Seeing Clearly Now : Horrific 1984 Beaning a Distant Memory, and With Pressure Off, the Padres’ Dickie Thon Has His Baseball Career Back in Focus

It has been the unspoken question of the Padres’ summer. It involves a shortstop, a fastball in his face and a comeback that no one quite understands.

It has been an unusual question in that the hardest part has been just asking it.

What does Dickie Thon see?

Does he see the baseball? Does he see it off the pitchers’ hand? Does he see it off the turf? It is a baseball he sees, right? It’s not a fuzz ball, is it?

Does he see the way he saw in 1983, the year before the beanball accident, when he was the National League’s best shortstop, hitting .286 with 20 homers and 79 RBIs for the Houston Astros? Or does he see the way he saw last season, when he quit the Astros, not once but twice, in hopeless frustration?

The question attached itself to Thon from his first appearance as a Padre in Yuma this spring. It followed him right through to opening night in, of course, Houston, where for a couple of days he was given so much attention, you’d have thought he was an oil spill.

After batting practice, before infield practice, after games in which he had trouble with a curveball or a grounder . . . always, there was the question.

And never would Thon submit an answer.

“I just wish,” Thon said then, “that all of this would go away.”

Since then, 122 games have passed. Thon has been an integral part of the Padre surge. He has found a home as a platoon shortstop with Garry Templeton for at least another season. He has found a home as a part-time leadoff hitter.

He came here as a curiousity. When he goes home this winter, it will once again be as a baseball player.

And that question, he’s ready for it now.

What does Dickie Thon see?

He sees a new life. He sees a clubhouse where he never used to be a star, where his locker is devoid of unfulfilled promise, his back unburdened by franchise hopes.

And he sees a clubhouse where nobody this season--not once--has asked him about his eye. Not Manager Jack McKeon. Not even trainer Dick Dent.

“Dead issue,” Dent said. “It don’t bother him, it doesn’t bother us.”

He sees acceptance. His limitations, caused by 20-40 uncorrectable vision in that beaned left eye, are being recognized and understood by McKeon, his teammates--and more importantly, by himself.

“Will I ever be the player I was?” Thon asked recently. “I don’t know. But I do know, I’m not worried about that anymore.

“I have decided to be the best player I can be now . And that’s it. I don’t want to be a .240 career hitter, but if that is what 100% of me is, then that is what I will take.”

Thon paused. The admission has not come easy, and will never feel anything but cold. But it is finally there, and for that he is thankful.

“The same player I was?” he asked. “I know if I was 100% of what I was, I would still be the shortstop in Houston. At least I understand that now.”

Finally, he sees a future. For one of the first times since the accident, he sees luck.

“I have never seen him happier, never seen him more excited,” said Vince Jarero, a Houston Spanish language journalist and one of Thon’s closest friends. “Coming to San Diego has been the best thing that’s ever happened to him.”

But the baseball. Does Dickie Thon see the baseball?

Thon heard the question, smiled and said it’s all in how you look at it.

“I have a lot of faith in God, and not just for healing me,” Thon said. “He has made me look at things different. He has made me look at things better.

“Yes, I feel like I’m seeing the baseball. Better than ever.”

For those still wishing to rubber neck, the facts:

April 8, 1984. Pitcher Mike Torrez, then of the New York Mets. The Astrodome. Third inning. One ball, two strikes.

A fastball, crashing into the left side of Thon’s face, glancing off the left ear flap of his batting helmet and then landing on his temple.

“Sounded like a gun went off,” Jarero said.

Silence in the Astrodome. A stretcher. A hospital. A fracture of the inferior orbital rim in the area of the left temple. Swelling in the tissue behind the left eyeball. Now, permanent scarring.

Initial vision in the eye after the accident: 20-300. Current and lasting vision: 20-40.

Dr. William Bryan, the Astros’ team physician, told reporters at the time, and has often repeated since: “The analogy we use is this: If you take a piece of wax paper and wrinkle it up, and then try to straighten it out, it still has wrinkles. The ophthalmologists tell us that’s how the back of Dickie’s eyeball looks.”

A few days into Thon’s hospital stay, his eyes still blackened and misshapen, he was phoned by Torrez. It is Thon who apologized. Says he turned his head the wrong way.

“That’s like Dickie,” Jarero said. “Blame it on himself. Make himself wonder.”

There are no direct quotes here from Thon, because Thon will not discuss the actual beaning incident directly. For most of this season, he was unwilling to discuss the eye, period.

Perhaps it is because at the time of the beaning, he was the National League’s Cal Ripken Jr. He was coming off the great 1983 season and, in five games in 1984, he had gone 6 for 17 (.353) and was on his way again.

“I still have the old tapes,” Thon said. “Sometimes I watch them. Sometimes it does not feel good watching them.

“But if I start thinking about that . . . it makes no sense. There is nothing I can gain.”

He realizes this now, as he has settled down at age 30 to become one of the club’s quiet, tireless and best workers. In his past 19 games he has hit .311 (19 for 61) with 4 doubles and 8 runs scored, lifting his average to .257 with an on-base percentage of .341, fourth on the team. He has also made only four errors in 47 starts at shortstop and one at second base.

When inserted as the leadoff hitter, plenty happens. Of his last 14 times in that spot, he has nine times started a game by reaching base safely, seven times scoring a first-inning run.

“When I look out in the infield before the game and watch the guys take grounders, there is one thing evident about Dickie--you never know whether he’s in the lineup that night or not,” said Greg Riddoch, the Padre first base coach. “ It’s because he always works the same--hard and intense.

