Benes’ Following Should Soon Expand Well Beyond Evansville

Andy Benes was sitting behind a desk in the Padre offices, thoroughly comfortable with the chair but thoroughly uncomfortable with the notion. He’s not a behind-a-desk-type guy, not now, at the robust age of 22.

Very carefully, he was scanning one of the Padres’ 1990 schedules.

“Can I get about 150 of these run off?” he asked.

No, he wasn’t looking to see when San Francisco or Los Angeles or New York or Chicago were coming to town. He was checking the road schedule, specifically to see when the Padres would be in Cincinnati, St. Louis and Chicago.

You see, his people see him play in those places. They come from Evansville, Ind., where he was a local hero both in high school and college. He might still be there but for the fact that major league baseball thus far has not granted the community a franchise.

However, let it be said that Evansville is the home of a franchise player. His name is Don Mattingly, and he is also known at that bend in the Ohio River as proprietor of a restaurant named Mattingly’s.

Let it now be said that Evansville may come to be known as the home of two franchise-level players, though the natives thereabouts are alone in that realization at this point.

Indeed, Andy Benes is in Southern California this weekend for a pair of baseball card shows, where he will occupy his right arm and hand signing autographs. The first show will be in Los Angeles today, the second Sunday here in San Diego. Folks hereabouts will undoubtedly have to ask exactly which guy is Andy Benes and maybe even why they should be asking for his autograph.

Allow me to help with identification. He will be the guy who looks like a mixture of a choir boy, linebacker and power forward, if you will excuse the incongruity. He stands 6-feet-6 and weighs 235 pounds. You could “shave” his baby face with tweezers.

San Diego got its first glimpse of him over the last couple of months of the 1989 season, when he started 10 games and had a 6-3 record with a 3.51 earned run average. If you are looking for reasons why the Padres finished so well, look for the kid from Evansville . . . if you can pick him out.

Most people in San Diego can’t.

“I enjoy that here,” he said. “I can go anywhere I want, because I don’t think anybody knows who I am.”

That’s not the case in Evansville.

He and his wife, Jennifer, went out to dinner not long ago, to Mattingly’s of all places, and called ahead to ask for what Benes described as a reasonably private table. Needless to say, the folks at Mattingly’s understood, what with the fact that the proprietor himself and many of his friends have rather high-profile names and faces.

The Beneses had a reasonably quiet dinner at their reasonably private table, and then the local hero retired to a different section of the restaurant and spent 30 minutes satisfying autograph hounds.

“The only time it bothers me,” he said, “is if someone wants to talk or get an autograph while I’m eating. Actually, I should start to worry when people don’t want my autograph and don’t want to talk to me.”

It may be a long time, if ever, before that happens. I always hate to stick a can’t-miss tag on a youngster, especially one whose professional experience encompasses all of maybe four months in the minor leagues and two months in the big leagues. But it sure looks as if it fits Mr. Benes.

Perhaps the key is that it hasn’t always been easy. He didn’t grab a ball as an 8-year-old and throw 12 years of shutouts before becoming the No. 1 choice in the free agent draft, which he did become. His earned run averages were 5.92 and 4.38 his first two years at the University of Evansville before he discovered himself and went 16-3 with a 1.42 ERA as a junior.

It was during that year that everyone else discovered him as well, the Padres being the ones positioned to draft him courtesy of their last-place finish in 1987. If Benes is the only good thing to come out of that, the organization may look back on it as the best of years.

He spent the first part of 1989 being bored in Wichita, yawning to an 8-4 record with a 2.16 ERA, and the middle part being bombed in Las Vegas, gasping to a 2-1 record with an 8.10 ERA. He thought he might spend the last part of the year riding back to Evansville under a boxcar, but the Padres called him up and gave him the baseball.

What happened was good enough to conclude that this fellow is going to be around awhile.

In fact, he’s going to find that more and more people handing him baseballs will be asking him to sign them . . . even here in San Diego.