PAIN KILLER

The third baseman of the San Diego Padres has played through a bad back that sent him to a chiropractor, a pulled chest muscle, a groin strain that kept buckling his knees, a torn rotator cuff that will require surgery, and dehydration so severe that an IV needle was still in his left arm only minutes before Ken Caminiti got off the trainer’s table that day and played, prompting disbelieving General Manager Kevin Towers to think of the movie “Bang the Drum Slowly.”

Tough?

“Nails,” catcher Brian Johnson said of Caminiti.

“The toughest,” said Manager Bruce Bochy, who may not even be aware that as a San Jose State cornerback, Caminiti once hid a broken hand from his coach, telling him it was only a bruise so that he could play the next game, or that he was sidelined for only 10 days by a separated collarbone suffered in a high school baseball game.

“If he can walk, he can play,” Lee Caminiti, his father, said. “That’s always been his attitude.”

Caminiti has been able to walk often enough and has played well enough to be considered the leading candidate for the National League’s most-valuable-player award.

Or, at the least, the American Medical Assn.’s man of the year.

“He lifts everyone on the team to a higher level,” Towers said. “Teammates see him playing with a torn rotator and other injuries and they give a little more effort. They forget their own aches and pains.”

Still, for Caminiti, this year has been a lark, considering the fog in which he sometimes performed during six-plus seasons with the Houston Astros.

Tough? Caminiti has never been tougher than that night in Houston in late October 1993. After having driven drunk at high speeds on a freeway, tears streaming down his face, not caring if he lived or died, he somehow found himself back in his own driveway. He decided at that moment that he’d had it with years of drinking and a vicious cycle of painkillers.

He checked into a Houston clinic the next morning--”He did it for the right reason, the right person: himself,” his father said--and began the process that turned his life and career around as relatives, and teammates Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio, had been urging.

Nancy, his high school sweetheart and wife, had patiently lived with what Lee Caminiti described as his son’s mood swings and sometimes intolerance even with his two daughters “who now love to have him home.”

How many times had Caminiti sworn off in the morning, only to be back in the bar that night, supplementing the painkillers, dulling the ache of injuries incurred with his face-in-the-dirt competitiveness and intensity? How many times had Nancy made him sleep on the couch, as she did when he returned from a night of drinking with a tattoo of a panther on his left calf?

Only Caminiti, who’d had operations on both knees even before he joined the Astros, could decide when the time was right, that he was ready to accept the reality that maybe he wasn’t so tough after all.

Or maybe he was even tougher.

“His mom and I went through parents’ week with him at the clinic and that was very tough,” said Lee Caminiti, a retired aero-space worker. “Everything comes out.”

Now Lee Caminiti stood in a corner of the Padre clubhouse and said he and his wife “couldn’t be prouder of Ken” for standing up and confronting his illness, of which Caminiti is hesitant to speak.

Ken said only that taking it on represented the biggest turnaround of his life and career.

“It’s no coincidence that I made the All-Star team for the first time the year I quit [drinking and taking painkillers] and that I’ve had two even better years since then,” he said.

“I was playing good baseball, hard baseball, but not to my potential. The night life was too good.”

In this year of repeated injuries, Caminiti has taken nothing stronger than cortisone for his shoulder. At 33, he is batting a career-best .321 with 39 homers and 128 runs batted in, career highs and club records.

The process began last year, when he obliterated anything he had done in Houston after being obtained with center fielder Steve Finley in the 12-player trade of Dec. 28, 1994--one week after John Moores became owner of the Padres.

“It was the best thing that could have happened,” Caminiti said of the trade. “I came here with the feeling that I was wanted, that I was special. The manager and coaching staff are the best I’ve ever been associated with.

“In Houston, it was like I was going to be traded every year. The rumors never stopped and I let it get in my head. It was brutal. I felt like I had to get a hit every at-bat to justify staying there, or justify being traded.

“I left some good friends there, Bags and Biggio in particular, but I don’t care what happens to management or ownership. There was never an attempt to stop the rumors and I don’t think the Astros ever believed I was capable of these numbers.

“Of course, maybe I didn’t either. I definitely feel I’m something of a late bloomer, that I can continue to improve. I’m still young and hope to ride this out for a long time.”

Caminiti was eligible for free agency after his then-career year in 1995 but re-signed with the Padres for a comparatively modest $6.1 million for two years. Incentives? “His only incentives are to make the club better,” Towers said.

