ALOMAR & SONS : BASEBALL : Three From Same Family Keys to Organization’s Future

Enough about these Alomar men. Enough about this Padre father and his two Padre sons who, if they were any tighter or more talented, would cause the average San Diego family to injure itself rushing to the therapist.

Spend 10 minutes in this washed-out little city on Caribbean Sea, in the middle-class house with the statue of Jesus in the front yard, and you sense any story should instead begin with two different, more important people. The Alomar women.

Meet household boss Maria and her oldest child, Sandia (age 23), who have spent a lifetime doting and worrying over Sandy the Tough One, Sandy Jr. the Different One and Roberto the Intense One.

Sandy, a former big-league second baseman, is the Padres’ third base coach. Oldest son Sandy Jr., 22, a catcher, was last year voted Topps minor league player of the year for the Padre triple-A farm team in Las Vegas. Second son Roberto, 20, a second baseman, played like a rookie of the year candidate for Padres in 1988.

Big jobs, big futures. Yet the Alomar women still buy most of the clothes for their men. The Alomar women, whenever they are in the same city, still cook most of the dinners for their men. Whenever they are apart, they still have hour-long phone conversations in the middle of the night with their men, adding to a monthly bill that average s $200.

And on bright Saturday mornings such as this, the Alomar women still like to sit around and talk about their men. They probably do this better than anything.

Sandia: “Did they tell you what happened this summer with Santino (Sandy Jr.)?”

Marie: “We tell you. We get a phone call from Las Vegas.”

Sandia: “It’s Santino. He calls every day. We think it’s nothing.

Marie: “Then he tells us, guess what. He just got married.”

Sandia: “We said, this is joke. Then we scream.”

Marie: “We scream.”

Sandia: “Then we talk to him for a while, and say, OK, if he is happy, we are happy.”

Maria: “I finally think, really, it is good that my boys go out and be independent.”

Sandia: “You do? Is that why, when Santino first went to states to play baseball, you cried so hard you spent a week with your head in a towel?”

In a story such as this, featuring a middle-class family that rises from a forgotten middle-class town to the edge of stardom in the professional baseball world, there is a tendency to overemphasize the word family. In the case of the Alomars of Salinas and San Diego, that is impossible.

The Padres signed Sandy Jr. in 1983, followed by his father in 1984, followed by Roberto in 1985. Since then, no organization in baseball has had three such leading figures with the same last name. No other big league park has an organist who plays the theme from “All in the Family” seemingly once per foul ball.

If this is giving you a Huxtable hangover, just wait.

On a recent drive through this sun-washed fishing community, a town passed over by the freeway several years ago and left to age in the obscurity of peeled paint and old men on park benches, Roberto Alomar makes three stops. One is to admire a mural of his father, Sandy, painted on the side of his childhood stadium. Another is to share a handshake and some stories with his Uncle Dimitri, who owns four faded walls and a fuzzy television set that pass for a bar. A final stop is at a downtown pharmacy, owned by a man he calls his second father, Nestor Pabon.

When he finally returns home, he is greeted by two cousins inside the house and two friends outside who wish the pleasure of washing his car. Inside and out.

“That’s why Robbie would be foolish to ever leave our town,” Sandy Jr. says later from his new home with wife Christie in Phoenix. “Everybody there want to wash his car.”

Everyone but Sandy Jr. still lives in this home, the same home in which father Sandy lived while spending 15 years as a major league second baseman. It’s neither big nor ornate, but it has a room full of trophies and the dusty scent of memories and just right now, nobody can think of leaving. They gather around the telephone almost once a day to talk to Sandy Jr., who is sometimes sad that he left for Phoenix.

After Sandy Jr. hangs up, they like to talk about the Last Great Year, 1985 in Charleston, S.C., when Sandy coached the Padres’ Class A team while Roberto and Sandy Jr. played there. Maria moved in for the summer, and together they lived in an apartment. With the exception of stray dogs and fish pastries and free car washes, it was almost like home.

“That was some year,” Maria said.

Success will probably never allow it to happen again. Just last season, although Sandy and Maria and Roberto were together in San Diego, Roberto lived in a separate condo.

“I’m old enough to start living with myself,” Roberto said.

“But then why,” his mother asked him from across the room, “you still always come over for dinner?”

