THE PADRES’ FUTURE : Top Pick Is Product of Another World : ‘All-American’ Label Fits Well, Helps Make Andy Benes Special

Before they set off last winter to find the best amateur baseball player in the country, the nation’s No. 1 pick in the June draft, the man who would keep their franchise clothed and their careers fed, Padre scouts agreed on only one thing. If they had to, they would find and draft a player from another world.

And so they have.

This world is its own kingdom, high and alone on the north shore of the Ohio River. It is 12 miles from the nearest highway connection to the rest of the world, 112 miles from the nearest major airport, isolated by the river itself.

When the dark and muddy Ohio reaches town, it curiously decides to go in the other direction, making nearly a 180-degree turn and leaving the 140,000 people here with winters of ice and summers of the kind of humidity in which one can never quite shake the feeling of being dressed in a woolen blanket.

In 1817, a man named Col. Robert M. Evans helped buy part of the city when the founder, who had no money to build it up, was ready to dump the whole production over the bluffs. The locals believed this purchase made such good sense--and still do--that they named the town after him.

Thus it became Evansville, a city of forests, farmlands and a new twist on an old joke. If it’s not the end of the world, the residents are pleased that at least they see it from here.

“It’s the kind of place,” says John Bertram, “where people don’t need any different and don’t know any different.”

Bertram is testing the approximate speed of sound in his pickup truck, offering brief glimpses of the hills of north Evansville while talking about his best friend. His friend would normally be in the truck right now, rolling around in the back with the baseball gloves and bats, howling about youth and invincibility and life as an heir to a kingdom.

But around noon on June 1, something happened to this best friend that changed all that. The friend’s name is Andy Benes. He was a junior pitcher from the University of Evansville, and on that day he was made the nation’s No. 1 baseball draft pick by the Padres.

Upon one 6-foot 6-inch, 230-pound body that threw 95 m.p.h. was instantly laid the cornerstone of a franchise’s future, and the Padres wanted to shout. Benes held a news conference by telephone with people in Southern California, setting a personal record for talking to people he did not know. He held another news conference here, during which he hugged his young wife and tried on his new jersey.

The Padres were so excited, they attempted to sign him immediately, and even talked about bringing him to San Diego a couple of days later and putting him on parade.

But then it hit the Padres just as it hits any intruder after all of 10 minutes here. This being another world, there would be other rules. And to understand these rules, one must first understand Andy Benes.

This was a 20-year-old who had rarely ventured west of St. Louis, or east of Ohio, and who this time last year wondered if he would be lucky enough to be drafted at all. He chose Evansville over scholarship offers from the colleges of Valparaiso and Wabash.

“Great choices,” recalled Bill Baumeyer, 58, his former American Legion coach. “People think Valparaiso is a South American country, and Wabash is a damn railroad.”

This was a 20-year-old who already had a wife and a baby on the way. He married the former Jennifer Byers on March 21, 1987, and missed just one game to do it. He had dated her since he was 15. The first time he took her to a prom, he couldn’t drive.

“Why not get married?” he asked at the time of their wedding, one of the biggest the Evansville Country Club has ever seen. “I was always at her house, anyway.”

This was a 20-year-old who was such a family man that last summer, he nearly cost himself any chance at being this year’s top pick when homesickness induced him to leave his summer baseball league in Iowa just before the playoffs.

The reason? “My wife was in Evansville,” Benes explained, “and I feel a husband should be with his wife.”

This was a 20-year-old whose financial adviser is his father-in-law, an Evansville businessman named Phil Byers who has never done this sort of thing before.

“I never thought it would take up so much of my time,” Byers said.

This was a 20-year-old who actually felt bad last winter while he watched the United States take a powder in the Winter Olympics. It was then that he expressed interest in pitching for the Olympic baseball team this year, even if it meant that he wouldn’t be seen by the Padres, or earn their money, until next winter.

“I know it’s not cool to say the kid is patriotic,” said Bob Boxell, Evansville sports information director. “But that’s it. That’s the truth.”

This was a 20-year-old who sealed his pact with the Olympic team when he learned that his wife could do some of the traveling with him.

“It was important that my wife be able to be with me,” he said. “A young marriage needs that. That is what’s important to me.”

In all, a different world, and one in which the Padres have had difficulty working. As of Thursday, Benes was one of baseball’s last top unsigned picks. When he does sign, probably for the richest contract ever given an amateur player, he still will be many months from wearing one of their uniforms, thanks to the Olympics.

But the Padres say they finally understand what the people of Evansville have long understood. And they agree on one thing.

“I just hope the Padres realize what a different, special kind of person they’ve got,” Baumeyer said.

“We do,” said Padre farm director Tom Romenesko. “We know exactly what we are getting. And we can’t wait.”

While walking at the Evansville news conference announcing his June 1 selection, Benes quietly asked Boxell:

“Do I have to say something?”

Boxell just smiled.

“You realized,” Boxell recalled later, “how all of this had happened so quickly.”

These days, Benes (pronounced BEN-ess) looks and acts the part. He talks easily, smiles outrageously easily and has the subtle wit often found in those who know they also have the last laugh.

He meets a visitor in an Evansville hotel lobby, where he greets the desk clerks, sales manager and almost everyone else who passes. Wearing swim trunks with his wallet stuck inside, Reeboks and a wrinkled T-shirt, he has thrown himself well into baseball’s idea of a national No. 1 pick.

“But anybody who would tell you they thought he would go this far is a liar,” Baumeyer said. “Hell, this was a kid nobody wanted.”

