Benes Gets Lots of Help in Debut

Maybe they were on the strip at Caesars watching Jay Leno and the O’Jays. Or maybe they were at the Desert Inn listening to Tony Orlando and Dawn for the umpteenth time, or catching Tom Jones at Bally’s.

Wherever Las Vegas residents spent their Thursday evening, few chose to drive north of the strip to Cashman Field Center to watch Andy Benes pitch his first triple-A game for the Las Vegas Stars.

There were more scouts and radar guns behind home-plate than fans, and the announced 3,096 who were there spent more time filling out Keno sheets than scorecards.

“I don’t know where everyone is, but I wasn’t going to miss this one,” said Bill Ball, who dragged his wife, Connie, to the game an hour early. “We haven’t had a player of this magnitude come through here ever during the middle of the season. This town needs something like him to get the town excited about baseball again.

“But after watching the Padres play today on TV, ooh, boy, it looks like they could use him a whole lot worse than we do.”

Well, before anyone gets carried away, it was apparent from Benes’ performance that the Padres should not clear a spot in the rotation quite yet.

Benes found out early that it won’t be quite as easy overwhelming the Pacific Coast League hitters as it was in the Texas League, leaving the game after five innings with a pitching line that read: seven hits, four runs, four earned runs, four walks, five strikeouts, two home runs, and a balk.

His 102-pitch outing was hardly picturesque, but considering that his teammates scored 12 runs for him in the first two innings and that he left with a 14-4 lead that resulted in a 14-5 victory, hey, what’s a few mistakes among friends?

“It’s really hard to judge on this one outing,” said Tom Romenesko, the Padre director of player development, “but I thought he did just fine. It was tough with the long innings, and for lack of better words, the circus atmosphere.

“Really, I thought he threw well. Maybe he threw too many breaking balls, but you could tell by all of the foul balls that they weren’t getting too many good hacks off him.

“There’s no question he’s headed in the right direction. It’s just that because he’s a No. 1 (pick), people think they’re going to see someone coming in and blowing people away. It’s just not going to happen here.”

Oh, he showed glimpses of why he was the No. 1 pick in the 1988 June free agent draft, but those in attendance hardly were impressed, giving him a lukewarm ovation when he left.

This town indeed can be rather tough on newcomers, making them prove their talent before reaching for their wallets. Quite a change from double-A Wichita, where he was a folk hero.

Benes, who rarely ventured west of St. Louis or east of Ohio while growing up, had never been to Las Vegas before Monday. He got into a cab, looked into his wallet for the name of that hotel where the Stars had reserved a room and watched in awe as the cabdriver pulled up at Sahara’s on the strip.

Wow.

“I’d never seen anything like that in my life,” Benes said. “The hotel rooms I’m used to, you’re lucky if your back-and-white TV is working, and room service is Denny’s down the street.”

With an eight-month-old baby for him and his wife to take care of, there has been no time to catch any shows, but Benes did sneak away Tuesday night for a couple hours of blackjack.

“I bet pretty much the minimum,” Benes said, “but I came away with $50. Not bad for a beginner, huh?”

The same, perhaps, could be said Thursday about Benes’ performance. He couldn’t believe the ease with which third baseman Jeff Mato blasted two home runs off him, but he did strike out five and kept the ball around the plate the whole game.

“You’ve got to remember they’ve got better lights here, they’ve got a better-quality of hitters, and the ball carries a lot better here,” Dodger scout Gail Henley said. “But he’s still got a long ways to go.”

Although the Stars were reporting afterward that Benes was throwing as hard as 92 m.p.h., there was not a scout around that had Benes throwing harder than 89 on any pitch. In fact, most of his pitches, Henley said, were 86 to 87.

“His fastball had life on it, with a lot of cutting action, but the velocity wasn’t quite there,” Henley said. “And after the fourth inning, it slowed up considerably (84-85 m.p.h.).

Although Romenesko said that Benes is not suffering any ill effects from the shoulder tendinitis that put him on the disabled list last month, Gary Lance, Benes’ pitching coach at Wichita, said it will be awhile before Benes is at full strength.

“He’s not really back yet,” Lance said. “He was throwing 90, 91 m.p.h. before he got hurt and occasionally 94 to 95 m.p.h. Now, I’d say he’s about 88 m.p.h. It’s still good enough to strike out hitters, but he’s not himself yet.

“I’m just glad he’s finally up there. I mean, this kid was ready a month ago. I felt leaving him here (Wichita) would give him an opportunity to regress.

“He just needed to be called up a lot earlier. Every day he was getting tired of being asked the same questions, ‘When are you going up? Why are you still here?’

“He got so frustrated that it actually got to a point where he’d stop in the middle of the game, and just yell out, ‘What am I doing here?’ Or, ‘Why do I even bother trying to get this batter out?’

“It created a lot of problems, and it resulted in instances where he just became very passive.”

Romenesko says that the Padres actually were considering bringing him up in early June when he began experiencing tightness in his shoulder, which later was diagnosed as tendinitis. He was placed on the disabled list, and Lance went to work trying to remedy the problem.

“It didn’t seem to scare him as much as it scared me,” Lance said. “He didn’t seem to be overly concerned with it. He just kind of shrugged it off.

“I told him it was something in his mechanics that created the problems. At the completion of his throws, instead of letting his arm come through, he’d stop it. It was about like throwing darts in a nightclub. He’d hold his arm real tight. Those same muscles he was using to stop his motion were the ones that came up with tendinitis.

“So right now, you’re not going to be seeing the real Andy Benes. He’s going through adjustments. But give him time, you’ll see.”

Uh, just how good can he be?

“Let me put it this way,” Lance said, “when you take in consideration how hard he throws the ball, his dedication, his work habits, his mentality, and everything else, I don’t see how anyone could doubt that he’s going to be one of the best.”