Providing Comedy, Relief : Padres: Larry Andersen is keeping the clubhouse loose while bolstering the bullpen.

The subject is the duration of his burp. And Padre reliever Larry Andersen is serious.

He isn’t snickering or even smiling. His voice is matter of fact, as though he were discussing the art of pitching to a .300 hitter.

So, how long is this burp? Fifteen seconds?

“I could probably do it 15 seconds,” Andersen says. “It wouldn’t be loud at 15. I could mute it a little bit and go longer but if I just let out a big thunder spray or something it’s short and quick. But it’s loud. It’s got some volume to it. The long ones are not quite as loud.”

It’s enough to impress his teammates. Second baseman Marty Barrett, who played with Andersen last season in Boston, still can’t believe it.

“I don’t know how he does it,” Barrett said. “It might even be 15 seconds, I swear. It seems like it’s forever.”

Andersen, 37, signed by the Padres last December to be the right-handed complement to Craig Lefferts, should be good medicine for this team. After a season filled with bickering and losing, the Padres could use a veteran who doesn’t take himself too seriously.

And what’s wrong with a well-orchestrated burp? It can be good for morale. Ever tried it, Jack Clark?

“That’s part of having fun,” Andersen said. “I think that helps me, helps take a little pressure off. You have to be able to be yourself.”

That’s something a rookie doesn’t always understand.

“They lose sight of the fact that there’s more to life than just winning or losing a baseball game,” Andersen said. “There’s a fine line between being intense and not caring, but I think I’ve been able to just have fun. At the same time, when I go out there, they know I’m going to give everything I’ve got.”

And they also know he’s going to give them something to laugh about in the clubhouse.

“He’s the type of person you need,” pitcher Ed Whitson said. “He keeps the guys on their toes, keeps them loose. When the tension gets high, all of a sudden here he comes out of the woodwork and says something and everybody just busts out laughing.”

Looking at Andersen’s tape-measure statistics page, you wonder how this guy is still around and, for that matter, how he is earning more than $2 million a year.

Let’s see . . . Reno, 1972. Class A ball. Andersen finished the season 4-14 with a 6.53 ERA.

Three not-so-noteworthy years later, he was called up to the big leagues for the first time with the Cleveland Indians. He made the minimum salary of $16,000 and thought how great it would be to stick around for four years, long enough to qualify for a pension.

He lasted a month.

He lasted 14 innings in 1977, his next chance, and a half season in 1979, his next chance.

By then, he had formed an opinion of the Indians.

“Cleveland at that time was a dismal, negative, terrible place to play,” Andersen said. “I’m not talking about the city. The stadium was rundown. It was ugly. It was like a puke yellow. And the organization left a lot to be desired. Other than that, it was perfect.”

After a trade to the Pirates and another stint in the minors, Andersen was traded to the Seattle, where he pitched two seasons--1981 and 1982--for the Mariners.

In 1981, he pitched well, going 3-3 with a 2.65 ERA in 41 appearances.

In 1982, he didn’t. In 40 games, he was 0-0 with a 5.99 ERA.

At that point, Seattle’s manager, Rene Lachemann, told him he didn’t think he was good enough to play at the major league level.

Imagine what was going through Andersen’s mind. Here he spent nearly 10 years in the minors earning $500 a month. And after he finally made it to the bigs for more than just a layover, his manager pulled him aside and told him he was recommending that the Mariners kick him off the roster.

And this was the Mariners. That made him wonder. The Mariners were the worst team in baseball. And the Cleveland Indians weren’t exactly the Gashouse Gang.

“I think by today’s standards,” Andersen said, “I’d have been released before I’d even finished the ’72 season.”

When somebody tells you you’re no good at the something you’ve spent your entire life trying to master, you often try a little harder. In a way, Andersen appreciated Lachemann’s frankness.

“It was probably the first time I’d ever had someone be honest with me in baseball,” he said. “After 13 years, you get someone being honest with you. It shouldn’t take that long.”

Less than a year later, after another trade, Andersen appeared in three World Series games for the Philadelphia Phillies. Now, nearly eight years later, he is coming off the two best seasons of his career.

The minors weren’t always fun, but they offered an opportunity to learn from players who knew the game. Not Hall of Famers. Just guys who used every trick in the book to survive.

Andersen survived. And now he has a National League championship ring from that season with the Phillies and a fat, new contract with the Padres.

“It’s something I’ll always have to look back and say: ‘I went from the cellar to the Series in less than a year,’ ” he said. “And a lot of it was because I wouldn’t let somebody convince me that I wasn’t good enough.”

Finished with his day’s workout, Andersen was sitting at his locker last week talking baseball when along came Tom Redington, a 22-year-old infielder who has never had a major league at-bat.

A few minutes earlier, Redington received a taste of Andersen’s slider, which Whitson says might be the best in the game.

“Your slider was nasty,” Redington said. “ Voooooooom. You threw the first one, and I said, ‘Well . . . I’m taking this one. I was having enough trouble hitting something straight.’ ”

The younger they are, the nastier it looks. Then again, it looks pretty scary to Tony Gwynn, too.

Gwynn was having trouble figuring out where the slider was going to end up next. Sometimes, it breaks away. Sometimes, it breaks in. Hitters know it’s coming. Andersen throws it 90% of the time. Yet knowing about it and hitting it are two entirely different matters.

