She Wasn’t Raised at Park, but She Has a Well-Bred Swing : Softball: The bloodlines of Stephanie Carew, who will attend UCLA in the fall, helped carry her through a bumpy high school career.

Baseball is filled with fathers and sons, with boys growing up in clubhouses, playing catch with their dads, chasing balls during batting practice.

Alomar. Bonds. Griffey.

It’s one of the perks of being the child of a professional ballplayer.

Rod Carew batted .328 over 19 years and is enshrined in Cooperstown. He had daughters. Three of them.

They were not given the same access to major league stadiums when their dad was playing in Minnesota and Anaheim. They grew up in the stands, not in the clubhouse.

When they played catch, it was on Saturdays at the park--the community park. Or the high school.

Charryse Carew, 19, had bad knees and her softball career never took off.

Michelle, 15, a junior varsity pitcher at Canyon High, was just named her team’s best offensive player during her sophomore season.

But Stephanie, 17, is the best athlete. When she was a sophomore at Canyon, she was a first-team selection on The Times’ all-county team. Today she looks like her father, not only in the face, but in the stance and the stride. Inherited or learned, her mannerisms give her away.

She’s a Carew, and sports are in her future. She hopes.

Carew is not heading to the minor leagues, but to UCLA after a successful high school season. She has no guarantees--there is no scholarship waiting for her, and she’s not playing softball this summer to prepare herself for the large task of walking on to a program that has won two of the last four NCAA titles and finished second twice.

She is instead working out on her own, getting a part-time job, traveling with her father, enjoying her last acts of childhood before stepping out of the house for college life.

“I wouldn’t be able to give my full attention to a team,” she said.

Nevertheless, Stephanie Carew will probably be all right. When it comes to hitting a ball, few have better bloodlines.

And though she did not grow up around the professional baseball environment that helped create second-generation stars like Brian McRae, she still managed to get in enough practice time with her dad, the hitting coach for the Angels, to be considered one of the county’s most dangerous softball hitters.

And she even has some power, which she showed this past school year at Brea-Olinda.

Her senior season at Brea ended a high school career that took one bizarre turn after another.

Feeling burned out, she decided not to play her junior year at Canyon or during the summer-and winter-ball seasons that followed.

The long layoff didn’t slow her down.

The genes and the personalized coaching served her well when she returned. She batted .422 with a phenomenal .828 slugging percentage after transferring to Brea-Olinda for her senior year. She hammered five home runs, drove in 16 runs and scored 20 despite missing eight games after undergoing surgery on her leg.

Her presence loomed large in the Ladycat lineup: Brea-Olinda (19-9) was 17-3 with Carew, 2-6 without her.

“She won three games for us with home runs,” Brea Coach Sharen Caperton said. “And she gave us stability at first base, which we needed.”

Stability is not the first word that comes to mind in describing Carew’s journey.

Her senior season was not without anxiety. It wasn’t all fun and games. There were the lumps on her right shin, and you couldn’t avoid thinking the worst.

“My mom (Marilynn) was really worried,” Stephanie said. “I wasn’t worried until the day of the surgery--the waiting to find out what it was was kind of scary.”

It wasn’t cancer. Instead, the fascia--a thin layer of connective tissue--covering her right shin had weaknesses in it. When she squatted, the overdeveloped muscles in her leg protruded through the weak areas, creating lumps.

It wasn’t a problem until they began hurting while participating at a UCLA instructional clinic at Brea-Olinda. When three doctors couldn’t determine what the problem was, there was exploratory surgery. She missed eight games and was not supposed to slide for three to four weeks.

She is limited to sprinting--no jogging or jumping rope.

Caperton jokingly told her to “just hit triples and home runs and we won’t have to worry about it.”

But Carew caused some panic during a Woodbridge tournament game. Asked later why she slid against doctor’s orders, she replied: “I needed to; we needed the run.”

There were other things the competitive Carew felt she needed to do while in high school, like get away from the game.

She quit the team on the first day of practice during her junior year because she was burned out and disagreed with Lance Eddy’s coaching style at Canyon. Quitting on the first day was important in the long run--she would otherwise have been ineligible to play once she transferred to Brea-Olinda.

Carew also avoided softball in the summer and winter seasons, even though she missed it after the first month.

And of course, she changed schools.

“(At Canyon, students) had their cliques and if you weren’t a certain way, you didn’t fit in,” said Carew, who admitted she got along with almost everyone. “I don’t like fake people, and a lot of them were fake.”

Caperton said there is nothing fake about Carew, whose genuineness fit right in on a team that had a strong senior nucleus that had been together for four years.

“Besides her hitting, she brings a great personality to the team,” Caperton said. “She was really an outsider coming in, but it didn’t seem that way. She fit in really well. She’s herself. She’s Stephanie--she’s not Rod’s daughter.”

The stride and the stance proves she is. She’s a Carew.