Bip Roberts Hopes Padres Can See How He Has Grown

Sometimes that’s what it takes, what Bip Roberts did that summer night in 1987. Sometimes, maybe, it takes stripping off both clothes and pride for a man to take a good look at himself.

It was in the middle just another triple-A game, in just another triple-A city, just another Bip Roberts grounder.

“Except I didn’t run this grounder out,” Roberts remembers. “I kind of, well, I walked to first base.”

He was immediately scolded and fined by Las Vegas Manager Jack Krol. And that was it. Roberts walked off the field, through the dugout and up into the clubhouse. He took off all his clothes. He was going home.

“I couldn’t take it anymore, I was done,” recalls Roberts, who just one year earlier had been the Padres’ starting second baseman. “I couldn’t handle this game, I couldn’t handle the failure. I had fallen a long way and reached the bottom and couldn’t see a way out. I was finished.”

Into the clubhouse rushed Rob Piccolo, Padre minor league coach. He approached this crazy-looking infielder in his underwear and read him the last rites.

“He told me if I couldn’t handle this, couldn’t handle adversity, then I could never handle anything,” Roberts said. “He told that if I left now I would be letting a lot of people down . . . but mostly myself.

“I thought about it and realized he’s right. I can’t quit.”

He was dressed and back on the field in time for the next inning. Now, two years later, back with a suddenly good chance to make the Padres, he won’t quit.

His role? He would be a utility infielder/outfielder, one who comes on in the late innings to either preserve a victory or make one.

The reason he’d be good for the role? “I can play in crunch time,” Roberts said, “because the last couple of years of my life have been crunch time.”

Flash back to 1986. With the departure of second baseman Alan Wiggins, the Padres claim there is a breeze through the middle of the infield. They are hoping to fill it with a kid from double-A named Leon Roberts, nicknamed “Bip” by his uncle, who was watching cartoons at the time.

“I guess that’s what I am, “ Roberts says today. “A cartoon character.”

That’s certainly what he was. Even before he put on a Padre uniform, he was telling people he would make them forget all about Wiggins. He was talking about stealing more bases, getting more hits. He was 22 years old.

“He was talking about this in the newspaper, even before spring training,” Tony Gwynn said. “I remember reading it and thinking he better do all that. If he doesn’t do all that, he’s getting ridiculed.”’

Guess what. He didn’t do all that. Didn’t steal the bases, didn’t get the hits, didn’t do anything but talk about it. In the end, he didn’t do anything but make everybody mad.

“He came in here and ‘big-leagued’ it,” Gwynn said, using a players’ term for players who act cocky with no reason. “People tagged him as our savior, and that’s kind of how he acted.”

Gwynn said that while Roberts initially struggled at the plate and in the field, he never came to Gwynn, or anyone, for help.

“So finally I came to him and told him, ‘If you work as hard on the field as you do off the field, you’d be a great player,’ ” Gwynn explained. “He looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ It was the kind of answer where, you knew he didn’t think I knew what I was talking about.”

Roberts eventually lost his starting job to Tim Flannery, with whom he was platooned. He finished the year hitting a respectable .253 in 241 at-bats. But the Padres decided they had seen enough of his act. Roberts went home in the fall of 1986 and was not heard from by the big league team again--not during the spring, not anytime--until the fall of 1988, when he was recalled after hitting .353 in a full season in Las Vegas.

At the time of his demotion, he couldn’t tell you what he did wrong. But the past two years have taught him. Have they ever.

“When you’re at the bottom looking up, you realize things,” Roberts said. “I had taken everything for granted. I was ready for the big leagues physically but not mentally. I had never been anything but No. 1 in my life, and all of a sudden pitchers were getting me out, and catchers were throwing me out.”

Also, for the first time, Roberts said he felt alone.

“Some of the veterans on this team didn’t want me to be here, and it was obvious,” Roberts said. “I got more and more down. It was like, I’d get out to the plate, and already I was down two strikes. It was hard.”

Said Gwynn: “The reason some veterans didn’t want him to be here was that he would just not act like a rookie.”

