Closing the Subject : Former Dodger John Wetteland Needed Two Trades in Two Weeks to Get Where He Wanted to Be

John Wetteland thought it was wonderful when he was traded by the Dodgers to the Cincinnati Reds on Nov. 27. He thought it was even more wonderful when he was traded by the Reds to the Montreal Expos two weeks later.

That was the strange but wonderful winter in which Wetteland went from an uncertain future with the Dodgers to a bullpen seat with the Reds to the pivotal closer assignment with the rebuilding Expos.

It was a winter to sing about, as Wetteland could, accompanying himself on the guitar he carries on the road, or to write poetry about, which he no longer does, his wife of two years having filled the void that was the subject of his poems.

“It just seems like every time I was traded I stepped up to a more important role,” Wetteland said in San Diego as the Expos completed a series with the San Diego Padres and prepared to open

a scheduled series in Los Angeles tonight.

“I understand that the (Expos) are going out on a limb (by using a 25-year-old closer who has done it regularly for only one year in triple-A and a winter in Venezuela), and I find their confidence in me very reassuring, very admirable, especially coming from where I am.”

Wetteland is coming from seven seasons in the Dodger organization. He might not write poetry anymore, but he can quote chapter and verse on why he should have been a closer from the start, rather than some weeks being a starter, some a relief pitcher, some neither.

He says, maybe, that he never really fit the Dodger image because of a personality that was different, and is now different from what it was then.

At any rate, after taking the shuttle from Albuquerque to Los Angeles and back each of the last three years, after finally exploding and demanding that he become a closer early last season, Wetteland seems to have proved his case.

He was 20 for 21 in save opportunities while holding opponents to a .187 batting average at Albuquerque, was 13 for 13 in Venezuela, and is three for four with the Expos, who have not been able to provide as many save chances as Wetteland, or the team, had hoped.

Nevertheless, Manager Tom Runnells said: “John has given every indication he can do the job. He’s something of a right-handed Mitch Williams (the left-handed Philadelphia Phillie closer who is known as ‘the Wild Thing’).

“And by that I mean, if he were to walk three people, he wouldn’t be fazed. He has the ability and mentality to strike out the next three.”

He also has the confidence. Wetteland said his goal is to convert nine of every 10 save chances by throwing hard on every pitch. In his view, he “set the National League on fire” with a 1.83 earned-run average for 19 relief appearances in his first stint with the Dodgers in 1989 and the “passion has burned brightly” ever since.

A lot of it, Wetteland said, has to do with character--being the type who thrives on responsibility, doesn’t hold anything back, doesn’t care who is at the plate, and is willing to pitch inside.

“I also have outstanding stuff,” he said. “When you can throw 95 m.p.h., you shouldn’t have to be a nit-picker, but that’s what the Dodgers wanted, that’s what I became and that’s when I started walking people.”

And losing his focus. Couldn’t the Dodgers see that his full-throttle approach was better suited for relief?

Maybe not, or maybe it had to do with personality and a veteran-oriented philosophy. At any rate, the Dodgers rebuilt the bullpen by trading for Jay Howell, signing Jim Gott and John Candelaria as free agents and trading for Roger McDowell last July.

“They just don’t like to put young people in positions of responsibility,” Wetteland said. “I was unstoppable once I made the transition last year, but they obviously still wanted me in only one capacity (a starter).

“For one reason or another I had worn out my welcome. I hadn’t fulfilled their expectations and they were frustrated by that. Well, they got what they wanted, and I got what I wanted.”

The Dodgers sent Wetteland and Tim Belcher to Cincinnati for Eric Davis and Kip Gross. The Reds then traded Wetteland and pitcher Bill Risley to Montreal for outfielder Dave Martinez, relief pitcher Scott Ruskin and infield prospect Willie Greene.

Wetteland said he never would have expected to become a major league closer at 25, but that the young Expos were one of the few clubs in position to take the chance.

