when you grow up in a central Los Angeles neighborhood where the streets were leased by gangs, and that older brother was a gang leader.

Chris Brown grew up differently.

“I had to be that way,” Brown said. “My brother didn’t want me to be like him. He wouldn’t let me be like him.

“I wanted an earring, he said no earring. I wanted to ride with him, he shoved me back in the house. If I’m like him, I’m dead.”

Baby. Mama’s boy. There’s only one more thing about the Padre third baseman that perhaps you should know.

“Don’t push him too far,” said Arbret, now a construction worker in Mississippi who pushed people for 10 years as a leader of the Crips, a group that roamed Brown’s neighborhood. “You can give him so much stuff. He’ll take a lot of stuff. He would call me to protect him a lot of times.

“But when you give him too much, he’s getting off on you. And that’s that.”

Entering the summer of 1987, consider Brown pushed.

Pushed by a rap he brought with him last season from San Francisco, a rap repeated over and over behind his back by Giant teammates:

Chris Brown isn’t tough enough.

His Padre teammates are not yet convinced. Padre officials--who will be paying him a utility player’s salary ($265,000) this season because this winter they showed an arbitrator statistics detailing Brown’s frequent missed games--are not yet convinced.

This summer, Chris Brown doesn’t want 30 homers or 100 RBIs. He just wants to play a full season.

“Yes, I’ve got to prove something,” Brown said. “You say you don’t hear people talking, but you do. You can’t help but hear it.

“I’ve got to prove I can play every day Larry (Bowa, the manager) writes my name in the lineup. I’ve got to stay healthy. I know I can do this. I’ve got to do this.”

And how the Padres need to have it done.

“You could easily say having Brownie healthy is one of the keys to our season,” Tony Gwynn said.

When he’s around, he can make the all-star team (1986), hit .317 (1986), hit 16 homers (1985) or lead National League third basemen in fielding percentage (1985).

When he’s not, such as last year with the Padres, when he missed 19 of 63 games before a broken hand ended his season, it can be a pain for everyone.

“In general, a manager has to know that who he puts in the lineup, unless the guy comes to the park with his hand in a cast, is playing,” Bowa said. “If a guy asks out of the lineup, it puts pressure on the extra men, cuts down my maneuverability and takes a key force out of the lineup. It’s bad for everybody.”

Brown, 26, desperately wants this year not to be bad.

“I’m saying 155-158 games,” he said. “That’s how many I’m shooting for.”

Maybe that way, everyone will realize what the Los Angeles gang called the Brims once found out the hard way.

“There were 10 of them, and they came up to me in junior high once and wanted my money,” Brown said. “I told them, no dice. I don’t know how much I had, but it wasn’t important. It was mine, not theirs. My parents had worked hard for that money, and it wasn’t right that they take it.

“So I grabbed my friends, and it was eight on 10, and we fought them.”

A visitor asked who won. Brown looked at the visitor funny.

“Uh, I don’t know,” he said. “Is that important? I kept the money, I know that. I kept the money.”

On March 14 in Scottsdale, just 11 games into the spring schedule, it started again. Against his old Giant teammates, including the pitcher who broke Brown’s hand late last season (Mike Krukow), Brown asked out of the lineup.

“It was my thumb, my old bone bruise. It was really swollen from all the swings I’ve been taking,” Brown explained. “I knew at the hotel that morning I couldn’t make it.”

“The thumb was really swollen,” confirmed Manager Larry Bowa.

The rest of the team wasn’t so sure. During batting practice, Brown heard things like, “Who’s coming back sooner, (Tony) Gwynn or Brownie?”

Or things like, “That’s four more weeks out for Brownie.”

Brown heard the comments, perhaps because they were said right in front of him.

“At least they say stuff to your face, and it’s mostly kidding,” Brown said. “I can take stuff to my face.

“In San Francisco, see, they talk behind your back. I couldn’t take that.”

That’s where the rap started, and, like many things from the Bay Area, has since grown to cult proportions. It goes something like this:

--In 1984, Brown once begged out of a game at triple-A Phoenix because he said his eye was sore from sleeping on it.

Later that season, then-Giant scout Jim Davenport filed this report: “I just wish the guy would play more days in a row.”

--His first full season with the Giants (1985), he was never on the disabled list, yet he played in only 131 games. In three major league seasons as a starter, he has averaged 110 games and has been on the disabled list only twice.

