A New Star Is Born and He’s a Yankee

On the days when Dwight Gooden is not throwing fastballs and forgetting what year it is, Bernie Williams looks more like a baseball star than anybody the New York Yankees have. Wade Boggs is one of the great hitters of all time. Paul O’Neill has hit since the day he got here. Andy Pettitte has 10 wins, but none of them would stop traffic.

It is different with Bernie Williams, who has style. You either have this kind of style or you don’t. At a time in New York when baseball still feels slow, even with the Yankees in first, Williams is someone to watch. A star continues to happen right before our eyes. Everybody seems to know this except Williams himself.

“I would never think of myself as a star,” Williams said.

Albert Belle was in the house at Yankee Stadium Thursday night, after a day when he appealed a five-game suspension handed out to him by the American League. Everything that happens around Belle seems to be loud, and that is why Kenny Lofton, who lockers next to Belle, was handing out slips of paper that read this way:

“Thank you but no comment about today’s proceedings.”

That was it. It meant Belle was doing as much talking about Belle Thursday as Bernie Williams does about Bernie Williams. He came into Thursday night’s Yankees-Cleveland Indians game at .338. A year ago at this same point in the season, Williams was hitting only .262. So there is no telling where he goes with all this. It seems he can do just about everything at the stadium, in this wonderful job of his, in DiMaggio’s center field and in Mantle’s, except have a sense of just how big he can be out there.

“I’m going telling you the honest truth,” Williams said. “I don’t think of myself as a star. I don’t see myself that way.”

He was told, “You’re being paid like one now.”

Williams allowed himself a small smile. “In sports,” he said, “that is no longer directly proportional.”

He had been standing in the outfield a few moments before with his teammate Gerald Williams, and with Belle. It did look as if there was a lot of conversation going on, but there never is when Bernie Williams is in the area.

Belle is not exactly a chatterbox, either, and that is why Lofton was handing out those slips of paper. But Belle is loud with his bat, and with the way he conducts his life and his baseball career, the contempt he occasionally shows for anybody who gets in his way. People look at Belle and see so much of what they think is wrong with sports these days: talent combined with arrogance, with this contempt. He is more polite on paper.

Williams, standing next to him, has the kind of grace that seems to come from another time, not just at Yankee Stadium but everywhere in baseball.

The game does not create its stars, or decide who the stars will be. The players always decide.

Belle had 25 home runs coming into Thursday night, and he is a huge star, whether he gets his five games or not, whether the writers like him enough to make him most valuable player. He has huge statistics, and notoriety, and there is nothing anybody can do about that.

It would be a good thing for the game if everybody knew about Williams by the time October comes around, not only New York. The game needs less players like Belle, more like the Yankee center fielder out of Escuela Libre de Musica High School in San Juan.

Last season, a short season, Williams was not even hitting .200 when the month of June started. This time, even with 15 days on the disabled list because of an injured calf, and time missed recently when he flew back to San Juan to be with his ailing child, he is way up there already, not only with the .338 average, but 10 home runs and 43 RBI.

So Thursday, before the beginning of a Yankee-Indians series that had some pop to it, even in the middle of June, Williams talked about how he has grown here in the last year-and-a-half; grown into his own formidable skills, grown into the job of being the Yankee center fielder.

“I never take this job for granted,” he said. “I never lose sight of the ones who have come before me out there.” He smiled, and put an awful lot of weight on the words “out there.” Never thinking for a moment he had to explain where he meant.

“It’s not just Mr. DiMaggio you think about,” he continued, “and Mickey Mantle. You think about Bobby Murcer, and Mickey Rivers. You think about the kind of center field Paul Blair played when he was a Yankee. The truth is, the best thing for me is to not think about those people too much. The best thing for me is to keep going.”

And then Bernie Williams, still only 27 even though it seems he has been around for a while, said the only thing that really matters is to keep going toward October. He had a taste of it last season, when the Yankees played that unforgettable playoff series against Ken Griffey Jr. and the Mariners. He saw what a full Yankee Stadium, an October Yankee Stadium, looked like from center field. From out there. He wants to see those sights again, and soon.

“Once you have this kind of job,” he said, “once you feel sure you will have this kind of job for a long time, you realize that the only meaningful goal after that is October.”

He has had one shot at October, against the Mariners. Williams hit .429. Someone to watch at Yankee Stadium, then and now. Someone the Yankees need. Stars bring people out to the ballpark as much as first place does, whether they are loud or not.