The Best Player in Oblivion

The best player in the National League this season might not be the gritty Lenny Dykstra for all his gaudy batting average; or Ryne Sandberg, the gifted home run leader of the Chicago Cubs. It doesn’t have to be the great B-boys from Pittsburgh, Bobby Bonilla or Barry Bonds; it could be Barry Larkin, but don’t bet the farm.

It could be Ronald Edwin Gant.

WHO ? you ask.

Exactly. He’s the best-kept secret of the league. Unless, of course, you ask any right-handed (or left-handed) pitcher. They’ll know who he is right away. Big trouble. Mr. Walk-him-if-you’ve-got-a-base open-and-maybe-if-you-don’t.

Ron Gant has superstar written all over him. Fast, smart, hard-working, he has the compact, power build of a Japanese import; he can do all the things Willie Mays could: hit, run, hit with power and field. Consistently.

There’s only one thing wrong with Ron Gant. He plays for Atlanta. This is like being an opera singer in Waco. Or a member of the Bulgarian Parliament.

More people come to see the Dodgers in a month than come to see Atlanta all season. In an era when franchises are topping 3 million, Atlanta hasn’t been able to get to 1 million in three years. It’s supposed to be America’s Team but it isn’t even Georgia’s.

Ron Gant has hit 28 home runs and stolen 23 bases this season. Only 12 players in history have hit 30 homers and stolen 30 bases in a season. Gant is batting .300. He is fourth in the league in runs scored, 10th in the league in doubles and sixth in home runs. That’s a Hall of Hame pace for a 25-year-old.

The question is, can you get to the Hall of Fame from Atlanta?

Individual prowess can carry you a long way. But on balance, if you’re going to be great, it’s better to be great in New York or L.A. Or, in a pinch, Chicago. It’s better to be great on a winner. How can you be a Most Valuable Player if your team finishes last? The famous lines of the general manager who let loose of a star with the words, “We finished last with him, we can finish last without him” haunt even the stars.

Playing in the dark has been the lot of generations of superstars. Ernie Banks is the patron saint of the group. Ernie, for decades, posted an annual 47, 45, 44 or 43 home runs with as many as 143 runs batted in one season and more than 100 most others--but the team finished in the toilet, losing 103 games a season twice. It was Banks and the writer, Jimmy Enright, who put a cliche in the game once when Banks came to bat in an exhibition game and Enright sang out, “Here comes the franchise!” thereby putting “franchise player” into the language of the grand old game.

Ted Williams, very possibly the best pure hitter the game has seen, played on Red Sox teams that managed one pennant in his whole career. For all his towering achievements, Williams managed only two MVPs in his career and didn’t even get one the year he batted .406.

Walter Johnson may have been the greatest pitcher who ever lived, but he was winning 36, 32, 28 and 27 games for teams that lost 110 and 103 games a season and inspired the deathless press box quote that Washington was “first in war, first in peace--and last in the American League.”

In this day of the footloose, fancy free agent and mass mobility, a player need not stay locked in a no-win situation. But historically, it was not so easy.

Sometimes, a player flourished, like certain potted plants, in the shade. Chuck Klein of the old Phillies, the team that put the word hapless in the anthologies, was a massive star of the 1930s on the team that played its games in a park that put the word bandbox in the language. In a stadium that was so small you looked for the side pockets, Klein was hitting 43, 40, 38 and 31 homers a year, batting in the high .350s, driving in 170 and 137 runs a year when he got traded to the contending Chicago Cubs. He promptly turned into a pumpkin. Pennant chases were not something he could fit in. Klein had been an MVP and on his way to the Hall of Fame till he left his comfort zone.

It cuts both ways. A situation where an inept supporting cast surrounds him works fine for some players who can just leave the team on its own and concentrate uninterrupted on personal goals that have nothing to do with winning or losing. Others get depressed, dispirited on losers. Some guys like being the Franchise. Others want to be Mr. October.

Ron Gant hasn’t been around long enough to find his mold. “I think my role is to try to become the best baseball player I can right now,” he says. “I’m learning the game. Don’t forget these are the 500 best players in the world out here, and they wouldn’t be here if they weren’t tough. You have to learn something from them. Then, when you get in position to win, you know how to do it.”

The Atlanta Braves are as encouraged by Gant’s attitude as his aptitude. His team instincts were tested early. He came into the league as a hard-hitting second baseman. He hung up rookie-of-the-year numbers--19 home runs, 28 doubles, eight triples--and, in fact, finished fourth in rookie-of-the-year balloting his first season, behind Chris Sabo of Cincinnati, Mark Grace of the Cubs and Tim Belcher of the Dodgers.

Then someone got the bright idea of making a third baseman out of the rookie. Years before, a similar decision had almost killed the career of Steve Garvey in its crib.

Like Garvey before him, Gant was unsuited to the position. “I was kind of a wreck,” Gant says. “I made 16 errors (in 69 games) and I worried so much that it began to affect my hitting, and I began to wonder if I belonged up here at all.”

The Braves called him in with a unique solution. How would he like to go to Sumter, S.C., and learn the outfield?

Now, Sumter, S.C., isn’t exactly Paris, and Class-A ball is not exactly the Palace. Says the former Dodger pitcher, now broadcaster in Atlanta, Don Sutton: “A lot of guys would have gone home and had their agents on the phone, screaming, ‘Get me outta here!’ Ron just packed his bag and got on the bus.”

He didn’t stay in Sumter long. To the intense relief of the pitchers there--he hit .385--he moved quickly to Richmond and this year back to Atlanta and stardom.

The Dodgers guaranteed a decade of victories when they anchored Garvey at first base. The Braves hope they have done as well anchoring Gant in center field. “You could say he figures largely in our plans for the future,” dead-pans Manager Bobby Cox. “Like Roberto Clemente figured in the Pirates’.”

But Ron Gant doesn’t want to become the Franchise in Atlanta. What he sees is someone saying, “Ron Gant? Wasn’t he the center fielder on all those great Atlanta teams in the ‘90s?”