Cardinals’ Zeile Makes Major Adjustment in Life Style

Poised now on the verge of what many predict will be a long and remarkable major league career, Todd Zeile has spent the winter making the mental transition from the dirty and dusty minors to the shiny and dazzling big leagues.

Even his vocabulary has undergone massive change. Gone are words such as “cockroach” and statements like, “Gawd, I think those socks have a pulse!”

Replacing them are words such as “arbitration” and statements like, “The players’ union simply wants to preserve the status quo.”

Zeile, 24, of Valencia, was a standout catcher at Hart High and UCLA before signing with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1986. In 3 1/2 minor league seasons he excelled at every level. Last August he got The Call, leaving the Cardinals’ triple-A affiliate in Louisville in August to join the major league club.

In the off-season, the Cardinals allowed five-time All-Star Tony Pena to leave as a free agent, clearing the way for Zeile to establish full-time residency behind the plate in Busch Stadium.

And as he looks back on his rapid-but-not-uneventful sprint through the minors, Zeile realizes that it wasn’t all bad. He had heard all the horror stories and had steeled himself for horrible sights.

And there are worse things in life, he knows, than spending a weekend wearing uncomfortable clothes and equipment that makes you itch in strange places while standing under a frying sun in El Paso, Tex.

Riding 18 hours on a smelly bus to get to El Paso, for example.

“That was maybe the one trip I’ll always remember,” Zeile said. “From Little Rock (Ark.) to El Paso. We left after a night game, rode all that night and all the next day. That was pretty horrible.”

Zeile was drafted by the Cardinals in the third round in June, 1986, after two seasons at UCLA. He was an instant success in pro ball, earning co-MVP honors in the Class-A Midwest League for Springfield, Ill., in 1987. He led the league with 106 runs batted in and was second with 25 home runs.

And he also met The Voodoo Man.

“He was a kid from Bermuda named Kenny Jackson, playing for Appleton (Wis.), and everyone said he knew voodoo and black magic,” Zeile said. “Every time he came to bat he would stand there for a minute, roll his eyes back in his head, stick out his tongue and go into a little trance.”

Amazingly, according to Zeile, other players thought this guy was weird. They made fun of him and played practical jokes on him. Two of his teammates, both pitchers, put a bloody chicken in his locker one night, and Jackson responded by chanting at them and saying he had put a curse on them.

And the two pitchers began to lose . . . and lose.

“Neither of them won a game for weeks,” Zeile said. “Every time we’d go to Appleton we’d get the update, and they were both losing every time out. Then one of them went on the disabled list with arm trouble and was released. The other guy began begging Jackson to take the curse off of him. He offered to pay him. He was desperate. Finally, Kenny Jackson took the curse off of him.

“Maybe the story was exaggerated. Maybe not. But all I know is that from then on, whenever Kenny Jackson came up to bat when I was catching, I was real nice to him. Sort of, ‘Good evening, Mr. Jackson. Would you like fastballs or curveballs tonight?’ ”

The next season Zeile moved to the Cardinals’ double-A team in Arkansas of the Texas League. After a slow start because of a thumb that he had broken the previous winter while playing in the Dominican Republic, Zeile came on strongly and finished with 75 RBIs, despite the often-grueling bus rides across the South.

Early in that season, while he struggled at the plate and behind it, he began for the first time to wonder if he was headed for a lifetime in the minor leagues, if he was to be just another of the thousands of young men whose dreams of playing in the major leagues had died a slow death on the back roads of America.

“There were times when I doubted I’d ever make it,” he said. “One night we stayed in some small town somewhere and the motel was right next to a prison. It was a very bad town and a very bad part of that town. And we had lost a game and I remember being in bed that night thinking just how far away I was from the major leagues.”

He married former Olympic gymnast Julianne McNamara of Encino that winter and was invited to the Cardinals’ spring training camp in St. Petersburg, Fla., in 1989. He was, as expected, sent back to the minor leagues, but with a boost: He would play for the triple-A club in Louisville.

Once again, Zeile excelled. He tore up the American Assn. with 85 RBIs in 118 games, second highest in the league and fourth best among all triple-A players. He also had 19 homers and batted .289.

And then, at a team picnic on Aug. 16, he got the news: His life in the minor leagues likely was over.

In 28 games with the Cardinals at the end of the season Zeile batted .256 with one homer and eight RBIs. He proved he could hit major league pitching. More importantly, he proved he already was one of the best catchers in baseball.

A national magazine has picked Zeile as the top candidate for the 1990 Rookie of the Year award. And he has roamed the Midwest with teammates this winter on the Cardinal Caravan, a frenzied good-will tour of small towns that enables fans who live far from a major league city to meet some players.

The towns were of the same type that Zeile remembered so well from his minor league days. But the transportation and accommodations were decidedly not.

“It’s really a first-class tour,” he said. “We visited places like Bloomington, Iowa and Peru (Ill.) and Oklahoma City and some real small towns in Texas.”

And, often, there were the baseball card shows and autograph sessions, which now cost a fan bundles of American currency.

That, Zeile said, has been perhaps the most bizarre part of his rapid transformation.

“It was just a strange, strange feeling,” he said. “All these people lined up, sometimes 300 and 400 of them, to get my autograph. I always hoped to play in the major leagues and hoped people would someday know who I was, but I never envisioned this.”

The tours left Zeile exhausted. He and his wife, who now live in Palm Desert, made many trips back to the Valley area during the winter to see friends and family.

And, with an owners’ lockout of spring training appearing more likely, Zeile also was looking for a place to work out.

He found one that sent waves of emotion sweeping over him: Hart High in Newhall, the place where his baseball life began to mature.

“In some ways it seemed like it was just yesterday that I was playing there,” he said. “And in other ways it seemed like a million years ago. I walked around the school and the students seemed like such little kids. They all seemed so young.

“I thought a lot about all that has happened to me since then. Mostly, it felt like I’ve been gone from there forever.”