Joyner Has Angelic Looks, Devil of a Bat

Wally Joyner is one of my favorite ballplayers. Got this nice level swing. Perfect build for a hitter. Not too tall. Not too much strike zone. Strides into the ball well. Graceful follow-through. Hits the ball where it’s pitched. Good power. Hit 34 home runs his sophomore season. A team player all the way. What’s not to like?

But there’s one thing I wish he would do for me.

Bat .400? Nah! That would be nice but unrealistic. Hit 50 home runs? Well, I could live with that. Win a pennant? Gene Autry would like that.

No, what I would like Wally Joyner to do for me is look a little bit older.

Oh, I know the hair is getting a bit thin on top. But, with a hat on, Wally still looks more like a Little Leaguer than a big leaguer. He has these rosy cheeks, these bright brown eyes, the skin of a baby. His nickname should be Huckleberry. You’re surprised he’s wearing shoes. He should have a frog in his pocket, a fishing pole in his hands and be on his way to the raft. He should want a pony for Christmas. You look at him and you want to say “What do you want to be when you grow up, kid?” Or, “Where are you going to college, sonny?”

Wally has been around the major leagues for six years now. He’s gotten 785 hits, 94 homers. He’s a natural-born .290 hitter. He’s hitting .315 this year.

You know what a guy who’s been around the majors for six years is supposed to begin to look like. Barbed-wire beard. Tobacco juice coursing down his chin. A vocabulary consisting of four-letter words and not much else. A bat-thrower, a helmet-kicker.

Wally has to learn to act the part. It’s for sure he’s never going to look it. Wally is 28 years old, going on 12.

I think it helped him in his early career. Pitchers took one look at this--well, this cherub with a bat in his hands, and they would think “Hell, I can throw this little baby anything. How’d he get away from his Momma? No way he can get around on my fastball.”

After the ball ricocheted around in the right-field corner a few times--or sailed over the fence--they got the message. This was Stan Musial in a Boy Scout uniform--or even a Cub Scout. It’s well known in nature that a baby rattlesnake is far more dangerous than a wise old one. He doesn’t give warning, for one thing.

Wally Joyner even seems to have been able to fool the home nine into undervaluing him. Believe it or not, they seem to have spent the winter trying to get rid of him. Trade him to Houston for Glenn Davis. It’s hard to figure why. Unless the baby face is fooling them, too.

Wally had to sit out last year, to be sure. But that was only after he played something like six weeks on a broken kneecap.

It didn’t show up on the X-rays. So, Wally took the doctors’ word for it: he had a form of tendinitis.

It did show up in the form of excruciating pain. They should have known something was wrong when Wally’s May numbers of .337 batting average, five home runs and 22 runs batted in tumbled as the month ended, and in June he hit .234 and July, .220, trying not to scream as he put weight on his front foot in the batting cage.

Wally’s career has never been what you would call a ticker-tape parade. All he had to do when he first came up was replace Rod Carew. If you’re looking for Rod Carew, check the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown this July. He’s going in on the first ballot. He only hit .328 for his career, became the 16th player in history to collect 3,000 hits and only won seven batting championships.

It could have been worse. Wally could have been replacing Babe Ruth. But he replaced Carew so well, that, in his first two seasons, Anaheim Stadium was festooned with signs for “Wally World” and “Wally Wonderful.” He was everybody’s darling.

Well, not everybody. He twice had to go to arbitration. He and the ballclub were several hundred thousand to half a million dollars apart.

Wally always won the arbitration but, as a free agent at the end of this year, he could be taking his baby face to another part of the country. “They don’t seem to be making much of an effort to dicker with me here,” he confided the other night as he sat in the Anaheim dugout before a game against the Orioles.

Wherever he goes, the league is wise to him, now. The word is out that, beneath that baby stare lurks the baseball heart of a serial killer. With a bat in his hands, Wally is like the choirboy who turns ax murderer.

Few people know it, but Wally says he is actually as nearsighted as a Mr. Magoo. He says it took the optometrists’ highest art to get him to see the curveball. “They actually fitted me with contacts that enable me to see 20/15 (or a little better than normal), but they said I was the hardest guy to fit to 20/15 they had.”

Contact lenses, a face that looks as if it should have a bonnet on it instead of a batting helmet, notwithstanding, Wally Joyner is that most dangerous thing in nature, the assassin who looks like the altar boy.

I’m not the only one who wishes he looked his age. In the pitchers’ union, the word is out. “Don’t let those downy cheeks fool you. Don’t give Little Boy Blue anything over the middle of the plate--not unless you’re crazy about three-run homers or base-clearing doubles!”

You might want to give him a lollipop. Just don’t give him a slow curve.