Even though he played three sports in high school, Benes was best known, as almost every athlete is down here, for his basketball. People still talk about the time he scored 42 of Central High’s 61 points in a 1985 playoff loss; some even call it the best playoff performance in city history.

“But only reason I scored so much was because the coach wouldn’t let anybody else shoot,” Benes recalled with a shrug. “I heard him forbid it in the huddle during a timeout.”

Turns out he was too slow for big-time basketball and just OK in football, and as his high school’s No. 3 pitcher, he was not talented enough to turn many baseball coaches’ heads. He finally signed with Evansville only when Baumeyer called the Aces’ coach, Jim Brownlee, and told him the kid was worth a chance. He was signed in a parking lot after a sandlot game.

“I wanted to get everybody together before anybody changed their minds,” Baumeyer recalled.

As an Evansville freshman who also played on the football team, Benes was just 4-6 with a 5.92 earned-run average. As a sophomore, he was just 7-5 with a 4.38 ERA.

But last summer, after that season, he decided to devote himself strictly to baseball--”just to see what would happen,” Benes said. “I figured if I had any future, it would be there.”

Not coincidentally, that was the summer he grew up. It happened in Clarinda, Iowa, a tiny town with a team in the Jayhawk Leagues, one of several summer leagues to occupy college stars’ time.

Just by going there, Benes was making a statement about his intentions. But then by staying there for most of the summer, and then returning there after a brief battle with guilt, he confirmed to the baseball world that he meant to find out just how strong he could be.

“I think the population of the town was 5,000, if you count the animals and everything,” recalled Benes, who brought his new wife out several weeks after his arrival. Together they found their first apartment. The worst of apartments.

“It had a bathroom the size of a chair,” Benes recalled.

The size of the bedroom didn’t matter, because the ceiling leaked and they couldn’t sleep there. For the entire summer, their bed rested on the living room floor.

Which wouldn’t have mattered--”We wouldn’t have had any company, anyway”--except for the tornadoes.

One night during a terrible storm, they were snuggled up when the apartment started shaking. Benes calmed his wife, saying nothing bad was happening as long as the town’s emergency sirens didn’t go off. A minute later, the sirens went off.

The couple grabbed their clothes and ran down to a neighbor’s more stable house, arriving soaking wet in the middle of the night.

After a couple of months of this, Jennifer Benes returned to Evansville. A few weeks later, after he walked two consecutive batters in an important relief appearance in a game just before the playoffs, Benes joined her.

“I was so disgusted with everything, I didn’t know if I could stand doing baseball for the next 10 or so years of my life,” he said.

Friends heard that he was home and bombarded the house with phone calls and urgings to return. Finally, it was Jennifer who threw him out.

“She told me I had a great opportunity, and I couldn’t blow it,” he said. “And she was right. I just didn’t want anything to hurt my marriage.”

He returned and pitched a couple of great games in the annual National Baseball Congress Tournament. He then played fall baseball for the first time and allowed just four runs in 50 innings. By winter, he was nearing the top of every scout’s chart.

Then came March 6, in his team’s fifth game of the season, against North Carolina Wilmington. Benes struck out the first seven batters and then darn near kept it up, striking out 21 and walking two in nine innings.

“The day after that game, I talked to 10 scouts I’d never seen before,” Benes said. “I figured something was up.”

Then came the Padres, whose officials were unanimous about him after they watched him hand the eventual College World Series runner-up, Arizona State, its only shutout of the season in an NCAA regional. Along with the Padres came the chance to forget the Padres for a second and join the Olympics.

The Padres thought that it would be a tough choice. Turns out it was no choice.

We pause here to talk about all-American and all that stuff.

Benes does not smoke. He does not dip snuff. If he can’t play pro baseball, he won’t kill himself--he’ll be a pharmaceutical salesman. He has a 3.1 grade-point average in a schedule of classes that include puffs such as organic chemistry. The only time he has gotten a speeding ticket, he was rushing to make a benefit basketball shooting contest.

One of the wildest things he’s ever done is drive toward St. Louis late one night with his friend Bertram on an impulsive trip.

“But a half hour into the trip, we turned around,” Benes said. “We had forgotten we had a high school game the next morning against a team that was 0-25. We couldn’t lose to them.”

Even today, he throws batting practice to his old American Legion team, Eugene Pate Post 265. He stops by and visits with his old high school coach. The first thing he did, after he was told to give a news conference after his No. 1 selection, was to phone Bertram.

“He said with it being his first press conference, he wanted me in the audience for support,” Bertram said. “When I got there, he hugged me.”

Evansville is a town where, down by the river, the Four Freedoms Monument sits. Up the road from there is the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Coliseum. Every summer, the city throws a Freedom Festival.

And Andy Benes is a man who would turn down the Olympics to spend the summer playing double-A baseball in Wichita?

“I never, ever thought I would have an opportunity to play on the Olympics,” Benes said. “Shoot, I watched the Pan-Am games last summer and thought those guys are really lucky.

“Man, this Olympics is once in a lifetime. You have to realize that. I’ve realized that.”

When it comes time to report to the Padres this spring, Benes said he hopes everybody will realize just where he is coming from.

“I don’t know what to expect when I get with the San Diego organization, but I do know one thing,” Benes said. “I don’t want people to see me as some kind of unbelievable guy. I don’t want to be different. I don’t want people looking at me.”

In other words, he wants to be treated with the same fanfare that accompanied the signing of the only other top baseball player from this city. He was a Memorial High kid taken back in 1979, way back in the 19th round, just another kid from another world with the slimmest of chances. Kid by the name of Don Mattingly.