He Makes the Royals Bullish

This is the year everything was to be up-to-date in Kansas City. The Royals were going to go about as far as they could go. Like, the World Series.

Why not? They had two Cy Young pitchers. Bret Saberhagen was already there, and they acquired Mark Davis at about the cost of Rhode Island. They had Mr. Everything, Bo Jackson, stopping off in Kansas City on his way to take over the world. They had the Right Honorable George Brett, probably the best pure striker of the baseball in the game. There was Mark Gubicza, who had won 35 games in two years. Willie Wilson was still beating out infield hits, and even at 39, Frank White was playing second base as if he invented it.

You had to say this team was ready. Nothing left but the reception at City Hall and the parade. You almost felt sorry for the rest of the league. This was a juggernaut. When they picked up Storm Davis, a 19-game winner with Oakland the year before, you wondered why the commissioner didn’t step in. Or even the Humane Society. I mean, you’re talking the 1927 Yankees here. The Lombardi Packers. Vegas liked them. The league liked them.

It was a lovely team. The on-paper all-everything. Not a hole in them. Cooperstown, here we come!

Well, it didn’t turn out quite the way it looked on paper. It seldom does. It turned out this team was like the old Austro-Hungarian cavalry. They looked great in parades or the Emperor’s Waltz but weren’t so good when the shooting started. They kept coming back with their gold epaulets shot off and their fur hats in the dust. The music stopped too soon.

All of a sudden, the Royals’ Cy Youngs looked more like Sayonara. Mark Davis couldn’t save bottle tops. George Brett, who once batted .390, struggled all year to get to .300. Bo Jackson was Bo Jackson--a great soloist, but the team was on its own. Bo did his thing. The team was just the chorus. After all, who ever asked Caruso how the opera went?

No one could really figure out what the Royals lacked. And then, all of a sudden, it became clear: What they lacked was Danny Tartabull.

Who? you may ask. How can a team that boasts Bret Saberhagen, George Brett, Mark Davis, Willie Wilson and company lack a . . . er, what kind of a bull did you say this was?

Well, consider the Royals spent most of the summer in the cellar--and Danny Tartabull spent most of it on the bench, or in the trainer’s room, and you begin to get a clue.

Because when Tartabull got healthy again in late July and hit the lineup in August, it was a great day for Royalty.

The Royals aren’t exactly printing World Series tickets, but they’re out of the cellar. They’re still 18 1/2 games behind Oakland, but since Tartabull played himself back into the lineup, the team is 16-4.

Tartabull drove in runs in 14 games of that mini-spurt. He hit three homers in 10 games.

The renaissance illustrates a basic point of baseball: It isn’t always the superstars who mean the most to the success of the team. Ted Williams never really was able to pull the Red Sox along with him. Not even Henry Aaron could help the Atlanta Braves, nor Ernie Banks the poor old Cubs. Babe Ruth was the exception, but with the cast he headed--Gehrig, Dickey and Lazzeri hitting behind him--no pitcher could pitch around him.

Sometimes, a championship team comes up one bat short of a title. That extra menace in the middle of a lineup can add up to a dozen games or more in a season, often the difference between first and third place--or first and last. It can mean the opposing pitcher sweats a little more on the mound and has less room for mistakes. It can result in better pitches for the cleanup crew. It can take the pressure off your own pitchers, who can pitch more boldly with four- or five-run leads.

It was the role the Royals had in mind for Danny Tartabull when they traded for him three years ago.

Tartabull was probably as natural a right-handed hitter as came along in 1985, when he was runner-up in rookie-of-the-year balloting to no less than Jose Canseco and Wally Joyner. But he was miscast as an infielder. It was a little like Goldie Hawn playing Lady Macbeth. He belonged in an outfield.

He was a second-generation ballplayer. Papa Jose had quit only a decade before, after a career with the Athletics and Red Sox; so recent that some thought Danny was his own father essaying a comeback.

Danny was tacking on numbers his father never achieved. He hit 43 home runs for Calgary in his last full minor league season and, when he got to the majors with Seattle, he promptly hit 25 homers and drove in 96 runs in his rookie year.

He was almost a cult hero with the Mariners, but the team needed pitching and Danny was traded to Kansas City for two pitchers and a reserve outfielder.

Kansas City got what they needed. In his first year, Danny hit .309 with 34 homers and 101 runs batted in. The next year, he hit .274 with 26 homers and 102 RBIs.

And that’s when the Royal flush got busted. “I was shagging flies in the outfield one day when suddenly I heard this ‘pop!’ in my leg,” Tartabull says. “At first, I thought somebody had thrown a ball at me.”

What had happened was, he had torn calf muscles. Tartabull became what baseball calls a “day-to-day” player. He could never seem to find a perfectly healthy stance even when he came off the disabled list.

The Royals have always had that unsung but indispensable player in the middle of the lineup. For years, it was Amos Otis. Then it was Hal McRae. But this one was limping to the plate, and the ballclub was limping to the cellar.

“If I’m healthy, I’m going to hit 25-30 home runs, bat in 90-100 runs and score 80-90,” Tartabull says. He has averaged 25.8 homers a year, .283 at the plate, and has 415 RBIs for a little more than four years.

He becomes a free agent later this year. He doesn’t play football in the fall. He’s not the kind of player where the ads will read: “Danny Tartabull and the Kansas City Royals Will Be In for the Weekend.” But he may be the kind of player who makes the difference between playoff and buzz-off.