WHERE ARE THEY NOW: TIM FOLI : Perpetual Fire : Pro Baseball Not a Game to Former Notre Dame Star Now With Brewers

Tim Foli went after baseball with roughly the same intensity with which a wild, starving dog goes after a hunk of meat. He lived and literally slept his beloved game, once stretching out a sleeping bag in the dirt between second and third base and snoring the night away in the shortstop position at the park in Class-A Visalia in 1969 because his house was overcrowded with visiting friends.

How intense?

In 1982 for the California Angels, he set an American League record for fewest walks in a season, catching a free ride just 14 times in 150 games. Brett Butler of the Dodgers considers that a decent week. Foli never showed up for a game to walk. The adrenaline just wouldn’t allow it.

How intense?

“In 14 years in the major leagues, I don’t think I had fun even one single day,” Foli said. “I mean, I enjoyed the game. But fun? I can’t recall even a moment. For me it was life and death. A constant struggle to survive.”

It was a successful struggle.

In 14-plus seasons, Foli batted .251, helped the Pittsburgh Pirates win a World Series in 1979 and showed off a remarkable glove. In 1980 he led National League shortstops with a sterling .981 fielding percentage. And in 1982, with the Angels, he led all American League shortstops with a stunning .985 percentage. Today, the former standout athlete from Notre Dame High is trying to lower the flame on his rocket engines. As a coach with the Milwaukee Brewers, Foli said that almost daily he talks to the younger Brewers about something that he was never able to master: relaxing.

“People who know me will laugh, but I tell the players today that it’s only a game,” Foli said. “We want them to prepare as hard as they can and do the best they can, but then we want them to go home and sleep. I want them to laugh a little, see the good things.

“I always took the game a little too far, I think. Many, many nights I didn’t sleep after a game. That was my personality. I would have liked to have been a nice, easygoing guy, but I just wasn’t. It was the nature of the beast.”

The beast emerged early in Foli’s life. Living in Canoga Park, he went to the private Notre Dame High because school officials there allowed him to play three sports as a freshman rather than the two he would have been allowed in the Los Angeles Unified School District. That rule has since been abolished.

With the fire already at general-alarm status, Foli started on the varsity baseball team for four years at Notre Dame and most of three seasons on the football and basketball teams. As a senior, he was the Southern Section 3-A Division player of the year in baseball, All-Southern Section in football and all-league in basketball.

Gene Mauch, who knew the fiery player during Foli’s youth and managed him in the major leagues, once had this assessment of Foli:

“He was a great football player and a polished baseball player when he was 12 years old. It’s all he knew. He was going to revolutionize the game, a combination of Pee Wee Reese and Joe DiMaggio. Anything less than that tore him up. Anything less than total excellence by his own young standards was torture.”

Torture. Perhaps the best description of how Foli strived for the unreachable in sports.

As a senior at Notre Dame in 1968, he accepted a football scholarship to USC, where he intended to play quarterback for Coach John McKay. That idea died in June of that year, however, when the New York Mets made Foli the No. 1 overall pick in the free agent draft. With a $75,000 signing bonus in the bank, Foli went to work.

Three years later he was the Mets’ third baseman. And for 14 years, later with the Montreal Expos, San Francisco Giants, Pirates, the Angels, New York Yankees and finally with the Pirates again, the fire raged.

In the 1985 season, at the age of 35, Foli began to falter. Batting just .189 in June, he was released by the Pirates.

“It was hard to get baseball out of my system,” Foli said. “I tried working at a country club near my home in Florida, working with the golf director, and that was one direction I thought my life might go. But I missed baseball. Not so much the playing because that had always been such a grind for me. But I just missed baseball.”

By the end of the summer, Foli was back in the game. He took a job as the player-coach of the Miami Marlins of the Florida State League and then, in 1986, took a job as a coach with the Texas Rangers under Bobby Valentine.

“Sometimes, I think coaching is better than managing,” Foli said. “Coaching is probably a better life than managing. Managing just crushes people with all the responsibility.”

Foli said those words early Thursday.

Late Thursday afternoon, the Rangers fired Valentine.

After two seasons at Texas, Foli thought he needed a change. He returned home to spend time with his wife and four children.

“I just wanted to see them grow for a while,” he said.

While the kids were growing, however, Foli was also starting to miss the game again. And so in 1987 he joined the baseball coaching staff at Stetson University in Deland, Fla., minutes from Ormond Park, his home of the past 13 years. And for three years, Foli had it all: a baseball coaching job and his family.

“Then last year my wife kicked me out of the house,” Foli said, joking. “She knew how much I missed the major leagues. She knew what I do best and told me to go try it again.”

Weeks later, the Brewers hired Phil Garner as their manager. Garner and Foli played together on the 1979 Pittsburgh world championship team, Foli at shortstop and Garner at second base.

“He knows the way I think and I know the way he thinks,” Foli said. “It’s a good relationship.”

And so Foli, unwilling to put up with the demands and responsibilities of a major league manager, will settle for a lifetime of coaching, right?

After all, in his own words, “managing just crushes people.”

“Of course I want to manage,” he said. “I figure I’ll go through the coaching cycle first, get the experience and then see what happens. I know what managing can do to people. I’ve seen it. But I’ll welcome the chance some day. I can’t get involved in something halfway.

“That’s just not me.”

He probably won’t spend any more nights in a sleeping bag on the infield dirt, but the fire inside Foli, the fire that kept him warm that night long ago in Visalia, still burns.