Armed and Dangerous : Erickson Paints It Black, Keys Intimidating Staff of Pitchers That Lifts Twins From Cellar to Top

He is Darth Vader in double-knits--brooding, intense, shrouded in darkness.

“Day of Death” is what his Minnesota Twins teammates call Scott Erickson’s turn to pitch. He arrives at the park dressed entirely in black.

At 23, in his first full season in the major leagues, Erickson is 12-3, a record he has compiled, in large part, despite a slight muscle strain in his right forearm.

The condition may require rest and force the Twins to put Erickson on the disabled list this week, costing him a possible start in next Tuesday’s All-Star game, but it has not inhibited his status as the emerging ace of a rebuilt pitching staff, cornerstone of the Twins’ sudden and unexpected rise in the American League West.

“Play our game and we can play with anyone in the league,” said the veteran Jack Morris, another bricklayer in a 22-6 June that included a 15-game winning streak and lifted 1990’s last place Twins into first place in the West.

The Twins’ game? Nothing unique. Infectious hitting supported by often spectacular pitching and solid defense. They are first in the league in team batting, second in pitching and third in defense.

And they would seem to be more contender than pretender, or as General Manager Andy MacPhail said, “We would expect to be in it the rest of the way.”

Erickson is hope enough, the sudden star and stopper.

A fourth-round choice in the 1989 draft, he made the jump from double A last year after pitching fewer than 200 minor league innings. He is 17-3 since Sept. 1 and the first pitcher to win 20 games in his first calendar year in the majors since 1954, when Bob Grim of the New York Yankees did it.

“He is your best dream come true,” MacPhail said. “If there was a higher league, he would have to be called up to it, because that’s how good he’s been in this league.”

Using a darting fastball that seldom moves the same way twice and is generally clocked between 88 and 92 m.p.h., the 6-foot-4, 225-pound Erickson presents a menacing figure on the mound.

He pulls his dark stirrups down to cover his white socks. He uses eye black to erase the white trade name on his shoes, custom made without the usual white stripes. Only his dark and penetrating eyes are seen above a black glove, on which even the stripping on the fingers has been blackened.

“My favorite color,” he said. “I’ve just always been comfortable wearing it. It used to be purple, but I changed when I was 10.”

Hard to imagine what the Twins would say if he walked into the clubhouse all in lavender.

As it is, they view his idiosyncrasies--he always eats spaghetti on the days he pitches because his mother always made spaghetti before he pitched--as a sign of his independence.

Said Chili Davis, the designated hitter who shares a rented house with Erickson and is something of an independent thinker himself: “Scotty is one of a kind. He’s not going to do something just because someone tells him to do it. He has to be convinced it’s right for him.”

Coaches at the University of Arizona weren’t happy when Erickson blackened the name of their shoe sponsor on his own spikes, but they admired his work ethic and stopped complaining when he won a school-record 18 games in 1989, the NCAA high that year. Erickson laughed at the allowances that accompany consistent victories.

“If I was 0-10 now I’d probably have to do things like everybody else,” he said, knowing full well that he would be back in the minors doing them.

As it is, black is beautiful and part of the act, a little intimidation.

“There’s a guy standing out there with that black glove and those black socks, and you can’t see his face behind the glove,” Davis said. “And if he’s ahead in the count, you don’t have any idea what his intention is because he’s got so much movement on the ball just naturally.”

Said Junior Ortiz, who is Erickson’s personal catcher: “It’s not his stirrups, shoes or glove. It’s his arm. I haven’t seen a pitcher with his kind of nasty movement, and I’ve caught Dwight Gooden, Doug Drabek and Tom Seaver.

“If he throws 100 pitches, 95 are sinkers. Batters swing, and it’s already in the dirt. They keep asking the umpire to check the ball and they never find anything.”

Said manager Tom Kelly: “The damn thing starts at the knees and ends up at the ankles. It’s scary. You think it’s in one spot, then it’s in another.”

Said Erickson: “I take it as a compliment when hitters ask to check the ball. I guess it’s moving more than they expect. I’m fortunate to have that natural movement. I’m not trying to turn it over or make it sink.”

That is tantamount to a speech by Erickson, who submits to a daily barrage of interviews but says little. Team broadcaster John Gordon remembers introducing Erickson at a stop on the Twins’ winter sales tour, expecting he might tell a joke or two and talk for a few minutes.

“He got up and said, ‘I’m glad to be here and I think we’re going to have a good season,’ and he sat down,” Gordon said. “That was it. I mean, he didn’t do it rudely, it’s just the way he is.”

Erickson played baseball, soccer and football--well enough to be offered a scholarship as a linebacker by UCLA and other Pacific 10 schools--at Cupertino High near San Francisco. He read Ted Williams on the art of hitting and hoped to follow Mike Schmidt and Pete Rose as the next great third baseman, but was switched to the mound, went 3-6 as a senior and was drafted by the New York Mets in the 36th round.

He decided to attend San Jose City College instead and was drafted in the 34th round by the Houston Astros in 1987 and the 44th round by the Toronto Blue Jays in 1988.

Still disappointed by those low-money selections, he went to Arizona, where he produced the 18 victories in 1989. But he did it with an unattractive fastball that was generally clocked in the low 80s, a result, he said, of too much work with weights.

