Griffey Making a Tough Transition : Baseball: Mariner struggles to go from being a youth with potential to an adult with consistency of a champion.

The way the story goes--as told by The Natural’s mother to one of his baseball mentors, Harold Reynolds--Ken Griffey Jr. didn’t make an out in an organized baseball game until he was 15 years old. And when he finally did, he wasn’t at all happy about it. He walked back to his team’s bench, spotted his mom in the stands and told her in a snit that he just might quit playing baseball--for good--right then and there.

Alberta Griffey, the story goes, told her oldest son: “I don’t know what you’re so upset about. Your dad makes outs all the time.”

And Ken Griffey Jr., still four years away from reaching the major leagues but already beginning to prove he would be an even better player than his father, replied: “I’m not my dad. I don’t make outs.”

So, it seems, George Kenneth Griffey Jr. has known a thing or two about expectations for some time. But he obviously is still learning. He’s still learning how someone who’s done more at his age than all but a select few in the history of the game can be regarded by so many baseball people as obnoxiously immature and too often disrespectful--to the game and to his immense talent.

At the tender age of 23, Ken Griffey Jr. is a four-time All-Star and perhaps the best player in baseball not named Barry Bonds.

The Seattle Mariners’ precocious center fielder clearly still is feeling his way, trying to figure out how a superstar should play the game and how a celebrity should live his life. As Reynolds--Griffey’s teammate with the Mariners for four seasons before signing as a free agent last winter with the Baltimore Orioles--said: “He’s so misunderstood. . . . “

For his part, Griffey says some of the criticisms have been valid. Maybe he’s had an immature approach at times, he concedes. But, after all, he was only 19 when a dazzling spring training convinced Mariner officials to keep him in the big leagues in 1989.

Perhaps he hasn’t always gotten the absolute most out of his abilities, he says.

Seattle’s first-year manager, Lou Piniella, occasionally has had to pull Griffey aside this season and tell him, “I need more. You can give me more.” But always, Piniella says, Griffey has responded--and done so immediately. “Sometimes he just needs to be reminded how good he is,” Piniella said here recently. “ . . . But when he really gets zeroed in, it’s something to see.”

Said Griffey: “People have said I don’t play hard all the time. People have said I turn it on and off. Maybe that’s true. (Piniella) makes sure to remind me when I get off track. . . . But I think my concentration is better than it was a few years ago. I’m still learning, and I think I have learned. I’ve dedicated myself to being as good as I can be.”

That is a frightening thought for the Mariners’ opponents. At 19, in 1989, Griffey hit .264 with 16 home runs and 61 runs batted in in 127 games. And he’s gotten better in each season since. He became the first Mariner--and the third-youngest player ever--to start an All-Star game, at 20, in 1990, when he finished the season with a .300 batting average, 22 homers and 80 RBIs.

He had 22 home runs and 100 RBIs while raising his average to .327 in ‘91--which made him, according to the Elias Baseball Analyst, the first player to improve his average by at least 25 points in each of the two seasons following his rookie year since George Brett and Ken Griffey Sr. turned the trick in 1973-75.

Going into Saturday night’s game against Toronto in Seattle, he was leading the league in home runs (39) and was among the AL leaders in average (.315), RBIs (90) and runs scored (93).

In the early stages of the younger Griffey’s career, most of the attention was on the relationship between Senior and Junior. In 1989, the Griffeys became the first father and son to play in the major leagues at the same time (Griffey Sr. still was with the Cincinnati Reds at the time).

Said Reynolds of Griffey Jr.: “He can do it all. He can do pretty much whatever he wants to, whenever he wants to do it.”

Said one American League manager: “ . . . He’s young. But he just doesn’t play the game right all the time. It’d be a shame for any of that talent to go wasted. You’re talking about possibly one of the greatest players ever--if he grows up.”

Always, it seems, there are surprises with Griffey. He created a stir in 1992 when he said he’d contemplated suicide as a teen-ager. Upset earlier this season at being pitched around by Detroit, Griffey punctuated a home run with a lewd gesture toward the Tigers’ bench as he crossed the plate--an act for which he later apologized.

“The thing that will take him to another level will be if (the Mariners are) in a pennant race,” Reynolds said. “Then you’ll really see what Ken Griffey Jr. can do.”