They’ve Been Thrown a Curve : Jeff Robinson: Bad timing keeps him a step ahead of success, but now he’s returned home.

Jeff Robinson has spent his career on the move since he left Cal State Fullerton. And too often, he’s been one stop ahead of victory, which pulls into the station he’s just left with alarming regularity.

His first major league team was the San Francisco Giants, who traded him to Pittsburgh in the heat of the 1987 pennant race.

“It was late August, and we were in first place,” said Robinson, a pitcher drafted by the Giants in the second round in 1983. “The Cincinnati Reds were talking about getting Rick Reuschel. The Giants didn’t so much need pitching, but if Cincinnati got Rick Reuschel, it could put them over the top to win the division.”

The Giants moved to stymie Cincinnati, sending Robinson to Pittsburgh to get Reuschel themselves. Robinson got the word from General Manager Al Rosen and Manager Roger Craig.

“Al Rosen told me, ‘It may be a mistake, it may not be a mistake. You’re young.’ It was Aug. 22, my son’s birthday. I got traded.”

Robinson joined a team that was in last place. The team he’d left won the division that year, then made it to the World Series in 1989.

Pittsburgh turned out to be better than Robinson expected, however. The Pirates became contenders by the time he left, traded to the New York Yankees in 1989 during the off-season--the off-season before the Pirates won the National League East last year.

So, you say, Robinson has had a run of bad luck? If so, it’s been a long run.

“It was the same thing in college,” said Robinson, who has returned to his old neighborhood after signing a $1 million free-agent contract with the Angels in January. “I was at Fullerton from ’79 to ’83. They won in ’79 and ’84.”

The Titans were College World Series champions in 1979--Robinson’s last year at Troy High School--and 1984, when he was breaking in with the Giants.

“Things are bound to work out somewhere along the way,” said Robinson, whose younger brother Chris has a knack he lacks. Chris went to the College World Series with the Titans last year.

With Robinson’s latest move, perhaps the string of championships washing up in his wake has ended. He left the Yankees, who finished last in the American League last season.

Surely they won’t win now, too?

Robinson, a right-hander who will be used in middle relief with the Angels, has alighted somewhere he’d like to stay. He and his wife, Lorin, have a son, Danny, who is approaching school age, a daughter, Heidi, and a third child on the way.

“Throughout my career, we’ve always been Gypsies,” Robinson said. “It was always a dream to play in my hometown.”

As a youngster, Robinson was an Anaheim Stadium regular.

“I would go to as many games as I could get a ride to,” he said. “Once a week during school, then as soon as school was out, every chance I got.”

As much as playing in Anaheim Stadium will mean, having his family settled in their new home in Coto de Caza means more.

“It gives us a little stability. It’s such a pain to pack up your stuff and be a jet-set, bicoastal family.”

Usually, the family would join him during the season, establishing a temporary home, never a real one.

“One year in Pittsburgh we tried,” he said. “I signed a two-year contract, we sold the house in Mission Viejo and bought a house. We spent the whole season, the off-season, the next season in Pittsburgh.”

Then came the trade to New York, a city where the Robinson family couldn’t imagine living.

“No way I was ever going to try that,” he said. “It’s hard to say what I really honestly feel without offending anyone. . . . I didn’t look like a New Yorker, blond hair and all. As far as I was concerned, I felt like I accomplished something every day I drove to the ballpark and drove back home.

“We lived in New Jersey, a half hour from the park. It could be two hours. I had to cross the George Washington Bridge, a million cars cross it every day. There was usually an accident, but if there wasn’t an accident, there was a road crew.”

Now, the thought of his commute makes him smile.

“Right down Trabuco Canyon road,” he said. “The best thing in the world is to get paid a million dollars by the team I always wanted to play for.”

Unfortunately for Robinson, he is signed only through ‘91, with an option for ’92. At 30, there may be a few more teams in his future.

“That’s a very realistic possibility, too,” he said.

As long as the Yankees don’t up and win the AL East, adding to the strange history of Robinson’s former teams, maybe the Angels won’t be tempted by superstition to trade him, then wait for the championships to arrive.