So Padre management made him back up. The first step was the spring of 1987, when he quickly cut from the big league camp and ordered to triple-A in favor of Joey Cora. Once in Las Vegas, he became so despondent that he became a different player, a period culminating in his near-quitting experience.

“Let’s just say he was depressed,” said Mark Parent, the Las Vegas catcher in 1987. “He would walk around looking down and just not getting the job done.”

It was to get worse before it got better. Although he wound up hitting .306 in Las Vegas in 1987, he was not even put on the major league roster, and last spring he was not even invited to big league camp.

This meant he reported to Yuma with the minor leaguers. And dressed in crowded, cluttered quarters with the minor leaguers. And spent a month at the Motel 6. And ate on $3 a day.

“Living in a dump, barely having enough money to eat, I hated it, I hated it,” Roberts said. “It set off something inside of me. It got me thinking, I’ve got to show everybody how to play this game.”

So he hit .354 at Las Vegas, somewhat amazing even in the rarefied air of the Pacific Coast League. And then he was called up to San Diego after he had helped the Stars to a league title. In his only start with the Padres, he had three hits.

And this spring, he returned to big-league camp, back to the Days Inn Suites and all the food that can be purchased for $50 a day. He wasn’t coming in as the starting second baseman--Roberto Alomar moved in during his absence--but he’s not just a second baseman anymore. He has learned to play third base, and shortstop, and left and center fields.

“That’s another thing I learned,” he said. “The more you do, the harder it is for them to get rid of you.”

And thus he may stay. He had five hits in two games on the second day of camp and has not stopped hustling. Manager Jack McKeon has used him in more spring games than anyone--all eight thus far--and even though he is hitting just .133, a manager sometimes looks for other things. Such as head-first slides into first base.

“Biff has showed me a lot,” McKeon said. “By playing a lot of positions, Biff can give me more options late in a game. Biff’s looked good out there.”

Looked mature, too. So mature, it doesn’t even bother him that McKeon consistently and inexplicably refers to him as “Biff.”

“Long as he gives me a job,” Roberts said, “the man can call me Pee-wee Herman.”

Padre Notes

The Padre defense was awful again Friday in an 8-5 loss to Oakland in Phoenix, which dropped the Padres’ spring record to 4-3-1. A sign of a championship team is consistency, but the Padres don’t need this kind of consistency. Shortstop Mike Brumley let another ground ball skip past him--he’s playing himself off the team at this point--while left fielder Gerald Clark didn’t help himself by not chasing down what could have been an easy fly out. “I don’t like our defense,” Manager Jack McKeon said in one of the few negatives to escape his mouth this spring. “ All of this is going into our computer.” What computer? “The one I have in my hotel room,” McKeon said. “My computer smokes a cigar.”

For the Padre offense, the bright spot was a base hit by Brumley’s competitor for the backup shortstop job, Gary Green. It was Green’s first hit of the spring in nine at-bats. Still hitless are Sandy Alomar Jr. (11 at-bats) and Garry Templeton (12). . . . There were no bright spots for the pitchers. Starter Walt Terrell was racked for five runs on 10 hits in just four innings. Greg Booker was hit for two runs in two innings and Eric Nolte for one run in two innings. . . . Jack Clark played right field for the first time this spring after John Kruk bruised his right foot Thursday and moved from right to designated hitter. Clark easily handled his only fly ball with a catch at the wall, not to mention going one for three with an RBI. Although Clark claimed he was a slow spring starter, he is five for 11 (.455) with two doubles. . . . Tony Gwynn had two more hits, bringing his spring average to .417, despite saying before the game that he has stopped taking extra batting practice, formerly a tradition with the three-time batting champion. “The older you get, you learn to make adjustments,” said Gwynn, 28. “Physically, all that hitting is a grind. I hit off a tee now, and I think it will be just as good.” Historians will recall that it was in this Phoenix ballpark used by the A’s where last season Gwynn finally admitted his left index finger was too sore to continue. He flew home after the club’s game with the A’s and underwent surgery shortly thereafter. “Last year here, I came out to take batting practice, and I couldn’t do anything,” Gwynn recalled. “I flew back to San Diego . . . where hell began.”