Success Is Long Overdue : Baseball: Orioles’ Manto is hitting the long ball after a long haul in minors.

Not long after Jeff Manto, fresh from Temple University, arrived deep in the minor leagues, an unheralded 14th-round draft choice of the California Angels, he knew one thing. “It’s going to take a lot of hard work,” he remembered thinking. He stood at his locker in the Baltimore Orioles’ clubhouse, looking back across the years, the organizations, the leagues, the teams, the towns, the bus rides that never seemed to end as he looked out his window on North America. What he didn’t know was how much hard work it was going to take.

Quad City, Palm Springs, Midland, Edmonton, Colorado Springs, Richmond, Scranton, Norfolk and Rochester.

Manto put in two years at Quad City and three years in all in Class A. He played parts of two seasons in Colorado Springs. He logged six years before he got a glimpse of the big time, with Cleveland.

He was traded by the Angels, released by the Indians, picked up and let go by Atlanta, picked up by Philadelphia only to be dropped and picked up by the New York Mets and traded from their Class AAA farm club, Norfolk, to Rochester, the Orioles’ AAA affiliate.

“I don’t want to be a career minor leaguer,” he told the Rochester manager, Bob Miscik. Miscik told him, “You have an opportunity in this organization.” Manto wanted to believe.

What Miscik said came true: He did get his opportunity. And as anyone who goes to games, reads box scores or watches ESPN highlights knows, Manto last week tied a major league record with home runs in four consecutive at-bats, and totaled five home runs in three games. He’d arrived in Baltimore, at age 30.

Having taken so long to prove himself and get this attention, Manto wasn’t doing cartwheels in the clubhouse. It was as if he could still see the headlights from oncoming traffic during those late-night bus rides when he said: “The game is set up to disappoint you. In my past I’ve always known disappointment. This game will humiliate you in a heartbeat.”

And then: “Don’t get me wrong. This is fun. But by no means am I walking around on Cloud Nine. I’m not going to get too high. Just like I tried never to get too low.”

Only once, really, did he consider quitting. He had, as it’s said in baseball, “put up the numbers” at Colorado Springs and Richmond, both AAA, when the Phillies farmed him out to Scranton-Wilkes-Barre. “I figured that was it,” he said. So he quit.

He unretired 14 days later and arrived in Scranton, where it had been thought for a while that he was taking a slow bus through the Poconos.

He decided “to give it one more year.” He and his wife, Denise, thought it would be better to keep trying. He wouldn’t have met Denise if he hadn’t been mired in the minors. But he had to work in the offseason, to make enough money to live, as a substitute elementary school teacher. Denise was teaching elementary school, too.

When the Phillies granted him free agency, Manto hooked on with the Mets, figuring a decade of experience in the minors and a major league team without the greatest talent could be the combination for him. But after 37 games at Norfolk he was sent to Rochester. Manto’s surprise was that Miscik, the manager, knew something about him.

“I’d see him hitting for two years,” said Miscik, now managing for the Orioles at Bowie. “I’d called (then Orioles’ assistant general manager) Doug Melvin in ’93 and told him we liked him. Then last year Doug called me up and said, ‘We’ve got a chance to get him.’ I said, ‘Let’s get him.’ ”

Manto took to Rochester the helpful hints of managers and coaches galore, but foremost was been Charlie Manuel, now Cleveland’s hitting instructor. Five years ago Manuel suggested to Manto he could be a power hitter -- he is 6 feet 3, 210 pounds. “He taught me how to hit when I’m ahead in the count, when to turn on a pitch, when to go to right field. He said that it was okay to make an out as long as they’re backing up and diving.”

Four seasons later, playing for Rochester in a game in Columbus, Ohio, with one mighty cut, the ball soared off Manto’s bat and far over the right-center field fence, “and then I thought of Charlie Manuel.” Manto hit .320 at Colorado Springs, .291 at Richmond, .289 with 17 home runs and 88 runs batted in at Scranton-Wilkes-Barre, but at Rochester he was headed toward International League MVP with a .310 average, 27 home runs and 83 RBI. He homered in three consecutive games three times.

He’d come to the plate with the right mental approach, “a confidence about me that’s quiet. It’s a composed arrogance.”

He was so ready, he had been up and down so many blue highways, that now he can’t bring himself to celebrate this hot streak.

“This is going to end,” he said.

The streak?

“No, baseball. I definitely know what’s important. The family.” He and Denise have a year-old daughter, Gabrielle.

But Manto can’t stop his teammates from enjoying his streak. “He’s just in a zone,” said pitcher Ben McDonald.