Catcher in the Right : Baseball: When Fisk should be basking in the glow, something is not right.

It seems as if Carlton Fisk lives on an island when he comes to Chicago’s Comiskey Park, his home away from home.

His dressing cubicle is back in the farthest corner of the spacious clubhouse--far behind the Ping-Pong table where the Joey Coras and Ron Karkovices frolic away the pregame hours; back there next to the secrecy of the trainer’s room and the solitude of the weight room; back there as far from personal contact as you can get.

It’s back in a corner where a cloud of gloom can hang, unnoticed, except by the passing shoe-company representatives and locker-room attendants and by an occasional member of the media who might venture there in an effort to extract opinions--often vitriolic, never dull--from the cubicle’s tenant.

These should be the best of times for golden-ager Pudge Fisk, who is certain to enter the Hall of Fame by the end of the century and who should be a center of attention instead of camping on the fringe, by choice.

Instead, sadly, he sees them as the worst of times.

At 45, Fisk is the second-oldest player in the majors (11 months younger than Nolan Ryan) and the oldest position player--by nearly four years. More than two dozen current big-leaguers--including teammate Wilson Alvarez and 1992 home run champion Juan Gonzalez of the Texas Rangers--weren’t even born when he made his first major league appearance in 1969, against Baltimore Orioles pitcher Mike Cuellar.

Sometime in the next few weeks, barring injury, Fisk will fulfill a dream, conquer an obsession: He will claim the major league record for games caught. Through Tuesday’s games, he had been behind the plate in 2,214 games--12 short of Bob Boone’s record. Fisk already holds the major league record for most home runs by a catcher, 352--25 more than Hall of Famer Johnny Bench.

Instead of smiling about the idea of adding still another chapter to his 22-season book, Fisk tends to grimace. He comes across as baseball’s Prince of Pathos.

He is embittered because of ongoing contract battles over the past eight years with White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, who he says can’t define the word “loyalty.” He lashes at critics who say the games-caught record is artificial--even though those same critics would never challenge his dedication to his craft.

He says he would be happy to share his baseball insights but is rarely asked, except by young pitchers. He has no close friends on the ballclub, following the 1992 departure of Charlie Hough, only 10 days his junior, and sometimes he seems to wear that as a badge of honor.

It’s because of a generation gap, of course. He battles that gap like Don Quixote. He doesn’t win, can’t win. When he was 25, he says, he “couldn’t wait to get to the clubhouse before a game and hated to leave it after a game.” Now, he sighs and shakes his head and says he can’t understand why so many current players treat baseball as a 9-to-5 job and then leave their work milieu as quickly as possible.

If all of this seems pitiable or vaguely noble to you, or both, then give pause. Don’t we all know somebody like Fisk, a person who is forever comparing these days to those days, who stands for old values and then seems to become a caricature of them?

We tend to view such people as if they are in a time warp, yet, we can’t dismiss them out of hand, not entirely, because there may be at least a kernel of truth in what they say.

There’s a kernel of masochism in Fisk, too. Despite his gloom, his real or perceived problems, he still wants to play in 1994, somewhere, after he has claimed his record--not so much to disprove others’ doubts but, rather, for a final burst of personal satisfaction.

One feature of the new Comiskey Park is an area called “Pet Check,” where dogs and cats can be boarded during a game. The cost is $12, the same as an upper-deck box seat. Drinking water is included, food is not. And this season and last, game-day housing was reserved for a visiting St. Bernard named “Carlton Frisk.”

“How appropriate,” Carlton Fisk says, without levity. “I could tell him a lot about what it’s like to be in the White Sox’s doghouse.”

That wasn’t always the situation. In early 1981, Fisk was residing in the White Sox’s penthouse. He came on the open market then because of a technicality--the Boston Red Sox were tardy in offering him a contract--and Reinsdorf told PBS’s “Frontline” program last month, “Signing Carlton at that time was incredibly important because the White Sox were the Rodney Dangerfield of baseball. When Fisk became a free agent, none of our fans thought we could sign a premier player like that. We were able to pull that off, and it immediately created credibility.”

The honeymoon lasted five years, through the 1985 season--when Fisk had career-high home run and RBI totals (37 and 107).

But then, Reinsdorf lost all credibility--with Fisk. “Ah, 1985, that was when Jerry tried to get me to go out into a collusive free-agent market knowing I’d wither and die,” he says. “I refused.”

Every year thereafter, a nasty salary battle has ensued. And as Fisk got older, the pendulum--or the hammer--clearly swung toward the owner. “Jerry was playing mind games with me; he could do it because he knew I didn’t want to leave, because there was no great market for me and because he knew that I felt the (games-caught) record was supposed to happen with the White Sox,” Fisk says.

Fisk’s best one-year Chicago paycheck was $2 million in 1991. “But that was only because I fulfilled all of my incentives except one,” he says.

Fisk became a free agent after that season, but in name only because nobody believed he would leave. Chicago Cubs general manager Larry Himes said he wouldn’t bid because “Pudge would only use it as leverage with the White Sox.”

Fisk concedes the point. “I couldn’t see myself playing for the Cubs, even if they had been willing to pay me more. Unfortunately for me, Jerry knew that, too.”

Fisk was paid $1 million from the White Sox in 1992 but played in only 62 games because of injury, and that created an inevitable transition--the elevation of Karkovice to the regular catcher’s role.

Fisk wasn’t on the ’93 Sox roster last winter; he had been released to enable the club to protect a younger player from the National League expansion draft. But the club still planned to keep him, and Reinsdorf made Fisk an offer, a $500,000 low-ball.

“How many years can you overpay him?” Reinsdorf told PBS. “He was entitled to have a year (1991) when he got paid more than he produced but not two years.”