For comparison, in the last three seasons, Gwynn has averaged 157 games.

--One spring training with the Giants, Brown missed a workout, saying he had the flu. That night, he was spotted at a Phoenix Suns basketball game.

--Once during batting practice with the Giants he was hit in the head with a lob. He fell to the ground and remained motionless for three minutes, then got up and continued.

Later that same season, he was nicked in the face by a ground ball, and he fell and lay motionless for three more minutes before he got up unhurt.

Said a teammate: “A fly must have landed on his neck.”

--In the middle of the 1986 pennant race, he asked out of a big game in New York, saying he had a sore shoulder. Extensive tests showed only slight tendinitis. Giant Manager Roger Craig blew up, calling it the final straw. By that time, his Giant teammates had taken to calling him “Crystal.”

--Shortly after joining the Padres in a seven-player trade July 4, 1987, he came down with that bone bruise on his hand. He played in only 44 of 63 games before Krukow broke his hand with a pitch Sept. 14, putting him out for the season.

“We have accepted Chris with a clear mind, but we all know what has been said,” Padre infielder Tim Flannery said.

But a few things haven’t been said, or haven’t been said much.

Such as, after that 1986 season when the Giants accused him of faking it, it turned out that Brown’s shoulder was really hurt. He needed off-season surgery to repair a partially detached tendon.

Such as, in 1987, before joining the Padres, he missed two months with an almost impossible-to-fake injury--a broken jaw, caused by a pitch from St. Louis’ Danny Cox.

Such as, the broken hand that forced him to miss the last 18 games of the 1987 season.

“People have to realize, some of his injuries are real, unbelievable stuff,” Bowa said. “You can’t judge him on those injuries. I’d like to see him with a full year with no major injuries. Then we’ll see what what happens.”

Brown promises that will happen now.

He said once the regular season starts, he will play with the bone bruise: “It will get better, so there’s no use overdoing it now.”

He said he doesn’t really know how many more freaky injuries can hit him: “All these things that happen to me, I can’t imagine them continuing.”

He says it all with a smile--he’s one of the most pleasant, joking members of the team. But somewhere in there remains anger. Brown says you can’t go through the many storms he has gone through and not retain a little heat.

He’s still angry with Padre management for this winter’s arbitration loss. He received $265,000; he was seeking $410,000.

“The only reason I lost is that they lied,” he said. “At the time, I believed in the front office. For them to lie about me being a utility player, when my injuries were honest, is wrong.

“To win is one thing; to win because you lie is another thing.”

Brown contends management said he was a utility player during arbitration hearings, even though he had started all but two of his 44 games played with the Padres.

Responded Padre General Manager Jack McKeon: “As far as I know, our representative (consultant Tal Smith Jr.) just presented statistics. That’s all you can present in there, statistics.”

And he’s still mad at the Giants, who, near the end of his time there, regularly took shots at him in the Bay Area newspapers under “anonymous teammate” labels.

“This year, it’s me against them,” Brown said. “There were guys who were jealous of the things I was doing. And they weren’t man enough to say things to me. They had to go to the press. That’s not what I call a man.

“I can’t say one Giant was like that, because a lot of Giants were like that. But it was wrong, and I’ll remember it.”

Not once back then did Brown speak out in the media or fight back in the clubhouse. It has something to do with what his brother said about what happens when he gets angry. Brown didn’t trust himself.

“I say one thing, I do one thing, and there will be an explosion,” he said. “I get in somebody’s face and that’s it, everything breaks loose. I didn’t want to do that.

“As long as they didn’t put their hands on me, I was staying cool.”

Yet it’s 1988. It will be Brown’s fourth big league season, a time when unused talent can go from regal to ruin. The rap grows larger and the hands edge closer.

“If he doesn’t want to play, fine, that way I’ll get into the lineup,” Flannery said. “But I know this: To be the best club we can be, he has to play.”

“Speaking strictly in general,” veteran Keith Moreland said, “an everyday player is paid to be an everyday player. You don’t feel good, you’ve got to play. You’ve got to overcome.

“If I didn’t play when I didn’t feel good, hell, I wouldn’t play half the games. I guess there’s not as much of that around as there used to be.”

It’s 1988, and Brown admits that he has heard the voices for too long to no longer listen.

“My brother told me, you walk away, you walk away,” Brown said. “But when you can’t walk away anymore, you turn around. And then you see who’s the real man.”