Roberts Helps Get Padres Up to Speed : His Presence on Bases Is Causing Excitement--and Runs

It had been a couple of days since Mothers Day, but the topic was mothers.

“Now, I know most mothers can’t run very fast,” Bip Roberts was saying Wednesday afternoon in the dugout of Montreal’s Olympic Stadium. “But this one, well, she looked pretty big and mean. And she looked like she could move. I didn’t want to take any chances.”

Roberts was talking about a day, maybe 15 years ago, on an Oakland playground. Roberts had been taunted by a bigger boy.

Acting as he normally would under the circumstances, Roberts listened for a second, then walloped the kid. The kid started to cry. A big car then pulled up, and out rolled the kid’s mother.

“And here she comes after me, takes off like I don’t know what,” Roberts recalls. “And there I go.”

And it was at precisely that instant that Roberts came to a realization similar to one reached many years earlier by another tiny athlete, last name of Pan.

Bip Roberts realized he could fly.

“I turned around, and she was gone,” he said, although she wasn’t gone, he was gone. “I realized, I had run so far so fast, the park was out of sight. And I thought to myself, hey, I can do this.”

After seven professional seasons, he is now sharing this insight with the rest of the National League.

Yeah, Bip Roberts can do that. He can run. He can run faster than any of his Padre teammates and perhaps as fast as anyone in the league.

He can turn a dull game into an exciting one. Thus far, he has done that in six weeks worth of season. Into an otherwise mediocre 1989 beginning for the Padres, Roberts has come bursting out like, well, like a guy whose running style matches his nickname. What it lacks in definition, it makes up for in quickness.

Roberts, a 5-foot-7 infielder-outfielder who made the team this spring as a utility man and a surprise, has since been cast in the role of designated terror. In the Padres’ first 42 games, Roberts was used as a pinch runner 10 times. Three of those times, he stole a base. Three other times, he scored a run, twice moving from first or second base to score on simple hits that would score no others on this team.

The five times Padre Manager Jack McKeon has allowed Roberts to start--twice at second, twice in right field, once in left--he has also responded with speed. He has three triples, second on the club and already one more than he had in all of 1986.

“He’s the fastest man on the team, and you are seeing what speed can do,” said Tony Gwynn, who led the league in stolen bases with 17 in the team’s first 42 games.

“Bip is our spark,” said Greg Riddoch, the first base coach. “You can see it in his eyes when he runs down to first base to pinch run. He always wants to take off. You can tell he’s tickled to death to be be here.”

It wasn’t always that way. When Roberts was prematurely made the starting second baseman in 1986 following the abrupt departure of Alan Wiggins in 1985, his life became one of misery and worry. Although he hit a decent .253 that year, teammates found him cocky and unwilling to change bad habits, and he soon found himself on the bench. He spent all of 1987 and all but the last couple of weeks of 1988 in triple-A Las Vegas, lost behind Roberto Alomar.

It seemed his future with the Padres was finished until this spring, when Roberts showed he can also play third base and the outfield. He also gave McKeon this idea that, heck, why not keep this fast guy around to replace Jack Clark or Carmelo Martinez if they reach base in the late innings? If speed is his best weapon, why not use just that?

“We could see right away his value on this team,” McKeon said. “A guy like that, so you don’t play him every day, when you do play him, things happen.”

Take Monday in Montreal, where the Padres entered having lost five of their past six games and then found themselves trailing, 4-3, in the ninth. After pinch hitter Tim Flannery hit a one-out single off Expo reliever Tim Burke, Roberts came on to run.

Marvell Wynne then hit a soft single, but Roberts didn’t stop running until he had reached third. From there he was able to score the tying run on Tony Gwynn’s single to shallow center field, which might not have scored him from second.

But it wasn’t enough for Roberts just to tie the game. Two innings later, he drew a one-out walk on four consecutive pitches from Andy McGaffigan, later apologizing for it.

“Some guys on other teams say I’m so small, it’s hard to find my strike zone,” he said.

Four pitches later, Wynne doubled to right, and Roberts scored all the way from first with the go-ahead run. He didn’t even need to slide.

“I asked Amos Otis (hitting coach), ‘Did the outfielder bobble it, why did I get in so easily?’ ” Roberts recalled. “He just looked at me like, ‘You don’t know?’ It was a nice feeling.

“I guess I don’t know how fast I am. You don’t feel those things. Maybe you hear a little wind rushing through your helmet, but you don’t feel being fast. You just run like anybody else runs.”

Roberts has obviously not been like any other Padre this year, even when he stops. He seems to be having more fun. He is often one of the first ones at the park, one of the first to sit on the bench and watch the opponents take batting practice and certainly one of the only ones to openly dance to pre-game music.

“You bet I’m having fun,” Roberts said. “You spend a couple of years thinking you’re out of baseball, you’d have fun too.”

Even if, to this day, people still mishandle his nickname, given to him by an uncle in memory of a cartoon character.

McKeon still calls Leon Roberts “Biff.” A New York newspaper recently referred to him as “Dip.”

And then there was his little weekend first-base visit with the Mets’ Keith Hernandez.

“He turns to me and says, ‘How are you doing, Biff?’ ” Roberts remembered. “I turned to him and said, ‘Fine, Keef.’ ”

Quick, this kid.

Padre Notes

Joey Cora, the Padres’ 1987 Opening Day second base prospect who had recently fallen on hard times, fell a little further when he suffered ligament damage in his right ankle May 14 while rounding second base for triple-A Las Vegas in a game in Vancouver. He will have surgery and probably will miss 6-8 weeks. At the time, Cora was hitting .294 and leading the Stars with 12 stolen bases. . . . Another former Padre starter, pitcher Eric Nolte, struggled for Las Vegas in his first two outings after recovering from an ulcer that required surgery during spring training. In his first start he allowed four runs in 4 1/3 innings, and in his second he allowed six runs in 4 2/3 innings. . . . Outfielder Thomas Howard, a top outfield prospect who went backward last season and finished at double-A Wichita after starting at Las Vegas, finally seems to be putting it together for Las Vegas this season. In early May, the switch-hitter reeled off a nine-game hitting streak to improve his average to .340, with 11 doubles and 11 stolen bases in 37 games. . . . Earlier this year, the Padres may have had a first in organization history--two teammates whose brothers were also teammates in a different organization. Reliever Dave Leiper and outfielder Jerald Clark each had brothers playing for double-A London, Canada, in the Detroit Tiger organization. Philip Clark is a top catching prospect, and Tim Leiper is an outfielder who was recently recalled to triple-A Toledo. . . . All the stink about the Padre middle relievers should start easing up, considering their performance in the nine games played thus far on the trip. The middle men--Leiper, Mark Grant and Greg Harris--have allowed just three runs in eight appearances covering 23 1/3 innings.