Lefferts Plans to Fill Big Shoes Left by Davis : Baseball: His life has been a series of challenges. Replacing the Padres’ Cy Young Award winner is just the most recent.

The whispers permeate the clubhouse daily, perhaps not as frequently as a week ago, but believe Craig Lefferts, they still exist.

Oh, he might be sitting quietly in the corner of the clubhouse, checking out the box scores while vigorously chewing tobacco, but he hears them.

He tells himself he’s the Padres’ bullpen stopper.

He tells himself he’s the reason the Padres shelled out the most money for a reliever in the franchise’s 21-year history.

He tells himself he’s the man who’s supposed to help lead the Padres to the promised land, just like he did in 1984.

So how come he can’t be in the Padre clubhouse for more than 10 minutes, just once, without hearing that name, that damned name, every single day.

Mark Davis. Mark Davis. Mark Davis.

When is it ever going to stop?

“Really, I think it’s just human-nature,” Lefferts said. “You’re talking about a guy who was a very important part of this team, and not only that, he was extremely well-liked.

“I don’t expect to take up that void. I don’t want to replace the past. I’m not here to replace Mark Davis in any way. That’s the past. That’s for them to enjoy.

“This is my time. This is my opportunity. And I’m telling you now, if I get the same kind of opportunities Mark Davis did, I’ll do the same kind of job.”

Lefferts’ face broke into an expansive grin, knowing that the words that just spewed out of his mouth could burn him throughout the season.

Hey, the guy he’s replacing saved a club record 44 games last season. He was a landslide winner in the Cy Young Award balloting. Heck, he was even a leader in the clubhouse.

“There was nobody like M.D.,” Padre reliever Mark Grant said, “nobody. And it feels real weird in here without him. It just doesn’t feel right. He was the guy who kept the pitching staff together.”

And you, you Craig Lefferts, the one who has pitched almost exclusively in middle relief your entire career, are saying that you’re going to be replacing this guy.

“That’s right,” he said. “Why not? Why shouldn’t I feel that way? I’m not going to sit here and make apologies, or say I can’t fill his shoes.

“I think, given the same kind opportunities, I’ll do the same type of job.

“Maybe that’s being perceived as cocky, or arrogant, or whatever, but I’ve been confident my whole life.”

If he wasn’t, God only knows, Lefferts sure wouldn’t be playing major-league baseball today.

For, after all, this is a man who has enough difficulty just surviving everyday life.

Lefferts winced when he walked Friday morning to the Padre clubhouse. He saw tractors leaving the field, and after taking a whiff of the air, he knew what that meant. The grass had just been cut.

To everyone else on the team, all it meant was that infield would be smoother, the outfield less burdensome, the ballpark more picturesque.

To Lefferts, it meant fear and danger.

There’s no worse sight and smell to an asthmatic than fresh-cut grass, and considering that Lefferts has been afflicted with the disease throughout life--suffering an asthma attack just last week in his hotel room--he automatically clutched the breath-inhaler in his hand.

Lefferts keeps two breath inhalers in his locker at the ballpark, has a bottle of pills readily available, and mentally prepares himself for any sudden attack that leaves him gasping for breath.

“It’s the worst feeling in the world,” he said. “Your bronchial tubes swell, you have pressure in your chest, and you wonder if every breath you take will be your last. It’s like, ‘Oh, my, God, let me breathe.’ ”

Lefferts, who would not have an asthma attack on this day, and now has fewer than five a year, actually is one of the fortunate asthmatics.

He is alive.

His sister, Lynn, is dead.

She was 18.

“She had it a lot worse than I did,” Lefferts said, speaking almost in a whisper. “She had to have inhalers in her hand at all times. Then, one day, she had an asthma attack that was too much. She died.

“I’ll never forget it. I was still in college at Arizona, and they pulled me off the field to tell me. The next day, our team had to go to Phoenix to play Arizona State. We had to make up a suspended game, and then play another.

“Everybody told me, ‘Don’t go. It’s too much. Please don’t go.’ I said, ‘Lynn would want me to go, so I’m going. Nobody can talk me out of it.’ ”

The next day, Lefferts threw four scoreless innings in the suspended game, and after a half-hour rest, threw seven innings in the second game. In about three hours, he had pitched 11 innings, yielding three hits and two runs.

