No Invitation to the Party : For Now, Lynn Is a Free Agent With a Lot of Free Time

On a Sunday afternoon, about the time the latest baseball scores are coming in, Fred Lynn is out on his back patio facing the Mission Hills golf course, grilling barbecue chicken and hamburgers.

The day before, he had driven to Orange County to see his son, Jason, in a Pony League baseball game.

For Monday, after his weight-lifting session at a local club, he has scheduled an 11 a.m. tee time to play 18 holes of golf.

Lynn is doing all the leisure activities he never had time for the past three decades. Sounds idyllic, right?

The trouble is, this time of year, Lynn expects to spend the major part of every day or night in or around a ballpark. It was his living for 17 years and 30 days. That time span encompassed the big league career of a 39-year-old outfielder who:

--Was once regarded as Hall of Fame material.

--Has a career batting average of .283, with four seasons over .300.

--Hit more than 20 home runs in nine seasons, with a high of 39 and a total of 306.

--Twice had 100 or more runs batted in during a season, with a total of 1,111 RBIs.

--Won four Gold Gloves for his graceful defense.

--Was the American League’s most valuable player as a rookie.

--Played in nine All-Star games and hit the only grand slam in All-Star history.

--Is out of a job.

Fred Lynn thinks he can still play and contribute. He says he is in prime physical condition. He still trains and hasn’t noticeably lost speed or reflexes. His hair is solid black. At 182 pounds, spread trimly over a 6-foot-1 frame, he is two pounds heavier than when he broke in with the Boston Red Sox in 1975.

But no team in baseball invited him to spring training this year. He hasn’t faced a pitched ball since playing out his contract with the San Diego Padres last September and becoming a free agent.

And so the transition that confronts every aging athlete nudges him. What is he going to do with the rest of his life?

“You think you prepare yourself for this day when you start to get older and are still playing,” Lynn says from the comfort of a patio chair, gazing down a green fairway, with the 10,000-foot peak of Mt. San Jacinto as a backdrop. He is deeply tanned and relaxed.

“Somebody asked me about this last year. I said then, ‘I go on the field and appreciate the moments. I see little things I didn’t see before. I try to take it all in because it could be the last hurrah.’

“And it looks like it might have been. No matter what you say, though, you’re not prepared for it when it comes. I was a little bitter and a little upset.”

As he fretted through early spring with no calls, then the start of the 1991 season, watching games on TV and checking daily box scores, the edginess of not playing built up. In mid-April, he dropped out of sight and went fishing on Lake Casitas, near Santa Barbara. For five days, he didn’t read a newspaper or watch TV. For five days, he forgot about baseball.

“Now, I am not quite as passionate about it,” he says. “I look at some of my buddies still playing and I know that I can play with them, but I don’t have the opportunity. That’s the way it goes.”

But Lynn doesn’t quite concede that his baseball career is over. He believes that a team looking for a quick fix in a pennant race will turn to a proven veteran who can hit with power, who led the Padres in pinch-hitting last season and who was still fleet enough to play center field at 38.

“I still want to play,” he says. “I don’t consider myself retired. I’m kind of inactive.” He laughs.

“Being on top for so long and then having the bottom fall out, it’s mentally tough. I can’t let go totally, because if I do get a call, I (wouldn’t) be able to get back into it mentally.

“Physically, no problem. You hate to use the old cliche--it’s like riding a bicycle. But it is.

“For your own sanity, you have to admit that eventually it’s going to end. There’ll be a point where you put your glove away and do something else. You come to grips with that in your own mind.”

There is also a material adjustment. Last year, with a signing bonus and incentive clauses, he banked a comfortable $740,000.

“You get used to those checks of $50,000 to $100,000 coming in twice a month,” says Natalie, his wife. “It’s not just your income that’s cut off. You get an endorsement fee from baseball that’s substantial, more than $50,000. Your traveling is affected. Your whole lifestyle changes.”

During the five years of their marriage--it’s the second for both--Natalie Lynn has seen virtually every game her husband has played. She went on all the trips, separately. She made sure that he was picked up at the airport when the team’s plane came in, that his clothes were cleaned 24 hours before another trip, that he was taken to the ballpark and picked up every day, that he ate the right food, that all the bills were paid for at all the houses--at one time, scattered from Maryland to Michigan to California.

“You don’t want players to think about anything but baseball,” she says. “They get so isolated that I don’t even know if they can write a check. They just don’t deal with any problems.

“Now he is dealing with everything. He helps me shop and he helps me clean. He is back being a normal guy.”

Fred Lynn says: “I haven’t had a summer since I was 9 when I haven’t played ball. The things people take for granted that they do in the summer, I have never done.”

He saw Jason, 13, also a center fielder, play Pony League games in Tustin on five consecutive Saturdays. When Lynn was active, he saw only one game of Jason’s Little League career. He has seen Jennifer, 11, play volleyball and softball. When the kids visit from Orange, where they live with their mother, Lynn takes them to a local park and throws pitches to them, works on their technique and fundamentals--because they want him to do it.