Some scouts were turned off by the comparatively poor clockings, which is what Clair Rierson of the Twins expected to happen. He recommended that his bosses could go in another direction in the first couple rounds of the ’89 draft because Erickson would still be available later.

Erickson was the 25th player selected in the fourth round. Among the Twins’ earlier picks: Chuck Knoblauch, a rookie-of-the-year candidate who has put an end to the revolving door at second base; and pitcher Danny Neagle, who won 20 games in the low minors last year and is 7-2 at triple-A Portland.

Was Erickson impressed by the Twins’ shrewd move?

“I thought I was going to be drafted on the second round or higher,” he said. “I took (the fourth-round selection) as a challenge and source of motivation. Someone will pay. I’ll go to arbitration as soon as I can.”

This may be one price the Twins can bear. Erickson went to Class-A Visalia that first year and stopped lifting weights. His velocity jumped into the 90s, and a year later he jumped to the majors, which he leads in victories and earned-run average, 1.83, while averaging more than seven innings per start.

He won three games during the team’s 15-game streak and had registered a club-record 12 in a row before losing to the Chicago White Sox Saturday, when he gave up a first-inning run for the first time in 33 major league starts.

“He’s thrown as well this year as anyone I’ve ever seen,” said Morris, at 36 a 14-year major league veteran. “I mean, for his age and experience it’s phenomenal. His talent is obvious, but the thing I like is his intensity and fortitude. You can teach mechanics and fundamentals, but heart is something you either have or don’t.”

Erickson’s intensity allows him to shrug off the forearm discomfort. And only Ortiz can talk to him during a game.

Everything and everyone else is, well, blacked out.

“I almost feel like I’m possessed out there,” Erickson said. “It begins when I do my stretches before warming up. I may even sit in a corner of the dugout between innings and yell at myself. I don’t want anyone touching me or talking to me.”

Erickson, who resembles Christopher Reeve, the cinema Superman, and has been linked romantically with a local TV personality by the gossip columnists here, agreed with MacPhail’s view that this is all a dream come true.

“I’m just trying to keep it in perspective,” he said. “I know that any one pitch or game can turn it around. My record doesn’t mean anything the next time I walk out there, but I do feel I can get better, that I’m still improving. I’m in a developmental stage with the changeup and am still learning situations and hitters. As Jack (Morris) says, the education never stops.”

Morris, who dresses next to Erickson in the Twins’ clubhouse, was signed to a three-year, $7-million contract as a new-look free agent in January. He has celebrated his Twin Cities homecoming with an 11-5 record and an eight-game winning streak.

“I think I’m throwing as well as I did in the ‘80s,” said Morris, baseball’s winningest pitcher during that decade. “My confidence is back, my arm is healthy and I’m keeping my team in the game.

“I left Detroit with the feeling that my accomplishments were never really recognized there, but I don’t have that feeling here. I’m comfortable, and I feel a part of it. This team reminds me in many ways of ’84 (when the Tigers got off to a 35-5 start).

“There’s no friction, and it seems like there’s a different guy picking us up every day.”

Eleven of the 15 position players hit .280 or better in June. Only seven of the 15 and only one of the 10 pitchers, Alan Anderson, played on the 1987 team that beat the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series after having won the West Division title with only 85 victories.

MacPhail wasn’t deceived. He said he recognized that there were fundamental weaknesses in pitching--only Frank Viola and Bert Blyleven won more than eight games that season--and in the farm system, forcing the scrambling Twins to bring in Joe Niekro, Steve Carlton, Dan Schatzeder, Don Baylor and other aging veterans that season.

Viola and Blyleven, the aces then, are gone. So are power hitters Gary Gaetti and Tom Brunansky. MacPhail has rebuilt rapidly, using virtually every avenue, all the while cognizant of his small-market revenues. The Twins’ payroll of $22 million is the league’s 10th highest. Only eight Twins make more than $1 million a year.

The key moves:

--A financially motivated trade that sent Viola to the Mets for a starting pitcher, Kevin Tapani; a closer, Rick Aguilera; and an enigmatic left-hander, David West, who is recovering from an injury at Portland.

--The restocking of the farm system, with the emphasis on pitching.

--The signing of new-look free agents Morris and Davis last winter, the trade for set-up man Steve Bedrosian and the development of former farmhands Erickson, Knoblauch, Anderson and Mark Guthrie, the No. 5 starter.

Depth remains a question at the regular positions--the Twins lost four in a row last week when first baseman Kent Hrbek was sidelined because of a strained shoulder--but MacPhail said he is confident that there is a “next line of reinforcements” in the minors, and he “won’t have to mortgage the future just to stay afloat” if the team is struck by injuries.

Said Kirby Puckett: “There’s no comparison between this team and the ’87 team. We only had three pitchers that year--Viola, Blyleven and Jeff Reardon. Nothing against the other guys we had then, but we didn’t have the pitching depth we have now.

“I mean, we don’t have the overall power that team did, but we have the capability to win a lot more low-scoring games.

“People may be surprised at how well we’re playing, but I felt something special in spring training, when we had the best record in baseball. We pitched good. We did everything good. I knew it wasn’t a fluke.”