“She was my inspiration then, and she still is now,” Lefferts said. “That was about 10 years ago (1978), but she’s still with me every time I pitch. We were so close. We both had asthma together, and we both suffered together.

“She’s free from that pain now, and as long as I’m around, she’ll always be my inspiration.”

His teammates are curious, but no one dares ask him about it. Some haven’t even noticed. But when you begin talking to Lefferts, and look him in the eyes, something is wrong.

The left eye looks directly toward you. The right eye looks away. When he tries looking at you with both eyes, he says, all he sees is double-vision.

He has a wandering right eye, a lazy eye, if you will, that is absolutely useless.

That might not be considered such a handicap in the lives of most everyone else, but when your job consists of throwing a baseball over a 17-inch slab of white rubber, standing 60 feet, 6 inches away on top of a 10-inch dirt mound, it can be a nuisance.

“I’ve learned to deal with it,” Lefferts said, “but it’s getting progressively worse. The depth perception is the biggest problem. While most people see in three-dimensional, I can see only two.

“I don’t even use the eye any more. Once in awhile I’ll try to focus both eyes together, but it’s even worse. So I just look out of my left eye. I can still throw strikes, I can still throw the ball like anyone else.

“The biggest problem, I guess, is fielding. I’m not quite as quick when the ball’s hit right at me. I’m OK when it’s hit to the side, but the ones right at me are tough.

“I’ll probably have surgery on it after I’m done playing. The doctors said they can’t do anything for the eye, but they can do something cosmeticly to make it look better.

“It’s just another thing I’ve had to deal with in my life, but you know what, if it wasn’t for my bad eye, I probably wouldn’t be here playing baseball right now.”

While just about all of Lefferts’ friends grew up with the dream of being a major-league baseball player, Lefferts was different.

He wanted to be a pilot in the Air Force.

Just like dad, who spent 21 years in the Air Force before retiring as a Lt. Colonel.

“How great is that, for a son to follow in his father’s footsteps?” Lefferts, 32, said. “That’s all I ever wanted to do, and I really believed that’s what would happen.”

Why not? Everything was falling in place. He was nominated by his Florida congressman for the Air Force Academy. He was one of the top students in his class, and breezed through the SAT and ACT tests. All that was left was the physical.

“That’s when I found out, can you believe it,” Lefferts said. “I was 16 years old. That’s when I found out for the first time that my right eye wasn’t working right. It wasn’t nearly as noticeable then, and my vision out of the eye wasn’t as bad, but that’s all they needed.

“I was 16 years old, and my dreams were over. They wouldn’t even let me go to ROTC. I was crushed.

“The way I got over it was focusing everything on baseball.”

Lefferts, who was cut from his American Legion team, couldn’t make his high school team as a sophomore, and was a right fielder until his senior year, had no scholarship offers.

The best offer he had was from Jerry Kendall of the University of Arizona. And, really, Kendall said, it was no offer. It was a favor. He received a letter from Lefferts’ father, Ed Lefferts, asking if his son could join the team as a walk-on.

“I figured why not,” Kendall said. “But he was a skinny kid, and really didn’t throw hard. I cut him after a few months, and told him to get stronger, and then we’d take another look.”

Lefferts came back the next year and made the junior varsity, earned All-Pac 10 honors his junior year, and led Arizona to the College World Series championship his senior season.

“I showed them what I could do when given the chance,” Lefferts said.

Now, all he’s being asked to do is fill the biggest relief shoes in baseball.

Mark Davis was having a small dinner party the night of December 7. Teammates Mark Parent and Dave Leiper, and their wives, were there celebrating Davis’ four-year-old daughter’s birthday.

They were sitting around the dinner table when the sports came on TV. That’s how Davis heard the news that the Padres had signed Craig Lefferts.

Davis immediately excused himself and made a phone call. When he returned, there were tears in his eyes. He looked at everyone, and said, “Well, I guess it’s over.”

“His eyes were all watery and he was hurting,” Parent said, “but he tried as hard as he could not to let it show. There’s no way he wanted to leave San Diego. I could care less how much he says how he wanted to play in Kansas City, but we all know that there’s no way he ever wanted to leave. I know that. He knows that. There’s not a guy in this clubhouse that doesn’t know that.