After one session in the batting cage, Gwynn told Andersen that the slider was coming in so hard and breaking so quickly that it froze him.

“That’s a big compliment coming from a hitter like that,” Andersen said.

Last year, a short time after Andersen was traded to the Red Sox from Houston, he pitched 2 2/3 innings against Oakland and struck out five.

His secret is disguising the spin. He puts his hand over the top of the ball to give it a looping look when it comes toward the plate. It looks like a fastball. And then it breaks late. The spin is almost impossible to detect.

At times, his slider has been so effective he has been accused of scuffing the ball. He takes that two ways.

“In a way, it’s an insult because it’s like I can’t throw a slider that good or it can’t be thrown that good,” he said. “In the same respect, it’s a compliment.”

Anyway, it makes the hitter wonder. So why rock the boat?

“I’m not one to go out and go into some big charade that they’re accusing me of cheating,” he said. “The more they think, the better it is for me. Don’t ever try to dispel any doubt in the hitter’s mind. The more doubts he has, the better off you are.”

After last season’s trade from the Houston Astros to the Red Sox, Andersen was the scourge of the American League for a brief period in the September pennant race.

“When he came over, for the first couple of weeks he was unhittable,” Barrett said. “Then they kept running him out there everyday . . .”

Then his triceps began to ache. He didn’t keep track, but someone told him at one point he had been up in the bullpen 19 games in a row.

One day, he decided he wouldn’t even hike out to the bullpen. That seemed to be the only way to prevent being called on to warm up.

“I just got plain tired in Boston,” he said. “I’ll never make excuses. That’s just the plain fact of life.”

In relief of Roger Clemens, he lost Game 1 of the American League Championship Series.

That prompted the questions. What’s wrong? Sore arm? Why didn’t you get that guy out? They using you too much?

And he responded: “Hey, haven’t you ever had a bad day?”

The questions got old very quickly.

“I’m sorry, I happen to be one of those people that’s kind of human,” he said. “It’s almost like it’s not acceptable to be human.”

People expect an awful lot when you make a million dollars. You can’t have too many bad days at the office.

“If I go out and make a bad pitch it might be the end of me,” he said. “Not too many people go to work and have to prove themselves every single day and do it in front of anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 people. Until you’re out here doing it, you don’t know the pressure. And it’s not always pressure that other people put on you. It’s pressure you put on yourself.”

Tony Gwynn had his second big game in a row in Saturday’s exhibition victory over the Angels. In the clubhouse afterward, Andersen was wearing a T-shirt that read: “The Tony Gwynn Fan Club.”

You didn’t need to look too closely to see that Gwynn’s name was written in tape. This is an old trick. Andersen did it last season in Boston too. A guy has a big game, he’s Andersen’s best friend and his name appears on the shirt.

“That’s why I got tape on the shirt,” Andersen said. “I can always change the name.”

In one Padre spring training meeting, the players were told they would be given maps to direct them to a spot the team was traveling. Andersen asked if they would also be given maps to direct them back.

He has been known to ask aloud such questions as: “Why does sour cream have an expiration date?” And: “What do they package Styrofoam in?”

He was asked recently if, at the age of 37, he has lost a bit of his physical skill and he responded: “I didn’t have a whole lot of physical skill to start with, so there’s not a whole lot to lose. Outside of just throwing the ball, I’m not real adept at anything else. Can’t run, can’t hit, can’t field.”

There is no shortage of fun when Larry Andersen is in the room. So there is the tendency to assume he isn’t much more than the team clown. And he knows it.

“I have a personality that some people call a flake or crazy or insane,” he said. “But to me it’s just part of enjoying it more and realizing that it’s not the end of the world if it doesn’t work out and that I’m going to have fun doing it.”

If you didn’t know that Andersen has as good a slider as anyone around, and that his ERA was 1.54 in 1989, and 1.95 last season with Houston and 1.23 with the Red Sox, you’d probably think of him as the type of guy who would be sitting next to you in the bleachers.

A guy who would make you chuckle but not make you cringe. A guy who might buy you one more beer than you bought him. And then remind you of it. For 15 seconds.

“He has an air of humility for a guy with his kind of experience,” Padre Manager Greg Riddoch said. “And that’s a great example for people coming up.”

ANDERSEN’S CAREER

YR TEAM W-L ERA IP BB SO ’75 Cleveland 0-0 4.50 6 2 4 ’77 Cleveland 0-1 3.21 14 9 8 ’79 Cleveland 0-0 7.41 17 4 7 ’81 Seattle 3-3 2.65 68 18 40 ’82 Seattle 0-0 5.99 79.2 23 32 ’83 Philadelphia 1-0 2.39 26.1 9 14 ’84 Philadelphia 3-7 2.38 90.2 25 54 ’85 Philadelphia 3-3 4.32 73 26 50 ’86 Philadelphia 0-0 4.26 12.2 3 9 ’86 Houston 2-1 2.78 64.2 23 33 ’87 Houston 9-5 3.45 101.2 41 94 ’88 Houston 2-4 2.94 82.2 20 66 ’89 Houston 4-4 1.54 87.2 24 85 ’90 Houston 5-2 1.95 73.2 24 68 ’90 Boston 0-0 1.23 22 3 25 Tot. Five Teams 32-30 3.15 819.2 254 589