Looks Are Deceiving: Joyner’s Sweet Face, Mean Swing Prove It

There ought to be a law against Wally Joyner. People should look their part. Nobody that dangerous should look that innocent.

A guy with a face that angelic should not go around busting up no-hitters, driving in 100 runs a year, batting .300, slugging home runs, terrorizing pitchers.

Jack the Ripper should have fangs. Attila the Hun should look as if he drinks blood. A lion should look like a lion.

When you see Wally Joyner, you have to remind yourself that choirboys turn into ax murderers, too, and that Billy the Kid had pimples.

Still, Joyner overdoes it. It’s almost a case of false representation. He should at least have a warning label. A pitcher looks down the barrel and sees this bright-eyed baby face staring back at him, he doesn’t know whether to give it a fastball or a lollipop.

It isn’t fair. You look at Wade Boggs, or even Darryl Strawberry, up there and you know you’ve got trouble. You look at Wally Joyner and you feel as if you might get nailed as a child molester.

Joyner doesn’t even have muscles. What he does have is the most exquisite timing in the league. He sees to it that the ballistics are just right, that bat meets ball at the precise optimum instant. He does not have the raw strength of Jose Canseco to overpower mistakes. He cannot hit a pitch that he’s fooled on 450 feet. On the other hand, Joyner is seldom that badly fooled on a pitch.

“He’s one of the most consistent hitters we face,” offers rival Manager Bobby Valentine. “He seems to hit all my pitchers with the same skill--knuckleballers like Charlie Hough, hard-throwing left-handers. He never seems to have a bad day. Heck, he never seems to have a bad at-bat.”

It’s entirely possible that Wally Joyner could be a batting-champion type of hitter, could raise his average 30 points, if he wanted to change his style. Joyner, who speaks of himself in the third person, the way kings of England and fleet admirals do, is one who thinks so.

“There is no doubt Wally Joyner could become a higher-average hitter,” he agrees. “But that’s not what they want Wally Joyner for. I could drag bunt, I could shorten my stroke, I could find the holes in the infield. But Wally Joyner is the No. 3 hitter. For the team to be successful, Wally Joyner has to drive in 100 runs. Wally Joyner has to worry that pitcher.”

Valentine agrees. “When he first came up, we thought he was going to be the kind of guy who would try to beat you with a single. We played the infield in and the outfield shallow. Turned out he was the opposite. He’d beat you with that double to the wall, the home run over it.”

Joyner learned early the value of the big game. Although he lit up the league his first year with a .290 batting average, 100 runs batted in, 22 home runs and 27 doubles, he finished second in the rookie-of-the-year balloting to a guy who finished 50 points below him in average. But although Canseco batted only .240, he also hit 11 more home runs than Joyner and drove in 17 more runs.

Joyner was replacing a player, Rod Carew, who had been in that contact-hitter mold. Carew was one of the great bat manipulators of all time, but his RBI totals were only 31 and 39 his last 2 seasons. Joyner knew he needed another dimension if he wasn’t to become just the guy who thought he was Rod Carew.

He became Wally Wonderful in the banners unfurled from the upper decks at Anaheim Stadium, which became Wally World. He was the first really home-grown hero the franchise had.

You get a measure of his importance to the Angels when you recall the great sad story of 1986. That was when the Angels and the luckless Gene Mauch came within a strike of getting into their first World Series.

You wonder what might have happened in that game if Joyner had been in it. He wasn’t. He was out with a life-threatening staphylococcus infection and missed the final, critical 4 games. He was batting .455 for the series at the time, with a home run, 2 doubles, 2 runs batted in and 3 runs scored.

So he never did get to the “Wally World Series.” His second season was an enlargement on his first. This time, he did catch--and pass--Canseco. He had 34 home runs, 3 more than Canseco, and 117 RBIs, 4 more than Canseco.

This season, though, has been a disappointment. Joyner is flying far in arrears of Canseco, who is having an MVP-type of season.

Joyner acknowledges that. “A lot of players would have liked to have had the season Wally Joyner had this year,” he notes. But Wally Joyner is not one of them.

The numbers are there--.296 batting average, 30 doubles, 84 RBIs. But only 13 home runs.

Did the home runs fall because he began to go more for flare hits, soft liners?

Joyner shakes his head. “I had a bad stroke,” he says. “I was fighting to find my groove. I was only hitting .260 with 5 home runs up to the All-Star break. I didn’t have the Wally Joyner swing.”

He believes he found it in the second half. But even when he was struggling, he didn’t shorten his swing.

“Wally Joyner goes up there looking to drive the ball,” says Wally Joyner. “Wally Joyner is trying to hit it up the alleys, off the wall. That’s his role.”

His role is also to stay 15 years old forever. But if you ask an American League pitcher what Wally Joyner looks like, he’ll tell you, “Oh, he’s about 9 feet tall, got this blue-black beard, and he glowers a lot and chews tobacco and looks like he’s on loan from the Raiders.”

And if you protest, he’ll scowl. “If you want to know what he looks like to me, that’s it! If you want to know what he looks like in a mirror, go ask someone who doesn’t have to pitch to him and try to get him out.”