“To lose something you love can really make you scramble. You can tell, Dickie is playing like a man who nearly lost something he loved.”

Thon realizes this now. He didn’t back then. In coming back from the beaning, he admits he rushed. And he says the Astros rushed him.

After sitting out the rest of the 1984 season, he came to instructional league that fall and asked that at least during batting practice, the pitchers throw him inside. They did. He did not flinch. In five games, he had five hits.

But while with the Astros, it was never again so easy. After playing in 154 games the year before the injury, he played in only 190 in 1985 and 1986 combined. He hit only .250 with 9 homers and 50 RBIs during those two years. More important, three times during that span he went on the disabled list with “blurred vision.”

Today, he recalls that his vision wasn’t so bad. He said it was the Astros’ pressure on him to become what he once was that wouldn’t allow him to see straight.

“They made it very, very tough for me,” he said. “They didn’t know what I was going through, nobody knows, because nobody had gone through something so terrible before.

“I didn’t feel the way I wanted to feel. I needed time. I needed to come back slow. . . . They wanted me to come back fast. They put me right in there and want me to play like it never happened.”

Some say the rush was understandable, at least forgivable, considering the Astros were on the verge of a pennant, which they nearly won after taking the NL West in 1986.

“Dickie needed time after the injury to sit down and decide what he wanted to do,” Astro second baseman Bill Doran said. “But there just wasn’t time. We had games to win.”

Doran said it was easy to see how the rush affected Thon.

“He became miserable,” Doran said. “Everything was a struggle. He was fighting everything, everybody. He was tired of the questions, tired of the pressure.”

Said Jarero: “The Astros wouldn’t baby him, but it wasn’t a matter of babying him. It was a matter of passion. If the Astros had used any passion, he would still be there.”

In the spring of 1987, Thon had his first violent reaction to that pressure. He quit.

Thon won’t discuss it in detail, but Jarero was there.

“Dickie called me to take him to the airport,” Jarero recalled. “When he got into the car he told me, ‘I can’t see the ball, I can’t see the ball.’

“I told him, ‘I don’t believe you, you have been seeing the ball fine.’ He told me, ‘I don’t care, I’m quitting.’ ”

Two weeks later, in danger of losing his $600,000-plus salary, he returned.

“I needed time,” Thon says today of his absence. “I don’t know why, I just needed time. I needed a rest.”

Upon that return, he was sent to the minor leagues for a month, which he says upset him even more.

“I was treated real bad; they were trying to teach me a lesson,” Thon said.

He was finally recalled from triple-A Tucson May 9. But two month later, on July 3, he quit the Astros again, this time for good. Platooning at shortstop with Craig Reynolds, he had hit .212 in 32 games with 1 homer and 3 RBIs.

“I felt bad, I wasn’t doing my job, I wasn’t contributing,” Thon said. “I wasn’t the same player I was, and I had trouble dealing with that.”

Said Reynolds: “Everyone was pulling so hard for him, and that just made it worse. I think he realized he needed to leave us and get on with his life.”

Last winter, while free agent Thon worked out in his native Puerto Rico with Padre Carmelo Martinez, among others, his agent Bill Landman accepted calls from around the league. Jack McKeon was one of the callers. With little negotiation--Thon, lacking bargaining power, accepted a $300,000 contract--McKeon signed him just before spring training and pronounced this a new beginning.

“We told him and his agent, we’re looking to bring him along slow,” McKeon said. “We thought this would be a good place for him because he could have fun, with no pressure, and come back to his old self slowly. In Houston, he was expected to get to that point too quick.”

In keeping with this theme, the first thing Thon did upon signing was meet with McKeon and the Padre media relations people and ask that he be allowed not to discuss his eye with anyone. They agreed.

Then, in Thon’s first spring batting practice, the opposing pitcher was Padre minor league right-handed submariner Todd Simmons. Larry Bowa, then the manager, saw this and rushed to the cage to tell right-handed hitting Thon he could bat against a safer looking pitcher.

With the wave of hand, Thon stopped Bowa in is tracks and stepped back in the box.

“A lot of people think I had become afraid of the ball,” Thon said recently. “They were wrong. If I’m afraid, I’m not standing in this clubhouse today.”

Thon formalized this sturdy beginning with a grand slam in the Padres’ final spring exhibition game, an 8-3 victory over their triple-A Las Vegas affiliate. While his ensuing months have not been quite so climactic, impressions have been made.

“He’s so much better now than in his last few years in Houston,” Tony Gwynn said. “He is more aggressive, swinging the bat better, doing more things. It seems like the Padres are giving him the space he needs to become the player he can be.”

Added McKeon: “He’s been a real professional. We have nothing but respect for him.”

And finally, it seems, this new Dickie Thon has respect for himself.

“OK, so I’m on the bench, I’m not playing every day--I will not complain,” he said. “I have learned, sometimes you swallow pride. Sometimes it’s very hard. But you do.

“I’m just happy for the chance to be here. I’m just lucky.”

Thon feels so lucky that he is the worst person to ask about this winter’s contract negotiations, even though he will be a free agent.

“I have no idea that I even am a free agent,” he said. “I haven’t thought past the end of the season. I just wanted this year, just one. Anything else is gravy.”

Who said that man seeing 20-40 out of one eye couldn’t have 20-20 vision? After four cloudy years, Dickie Thon is indeed seeing better than ever.