THE MANAGERS : MASTER SALESMAN : Believing in Padres Is One Thing; Getting His Players to Buy It Is What Sets Manager Jack McKeon Apart

It is one day before the start of the San Diego Padres’ 1989 spring training, and one important club official is still home.

He is sitting at a table in a crowded room on the first level of San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium. There are nearly 300 people seated in front of him, many of them holding up post cards and waving them wildly. On one side of each card is a lucky number. On the other side is this man’s picture.

He is Jack McKeon, known widely as Trader Jack. Welcome to “The Trader Jack Show.”

“OK, OK, OK,” McKeon shouts into the microphone, staring above the flapping cards. “We have a prize here of one white Trader Jack hat. And the winner is number . . . 131. (Scream from the back of the room) Oh, how sweet, that lady has been coming here every week and finally she wins. Wonderful.”

One word about Jack McKeon. He is not the Padres’ radio announcer. He is not the Padres’ mascot. He is not even their general manager anymore.

He is their manager. He holds the same job held in other cities by Tony LaRussa, Dave Johnson, Sparky Anderson. But it is unlikely that on this final Friday night before spring training, any of them is doing a variety radio show with a live audience, giving away clothing adorned with big pictures of his face.

“OK, all right, good people, our next prize is a Jack of All Trades T-shirt, a lovely shirt,” McKeon says. “The number is . . . 99 (More screams). Oh my, we’re giving you winners all night long.”

Carmelo Martinez, the team’s left fielder, has been jogging around the stadium. He stops outside the door of this strange place. He hears his manager, he hears the laughter, he thinks he smells hot dogs, which he does, because McKeon’s shows come fully equipped with concessions.

Martinez is met by Bill Beck, Padre media relations director.

“Hey, come on in,” Beck says. “Jack wants to introduce you.”

Martinez considers it for all of four seconds.

“No way, man” he says, slipping back into the darkness.

Through the thick smoke that assembles daily in the manager’s office at Yuma’s Kroc Complex, you can make out a pair of glasses and a mustache. You assume it is Jack McKeon. Then he puts down his cigar and speaks, and you are certain.

“Hey, hey,” McKeon says. “What I am, is a salesman. I sell confidence. I sell attitude. I sell winning.”

He began this spring needing to sell his players on risking their lungs to visit him in that office, where he smokes at least seven cigars, or half of his daily allotment.

Says red-eyed outfielder John Kruk: “It’s like a pool hall in there.”

But he has since engaged in a far easier task: selling his players on last season, when they became sold on him. On May 28, he came down from his post as general manager to replace the fired Larry Bowa and serve as a manager for the first time in a decade.

McKeon was 57. He was round and gray. He was unassuming and irreverent and appeared to live by only one rule, attending daily Mass, an event not exempt from his irregular perceptions. “I’ve got one question about church,” he said one morning.

“They’ve been reading all these letters from Paul to the Corinthians. Don’t the Corinthians ever write back?”

He was both unfailingly positive and peculiar. He patted backs, telling old stories between, at times looking as if he did not have a clue.

“The clubhouse has been invaded by Milton Berle,” one player said.

But oh, McKeon had a clue, all right. If you squinted through the smoke, you could see a salesman working his baseball team the way Wayne Newton works a room. Almost before he found a uniform to fit his bulky frame, he had taken one of baseball’s worst teams and sold it on believing it was one of baseball’s best teams.

When he took over, the Padres were 16-30. In four months, with nearly the same team, except for pitcher Dennis Rasmussen, McKeon led them to a 67-48 mark, second best in the National League during that time, and best in the West Division. Those 67 victories were also two more than the Padres had in all of 1987.

“Same team,” McKeon barks. “Different attitude.”

Said Garry Templeton, shortstop and captain: “Too many times in this game, we are told what we cannot do. Jack told us what we could do. And kept telling us.”

McKeon was rewarded with a three-year contract worth $1.2 million. And even though he had to give up his general manager’s post, he was given the freedom to engineer transactions this winter that made Padres of outfielder Jack Clark and pitchers Bruce Hurst and Walt Terrell.

Now this spring, at the same locale that 12 months ago was the spring home of baseball’s worst team, everybody is talking about a championship. And everybody is serious. Jack McKeon is still Trader Jack and still crazy, only now he has them sold, cold.

“Jack has so much faith in you, it makes it easy to play hard and have faith in yourself,” infielder Tim Flannery said. “So why not shoot for the championship?”

“Yeah,” McKeon barked. “Why not?”

