McGriff in Shadows Despite Shining Play

Baseball is the opposite of golf in that the big hitters, the drivers, get the dough. No drive for show and putt for dough in this game.

Fans love the big guys who hit the ball out of sight. Those are the players who get their faces on the cover of national magazines and endorse cereal and razor blades and show up on late-night television. Collectively, they inherit the legacy of Babe Ruth.

Incredibly, one of these fellows is almost a Who’s He? in his own hometown.

Fred McGriff?

He plays for the Padres, right? First base?

The man may well be the best power hitter the Padres have ever had, but you wouldn’t know it from the recognition he gets. He is sort of the Charlie Joiner type, a quiet and professional person who just goes out and does his job without flash and dash or controversy.

All he has done is hit more than 30 home runs for the past four years in a row, three in Toronto and one in San Diego. No one else has hit more that 30 home runs in each of the past four years. Not Canseco, not Mitchell, not McGwire. Not anyone.

McGriff put up MVP numbers in 1991, his first season in the National League. He hit 31 home runs and drove home 106 runs. He finished 10th in the voting. He didn’t even make the All-Star squad , which would be a travesty this year should he put together the same type of season.

“People take him for granted,” said Greg Riddoch, the Padres’ manager. “He’s not a crowd pleaser who seeks the center stage. He just had a phenomenal year and no one knows it.”

Pitchers know it. There may be no more feared hitter in the National League. He led the major leagues last year with 26 intentional walks, one of them with the bases empty . They’d rather milk a cobra than give McGriff anything to hit.

“They pitched around him all year,” Tony Gwynn said, “and he still hit 31 home runs and drove in all those runs.”

McGriff shrugged.

“They’re not going to lay it down the middle of the plate,” he said, “just so I can hit home runs.”

So he takes it where he gets it and still hits home runs.

Bunches of home runs.

So why has attention eluded this man?

“Well,” he said, “I played four years in Toronto and Toronto doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. You play up in Canada and people down here think we’re all Canadians and they really couldn’t care less. Toronto leads the league in attendance at home, but they’re probably last in attendance on the road.”

So McGriff gets traded from one off-the-beaten-path franchise to another. What’s more, he is part of a trade his new hometown fans probably wish was not made. Through absolutely no fault of his own, he came when the popular Robbie Alomar left.

From his boyhood days in Florida, he knew recognition would be hard to come by in San Diego.

“When I was growing up,” he said, “I never knew much about teams like the Padres or Angels because it would take two days to see the box scores . . . if we got them at all.”

Another problem is that fans are creatures of habit. They have not gotten into the habit of checking out “McGriff, 1b” when they see a Padre box score, just as they did not get in that habit when he was with the Blue Jays.

“When I first came up, Don Mattingly was always going to get the All-Star votes,” he said. “After Oakland got into a couple of playoffs, Mark McGwire started getting the votes. Toronto got into the playoffs one year and what did I do? I struggled.”

He went three for 21 in 1989 with nary an extra base hit. It was the wrong time not to make an impact, not with the whole world finally as his stage.

“Over here,” he said, “we have Will Clark. He’s going to be voted in no matter how he’s doing.”

The thing about Fred McGriff is that you will never find him complaining about the injustice of it all. It’s not his nature. It doesn’t fit with his priorities.

“He has life in perspective,” Riddoch said. “His family is No. 1 in his life, as it should be. His profession is second to his family.”

His profession is doing quite nicely for his family. The Padres will pay him $3.75 million this year, the highest salary on the team. Obviously, there is appreciation there.

Whatever else might come simply comes.

“There are some things you can’t control,” he said. “I’m not an outspoken person who calls attention to himself with crazy comments making headlines. I play hard every day and I enjoy the game. That’s my makeup. That’s the way I am.”

The way Fred McGriff is and the way Fred McGriff plays should be enough to make headlines and get attention without him even having to open his mouth. If it’s his nature to let his bat do his talking, that’s plenty loud all by itself.