ALL-STAR GAME : PITCH AND RUN : After Appearing in All-Star Game, He Leaves for More Important Business

When Montreal reliever Tim Burke was called into Tuesday’s All-Star game in the fourth inning, he left the left-field bullpen in a sprint. Then halfway to the mound, he stopped.

“I told myself, wait a minute, you may not ever do this again,” Burke recalled. “I decided that, no matter what had been going through my mind, I was going to enjoy this. I was going to soak it all in. So I decided to walk. Slow.”

The three previous National League pitchers allowed five runs in three innings. But the relaxed Burke stopped the bleeding with two scoreless innings in what was the NL’s most effective pitching performance in an eventual 5-3 defeat. He came off the field about 30 minutes later with his mind finally free to think about only what he really considers important.

An hour after the game, Burke rushed to Los Angeles International Airport to catch a midnight flight to Guatemala, where this morning he and wife Christine will adopt a 2-year-old boy. It will be their second foreign adoption--two years ago they adopted a girl from South Korea--and likely their toughest.

The boy was born with an undetected thyroid condition that has left him with some possible mental retardation, and with arms and legs too small for his body.

Burke has talked and worried about the adoption since arriving here Monday. After working on it since Christmas, he said he could think of little else, and was even prepared to skip the game to hasten the process until his wife talked him out of it.

“We want to take some child who is unwanted,” he explained. “We want to show some love to somebody who maybe never has a chance for love.”

But with his first All-Star appearance crowding him, he said he was never really relaxed about his flight until after getting his last out Tuesday. It came, with Baltimore’s Cal Ripken running from third base, on a grounder from Oakland’s Mark McGwire that St. Louis shortstop Ozzie Smith dropped, then threw to first to beat McGwire by a half-step.

Burke slapped his glove off his knee and ran into the dugout. And he said then, he was ready to meet his son.

“After I got my last out, I was so thankful,” said Burke, who stayed with the team until the end of the game even though he could have been excused early. “I had done my job, I had thrown two scoreless innnings, this end of it was over with. Now I could do what was important.”

Important and extremely difficult. Burke said he was up Monday night talking to his wife, who is already in Guatemala and met the boy at the orphanage. He said the 20-minute call kept him awake for nearly four hours.

“She said it was going to be hard,” he said. “She said the boy was beautiful, but really small. And he didn’t take to her very well. He was real attached to the two woman at the orphanage, and really freaked out when he was taken away from them.”

Burke learned that the boy, who they have named Ryan, is also sick.

“He was throwing up and having all sorts of problems--I think he probably has parasites in him from all the bad conditions,” Burke said. “The orphanage there is very, very impoverished. We need to get him out of there and get him to a doctor.”

Burke who celebrated his All-Star debut with a soft drink in a paper cup, managed a smile.

“So it’s going to be very hard for us--but that is what it’s all about,” he said. “I guess if it was easy, everybody would take kids like him.”

After finally falling asleep around 2:30 a.m. Tuesday, Burke said he awoke with the same concerns about the phone call. He said he went through the day in sort of a daze, and the impact of his upcoming hurdle finally hit me when he was introduced on the third base line before Tuesday’s game.

“They called my name and I had tears in my eyes,” Burke said. “I thought about Christine, and how come she couldn’t be here. I thought about my new son. I wanted to be here, I wanted to be with them. It all sort of hit me.”

In the bullpen, the daze continued.

“For a guy in his first All-Star game, I was surprised how calm he was down there,” San Diego reliever Mark Davis said. “It was my first game last year, and I was going crazy. I was fidgety, I was all over the place.

“I look over at Tim and he’s just calmly watching things and I thought, man, I wish I could have been like that. Who knows, maybe having something on his mind helped him.”

The first batter Burke faced in the fourth, Bo Jackson, punched a single to right.

“I thought, oh well, he was having a great game and he’s still having a great game,” Burke said.

But Burke retired Boston’s Wade Boggs on a grounder, Minnesota’s Kirby Puckett on a fly out to center, and ended the inning with Jackson stranded on third by striking out Harold Baines of the Chicago White Sox.

In the fifth, after getting Julio Franco of the Texas Rangers on a fly out to right, he allowed Ripken to double down the right-field line.

But then he retired Ruben Sierra of Texas on a grounder to first and got McGwire on a grounder to end the inning.

“Same old Tim Burke we’ve seen all year,” Montreal teammate Tim Wallach said.

And the same Burke who they won’t see until game time in Cincinnati on Thursday, when the Expos return to action. Burke will fly all day from Guatemala and not arrive at Riverfront Stadium until around 7:30 p.m.

“But that’s OK,” Wallach said. “We understand what he’s going through. And anyway, we won’t need him until about 10.”