Trio on Different Paths, but Goals Remain the Same : Baseball: Jim Austin, Mike Kelly and Tommy Adams--former county standouts now in minor leagues--trying to live up to great expectations.

They formed arguably the greatest college outfield of their time, and possibly for generations to come.

Even in the long and distinguished history of Arizona State baseball, that cradle of major league talent that produced some of the finest players in the game, no three outfielders with their ability and potential played side by side like they did.

Perhaps no three others will ever again.

What Jim Austin, Mike Kelly and Tommy Adams accomplished in their sensational stint with the Sun Devils earned them the nickname, “The Million-Dollar Outfield.”

Today, the three former Orange County prep standouts are trying to live up to that billing with minor league affiliates of three different professional franchises. Austin plays for the West Palm Beach Expos, Kelly for the Greenville Braves and Adams for the Jacksonville Suns, a Seattle Mariner farm team.

Their paths took different directions after they turned pro at the end of their junior season at Arizona State, but they remain close friends and keep up with how each is doing. Just last week, in fact, Kelly and Adams were reunited when their teams played a three-game series in Greenville, S.C. And in December, Kelly will be the best man at Austin’s wedding.

“We were all real good friends in college,” Adams said. “We spent a lot of time together. Jimmy and I have known each other since we were in Little League. We used to think it would be cool if we could play on the same team professionally.”

They also had a good time with the label pinned on them at Arizona State.

“We thought that was pretty much a fun thing,” Austin said. “It was neat being on the cover of Baseball America and all that, but we really didn’t make a big deal of it.”

Now the big deal for them is reaching the majors. At last look, they still have a long way to go.

THE LEFT FIELDER

When Montreal selected Jim Austin in the fourth round of the 1991 draft, the former Mater Dei High power hitter was puzzled.

“They really hadn’t talked with me very much and I don’t know why they took me,” Austin said at the time.

But he’s plenty glad they did. Austin, 22, is an outfielder with Montreal’s entry in the Class-A Florida State League, the West Palm Beach Expos. And though he hasn’t yet deciphered the league’s pitchers, Austin says he wouldn’t trade his spot on this team for another season with the Sun Devils.

“Usually your senior year you don’t get (good) money (to sign professionally),” Austin said. “That’s what I was looking at. I wanted to start playing pro ball so I didn’t want to stay in school.”

Maybe he should have.

In 87 games with West Palm Beach this season, Austin was batting a mere .217 with two home runs and 32 RBIs. He put up excellent numbers with Jamestown of the short-season Class-A New York-Penn League last year, batting .326 with eight homers and 52 RBIs in 71 games, but Austin says the adjustment to a better brand of Class-A ball has been tough.

“The pitchers here seem to be able to spot their pitches better,” said Austin, a 6-foot, 170-pound right-handed batter. “It’s not anything that’s mechanical. It’s just going up to a higher level. I struggled my first year in college, so I think I’ll be OK.”

If Austin can regain the form he had at Arizona State, the pitchers who are now getting the upper hand better look out.

After setting a single-season school record with nine home runs and 43 RBIs at Mater Dei in 1988, Austin made a quick impact with the Sun Devils his freshman year. He batted .269 with seven homers and 21 RBIs while playing mostly right field or designated hitter. Those numbers, however, paled in comparison to what followed.

In 1990, Austin was among the top 10 in every offensive category in the Six-Pac and made a run at becoming the third player ever in the division to hit 20 homers and steal 20 bases in a season. He batted .358 with 17 home runs, 57 RBIs and 19 stolen bases. During a stretch of seven at-bats against USC that April, Austin hit four homers, a double and a triple and had six RBIs.

Then the Expos came calling and Austin’s life has become one long excursion through towns called “picturesque” in travel brochures that stretch the truth and tease the imagination. Yet, he’s taking it in stride.

“I love it,” Austin said. “Playing every day is a lot better than having a suit job. The pay is not that good and the bus rides can be a pain. You learn to play cards. You also play a lot of those little hand-held video games. If you want to make it to the major leagues, you have to learn to live with it.”

This season, however, Austin caught a break. One of the road trips last year from Jamestown to Pittsfield, Mass., took nine hours. The longest ride this year is the four hours from West Palm Beach to Clearwater, Fla.

Besides the open highway, Austin also has other things on his mind these days. There’s the wedding to Jennifer Salinger in December and the need to perform well on the field; to rise through the organization all the way to Canada and le grand equipe. He knows the odds like he knows gin rummy.

“There’s a lot of pressure on you,” Austin said. “You see all these guys getting cut for not putting up the numbers and you wonder when it’s going to happen to you. So you just go out and play and try to pick up your stats, really.”

THE CENTER FIELDER

None of the three members of the feared Arizona State outfield benefited more from playing college ball than Mike Kelly.

Originally chosen from Los Alamitos High by the New York Mets in the 24th round of the 1988 draft, Kelly hit the jackpot when he was the second player selected in the ’91 draft. Adams was drafted in the 10th round in 1988 by Atlanta, and Austin in the 40th round by Kansas City.

The Braves took Kelly after the New York Yankees went for high school pitching sensation Brien Taylor with the first pick--as was expected--and assigned him to Durham of the Class-A Carolina League after reportedly paying a signing bonus in the high six-figure range.

It didn’t take a college graduate to see why the Braves were willing to give up big bucks for the 6-4, 195-pound Kelly.

His career batting average at Arizona State was .350 with 46 homers and 194 RBIs. And many of his home runs and defensive plays in the outfield became legendary.

In 1990, the year he became only the second player in Six-Pac history to hit 20 homers (he had 21) and steal 20 bases in a season, Kelly hit a 400-foot homer over the 30-foot-high backdrop in center field at Arizona State’s Packard Stadium. It was only the 10th ball hit over the screen.

