McIlvaine Is Making His Mark : Baseball: In less than five months, San Diego’s new general manager has stirred up the Padres with his personnel moves.

Letters of protest continue to filter into his office. Whispers swirl behind his back. Former employees, players and agents have taken their jabs.

So even after fleeing the streets of New York for the beaches of Southern California, Joe McIlvaine still is waiting to discover paradise.

In less than five months on the job as executive vice president and general manager of the San Diego Padres, McIlvaine has stirred up more folks around these parts than anyone since Roseanne Barr.

Thirty-one Padre front-office employees, scouts and coaches have been fired. Roberto Alomar, an excellent second baseman, and Joe Carter, perhaps the most popular player in the Padre clubhouse, have been traded. All-Star catcher Benito Santiago is so enraged by salary negotiations that he threatens free agency after the 1992 season. Big-name free agents were not pursued.

And, no one in his right mind is predicting that the Padres will finish higher than fourth in the National League West.

“I don’t think I’ll be running for mayor any time soon,” McIlvaine said.

McIlvaine, 43, realizes he has an impressive list of adversaries. This is a community that abhors change. And here’s a stranger, apparently dismantling the local franchise.

“I don’t think it helps, either, that I’m perceived as being from New York, even though I spent 21 years of my life in Philadelphia and eight years in Florida,” McIlvaine said. “I don’t think people take kindly to New Yorkers.”

Even so, McIlvaine refuses to allow hostilities to hinder his decision-making. Whatever people think, he’s here to give this city a winner.

The only time he has allowed public sentiment to influence his judgment was in his recent deal with All-Star outfielder Tony Gwynn. He gave Gwynn a $12.25-million contract guaranteed for three years, even though McIlvaine really wanted to guarantee only two.

“He certainly has shown he’s not afraid to take a chance,” said Bill Lajoie, who retired a month ago as the Detroit Tigers’ general manager. “He came in there and made a lot of changes very quickly. I think he surprised some people in this industry with some of the big moves.”

Yet, after the gut-wrenching decision he made in 1969, when he was only 21, his baseball moves seem rather trivial.

Joseph Peter McIlvaine was going to become a priest. But there was something about this crazy game that refused to let him go.

McIlvaine grew up on Hampden Avenue in Narbeth, Pa., outside Philadelphia. Like virtually every other Irish Catholic kid in the area, he spent an hour or so every Sunday morning at St. Margaret Church, where he served as an altar boy.

Still, baseball commanded most of his attention. He was playing ball by the time he was 8 and always was a pitcher. His father, also Joe, recalls that in McIlvaine’s first season in elementary school, he pitched in all eight games on the schedule, all victories.

“He spent every waking moment involved in baseball,” said brother Paul McIlvaine, 41. “He’d get up in the morning, go to the ballpark and get in a pick-up game. In the afternoon, he’d play in his organized league game. He’d come home for dinner, and then (Joe and his brothers) would play that baseball board game with all of the statistics until it was time for bed.”

Paul McIlvaine gave up baseball when he was 14 and became a professional opera singer and, later, an associate dean of the System Management College in Ft. Belvoir, Va.

The youngest brother, Fran, 39, became a lawyer and is a U.S. district attorney in Laredo, Tex.

Joe? Well, he had grown up wanting to be a major league pitcher. When he graduated from high school, he was 6 feet tall but weighed only 130 pounds and there wasn’t a baseball scout to be found.

The only college expressing interest was the St. Charles Diocesan Seminary in Philadelphia. It saw in McIlvaine a perfect candidate. He was intelligent, wholesome, and, most important, he wanted to be a priest.

It was an ideal situation. McIlvaine went to the seminary for nine months and pitched semipro ball in the summer. But each summer he pitched, he was a little bigger than the last. McIlvaine had grown to 6-6 and 170 by his third year.

He also was a much-improving pitcher. Scouts started arriving with their speed guns, and in January of 1969, McIlvaine was told that he had been drafted by the Tigers in the sixth round.

He spent a lot of time on his knees after that, looking for guidance. In the end, though, it was his decision.

“I think people have the perception that angels come down and sit on your shoulder and say, ‘You’re going to be a priest,’ ” McIlvaine said. “It doesn’t work that way.

“(The priesthood) really takes a commitment. You have to be celibate. You’re giving up marriage. You don’t have children. I don’t think I was committed to making those sacrifices.”

So on June 3, 1969, McIlvaine walked out of St. Charles Seminary, taking with him a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and a minor in classics. He was going to Bristol, Va., site of the Tigers’ rookie league team.

When McIlvaine packed for Bristol, he told his family that he would invest five years of his life to make the major leagues or find another occupation. The five years went quickly. McIlvaine was a decent minor league pitcher, going 9-6 with a 1.57 earned-run average one year at Lakeland, Fla., but he was a long way from making the major leagues.

After his fifth season, he sat down with his Clinton (Iowa) manager, Jim Leyland. McIlvaine assessed his skills and asked Leyland if he agreed that he should call it a career.

“That might have been his first scouting decision,” Leyland said. “I think he hit it on the head.”

McIlvaine had been teaching English and Spanish during the off-seasons, and he had been married in 1973. He told Marty, his wife, that he wasn’t prepared to leave the game totally, and he and his father prepared resumes and sent them out.

Baltimore was the only team that granted him an interview, then hired him as a scout for $8,000 a year. He scouted for seven years, in three organizations, never making more than $18,000 a year.

Did he complain?

“You kidding?” Marty McIlvaine said. “Joe was in heaven. I think he had been scouting when he was 9. He loved every minute of it.

“He still does. He already went to Los Angeles to scout a high school game, and one night he was watching a college game on TV. Just give him a game, and Joe’s happy.”