The story of this family’s success is only overshadowed by the fingerprint success has left. This was once just a family whose father, Sandy, a retired baseball hero, owned the corner Mobil gas station. This was it.

“People are always asking me if I think we got lucky,” Sandy says. “What is luck? We just live like we always live, and these things happen.”

The chief and most unfair thing to happen has been a placing of the two boys together, in the same sentence and same mindset, almost making them seem like twins.

Yeah, and DeVito and Schwarzenegger are twins.

As much as you would like to think the two Alomar boys are alike, they are different.

Start with Roberto’s small build (6 feet) vs. Sandy Jr.’s large build (6-5). Move to Roberto’s light skin and Sandy Jr.’s dark skin. Then go deeper.

“They are very, very different,” Sandia said. “Two people.”

Begin with this: Roberto was always the baseball player. Sandy Jr. was always the one who was bored by it.

“They would go to the park at the same time,” Maria remembered, “but while Robert would stay all night, Santino would leave and go to a movie.”

Roberto had to be a second baseman, just like his father. Sandy Jr. had to be anything but a second baseman.

“I want to be something somebody in my family is not ,” Sandy Jr. said.

Roberto had to win. Sandy Jr. just had to have fun.

“We would play Monopoly, and he would have to kick my butt,” Sandy Jr. said. “We go to the park, and he always has to hit first. He says, ‘I don’t hit first, nobody hits.’ ”

This is because Roberto had stated early that he wanted to be a baseball player, and a winner. Sandy Jr. wanted to be a pilot. And a dirt-bike racer.

“Even as a boy, Roberto have his game face on,” Maria said. “Sandy Jr., for a while, we didn’t think he would ever play. He did different things.”

Roberto has never even dreamed of quitting the game. Sandy Jr. actually quit for a couple of years, between the ages of 12 and 14, to race his dirt bikes.

“I am into excitement, dangerous things,” said Sandy Jr., who only rejoined the baseball world when a Juvenile League coach picked him up while he was working at his dad’s gas station and begged him to replace their injured catcher. “I didn’t find dangerous things in baseball. I was bored.”

So there is jealousy right? Their brotherhood ends where the sharp edges of their values begin, right?

“No, that is what is interesting,” Sandy said. “The boys are still family.”

“We fight,” Sandy Jr. said. “But not fight fight.”

They rarely fought as boys because their father was always there with the ultimate punishment.

“He’d grab our gloves and bats and tell us, no fighting, or I hide these,” Sandy Jr. said. “We smart enough to stop.”

And they have rarely fought as men. The only apparent jealousy between the two occurs when Sandy Jr. wonders how things could come so easy for Roberto, a wonder shared by many.

“Sometimes during school, I would not go to the park with my father because I have to study for test,” Sandy Jr. said. “Roberto bring his books to the park and study between taking grounders. We both take test, and while I get an ‘A,’ he still gets a ‘B.’ I ask him, ‘How in the hell do you do that?’ ”

Similar feelings arose again last season when, according to friends, Sandy Jr. became as mad at Roberto as his character would allow. Remember when Roberto was the last player cut from the Padres last spring? Remember when he spent an hour crying about it? When he returned to the hotel, Sandy Jr. really gave him something to cry about.

“I ask him, ‘Who do you think you are?’ ” Sandy Jr. said. “I tell him, ‘You are given a better chance than most of us young guys. We had no chance to make the team.’ I tell him, ‘You are now a minor leaguer like us, so you should like being with us.’ ”

Once at Las Vegas, even though he was only there a couple of weeks, Roberto continued to pout, not doing the dishes when asked by his roommate brother and another roommate, Joey Cora.

“I would just step in and wash them, no big deal,” Cora said. “It was just the little stuff all brothers fight about.”

“All I think is big leagues,” Roberto said. “I not think of anything else.”

Today they are the best of friends again. The minute Roberto made the big leagues, Sandy Jr. became his personal cheerleader, often encouraging him over the phone.

“He is more than my friend, he is my brother,” Sandy Jr. said. “My family.”

And when Sandy Jr. said he was getting married, Roberto did not scream.

“Good for him,” Roberto said. “I don’t know if I do it, but he like it, so he do it.”

Sandy Jr. laughed.

“I just didn’t plan a big wedding,” he said from Phoenix. “I just wanted to do something different.”

So he has. So have all the Alomars.