Being a Dodger Too Good to Be True : Baseball: Billy Bean couldn’t handle the pressure of living out his dreams last season.

It is the way of the baseball world. You work your entire life for something and then, when you finally attain it, the surprise knocks you off your chair.

So it was with Billy Bean last July 23 in Phoenix. His parents had driven him to the stadium, where he was scheduled to play a game with the triple-A Albuquerque Dukes.

But then he was called into an office and told not to bother with his uniform. He was being recalled to the Dodgers.

“Oh, my God,” Bean remembers saying to himself. “The Dodgers.”

This was the team the Santa Ana native had spent most of his 25 years dreaming about. He liked the nearby Angels, but the Dodgers . . .

In his days at Hoover Elementary, because of his appearance and leadership qualities, friends called him Steve Garvey. Later, as a student at Loyola Marymount University, he obtained one of Garvey’s jerseys. Everyone who knew Billy Bean knew of his dream.

After hearing the news last July, he phoned his parents at their Phoenix hotel. They returned to the stadium in record time, jumped out of the car, and hugged him.

“Oh, my God,” Bean kept saying to himself. “The Dodgers!”

Seven months later, Billy Bean is sitting outside the minor league clubhouse at Dodgertown, shaking his head. He has endured another three-hour workout in front of few fans, and with kids who seem half his age.

The Dodger major leaguers are not here, having been locked out by the owners. Their absence reminds Bean that he is no longer one of them. It also gives him the solitude he hopes will help him adjust to the theory:

The worst thing about your dreams is that sometimes they come true.

He should have figured it. Shortly after Bean slipped on his first Dodger uniform last July, he was approached by Kirk Gibson.

“Playing in front of your home fans will be the hardest thing you will ever have to cope with,” Gibson said.

Today, Bean says, he might be in the minor leagues because Gibson’s warning preceded the three craziest, most confusing months of Bean’s life.

Bean says he simply couldn’t cope with being a Dodger. Not with the constant phone calls from old friends wanting small talk and tickets. Not with the crowds of old friends waiting for him after every home game.

He could not cope with the feeling that every Dodger Stadium plate appearance would have to be discussed with dozens of people the next day, from an old coach to a high school chum. He says he felt he was carrying not only his dreams, but the hopes of hundreds of others.

By the end of the season, he had buckled under the weight. His face had grown pale, he was losing weight and all those friends were asking if he was sick. He didn’t know what to tell them, so he told them nothing. A glance at the statistics would have sufficed.

In road games last year, Bean batted .255. In home games, he batted .050. He had one hit in 23 trips to home plate at Dodger Stadium.

“I would come to bat and I knew everyone was always there, watching me,” Bean said. “I wouldn’t see them or hear them, I was always good at blocking that out. But I felt them. And I worried.”

The only time he felt worse than when he played was when he didn’t play.

“Everybody would say, ‘How come you’re not playing? What is Tommy (Lasorda) telling you?’ ” he said. “They don’t understand that in the big leagues, the managers don’t tell you anything. Everything is kind of understood. You don’t produce, you don’t play. But how could I explain this?”

The morning after home games, just when Bean was forgetting about the night before, it would start again. The phone would begin ringing at 8 and continue long after Bean had already given away his allotment of free tickets.

“The best way to describe it is, overwhelming,” Bean said. “Here I was, always outgoing and trying to be friends with everybody, and suddenly I’m relishing my privacy. It was weird. It was terrible.”

According to his mother, Linda Kovac of Dana Point, the entire summer was typical.

“Billy has always carried around the burden of trying to make everybody happy,” she said. “And when he feels like he can’t do that, it can be devastating.”

She spoke of how Bean is the kind of guy to have his elementary school friends in his wedding. Of how he still mows the lawn when he visits their home. Of how he sent a Valentine’s Day card to his 64-year-old grandmother.

One of the Bean family’s most cherished possessions is a letter from a man whose shy granddaughter was sought out and given an autograph by Bean after she saw her first big league game.

“And then to be put into a situation like last summer, where suddenly so many people want to be a part of what you are doing . . . “ Kovac said. “The problem was, none of us ever thought Billy would ever play for the Dodgers. That was always the ultimate. So we never even imagined it.”