McIlvaine also appeared perfectly content during his 10 years with the New York Mets, joining them in November of 1980 as their scouting director and becoming their vice president in charge of baseball operations in 1985. He was told that he would be the man eventually replacing Frank Cashen as the Mets’ chief operating officer and was willing to wait.

But on June 18, 1989, the day the Mets traded Lenny Dykstra and Roger McDowell to the Philadelphia Phillies for Juan Samuel, McIlvaine’s world began changing. It turned out to be a horrible trade for the Mets, and the tabloids reminded everyone daily.

Never mind that McIlvaine was the same guy who had virtually stolen Howard Johnson, Sid Fernandez, David Cone, Keith Hernandez, Ron Darling, Walt Terrell, Bob Ojeda and Kevin McReynolds in trades. In New York, you’re only as good as your last trade.

“Our manager (Davey Johnson) was pleading with me for two years to get rid of (Dykstra),” McIlvaine said. “We had two center fielders, and it was like he wanted (the front-office) to solve his problems. I’ll admit it was a bad trade, but it’s like everyone had forgotten what we had done in the past. It didn’t seem fair.”

Said Al Harazin, Met senior vice president, “The criticism was not only harsh, but it was cruel. Joe took it hard. I think the ’86 championship team had become mythical in a way, and trading someone off that team--and not being able to repeat again--there was a lot of frustration.”

You can imagine how McIlvaine felt when Timmy, his 9-year-old son, came home from school, telling him that the other kids were teasing him about the trade. You can imagine the frustration of constantly being nagged about the trade on talk shows and in newspapers. But only McIlvaine knows the anger he felt the day a newspaper columnist berated him, saying, “This is a guy who once gave up God for baseball.”

“That was the lowest,” Marty McIlvaine said. “Joe’s very intense about his religion. He didn’t give up the seminary, religion or anything else for baseball.

“That was the first time I had seen Joe truly angry.”

McIlvaine was sitting with scouts in Philadelphia the weekend of Sept. 7-9, when he was informed that Tom Werner, the Padres’ new managing general partner, had been refused permission to interview him about the Padres’ general manager’s job. McIlvaine was outraged. Sure, he had turned down plenty of other job opportunities, but he at least wanted the courtesy of being allowed to interview. He wanted to talk to Cashen.

“I went in the next week and told Frank that I’d like to be considered for the job,” McIlvaine said. “He was taken aback. I think he was hurt because he thought I was going to be the one taking his place in New York.

“The Mets offered me a three-year contract because my contract was up in December, but I just wanted to check this out.”

The Padres already had interviewed about six candidates, but none had McIlvaine’s qualifications. They were delighted that he agreed to be interviewed. He took a flight to Los Angeles two days after Jack McKeon was fired Sept. 23 and was picked up at the airport by Werner.

“Quite honestly, I was coming out to interview them,” McIlvaine said. “I needed assurances that they wanted to win. I knew I could get the job if I wanted it.

“I wanted to make sure this was going to be hush-hush and very secretive, and Tom assured me it would be. Well, we drive to Tom’s house, and there are TV trucks and TV cameras all over the place. It was unbelievable. I said, ‘What kind of secret meeting is this?’

“As it turned out, they were filming the movie of the week at the house next door.”

When McIlvaine took a flight back to New York, he took along a five-year contract offer. The financial details, which turned out to be a package worth more than $2.5 million, would be worked out later.

He decided during the flight that he wanted the job.

But the final decision was going to be Marty’s. He had been moving the family on his whim for 17 years. They had taken only four vacations. This time, Marty and the three children would decide whether they would be uprooted.

“I really liked where we were living in New York,” Marty said. “All of our family was just 2 1/2 hours away in Philadelphia. It was really tough to take the children from the relatives.

“Joe loves me so much that I knew if I said no, we wouldn’t have moved. But I loved him too much to say no.”

The decision shocked the Mets’ front office, but the family accepted it.

“I think the only thing we reminded Joe about was the Roseanne Barr thing,” Fran McIlvaine said. “We all got a laugh over that.”

Barr’s rendition of the national anthem last season disturbed Paul McIlvaine so much that he wrote a letter to the editor of the New Haven (Conn.) Register. There are 19,000 opera singers who emerge each year, he said, and surely the Padres shouldn’t have to resort to comedy actresses.

So guess who’s planning to come out this year and show just how it’s done?

“I told Joe I’ll be there,” Paul McIlvaine said.

It doesn’t matter that at least half a dozen of the 31 firings occurred before McIlvaine’s arrival. No one seems to care that many of the firings occurred simply because of recommendations made to McIlvaine. He’s been labeled, in his own words, “the hatchetman.”

Now, it seems, everyone’s waiting for the ax to fall on Manager Greg Riddoch. It will be only a matter of time, critics say, before McIlvaine will want his own man--say Clint Hurdle, Jim Riggleman or Mike Cubbage.

“I just want the best possible people in this organization, and that includes Greg Riddoch,” McIlvaine said. “He’ll get every single opportunity in the world to be a big league manager. I want him to be successful. That’s why I hired experienced people around him, to give him the best opportunity possible. I feel bad about what happened before. I empathize for the people I had to let go. You’re often affecting people’s lives. But we had to have a new attitude and be free of the sins of the past.”

Now, McIlvaine simply is asking for patience. Although he believes the Padres will be the surprise of the division, he says it’s silly to justify that belief with reasons. But if the Padres develop the way he has in mind, building through the farm system, he doesn’t see any reason they can’t be a championship-caliber team by at least 1993.

“I have a very little ego in this, unlike my predecessor,” McIlvaine said. “But I know the buck stops here now. I have the final say.

“Simply, what I want to do is establish the best organization in all of baseball.

“I know I’m prepared for this job.

“I know I can do it.

“Now I’m planning to prove it.”