Careful when he barks. The only thing he does that is potentially more sickening than smoking cigars is chewing big wads of tobacco, which his players claim increases their mental alertness.

“After you’ve been talking to him a while, you’ve got to watch out for that spray,” outfielder Tony Gwynn said.

“Oh, I don’t spit on my players anymore,” McKeon said. “Now I just mostly spit on myself.”

There are lots of things he doesn’t do anymore, things that helped him survive 27 years of managing, mostly in the minor leagues. He moved to the Padres’ front office in 1980 and has since made more than 120 player deals, giving him the nickname “Trader Jack,” an image he cultivates through radio shows and speeches and souvenirs. But it’s on the field that he has done his most unusual work.

There was the time in Missoula, Mont., when, after six straight losses, he organized a “Break the Jinx Night.”

On the field before a game, the players chased around a child dressed in a black cape--the jinx--before one player finally “shot” him with a gun firing blanks. McKeon’s team promptly lost its seventh straight.

Another time at Vancouver, B.C., McKeon couldn’t understand why his triple-A pitchers couldn’t properly read his signs. So he began using a radio that allowed him to talk to them from the dugout during the games.

“The problem was, I could only talk to the pitcher, nobody else,” McKeon recounted. “So during a pickoff play, I would tell the pitcher, ‘Throw to first!’ and he would, and the ball would hit the first baseman right in the chest.”

Through those years, McKeon has learned to do whatever it takes.

Once at Missoula, to teach an inattentive baserunner named Sandy Valdespino, he ordered him lassoed with a clothesline at first base.

Another time, at Wilson, N.C., he used more extreme measures to scare a baserunner named Juan Visteur, who constantly ran through his “stop” signs at third base. McKeon brought a gun, loaded with blanks, to the park and as Visteur ran through another sign and attempted to score, McKeon turned and fired on him.

“The poor guy was from Cuba, and this was right during the Bay of Pigs thing,” McKeon said. “So he heard the shots and hit the ground and crawled the last 20 feet to the plate. Good thing for us, the shortstop also got scared and threw the ball away.”

It is such memories that made McKeon want to return to a precarious field position last year after establishing himself in the front office. The rest of his reasoning, he says, was dumb loyalty.

“Hey, I signed most of these ballplayers,” he said. “I’m the one who put them in this losing situation. I felt I owed them one last shot at getting them out of it. I felt, ‘OK, I’ve been saying these guys are so good, I should go down on the field and prove it.’ ”

And so he put on his uniform and began to sell. Much had changed since his last managing stop at triple-A Denver in 1979, not the least of which was his waist line.

Few will forget his first unofficial appearance as Padre manager. He was running around the clubhouse in New York’s Shea Stadium in his underwear, looking for a pair of pants he could squeeze into. He ended up taking pairs from the two guys who most closely resembled his 5-foot-9, 210-pound frame--John Kruk and Tony Gwynn--but not without penalty.

“What are you going to do, sew the pairs together?” Kruk shouted.

McKeon heard it. In front of everybody, he laughed. And for the stunned Padres, a new life had begun.

“This is one place where you can actually come in and shoot the bull with the manager,” Gwynn said. “That relaxed all of us right away. We weren’t afraid of Jack. We could be ourselves with him, because he was being himself with us.”

Said Greg Booker, a reliever who knows McKeon better than most because he married McKeon’s daughter, Kristi: “I’ve always been amazed that he’s not afraid to fail. He’s not afraid to tell jokes that are bad. He’s not afraid to try things that might not work. He’s not afraid to be himself.”

And out of this humanness has come a closeness that many of the Padres say they’ve never felt with a boss.

“We respect him, but we don’t feel threatened by him,” reliever Dave Leiper said. “And that’s important.”

What’s to feel threatened by? Whereas McKeon gladly accepts accolades from those who refer to him as Tom Lasorda South--”I wish I could do half as well as that man,” he said--there is a feeling that McKeon is not quite so touched up, not quite so packaged.

On the field, McKeon is one of the least imposing managers in the game, perhaps because he is rarely on the field.

He never makes the pitching changes, he says, because, “I’m afraid the guy will talk me out of taking him out.”

He rarely argues with umpires because, “Now how in the heck can I see a play out at second base from the dugout? Why argue if you don’t know for sure that you are right, which you don’t know very often?”

But when he does argue . . . His mystique reached new heights late last season when he actually won an argument.

