He Was Back in the Minors by Accident

Of all the ballplayers who came from Rod Dedeaux’s USC Trojan teams--and there were some great ones, Tom Seaver, Fred Lynn, Ron Fairly, Dave Kingman, Don Buford--a lot of people thought Steve Kemp was going to be the greatest.

He was built along the general lines of a medium tank, he had this short, compact, murderous swing, he had no strike zone to speak of, and he was as dangerous to pitch to as a crouched leopard.

They didn’t throw the pitch he couldn’t line to right. He was 6 feet tall but he walked as often as a crouching leadoff man with a choked-up bat because he had an eye that could see dust on a needle. Kemp swung at strikes. And he hit them.

At USC, he batted .435 one year and .397 overall, a school record. He hit 13 homers and had 67 RBIs his junior year.

He never spent a full year in the minors. Detroit signed him for $50,000, a bargain in that year, 1976, and Tiger Manager Ralph Houk thought he had the next Lou Gehrig. Kemp rattled out 18 homers and 29 doubles his rookie year. He had hit .386 at Evansville the year before.

In 1979, he hit .318 with 26 home runs, 26 doubles and 105 runs batted in. He led Detroit in RBIs in 1980, and in hits, doubles, RBIs and walks in 1981. If he couldn’t do it all, he could do most of it.

But in 1982, something terrible happened to Steve Kemp: He signed with the New York Yankees, a place where a lot of careers go to die.

I talked to Kemp in a locker room in Florida the other day. This was not the Steve Kemp of unlimited promise. This was Steve Kemp, a minor league player trying to catch on with the big club, the Texas Rangers. A guy trying to make a comeback at the too-young age of 33.

What had happened? Well, first of all, Kemp, to his sorrow, had allowed himself to be swept up in one of those wide-net sweeps of all available talent Yankee owner George Steinbrenner liked to indulge in from time to time. He’d seine up all the stars he could in wholesale lots, on the theory that, even if he couldn’t use them, neither could the teams he’d snatched them from.

It’s a suicidal trap for an everyday player, which Steve Kemp was, an athlete who had to play repeatedly to keep his rhythm and timing intact.

For the first time in his life, Kemp found himself a sometime player. He went from 160 games to 94, from 580 at-bats to 313. Yankee fans were unmerciful to the young man who had signed a million-buck contract to make the world forget Roger Maris.

And then, one night in Milwaukee, it all came to a shuddering stop. It happened as Kemp was walking in the outfield, with Omar Moreno in the batting cage. Moreno hit a vicious line drive. It caught Kemp in the eye socket, narrowly missing gouging his eye out. It shattered the bone around the eye and broke his jaw.

Kemp was lucky he could eat or see but it didn’t stop one club official from making light of it. “It was the first line drive Moreno hit and the first one Kemp didn’t miss,” he was overheard saying in the press room.

It was not funny. Steve Kemp’s vision deteriorated to 20/50 in the damaged eye, and even though he worked out at Yankee Stadium all winter and came back to hit .291, that crack was a measure of the disenchantment of the Yankee brass. The Yankees used him only sparingly and dealt him off to Pittsburgh for a bunch of immortals named Alfonso Pulido, Jay Buhner and Yogi Berra’s son.

The music had really stopped for Steve Kemp by then. Instead of going to Cooperstown, he was going to Las Vegas. Pittsburgh gave him a half-hearted chance, and when the Pirates released him, he signed with San Diego’s minor league farm in Vegas in June of ’86.

Usually, when you’re a marginal player all your life, up and down from the minor leagues, you shrug and play out your career in the high minors. But, when you’ve been a star, that’s not standard behavior. I mean, would Joe DiMaggio finish out in the bus leagues? Would Stan Musial look for a few more good at-bats in a pothole field where the lights are dim and network cameras are never seen?

Steve Kemp had plenty of money. He could have gone home and bought a business and joined the Rotary.

But he felt he still had a lot of base hits in the lumber. Only 32 at that time, never out of shape, the belly was still hard and flat, the wrists supple, the back strong. Even the eye was better. Kemp still made you come in with a strike.

So, Steve felt it was an opportunity, not an insult, when the Texas Rangers signed him and sent him outright to their Oklahoma City farm team in the American Assn. last year. He finally got to play a full season in the minor leagues at the end, instead of the beginning, of his career.

He made the most of it. He rode the buses, ate in diners, slept on cots. He also hit 20 homers, 28 doubles, drove in 84 runs and walked 71 times. A typical Kemp year. He hit .522 in the league playoffs.

Steve Kemp was hitting .435 with the Texas Rangers this spring when I caught up with him in the Rangers’ locker room at Port Charlotte.

“Why did I go back to the minors?” Steve pondered the question.

“Well, first of all, I didn’t think Syd Thrift (general manager of the Pirates) gave me a full chance. But I think when you still have it in here (tapping his chest), you owe it to yourself. Baseball has been my life since I was 5 years old. I love it. I think I can still play it.

“You have to have confidence to play this game. I think I lost that confidence for a while after that accident with the Yankees.”

The ball, Kemp suggests, broke more than his jaw and teeth, it broke his spirit. “I had to rebuild Steve Kemp,” he explains.

He seems to have done a good job of it. Steve hopes the Rangers find a role for him.

The only problem is, when he talks of “that accident with the Yankees,” you wonder whether he means the line drive--or signing with them in the first place.