That season, Kelly batted .376, knocked in 82 runs and was named Baseball America’s player of the year. After another brilliant season with the Sun Devils in ’91 (.373, 15 HRs, 56 RBIs), Kelly had nothing more to prove at the college level.

But he still needs to accomplish more on the farm before becoming the major league impact player people predicted he would be.

He batted .250 with six homers and 17 RBIs for Durham last season; however, his average this year with front-running Greenville of the double-A Southern League is at .227. His power numbers--20 home runs and 60 RBIs in 115 games--are among the league’s best.

Kelly’s inability to make consistent contact might cause some to worry, but it doesn’t seem to concern Grady Little, Greenville’s manager.

“It’s about what you would expect from a guy like that in his first full year at this level,” Little said. “As he gains experience and as he becomes more comfortable in pro baseball, you’re going to see the average go up. . . . You’d have to be a blind man not to see his great talent.”

Whatever Kelly’s feelings are about the season, apparently they’re not something he’s eager to discuss. Several calls to him were not returned.

“He’s been like that all year,” said Jeff Wasserman of the Greenville publicity department.

THE RIGHT FIELDER

Tommy Adams arrived at Arizona State with enormous promise as a baseball player.

Although he missed his senior season at Capistrano Valley High in 1988 because of a groin injury, Adams batted .429 with eight home runs and 22 RBIs the previous year to help the Cougars win the South Coast League and the Southern Section 2-A titles.

The one-year layoff didn’t affect his ranking in Baseball America, which still picked him as the 11th-best prep prospect in the country, or the opinion held by Sun Devil Coach Jim Brock, who welcomed Adams with high expectations.

And Adams lived up to them. At least on the field.

As primarily the team’s designated hitter during his freshman year, Adams batted .310 with two home runs and 19 RBIs in 45 games. He also had 16 multiple-hit games, including four in a row during one stretch early in the season, and had a six-game hitting streak.

But Adams also had another kind of streak in him, too. It was a rebellious one that began to periodically get him in trouble with Brock. That season, the coach briefly suspended Adams for cutting a class.

“There was a team rule that you couldn’t miss a class as a freshman,” Adams said.

The next season, Adams joined Austin and Kelly in the outfield and batted .310 in 58 games, increasing his power numbers to 13 homers and 51 RBIs. He tied for seventh in the Six-Pac in homers, hitting eight during a 12-game span in April.

His ability to hit the long ball and produce runs reached new heights on May 2, when Adams hit two three-run homers and knocked in nine runs against Nevada Las Vegas to tie the Pac-10 single-game RBI record. Adams’ future in college baseball looked bright.

Then the real problems began.

During a series against Florida State in Tallahassee, Adams suffered a contusion of the spleen while trying to steal a base and spent a week in the hospital. He returned as the designated hitter and traveled with the Sun Devils to play Hawaii in mid-March. They were to be his last games for Arizona State.

After missing curfew one night in Hawaii, Brock dismissed Adams from the team when it returned to Tempe. Adams, batting .387 with four homers and 21 RBIs, was upset but couldn’t challenge the decision. He and Brock had agreed before the season that one more rule violation would be his last.

So Adams went home and waited for his next opportunity. It came in June, during the draft, when the Mariners chose him in the second round (55th overall) and sent him to Bellingham, their Class-A affiliate in the Northwest League. There, Adams batted .260 with three home runs and 18 RBIs in 46 games, earning a promotion this season to San Bernardino of the Class-A California League.

Adams played so well with the Spirit--.280, 13 homers and 75 RBIs in 94 games--that the Mariners moved him to double-A Jacksonville in the Southern League two weeks ago. The offensive statistics have dipped for the 6-foot-1, 200-pound right-handed hitter since joining the Suns, but not his new outlook on baseball and life.

“I’ve changed just by growing up,” said Adams, 22. “I kind of learned from my mistakes. I tried to be the rebel, but I’ve realized that to play in the major leagues I had to approach things differently. I’m just enjoying the game now instead of getting involved in other stuff.”

Adams probably enjoyed the game a little more at San Bernardino than with the Suns. In 12 games at Jacksonville, he’s batting .211 with no homers and three RBIs while splitting time between right and left field. Adams said he can’t pinpoint the reason for his slump, but offered a couple explanations.

“I don’t know if it’s because this is my first full season in pro ball and I’m a little tired, or because the pitching is much better here (than Class A),” he said. “I didn’t think they were going to move me up. I thought I would stay the whole year in San Bernardino. That would have been fine with me.”

Peter Bragan Jr., Jacksonville’s general manager, says Adams indeed might have been better served to finish the season at San Bernardino and start the 1993 season with the Suns.

“He’s probably a little overmatched (by the pitchers) at this point. He’s struggling a little bit,” Bragan said. “But I think he’s going to be a good one next year. I think he’s going to be a big league star.”

Whether Adams becomes a household name with the Mariners, or whether he even makes it to the majors, is anybody’s guess. But if he does, Adams hopes Austin and Kelly will be joining him.

“Hopefully, all three of us can play in the major leagues,” Adams said. “It would be nice if we all could make $1 million each. Then they’d call us the $3-million outfield.”

Arizona State’s Million-Dollar Outfield

Tommy Adams

Position: right field

High school: Capistrano Valley

Present club: Double-A Jacksonville

Affiliation: Seattle Mariners

Jim Austin

Position: left field

High school: Mater Dei

Present club: Class-A West Palm Beach

Affiliation: Montreal Expos

Mike Kelly

Position: center field

High school: Los Alamitos

Present club: Double-A Greenville

Affiliation: Atlanta Braves