Around the house, he idly swings a black bat just to use muscles he may need. Three mornings a week, he runs several miles around the Mission Hills Country Club where he lives, breaking up the routine with quick sprints and special agility exercises. Three other mornings, he lifts weights.

“It would take me two days to get my batting stroke back,” Lynn says.

Fredric Michael Lynn, who grew up in El Monte, was a natural. His life was compartmentalized by seasons. In the spring and summer, it was baseball; in the fall, football; in the winter, basketball. And he starred in each sport.

A quick runner with a graceful stride, he went to USC on a football scholarship as a wide receiver and defensive back. He had also been recruited by UCLA but chose the Trojans because then-coach John McKay told him he could also play baseball in the spring.

In his first game for USC’s freshman team, he and Lynn Swann lined up deep to receive the kickoff against California.

“Everybody knew who he was,” Lynn recalls, referring to Swann, who later became an All-American and an all-pro with the Pittsburgh Steelers. “They didn’t know who I was. They’re not going to let him touch the ball. They kicked off to me.”

Lynn caught the ball on the run at the 20 and went 80 yards for a touchdown. After his freshman season, he was set to become a varsity cornerback in a depleted USC secondary.

That spring, he played center field on a USC baseball team that won the national title in Omaha, and was named to the all-tournament team.

Old Bovard Field on the USC campus had a huge eucalyptus tree down the right-field foul line.

“The only reason they kept it there was to protect Founder’s Hall and the English department, right behind it,” says Lynn, a left-handed pull hitter. “I would hook balls into that tree and would have cost the school a lot of money (if the tree hadn’t been there).”

He also played that summer for the United States in the 1971 Pan American Games and later toured Japan.

Says Lynn: “Everybody kept telling me, ‘Why are you playing football? You’re crazy.’ Here I was, one of the best baseball players in the country, playing football against these monsters. I was 18 years old and scared to death when I went to McKay and told him I was quitting. It was a tough, agonizing decision because I loved football. It was a big part of my life; it was how I got to college. I never went to another football game after that. I couldn’t watch.”

In the summer of 1973, after the Trojans had won their third consecutive NCAA baseball championship, Lynn was drafted in the second round by the Boston Red Sox and received a signing bonus of $40,000. By the late summer of ‘74, with only one season of minor league experience, he was in a Red Sox uniform.

Then the rookie became the starting center fielder early the next year. Other first-year players in Boston’s 1975 lineup were shortstop Rick Burleson and left fielder Jim Rice. Right fielder Dwight Evans had arrived two years earlier; catcher Carlton Fisk was a three-year man. The only longtime veteran starters were first baseman Carl Yastrzemski and third baseman Rico Petrocelli.

Yet, the Red Sox won the title in the American League East and, in the American League championship series, ended the dynasty of the Oakland A’s, champions of baseball for three years, before losing a dramatic seven-game World Series to the Cincinnati Reds.

That season, Lynn batted .331, with 21 home runs and a league-leading 47 doubles--most to date by an American League rookie--and drove in 105 runs. He also was awarded his first Gold Glove for his play in center field.

In the playoffs, he batted .364 and was the Red Sox’s RBI leader. In the World Series, he hit .280, with one homer, and tied Evans for the team’s RBI lead with five. Lynn was on deck along the first-base line and got the best view in Fenway Park when Fisk hit a homer off the left-field foul pole in the 12th inning of Game 6 to end one of the most exciting games in Series history.

Throughout baseball-crazy New England, Fred Lynn at 23 conjured up an image of Ty Cobb, Ted Williams and Tris Speaker rolled into one. He would need his own Hall of Fame.

His salary for that rookie season, negotiated without an agent, was $18,000.

Winds of change blew through baseball during the 1975-76 off-season. A couple of pitchers, Andy Messersmith of the Dodgers and Dave McNally of the Baltimore Orioles, sued for free agency, and an arbitrator set aside the standard reserve clause in baseball contracts, which had previously bound players to their respective teams for life. While the suit was pending, Lynn, Burleson and Fisk became holdouts.

“We weren’t going to sign a contract that bound us to the club when we might be able to be free agents,” Lynn says.

But in Boston, the negative publicity stunned him.

“Columnists, beat writers, the whole town took shots at me,” he says, shaking his head. “I was the last to sign, playing under my old contract until early August. It was incredible, the amount of pressure I was under. I really got bitter and wary that year.”

All three holdouts eventually signed no-trade contracts.

“As soon as they could, (the Red Sox) got rid of all three of us,” Lynn says. “The heart of the club, right up the middle--catcher, short and center.”

In the winter of 1980-81, Fisk became a free agent and signed with the Chicago White Sox, for whom he still toils productively at 42. Burleson, who is now a batting coach with the Oakland A’s, and Lynn went to the Angels.

Somehow, a notion persists that Lynn never played back to his rookie form. But in 1979, his fifth season, he led the American League by hitting .333 and achieved career highs with 39 home runs and 122 RBIs. During his six seasons with the Red Sox, he batted .308.

Yet, he left Boston labeled as a guy who was always hurt, despite having averaged 135 games a season.

