WHERE ARE THEY NOW?: ANDRE DAVID : A Sweet Swinger Pays His Dues : A Hit Off the Bat in Majors, Former Slugger From Chatsworth High Seeks Minor Miracles

Andre David rocketed the first major league pitch that he ever swung at deep into the cheap seats at Tiger Stadium off Jack Morris, becoming only the 49th player to homer in his first at-bat. He ran around the bases like a wild man, head down most of the way, eyes bulging and spikes sending up great clods of dirt as his heart roared at roughly the same rate as Richard Petty’s car engine.

If he had known that it was the only homer he would ever hit in the major leagues, he might have slowed down a bit and enjoyed it.

Two years and 37 games after cracking that wicked Morris forkball for a two-run homer as a member of the Minnesota Twins, David was gone, his time in The Show over at the age of 28. The sweet left-handed swing that brought roaring success at Chatsworth High and Valley College from 1974-78 had gone away.

“It happened so fast,” he said. “Like a dream.”

Another steamy, sweltering eastern Tennessee morning fades, giving way to a scorching, stifling eastern Tennessee afternoon, and the Kingsport Mets begin to gather, a Class-A team of young kids with old dreams thrown together in a town of 30,000 people near the rugged borders of Kentucky and Virginia.

Kingsport is an odd name for a place more than 300 miles from the sea, where only the slightly muddy Boone Lake serves as a swimming hole, amid the oh, let’s say rural towns of Okolona, Spurgeon and Flourville. But none of the Kingsport Mets of the Appalachian League plan to be here for long. A year or two at most, then on up the slippery minor league ladder, all the way, each and every one of them firmly believes, to the majors.

Inside the stadium, the manager of the Kingsport Mets is on the phone, talking to a reporter. He is asked the name of the Kingsport stadium where he has worked for the past year and a half. He pauses. He covers the phone with a hand and booms.

“Hey, what’s the name of this place?”

A longer pause.

“It’s Dobyns-Bennett,” he says. “Dobyns-Bennett Stadium.”

The manager laughs softly.

“That,” Andre David said, “was a good question. I forgot the name of the place.”

If you lay out a map of the United States and trace the path that David’s life has taken him in his 33 years, the result would make one think a 3-year-old child had gone wild with a crayon. From Southern California to Florida and New York and Minnesota and Toledo and Milwaukee and now Tennessee. With him for most of the crazy ride has been his wife Lisa, from Agoura Hills. Also with him for most of the ride was that swing, a classic left-hander’s cut of silk that brought bat against baseball with great ease and power.

But somewhere, somehow, for reasons known only to the gods of baseball, David’s swing started producing fewer and fewer such collisions. After the home run on June 19, 1984, he finished with a .250 average for the season and was sent back to triple-A Toledo for all of 1985.

In 1986 he led the International League in hitting with a sparkling .328 average and on-base percentage of .418. But when he got his second shot at the big leagues, the bat went silent again. He played in five major league games at the end of that season, collecting one single in five at-bats.

He didn’t know it at the time, but there would be no more chances. The Twins traded him to the New York Mets in 1987 and he played for the Tidewater farm club for the next two years, but the numbers kept sliding. Traded again, he played another season in triple A for the Milwaukee Brewers in 1989.

And then, at the age of 30, he knew.

“I left the game with no doubts,” David said. “There was no wondering, no ‘Should I have stayed for another few years?’ I had gotten a little older and a little slower and it was time for me to move on. It was that simple. It was just a gut feeling. I can’t put it into words, but I knew exactly what the feeling was. It was time.”

The thought of leaving the game completely, however, never occurred to David.

Much has been written in baseball lore about the fact that the game’s best hitting instructors never had much success cranking their own bat against a baseball, and that some of the greatest hitters ever to wrap their hands around a bat handle have been nightmare figures when they tried to teach others how to do it. Can you say Ted Williams ?

And so it is that David became a roving minor league hitting instructor for the Mets in 1990. Critics would ask what exactly he could teach about hitting--specialize in a player’s first major league swing, perhaps?

David gets the last laugh here. Along with one-time phenom Clint Hurdle, David became one of the Mets’ prized instructors. The major league administration thought so much of David that in 1991 it offered him a managerial job--albeit in Kingsport.

“People ask how I ended up in Tennessee and I tell them I made a right-hand turn at New York,” David said.

“I want the chance, someday, to contribute to the Mets’ organization at the top. Now, it’s time to pay my dues.”

Those dues consist of a grueling schedule and spine-jarring bus rides throughout the South. Of course it’s not all bad news. Fortunately, the team also gets to stay in cheap hotels and eat cheap food.

And for David, there’s even more. Many of his players are from Mexico, Puerto Rico and Venezuela. They do not speak English. David’s knowledge of the Spanish language is, he admits, somewhere around that level where you just talk real loud and slow in English, thinking that will help.

“Let’s say I speak very broken Spanish,” he said. “But my pitching coach is bilingual. He helps. On my own, I know when the players are happy with me and when they’re mad at me. When they talk real fast around me, I know they’re mad and they don’t want me to understand them. That much I know.”

Any success he achieves as a manager will, David said, be as much the success of other people, people who have guided him. First and second in that category, he said, are his parents.

“From the start, they were there for me,” he said. “What I achieve will be because I have become mentally tough, and that comes from my dad. He taught me about that and about life and about being a man and having character and accepting responsibility. I am what I am today entirely because of my mom and dad.”

And if you figure a lifetime of minor league baseball might make a person loony, well, don’t worry. Someone else made sure that wouldn’t happen to David.

“When I was with the Twins, Tom Kelly (then a minor league manager) took me aside once and talked about a life in baseball,” David said. “What he said was this: ‘Baseball is not your life and it’s not your wife. While you’re in the game, make the most out of it. Be in shape. Be prepared. Do your best. But when you go home at night, go to sleep. Baseball is not life and death.’

“Playing professional baseball taught me about life. From learning how to handle the success of hitting a home run the first time I got up to learning how to deal with the not-so-great moments. Now I want to teach it to others.”