The Sox finally raised their bid to $650,000, but it was in the form of a Triple-A contract, which came as a nasty blow to the ego of a proud veteran. Even if the Sox really didn’t plan to send Fisk to Nashville, they didn’t put it in writing--and the money in a Triple-A contract can’t be guaranteed.

“I had promised Pudge he would be on the White Sox’s opening day roster,” Reinsdorf says. “People usually take me at my word. But he didn’t.” So a special clause--approved by the Player Relations Committee--was inserted, a clause that said Fisk could claim $800,000 in severance pay if he wasn’t in a Chicago uniform April 5.

Reinsdorf says Fisk’s agent, Jack Sands, knew the offer to Fisk was of a Triple-A variety but failed to relay the news immediately to his client. Sands says he couldn’t reach Fisk, who was attending a funeral in New England. Fisk says he was told by the Sox that a courier “got lost” while trying to deliver a revised contract “but the courier somehow found my house a day later and he said he didn’t have any trouble.”

Reinsdorf says Fisk then hid out for six days in Sarasota, Fla., the Chicago spring training base, and didn’t appear, signed contract in hand, until the last reporting day. Fisk doesn’t deny that he was within easy driving distance of the spring playing fields in late February. “What did that have to do with things?” he asks.

Meanwhile, along the way, the catcher called the owner a “jerk,” plus a few unprintable expletives. The owner responded by calling the catcher “selfish . . . pampered . . . a prima donna . . . a spoiled child.”

That’s how the 1993 season began--with neither man claiming to be misquoted.

Karkovice, wisely, declines to say anything about the feud. Why should he? Detroit manager Sparky Anderson says Karkovice is now “the best (defensive) catcher in baseball.” And Karkovice, who has paid his dues for more than 10 years, will be the White Sox’s regular long after Fisk has departed.

“Look, Carlton and I agree about a lot of things,” Reinsdorf says, “like he thinks he’s great and I think he’s great. We signed him mainly because he’s the second-best catcher in our organization. We wouldn’t have signed him if it was going to make a farce of things.”

So, don’t blame Fisk for being unhappy and don’t blame Reinsdorf for being a hard-nosed negotiator. But the bottom line was that the White Sox did make a farce of things--from a public relations standpoint.

“If I had been the owner of the White Sox,” says Hough, now with the expansion Florida Marlins, “I would have called the world’s biggest press conference last winter to announce I was overpaying Carlton Fisk and bringing him back in 1993. I’d have figured I’d get my money back in publicity and attention.

“I can understand Carlton’s bitterness in Chicago. He’s a dedicated person, so why does he have to battle for a contract every season? He should have been treated more like the way Texas has treated Nolan Ryan in recent years.”

Cubs manager Jim Lefebvre says he’ll never forget an evening in 1991, when he was managing the Seattle Mariners. “We played a night game against the White Sox in Seattle, and I remember Fisk coming by my office an hour after the game, carrying his weighted belt and heading for the (Kingdome) exercise room,” LeFebvre says. “We talked for a while about baseball, then he went to the weight room for an hour and came back to my office to talk baseball some more. It was after 1 a.m. when we left--and we had a day game coming up in 12 hours.”

Fisk’s obsession with Boone’s record is minuscule compared with his obsession with pumping iron. “I lift an average of 90 minutes a day in season,” he says. “In the offseason, I work three hours a day on four days of the week and 90 minutes a day on two days. I concentrate on my legs three days, my upper body two days and the rest is aerobic. Sometimes, while I’m lifting, I wonder why I’m doing it. But most of the time, it’s a ‘work equals reward’ kind of thought process.”

“Nolan (Ryan) gets all of the publicity for his physical fitness routine,” Hough says, “but Carlton probably works harder.”

Former White Sox manager Jim Fregosi, now the Philadelphia Phillies’ manager, has high praise for Fisk. “Pudge works harder than anyone I know, because he sets goals for himself and then follows through. I think he’s the ultimate professional.”

Fisk didn’t come to the major leagues with barbells in his shoulder bag, though. He encountered them out of necessity--because of five knee operations.

“The irony about Pudge’s longevity is that it’s probably because of an injury,” Burleson says, “the horrible knee injury he had in 1974 (after a home-plate collision with the Cleveland Indians’ Leron Lee). I remember how ghastly that one was--Pudge on the ground and his leg sticking out at some weird angle. He had to undergo an intensive rehab program just to survive. He was out for nearly 12 months, and that program carried over to the rest of his career. Who knows? If Pudge hadn’t been involved with weights in 1974, maybe he never would have used them--and then he would have been out of the game by now.”

Fisk concedes the point. “Weightlifting probably has added five years to my career, maybe more.”

If Carlton Fisk could have had an out-of-body experience this season, he probably would have transported himself to the California clubhouse for the month of April, when the young, no-name Angels were tearing up the American League.

“We get to the park early and stay late,” Angels shortstop Gary DiSarcina, 25, told the Los Angeles Times, “and the veterans are telling Chad (Curtis) and Tim (Salmon) what to expect from a certain pitcher. I’m not saying we’re one big family, but it’s fun.”

Fun is exactly what Fisk says he isn’t having--and the anomalous Angels’ scenario is what Fisk says he wishes would happen in Chicago.

“I remember fun,” he says. “I’m not having any this season, but I remember it. Can I have fun again? I don’t know what the length of ‘again’ encompasses.”

Fisk says he isn’t looking for drinking buddies, but it sure would be nice if some members of the Now Generation had just a touch of the “Baseball Jones” in them.

“So many of today’s young players are in too much of a comfort zone--and there was no comfort zone for young players back when I broke in,” he says. “Their current motivation is just to be paid as the best, not so much to be recognized as the best.

“Today’s players know it all. Or, rather, they know what they want to know. And, as a result, everybody knows nothing.”