“When he signed with Kansas City, do you know what he did? He was so worried about us thinking that he sold us out, that he called most of us. He was worried about the fans. He was worried about everybody in San Diego. He’s so sensitive, he thought people were going to start thinking differently about him.

“I told him, ‘Hey, we all know it’s a business, man. Don’t worry about it. These things happen.’ But it didn’t matter to M.D. He still thinks he let us down.”

Lefferts has met Davis before, but can’t say he really knows him. When they meet, maybe he’ll thank him. After all, if not for the bungled negotiations between Davis and the Padres--in which everyone but the bat boys have been blamed--Lefferts never would have returned to San Diego.

“I wanted to go to whoever would give me a shot at being a closer,” Lefferts said. “There were lots of teams willing to give me a job as a middle reliever again, but I’ve been doing that for pretty much the last seven years. I wanted to move on.”

Lefferts, who had the finest season of his career last year with 20 saves and a 2.69 ERA, made up his mind to file for free agency the moment the Giants traded for Steve Bedrosian on June 18. He says he has no ill will toward the Giants, but yet, also admits he has not spoken with anyone from their front-office since a few days before he signed with the Padres.

“They told me when they got Bedrosian that I’d be the closer half of the time,” said Lefferts, who had 15 of his 20 saves before the All-Star break. “It was a joke. It turned out to be maybe one-third, or one-fourth of the time.”

When Lefferts became a free agent, he was contacted by 23 of the 26 big-league clubs. The Padres made a casual offer of 2-years, $1.9 million, just to let him know there was interest.

“We just wanted to protect ourselves at that point,” said Jack McKeon, Padre manager and vice president/baseball operations. “We still thought we’d sign the other guy (Davis).”

The Padres raised the offer slightly on the eve of the baseball winter meetings, but still had hopes of signing Davis. The Padres still were negotiating with Davis on December 6, offering him a four-year, $12 million contract. When it was rejected, Padre owner Joan Kroc told McKeon to look elsewhere. If McKeon could sign Lefferts, she said, tell Davis he no longer is wanted.

McKeon met with Lefferts’ agent, Steve Comte, at 7 the night of Dec. 6, in McKeon’s hotel suite. They talked for an hour, and agreed to talk again later that night. McKeon telephoned Comte at 11, and made another counter-proposal. Comte said he’d inform Lefferts of the offer, and they’d get back to McKeon in the morning.

“I wouldn’t let him,” McKeon said. “I wanted it done before I went to bed.”

McKeon didn’t get to bed until 6:30 in the morning, four hours after he signed Lefferts to a three-year, $5.25 million contract.

It was seven years to the day that McKeon acquired Lefferts for the first time from the Cubs. Only this time, McKeon says, he doesn’t plan on giving him up again.

“I think he’s going to do a hell of a job for us, I really do,” McKeon said. “I don’t know if he’s going to get as many opportunities as the other guy, but if Davis came back, he probably wouldn’t get as many opportunities either. Last year was a once in a lifetime thing.”

There are those, of course, who would say that Lefferts is incapable of ever producing a season closely resembling that of Davis.

Isn’t this the same guy who wound up with a sore shoulder at the end of last season?

Isn’t this the same guy who has saved just 54 games in his career?

Isn’t this the same guy whose fastball barely can top 80 m.p.h.?

“All I’m saying is that I’m going to be carrying on what happened last year,” Lefferts said. “I’m sure people have their doubts about me, not only in here, but in baseball.

“But what’s new, I’ve been going through this my whole life.”

Padre Notes

The pitchers optioned out six players from their major-league camp Saturday, reducing their roster to 32 players: infielders Eddie Williams and Paul Faries; outfielders Thomas Howard and Alex Cole; pitcher Ricky Bones; and catcher Bob Lutticken. . . . Craig Lefferts pitched two scoreless innings Saturday night, allowing two hits and striking out one. “I felt real good tonight,” Lefferts said. “I worked on the side since my last outing, and concentrated on my fastball. I’ve got to spot my fastball to be effective, and I did that tonight.” Lefferts is expected to pitch three of the four games against the Angels in Palm Springs. . . . The Padres swept a doubleheader Saturday from the Seattle Mariners, 9-3, in the first game, 7-2, in the second. Mark Grant (4 innings, 4 hits, 3 earned runs) was the winning pitcher in the first game, and Eric Show (5 innings, 6 hits, two runs, one earned) won the nightcap.