Not even Bean, who as a boy would sit in the stands at Angel games and try to rid himself of any such thoughts.

“I could picture myself as an Angel, maybe because the Angels didn’t have great teams back then,” he said. “But the Dodgers, no way. They seemed to play a level above baseball. There was always something different about them. To me, playing center field for the Dodgers was like playing tailback at USC. It was something special, something out of reach.”

He paused, and continued: “The stadium was so blue, the team was so Hollywood, so glitzy, they were always on television, they had Vin Scully . . . “

He played a State championship game in Dodger Stadium, but Bean was never sought after by the Dodgers. After attending Loyola Marymount, he signed with the Detroit Tigers, and advanced to the big leagues after one season. One of the Tigers’ first trips in his 1987 rookie year was to Anaheim. Bean should have taken the experience as a warning.

The entire Northeast Santa Ana Little League program, where Bean had once starred, canceled its games and bought a block of tickets to watch Bean. There were several hundred other Bean fans in attendance, seemingly each of them with a banner.

“It was wonderful, but it was absolutely crazy,” Linda Kovac said. “It made us realize how many people wanted to be a part of this.”

Bean was later sent to the minor leagues, and did not return to Anaheim as a Tiger. Last summer, as he toiled at triple-A Toledo, his left-handed bat and good fielding interested the Dodgers. On July 18, he was acquired for prospects Domingo Michel and Steve Green, and immediately sent to Albuquerque.

He didn’t feel the effect of the trade until a week later. After his recall, he flew all night from Phoenix to join the team in Pittsburgh. He walked into the visitors’ clubhouse at Three Rivers Stadium and saw his uniform sitting there. He said the feeling was so strange that it reminded him of a Robert Redford movie.

“You know the movie ‘The Candidate,’ where Redford spends his whole life trying to be governor of this state, and then he finally gets it?” Bean said. “Remember the last line of the movie? Redford says, ‘Now, what do I do?’

“That’s how I felt. I saw that uniform and I thought, ‘It looks great, but now I’ve got to put it on. Now what do I do?’ ”

The confusion carried on to the field, where he found it hard to believe that his beloved Dodgers were suddenly his teammates.

“I never thought I would be out there with guys like Hatcher and Hershiser and suddenly, I was,” he said. “People don’t understand how hard it is to overcome those feelings of awe, to separate the person from the name. It’s hard to play with a guy until you realize he is just a guy. And that’s not always easy to do.”

He made his debut as a pinch-hitter on July 24 in Pittsburgh. Five of the remaining six games on that trip were televised back to friends and family in the Los Angeles area. When he came home for the first time before his Dodger Stadium debut on Aug. 1, his parents greeted him with enough phone messages for a month. The onslaught was on.

“I returned the calls and, even though these were my old friends, all of a sudden nobody wanted to talk about themselves,” he said. “All they wanted to talk about was me. It was like, because of TV and radio, they knew everything about my life, everything about my job.

“They talked about every little thing I had done on television. They talked about how Vin Scully was calling me Guillermo Frijoles. These people weren’t right or wrong. They just overwhelmed me.”

Bean spent 15 minutes before every game filling out ticket requests. And then, for about 45 minutes after every game, he thanked friends for showing up.

“He would have us wait in a special section of the parking lot, so he could drive there after signing autographs,” his mother said. “When he got out of his car, you could just see the terrible weight on him. And after talking to people for so long, you could see him just run out of things to say.”

So this year, he says, if he wins a job as a sixth outfielder, he is going to say something new. No, he’s not going to just say no. He’s going to say relax.

“The problem is not with my friends, it’s with me,” Bean said. “OK, so I can cut back a little on the tickets and the phone calls, but the main thing is me. I’ve got to relax and forget about what happens outside the stadium. It’s out of my control. These people just care about me, there nothing so wrong with that.

“What separates major leaguers from minor leaguers is their ability to handle these distractions. I’ve got to relax and handle them. I have to keep telling myself that, over and over. Relax.”

He smiled wearily.

“That’s the way it is, you know. You get to the big leagues. Then you fight for your life.”