Harvey Ready for Anything : Former Angel Relief Pitcher Might Even Bat for Marlins

Bryan Harvey got a day-pass from Marlin training camp the other day, so he and a buddy headed out fishing on a lake not too far from Melbourne, Fla.

There was nobody in the boat but two old friends, Harvey and Bob McClure, and they managed to catch a few bass despite waging an ongoing fight with a spring wind that kept pushing the boat toward shore.

Once, they were Angels, clubhouse mainstays of a close-knit pitching staff, particularly back in 1989, the last time the Angels caught a glimpse of a pennant race. Those were the days when McClure became an evangelist for the art of doing nothing-- rotting is his term.

“He’s still doing it,” Harvey said. “But he ain’t going to find too many rotters on this team.

“Everybody’s so young.”

They are companions on an expansion team now, with Harvey the Marlins’ incongruous catch--an expansion-team closer with a big salary and a surgically repaired elbow.

The day before the fishing trip, Harvey had pitched in an intrasquad game.

“Two innings in a little ol’ camp game,” he said.

But he had thrown hard, not holding back, and the forkball was sinking.

It’s still early, but so far it looks as if the Angels might lose their bet that he won’t recover his dominance after elbow surgery last Aug. 14-- if that was the bet at all.

Angel President Richard Brown has said that Harvey was left unprotected for the expansion draft not merely because of doubts about his elbow, but because the club wanted to get rid of Harvey’s salary, a guaranteed $11.25 million over the next three seasons.

Now, the 29-year-old who led the American League with a club-record 46 saves in 1991 and whose photo graced the cover of the Angels’ media guide in 1992, is with the Marlins, who aren’t expected to have much need for a closer.

“With a healthy Bryan Harvey, we have as good a chance as any team in baseball to win a game we’re leading in the ninth inning,” said Marlin pitching coach Marcel Lachemann, who left the Angels after last season and joined his brother, Manager Rene Lachemann, in Miami.

Therein, of course, lies the rub.

There will almost certainly be weeks this season when Harvey could hang a sign on the bullpen gate, “Gone Fishing,” and never hear a word about it.

“It could be a long season,” Harvey said. “It’s hard to tell. Our starting pitching is going to be young--with the exception of Charlie Hough. If Jack Armstrong throws like he did a couple of years ago, or even last year when he went to the bullpen, that will help.

“We’re going to be in a situation where we have to stick with young guys. It’s going to be awful hard to expect a lot. I think we’re solid defensively up the middle, with (Benito) Santiago, (Walt) Weiss, (Bret) Barberie. . . . Catching and shortstop, we can probably match up with anybody. Maybe first base, with Orestes (Destrade, a Cuban who led Japan’s Pacific League in home runs the last three seasons). . . . You know, our outfield, I don’t know too much about.”

That’s the best he can do for optimism. Reality is, he doesn’t expect to get a lot of work.

“It ain’t hard to handle because you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” he said. “I’m sure Lach will get me in a few games. Maybe I’ll get to hit. That’s been the most fun, going to the cages and learning to bunt and all that.”

Harvey is one of four former Angel expatriates with the Marlins. Angel pitchers Mark Langston and Chuck Finley--and Jim Abbott, in his Yankee pin stripes--all lament the Angels’ off-season moves and their separation from one another and Marcel Lachemann, who announced late last season he was leaving. Harvey is still with him.

Lachemann, of course, lobbied the Marlins to select Harvey--and not coincidentally, had a pretty good idea of how Harvey’s arm felt when the two were playing catch late last season after the surgery, before the Angels decided to shut him down because the season was over, for all intents and purposes.

Besides Lachemann and McClure, Harvey also has been reunited with Doug Rader, a Marlin coach who was the Angel manager the last time the team managed a winning season (91-71 in 1989) but was fired in 1991.

Harvey has not criticized Angel management for exposing him to the draft or for the club’s subsequent remarks about the decision.

“When I first found out I wasn’t on the (protected) list, I was a little upset or whatever you want to say,” he said. “The way I look at it, they had a decision they had to make, me or the other guy. I had a big contract, and there was a chance (the surgery) didn’t work.”

Brown’s comments made their way to Melbourne.

“I heard it,” Harvey said. “I don’t pay no attention to it. They can say what they want to say, it don’t matter to me. The California Angels were good to me. They put me in a good position to take care of my family.”

He is perhaps more baffled by the Angels’ continued doubt that he will recover. Angel Manager Buck Rodgers said recently: “To tell you the truth, we don’t feel (Harvey is) ever going to be a 40-save guy again. He’ll save maybe 17, 18, 22 games, but now we’ve got Joe Grahe to do that.”

Harvey hears that and laughs, though not derisively.

“Ask me in October,” Harvey said. “What do you say? If that’s what he thinks, fine. I don’t understand. If I could save 18 or 22, why couldn’t I save 40? I can’t figure that out. If I get enough chances to save 40, I think I can do it. If I get 25 chances, I can’t save 40.”

Harvey was 0-4 with a 2.83 earned-run average and 13 saves last August when he underwent arthroscopic surgery, during which team orthopedist Lewis Yocum shaved some spurring in his right elbow. He went through rehabilitation before deciding late in the season to shut down completely until January.

Now he says, “I’ve been wide open since day one. I haven’t missed anything. It feels fine.”

After his first intrasquad outing, during which he threw fewer than Lachemann’s limit of 40 pitches, Harvey said he felt good, but that his mechanics were “a little messed up.”

Harvey won’t swear he’s back, but he doesn’t see any reason he won’t be.

“You can’t tell yet,” he said. “It don’t take but one pitch to flat blow it out, but everything feels good.”

If everything is good, and the Marlins find themselves with a healthy multimillion-dollar reliever spitting tobacco juice in the bullpen every day, the assumption is that Harvey would be traded for more useful talent. The Marlins insist that isn’t the plan.

“I don’t know what they’re going to do,” Harvey said. “Everything I’ve heard is that I’m going to be here. That’s what I’m going on.”

Even so, he and his wife, Lisa, have rented a home in Ft. Lauderdale for their family of four until they are either convinced that Bryan is staying or decide how much the family likes Florida.

Harvey sees the club’s potential motivation to trade him as clearly as anyone.

“If I stay healthy all year and, come August, a team with a chance wants me, it would be nice to go,” he said. “That’s what you work for. Your goal is to play in the World Series.

“The more the years go by, you get a little older and that becomes something you’d really like to do. Now if I stay down here, I expect it will be three to five to seven years before we have a realistic chance,” he said. “I’d love to stay down here that long and wait.”

Harvey wouldn’t have picked the Marlins, but . . .

“All I want to do is play baseball,” he said. “I don’t care where it’s at. Shoot, it would be nice to be like Robin Yount or Paul Molitor--but even Molitor left this year. It’d be nice to play your whole career in one place. But not too many people do that.

“You make a lot of good friends, and that’s the hard part of leaving, but you still see each other, and you meet new people. It wasn’t just leaving the California Angels, it was leaving friends.”