Santiago (2 Homers) Pleads Case

Whether he wants to be traded or doesn’t want to be traded--poor Benito Santiago just can’t make up his mind--the Padre catcher says one thing is clear.

“In my opinion,” Santiago said Tuesday afternoon, “the Padres would be dopes to trade me.”

A few hours later, in a game against the Atlanta Braves, his opinion counted for something--three things, to be exact.

A home run in the second inning. A two-run home run in the fourth. A run scored, after a single, in the seventh.

By the time the red clay had settled and the 6,730 fans had climbed over empty seats and out of desolate Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, the Padres had beaten the sorry Braves, 5-1, and a couple of other things were clear.

-- The Braves are more baffled by Eric Show than even his own teammates. In pitching his seventh complete game, the most by a Padre pitcher in four years, Show held the Braves to four hits and beat them for the 14th time in 17 career decisions.

-- Santiago’s most productive night in a year still couldn’t make him decide whether he is happy with the Padres or not. This means he probably never will get it figured out.

“Sometimes I get up in the morning and think I’ve got to get out of here. Other times, I want to stay,” said Santiago, last year’s NL rookie of the year who this year has been plagued by inconsistency, mental mistakes, and the background noise from Las Vegas’ Sandy Alomar Jr., who many scouts agree is the best catcher in triple-A.

Before responding Tuesday night with his bat, Santiago has mostly responded in anger. When he has slumped and been benched for Mark Parent--just 22 times in 111 games--he has protested that when your fielding is possibly the best in the league, who needs hitting?

When he was dropped to seventh in the batting order because he was swinging every time the pitcher wound up, he protested that guys who have 34-game hitting streaks deserve more respect.

Only recently, after several discussions with Manager Jack McKeon, has he settled down. A good indication is that entering Tuesday’s game, he had drawn seven walks in his past nine games after drawing just 13 in his previous 89.

“A record,” he said of the walks. “I feel like I’ve walked 100 times.”

And then came Tuesday night’s game, which turned out to be his first three-RBI game since the first day of last year’s hitting streak. It was only the second two-homer game by a Padre this year.

“This is a good night for me, eh?” he asked after his fifth and sixth homers, giving him 26 RBIs.

He later turned serious. “Sometimes I’m happy here. Sometimes I’m not. I don’t know what they are going to do, and I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Earlier he had warned: “There’s not too many catchers in the big leagues. When you find one, it’s hard to turn them away.”

The problem here, and the reason Santiago’s unhappiness is worth more than a crying towel, is that the Padres have found two catchers. After 92 games at Las Vegas, Alomar is hitting .297 with nine doubles, five triples, 16 homers and 71 RBIs.

It appears that one of them must be traded this winter. Until Santiago’s recent problems, it was always assumed that it would be Alomar. But now the Padres are asking themselves, when does a rookie of the year become a sophomore jinx?

“We’re not worried about it,” McKeon said. “Those things usually have a way of working themselves out.”

Said Santiago: “I know that if they want both of us on the same team, it will be the first time in baseball that two catchers will be in the game at the same time. We’ve both got to play. And I’m not going to play another position.”

On Tuesday night, they wouldn’t have wanted to move him. After the Padres scored a run in the first on Tony Gwynn’s RBI single, Santiago was the second hitter to face Atlanta ace Zane Smith in the second. He launched the second pitch, a changeup, just over the left-field wall to make it 2-0.

Two innings later, with Carmelo Martinez on first after a single, Santiago hit Smith’s fifth pitch, a curve, to a spot several yards to the right of his first homer. This made it 4-0, and Roberto Alomar drove Santiago in with the final run after Santiago’s single and Smith’s wild pitch in the seventh.

“I’m waiting for the ball, I’m not getting myself out . . . but it’s still not easy,” Santiago said.

It seemed exactly that easy for Show, who was touched only by Ron Gant’s homer in the eighth.

“I don’t think it has anything to do with owning a team,” protested Show, who is 3-1 against the Braves this year. “It’s just a matter of things happening at the right time when I’ve played them.”

Of course, not everything. He actually made Dale Murphy, the Braves’ star and nice guy, mad by hitting him in the first inning with a pitch that ricocheted off his knee and hit his elbow. Murphy actually glared at the mound before he ran to first base.

“That surprised me. He’s one of my heroes,” Show said.

Padre Notes

Randy Ready started at third base in place of Chris Brown Tuesday, even though Brown was healthy and a left-hander (Zane Smith) was pitching for the Braves. Although Manager Jack McKeon refused to confirm this, suspicions are that Ready, who had hit .406 in his last 11 games (13 for 32), may have put Brown on the bench for an indefinite period. Brown committed an error that cost the Padres a game Aug. 3 against Atlanta, and last weekend he went 0 for 6 against Cincinnati and left five men on base. “I’m just giving everyone a chance to play,” protested McKeon. Said the soft-spoken Ready: “Just glad to be in there.” . . . In preparation for what will be a barrage of off-season trade rumors involving catchers Benito Santiago and Sandy Alomar Jr., get this: Earlier this summer, Santiago and Alomar were traded for each other. That’s right, in an off-season transaction in the Puerto Rican winter league, Santurce traded Alomar to San Juan, even up, for Santiago. The deal was spurred when Alomar had a disagreement with the Santurce general manager over the small matter of not being paid while he was injured. “So you see, we know all about being traded,” Santiago said. . . . If pitcher Ed Whitson thought he was slumping Sunday when he gave up three earned runs in 5 innings and lost, 4-3, to Cincinnati, he learned better Monday. At a lake near Atlanta, he went bass fishing with Andy Hawkins, Ready and Keith Moreland . . . and was the only one to catch nothing. “I had one on my line, but he fell off as he got into the boat,” said Whitson, the most avid fisherman of the four. No big deal. They fished for only seven hours.

Stanley Jefferson was back in the lineup Tuesday after he missed two days with the flu. The Padres hope the time off gave the struggling Jefferson time to contemplate remarks such as the one made by Cincinnati relief pitcher Rob Murphy, whose only out in a terrible performance Friday was a strikeout of Jefferson. In Sunday’s editions of The Cincinnati Enquirer, Murphy was quoted as saying: “I had nothing. My slider was awful. The 0-and-2 pitch I struck Jefferson out on--my girlfriend wouldn’t have swung at that pitch.” In 74 at-bats this year, Jefferson has struck out 13 times.