Evansville Power Pitcher Benes Likely Top Draft Pick of Padres

Scouts call him a Roger Clemens in shoulder pads. He’s a football player turned baseball player turned 95-m.p.h. pitcher who once struck out 21, including the first eight batters of a game.

His name is Andy Benes, and he’s a junior at the University of Evansville (Ind.), and if you think he sounds like just what the Padres need, wait until Wednesday.

Baseball sources say the Padres, who own the No. 1 pick in Wednesday’s June free-agent draft, will pick Benes, a 6-foot 6-inch, 240-pound right-hander.

“I cannot get involved in speculation,” said Tom Romenesko, the Padre player development director, whose staff has spent the last nine months in search of this pick, which goes to the Padres by virtue of their last-place finish in 1987. “My staff has worked long and hard to look at everybody, and I’m proud of our efforts regardless.”

Benes’ coach, Jim Brownlee, was not so ambiguous.

“The Padres are taking him, you can bet the house on it,” he said from Tempe, Ariz., where Evansville is making its first NCAA regional tournament appearance. “After Thursday night, his fate has been sealed.”

Thursday, in front of Romenesko and Padre General Manager Jack McKeon, Benes pitched his Evansville team to a 1-0 victory over No.1-ranked tournament host Arizona State.

Dealing the Sun Devils their first shutout this season, Benes scattered eight hits and struck out nine, and that’s not half of it. His fastball was clocked at 100 m.p.h. on three occasions, and he was still so strong at the end, he struck out the game’s last hitter at 92 m.p.h.

“Outstanding,” said one major league scout in attendance. “Not only does he have a major league arm, he has a major league heart. He threw inside so hard so many times, we stopped counting potential broken bats at 11.”

Benes, who won’t be 21 until August, was 15-3 this season for hometown Evansville (enrollment 3,000). In 137 innings, he struck out 180 and walked 34 while compiling a 1.51 ERA.

He struck out 21 against North Carolina Wilmington, and he later compiled a 39-inning scoreless streak. It was all a far cry from last year, when, before baseball season, he was a quarterback for Evansville’s 3-8 football team, throwing for 1,378 yards and 10 touchdowns. He also found time, as a tight end, to catch 14 passes for 154 yards.

Perhaps out of weariness, this fall he decided to stick strictly to baseball, and his career took off like one of his high hard ones.

“I decided I had more of a future in baseball. I had to give it everything,” Benes said Friday from Tempe. “I thought about one day doing well. But I never thought it would be like this. I never thought I’d be in this position.”

Benes, who said he has been following Padre box scores in the newspaper, would like nothing better than to play in San Diego.

“I would be happy, no, ecstatic,” he said. “I’d like to play in the city, and it seems like a really good organization. A lot of people have said the Padres are going to take me. I’m just waiting to find out.”

Once he is drafted, the waiting might really begin. Benes is a shoo-in to make the 1988 U.S. Olympic team, which will hold tryouts in mid-June. If he decides to join that team, he will be occupied through the summer and will miss what probably would have been a half-season at double-A Wichita.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m weighing both sides of it,” Benes said.

“If he was my son,” Brownlee said, “I’d advise him to go to the Olympics. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”

Either way, with any of their draft picks, the Padres say they will understand.

“It’s not my position,” Romenesko said, “to say what a young American should or should not do for his country.”