THE WORLD SERIES : OAKLAND ATHLETICS vs. LOS ANGELES DODGERS : Weiss Gives It Old Soft Shoe in Filling Big Void for A’s

The way Walt Weiss sees it, if a man is dropped into giant shoes, the only way to make them fit is to take giant steps.

It doesn’t take a rookie to figure that out. Take Sunday night, Game 2 of the World Series, Jeff Hamilton batting for the Dodgers, Weiss playing shortstop for the Oakland Athletics.

Ground ball hit deep in the hole, almost directly behind third baseman Carney Lansford. Weiss decides to chase it. He takes one step. Two steps. Three, four, five, six, seven steps.

He lunges and sticks out his glove and the ball finds it. With all the motion not unlike that of a man trying on a suit coat 2 sizes too small, he spins and throws. The ball is a strike, more than one person in the crowd gasps, Hamilton is out by a full step at first, the inning is over.

“Doing that ,” Weiss said later, “is what makes me feel good.”

Perhaps also pleasing to Weiss was the batter standing on deck, staring at his play like everyone else, was Alfredo Griffin. You know, the man with the big shoes.

“I think the reason I can handle things now, in the pressure of all this postseason stuff,” Weiss said, “is because I’ve already had to handle replacing Alfredo.”

Perhaps a stronger verb can replace handle . Considered the best young defensive shortstop in baseball, a shoo-in for the rookie of the year award, Weiss entered the playoffs after committing just 15 errors in 147 regular-season games, and just 1 error after July 8.

Weiss, who batted .250 during the season, hit .333 (5 for 15) against the Boston Red Sox in the American League championship series. One of those hits was a ninth-inning, two-out game-winning single to beat Lee Smith in Game 2. In the World Series, however, Weiss has gone 0 for 7 and has hit only one ball out of the infield. “There have been a lot of challenges thrown at him this year, and he has accepted every one,” A’s hitting instructor Jim Lefebvre said. “He is a tough kid. Period.”

Tough enough to be just 1 of 8 A’s to show up in 90-degree weather Monday for an optional workout. Tough enough to joke with the hordes of media and offer his own special wisdom.

“Hey, look at it this way,” Weiss said with a chuckle when asked about his team’s chances. “The Dodgers just won their 2 games before we did.”

Look at it another way. After what Weiss has been through this year, both awkward and amusing, this World Series stuff isn’t anything.

--Take the way he replaced Griffin. On Dec. 11, the A’s traded their shortstop to the Dodgers and suddenly Weiss was the team’s starter.

“Right from spring training, I heard it from the fans--’This guy was just handed a job, Alfredo would have made that play, we need Alfredo back,’ ” Weiss recalled. “It was hard, and I had to go through it pretty much by myself.”

This is because, for one, when both he and Griffin were on the A’s together for a month last season and a couple of spring trainings, Griffin rarely spoke to him.

“Maybe a ‘Hi,’ and that was it,” he said. “I guess at this level, you just don’t interact with guys at the same position.”

Weiss said he never disliked Griffin for it, but he was never completely comfortable with the way they parted ways until this World Series.

“I’m sitting there in front of my locker on the first day of workouts in Los Angeles and here he comes, Griffin, right into the clubhouse and over to me,” Weiss recalled. “And he congratulates me. Tells me how good I’ve done. You don’t know how good that made me feel.”

--Take the way he was greeted by his old New York neighborhood when he and the A’s returned to play in Yankee Stadium.

The good people of Suffern, N.Y., his hometown about 45 minutes north of New York, held a lottery. The winners who would receive game tickets and a bus ride to Yankee Stadium.

The only qualifications were that they not be afraid to stand up in their outfield seats amid all those Yankee fans and shake green-and-gold “Weiss Watcher” signs.

Weiss thought it was all going to be sort of cute. Until he learned there weren’t just 10 or 20 winners, but 540.

“Amazing,” Weiss said. “I didn’t know hardly any of them, but they are all out there cheering for me. My teammates are getting all over me and . . . what the heck, it was still nice.”

And in the hometown pressure department, it was nothing.

“Oh no,” Weiss said. “You have to understand, the local newspaper in Suffern had been running my stats on the front page since the season started. Every day.”

These days he is on many front pages. Yet his face no longer changes color.

“A year ago, I had no idea I would be here,” he said. “But that’s OK. After this season, it’s almost like I belong here.”