On a shelf in his den is the MVP plaque with the name still misspelled-- Frederick instead of Fredric-- which Lynn received at the New York Baseball Writers Assn.’s annual dinner in 1975. That same night, he was asked to present an award to an old Brooklyn Dodger named Pete Reiser.

“I didn’t know who he was, except he was famous for running into walls,” Lynn says. “Plus, he had no hair on his head.

“ ‘Geez,’ I said to myself, ‘am I going to look like that? I better not run into any more walls.’ But unfortunately, I did. For my style of play, it was a foregone conclusion that I was going to run--or crash--into something.”

At one time or another, he has had ankle sprains, cracked ribs, arthroscopic knee surgery, groin pulls, sprained wrists and bruised shoulders.

In August of 1980, Lynn fouled a pitch off his right shoe. He ignored the numbness and lined a ball through the gap, but while running the bases he felt “a bolt of fire running through my foot.” He eventually scored and hobbled into the dugout. That was his last appearance in a Red Sox uniform. The foul tip had broken his big toe.

There were also allegations that he feigned injuries.

“He was hurt personally by things said about him dodging left-handed pitchers,” says Gene Mauch, his manager with the Angels from 1981 through ’84. “Fred is a proud man. He didn’t want to go out (to play) less than himself. If he’d confided in somebody like myself and said he was hurt, we might have eased the way for him.

“I just know he was one of the all-time talents in baseball. He was a fearless fielder.”

When the Angels won the American League West in 1982, Mauch says, “He picked us up and carried us for six to eight weeks. In the playoffs, Freddie was just fantastic.”

During the losing five-game championship series against Milwaukee--in which the Angels won the first two games--Lynn batted .611. Starting in ‘82, at 30, he hit more than 20 home runs annually for seven consecutive seasons. In one stretch of four years, he hit 23 homers each year.

“I went through a divorce and I still hit 23 home runs,” he says.

After his contract with the Angels expired, Lynn tested free agency for the first time and signed with the Baltimore Orioles in 1985. His salary had already reached a high of $1.45 million, and he admits he didn’t exactly feel underpaid.

“There were guys making more but I wasn’t complaining,” he says. “If I put my John Hancock on the bottom of a contract, that was it. I did OK financially. I’m one of those guys who would play baseball if I was making $5,000 or $10,000. I never thought I was going to get rich. At the time I started, doctors were making more than we did. Money wasn’t really the allure for me. It was what I liked to do, and I played well.”

But inevitably, his role was changing. With the Orioles floundering in 1988--they lost 21 consecutive games to start the season--Lynn was traded late that summer to the Detroit Tigers, who were in a tight pennant race. His average dipped as he altered his batting style, trying to pull the ball because of the inviting right-field overhang at Tiger Stadium.

He did contribute seven homers in 27 games to help the Tigers finish one game behind Boston in the American League East, then spent another summer in Detroit as a designated hitter and part-time outfielder.

As a free agent again in 1990, he signed with San Diego for his National League debut. The Padres had planned to use him as a pinch-hitter and spare outfielder. After hitting .500 in spring training, he was in the lineup and hit a homer against the Dodgers on opening day, but he later slumped and was sidelined. As the Padres dropped out of contention because of injuries to Jack Clark and Benito Santiago, Lynn virtually dropped out of sight.

“I’m not starting but they’re not using me off the bench, either, because we’re not getting into situations where I’m needed,” he recalls. “So I was wasting away.”

The baseball market isn’t especially strong for a 39-year-old reserve outfielder.

But his lawyer-agent, Bob Teaff of San Diego, argues: “Fred has value in four areas--fielding experience, designated hitter, pinch-hitter and between-the-ears expertise. It’s a question of fitting in with particular needs. On a contending club, he would have a niche to fill, but it hasn’t opened up yet.

“You’re talking about a known quantity with Fred Lynn. Last year was transitional, becoming a pinch-hitter, and he was effective in making it.”

Mauch says: “I don’t have any doubt in my mind he could still play. But for part-time players now, and that’s what Freddie would have to be, salaries in the game are so high that they’d prefer to keep younger guys.”

The Lynns are encouraged by the example of a former Angel teammate, 40-year-old Brian Downing. A free agent who wasn’t picked up until the end of spring training, Downing is batting about .300 as a designated hitter for the Texas Rangers.

Meanwhile, they have rented a condominium near the ocean north of San Diego, where they are spending all of June. Lynn says they are under no immediate financial pressure because of secure investments, but Natalie, with 12 years’ experience as a television sales executive, wants to go back to work someday.

“It’s kind of scary for Fred,” she says. “His security was that he was a wonderful baseball player. His insecurity is that he’s not sure what else he is.

“He’s a good role model for somebody coming out of baseball. He doesn’t chew that tobacco, he keeps himself in great condition, he doesn’t eat all that junk food and doesn’t have a weight span that goes up and down, up and down. There are endless possibilities for him, but he doesn’t know it.

“Sometimes it makes him think, ‘I was so good at this, but now what am I going to be when I grow up?’ Because baseball is not real.”