The Padres are still alive in the West Division beginning a three-game series in Los Angeles tonight. They are very much alive in the wild-card race.

“We are where we are because of Ken,” veteran pitcher Bob Tewksbury said. “He has the best combination of mental toughness and physical ability of any player I’ve ever seen.”

Tewksbury’s 5-year-old son, Griffin, clearly agrees. Caminiti arrived in the clubhouse recently to find Griffin paying his respects.

He was seated in front of Caminiti’s locker, wearing a Caminiti uniform top and having painted on a black goatee. Caminiti’s beard, combined with deep-set, dark eyes, adds to the portrait of intensity that Caminiti projects.

The tear in his left rotator cuff has kept the 6-foot, 200-pound Caminiti from lifting weights, so he is down about 17 pounds. And it often causes his arm to lock, making it difficult to extend or raise. His spectacular play at third base is even more impressive under those circumstances.

“A human highlight film,” Tony Gwynn said.

Dave Garcia, a former Angel manager and now a scout for that club, shook Caminiti’s hand on the Padre bench before a recent game and said, “I just wanted to tell you that I’ve been in baseball for 50 years and seen the best--Brooks Robinson, Mike Schmidt, Buddy Bell--and you may be better than any of them. You definitely have the best arm.”

Caminiti’s arm is considered the best among major league infielders, permitting him to nail runners from all angles and areas.

“He is better than Brooks Robinson,” said Merv Rettenmund, the Padre hitting coach and a former Baltimore Oriole teammate of the Hall of Fame third baseman.

“He moves better than Brooks and he has that stronger arm.”

Caminiti also has a remarkable ability to reach ground balls that appear to be past him and to leave his feet.

However, in the episode that has become legend, Caminiti was flat on his back 10 minutes before the finale of the mid-August series with the New York Mets in Monterrey, Mexico.

He hadn’t slept the night before, having been violently ill from something he ate, and thinking there was no way he could get out of bed. But he did, making it to the park, where trainers treated his dehydration with an IV setup rigged to a coat hanger.

“I looked at him and it wasn’t pretty,” Towers said. “He was white like a ghost, his hair messed, and I thought that there was no way he could play.”

Caminiti did play, but only after ordering trainers to find him a Snickers to satisfy a sudden chocolate craving. He wolfed down the candy bar, hit a solo homer in the first inning, a three-run homer in the third--by which time “We were all yelling for Snickers and an IV,” Gwynn said--and struck out in the fifth, after which he was assisted back to the trainer’s table and hooked up to the IV again, his team well on its way to an 8-0 victory.

Bochy found Caminiti’s performance incredible.

“You had to be there,” he said. “You had to see him all curled up on the floor.”

Back home, Caminiti hit a grand slam in the next night’s victory over Montreal, quickly signed an endorsement deal with the company that makes Snickers, batted .472 over a 10-day span that began with that Mexico finale, sizzled through August at .344 with 14 home runs and now smiles and says, “I’m still trying to get back to that dehydrated state.”

There is one state to which he is not trying to get back.

Nights on the road are much tamer now and free time is spent thinking about rebuilding his ’73 pickup, his first wheels, and a ’55 Chevy, which he bought for $3,900 and has turned into a spotless show car.

Engineering the Padre playoff drive, Caminiti has quietly gotten in the face of teammates when necessary.

His leadership style was illustrated when he responded to a player’s early-season criticism of Bochy by depositing the player’s uniforms in the manager’s office and informing the player when he arrived that if he really wanted to manage, that’s where he could dress. The criticism stopped.

“He’s the MVP by any criteria you want to use,” Gwynn said.

In the pivotal second half, Caminiti has the highest batting average, .357, the most home runs, 27, and the most RBIs, 79, of any National League player. Of the MVP possibility, Caminiti said:

“I enjoy the talk, but I try to leave it at that. I don’t want it cluttering my head. If you listen to the hype, you start believing it. I don’t want to lose my focus. I just want to show up and play.”

That’s what he does. No matter what.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

A New Man

A look at Ken Caminiti’s career statistics with the Houston Astros before entering a rehabilitation program:

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Years R H HR RBI AVG. 1987-93 346 781 57 370 .257

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Caminiti with the Astros and Padres since rehab:

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Year R H HR RBI AVG 1994 63 115 18 75 .283 1995 74 159 26 94 .302 1996 105 172 39 128 .321 1994-96 242 446 83 297 .304

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