“Right time, right place,” said Kevin Kennedy, who resigned as Albuquerque’s manager when the ’92 season ended and was hired as director of the Expos’ minor league field operations.

Kennedy urged Montreal’s new general manager, Dan Duquette, to pursue Wetteland, believing “he had been dominant in every way” after making the transition last year and was capable of doing the same for the Expos.

Kennedy cited Wetteland’s resiliency and his power-pitcher mentality.

“Whether he’s a little off the wall or not, John has always wanted the ball with men on base and the game on the line,” Kennedy said.

Off the wall?

Just because he once said that in his spare time he enjoys serving doughnuts on another planet?

Just because he recited poetry in the bullpen, played guitar in the clubhouse and peppered postgame interviews with references to obscure philosophers and musicians?

Just because he kept a button among the trinkets in his locker that read: “Don’t presume that I will respond in a logical or rational manner”?

“I was always a little different,” Wetteland said. “I’d go to the library, read up on tepees, build one in the front yard and sleep there.”

He grew up in a log cabin in the Northern California town of Sebastopol, with little to do except use his fertile imagination.

His father, Ed, was a musician who played the piano in San Francisco clubs. His stepmother, Barbara, was a singer who joined her husband in a touring duo called Sweet N’Hot. John and his brother, Mitchell, often made the 80-mile drive to San Francisco with their father and toured the city, getting samples of street life, while he performed.

It wasn’t unusual for the Wetteland boys to fall asleep under the piano. Baseball followed saxophone and clarinet lessons until Wetteland began to hear the call of competition. He signed his first contract with the Dodgers in a nightclub kitchen while his father played “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and customers were served champagne.

Ed and Barbara Wetteland performed the national anthem at Candlestick Park last Monday, when the Expos played the Giants there. Their free-spirited, free-thinking son still marches to his own drummer--for one thing, he brings coffee beans to the clubhouse and brews his own “power pitching espresso” in the sludge of the clubhouse coffeepot--but he is off the wall less frequently.

His marriage to a woman he met at a stadium in Shreveport, La., their idyllic lifestyle in the mountains of Cedar Crest, N.M., and his deeper acceptance and belief in God, he said, have left him more mellow and focused.

“Rather than trying to make up a life, I have a deeper understanding of what this one is all about,” he said.

“You can fall on your face only so many times before realizing there’s more than human philosophy and wisdom involved, and Lord knows I tried a lot of different philosophies and cults, and made up many of them on my own.

“I was very, well, carefree early on and I played along with that, made the most of it. I played people’s strings, and I probably rubbed a lot of them the wrong way.”

Fred Claire, the Dodgers’ executive vice president, said Wetteland’s personality was no factor in the trade, that the public persona was not a true measure of the quality person and committed athlete underneath.

“I think John came into his own as a relief pitcher, and you hate to trade any young player starting on his road, but it comes back to giving up quality to get quality,” Claire said. “We acquired an everyday player (Davis) who has already proved to be a force on the club.”

There were times with the Dodgers, Wetteland said, when he felt as if he was heaping emotion on emotion, when he was so deep in a hole “they would have had to pump sunlight to me.”

At one low point, he tried to burn his uniform socks and tear the padding out of his glove. He finally exploded, in his own words, during a meeting with pitching instructor Dave Wallace last year and got the OK to become the closer .

“I really respected Dave and always felt I could go to him,” he said. “I felt I was cut out to be (a closer) from the start.”

The organization, faced with the possible loss of free agents Howell and Gott at the end of that season, might have been thinking more of its own well-being than Wetteland’s, but the reason wasn’t important.

Looking back, the Expo closer closed a door.

“I think Fred always understood me, but he wasn’t the one making decisions on when I’d pitch and how I’d be used,” Wetteland said. “Am I bitter toward the organization or anyone in it? How could I be when I’m happy where I am and love what I’m doing?”