A Padre line drive landed underneath a bench in the right-field dugout at Jack Murphy Stadium. The batter was ordered back from third base to second, the ruling being that it was a ground-rule double. After a strangely long delay, McKeon suddenly jumped from the dugout and showed the umpires where the local ground rules dictate that such a ball is live. The runner was given third base, and McKeon was given a standing ovation. “I took so long because I had get a good look at a television and check out the replay,” McKeon recalled.

McKeon’s only other memorable visit to the field last season was to, what else, sell.

Rasmussen, while batting, had just been plunked on the right wrist by a pitch. Trainer Dick Dent joined the Padre pitcher at first base and began testing the wrist by shaking it. McKeon joined them and immediately began shaking the other wrist.

“He goes, ‘Hey, I’m Jack McKeon, nice to meet you,’ ” Rasmussen recalled. “I didn’t know what the heck was happening.”

Said McKeon: “Just trying to let him know that the injury was no big deal. Just giving him confidence. I want to be a teacher, an encourager. I want these guys to know that if something bad happens, they ain’t getting shot.”

Off the field, he exudes confidence through a strategy that can best be described as planned obsolescence. He’s losing his hearing in his right ear, but he plays upon that handicap, ignoring things that aren’t positive and answering difficult questions with positive weirdness.

McKeon was playing Santa Claus this winter at a local hospital, an annual task, when a child asked him for a game called Nintendo.

“You want Jose Oquendo?” McKeon reportedly responded. “Sorry, I tried to get him a couple of years ago and couldn’t.”

He also claims to forget names, a problem believed by nobody. Last season, when three members of the Padres’ bullpen were not being used, they approached McKeon in the dugout before a game to introduce themselves. McKeon played along until it was time for Dave Leiper to stick out his hand, when he responded with, “Nice to meet you, Don.”

The players laughed about it for a couple of days, and later seemed to forget that things were all that awful. Leiper was recently looking for a way to describe McKeon when the term eccentric grandfather was suggested.

“Yeah,” Leiper said. “That’s it.”

The only thing the players appreciate more than the eccentric part is the grandfather part. He treats them not as sons, but as grandsons, alternately scolding them and spoiling them but ultimately letting them make their own decisions. Or at least, letting it seem as if they are making their own decisions.

“It’s easy to look at him and wonder, ‘What the heck is he doing?’ ” Gwynn said. “We’ve all wondered that before. But just wait. He knows.”

There was that amazement last Aug. 21, when he called Gwynn into his office and asked the two-time Gold Glove right fielder if he would move to center field, to allow both outfielders Carmelo Martinez and John Kruk into the lineup at the same time. “He didn’t tell me, he asked me, and the way he put it, ‘You will be a great center fielder and blah, blah, blah,’ I couldn’t turn it down,” Gwynn said.

But wait. The amazing part of that morning was still to come. Without consulting Martinez or Kruk--who forced the lineup change because neither can play center field--McKeon put them into right and left field, respectively.

Martinez arrived at the park, saw this, and flipped. He had only played right field once in his life and was nearly beaned twice. He pleaded with Kruk to switch with him. Kruk, who doesn’t care where he plays, agreed to switch.

Martinez recounted: “So we walk into Jack’s office and tell him, ‘We saw your lineup card, but we’ve worked out a deal.’ We tell him we agreed to trade places. He just looks at us and says, ‘Fine, whatever.’ ”

Tony Gwynn proceeded to win the National League batting title. Martinez hit 11 homers with 38 runs batted in in his final 38 games. A disgruntled Kruk stopped pining for a trade. And barring a trade, the Padre outfielders will open 1989 in the same formation.

“What the heck, I’m not always right,” McKeon said. “I’ll do it your way. I’ll do it anybody’s way. I tell these guys, there is no such thing in the standings as a winning catcher, or a winning first baseman, or even a winning pitcher. There is only a winning team. Get everybody pulling for everybody else.

“Then you win, and it is fun. Winning is fun, fun is winning.”

McKeon repeated that phrase so much last year, players were constantly imitating him. But he believes it, as you can tell from “The Trader Jack Show,” which could easily be like any other manager’s talk show, without the audience or beer or door prizes.

“But we all need a breather,” said McKeon, who extends the winter radio show into spring training, where at Yuma, audiences are sometimes difficult to find. No problem. Last year, serving as a virtual one-man audience, Tony Gwynn clapped and whistled and changed his voice to ask several questions.

“We’re all business here at the Padres, but sometimes it gets too thick, and you need to step back, and that’s why I’m here,” McKeon said. “For those times you can’t see the trees for the forest. Or something like that.”