About Face

Have you checked out the Dodgers’ newest face?

Children used to joke about it. Adults used to stare at it.

Its owner shrunk behind it, underwent seven operations to fix it, played baseball to make people forget it, then triumphantly decided it didn’t matter.

Today, although traces of the devastating birthmark remain, he wears that face like armor.

Meet Brea’s Matt Luke, the Dodgers’ left-handed pinch-hitter, come home to remind the neighborhood bullies that strength is more than skin deep.

You might have seen him scoring the tying run recently against Arizona. Or throwing out the potential winning run from right field in St. Louis. Or starting two games at first base during the first homestand, both wins.

You might have seen Matt Luke up close, on TV or through binoculars, and you might have wondered.

So let’s get this out of the way:

He was born with the face of a nightmare. Thirty percent was covered with a multicolored, multilayered birthmark known as a “congenital hairy nevus.”

The condition also has been described as the “human werewolf syndrome,” which sounded about right to Matt’s father, Terry.

When he saw his newborn son, he ran from the room.

“He was smiling and happy, he felt great,” Terry said. “But we felt terrible.”

By the time Matt was old enough to understand, he wasn’t feeling so great anymore.

There were the constant stares. The awkward questions--”Why don’t you wash your face?” The first of several painful surgeries.

Children called him “Scarface,” and he would hide behind his mother’s leg.

“Kids are ruthless,” Luke recalled. “It was hard. I couldn’t understand why I had to look so different.”

When he got old enough to fight, he fought. When the tormentors were bigger than he, his older brother Scott fought.

Once during a vacation in the mountains, when an older stranger called him “Charcoal face,” Scott dragged the boy to a nearby grill and rubbed his face in it.

“I said, ‘I’ll show you a charcoal face,’ ” Scott recalled.

The family moved often, throughout Southern California, then to Oklahoma, then back again. At every stop, there were new kids, new explanations, new fights.

Through it all, he could look in the mirror and see one blessing. It was baseball. He was growing tall and strong and could play.

One gift had been denied, but another had been given, in abundance. Beneath the birthmark grew the best baseball player on the block.

“Baseball was the way I became accepted,” Luke said. “The first thing kids would notice is my scar. The next thing was, I could play a little baseball.”

Soon, kids forgot all about the first thing. Baseball became Luke’s ticket to normality. Baseball gave him his smile.

Is it any wonder he was soon sleeping in his youth-league uniform? Or begging a doctor not to put a cast on a broken finger, explaining, “I would rather be deformed for life than miss a game.”

Through baseball, he forgot that he had been born deformed.

Through baseball, he gained the confidence to end the reconstructive surgeries before his face was totally clear.

The decision was made in sixth grade, after he ran for class president in his San Diego-area middle school.

In front of the entire class in the school gymnasium, marked face and all, he debated the other candidate.

His mother, Vicki, who’d sneaked in through the back door, held her breath and rubbed her eyes.

Afterward, she knew. So did he.

For the foreseeable future, he would live with a scar under his left eye, and another running down the left side of his nose and mouth.

“I decided, this was who I am,” he said. “I didn’t want anymore changes. I was happy with myself.”

He lost the election, but gained an understanding many will never have.

Said his mother: “He is who he is because of the scars.”

From that moment on, Luke decided that about the only thing that could make his life better would be to one day play for his dream team.

The team that once inspired him to use his lunch money for baseball cards.

The team that inspired him and his two brothers to erect a monument in an Oklahoma field.

The team known as the . . . well, we told you the gift had been given in abundance.

Read on.

*

The Dodgers have played seven home games. The average attendance of Luke’s relatives has been 17.

Every time Luke comes to bat at Dodger Stadium, those listening to the radio might think that 30,000 people were cheering wildly for him.

This is because the Luke family sits directly under the radio booth.

If you are the fan who was recently approached by a middle-aged man wanting to buy that foul ball you had caught, we can explain.

It was Matt Luke’s first foul ball at Dodger Stadium, and the guy wanting to buy it was his father.

To confirm the identity of Matt Luke’s dream team, one needed only to be in his Brea home the day he was told the Dodgers had picked him up from the New York Yankees on waivers.

Around the corner from where Luke was receiving the news on the kitchen phone, his mother was screaming.

“To play for the Dodgers is a dream come true,” Luke said, words spoken by hundreds of players in the organization.

Only he means it.

During his years at El Dorado High in Placentia, Luke lived 10 minutes from Anaheim Stadium, and one hour from Dodger Stadium.

Yet he saw only one Angel game, and he-can’t-remember-how-many Dodger games.

“It was just the way I was raised, loving everything about them,” he said.

It figured that he once scored the winning run in a CIF Southern Section championship game by stealing home at, yes, Dodger Stadium.

What didn’t figure was that in 1992, after starring at Cal, he was drafted by the . . . Yankees?

“Three days of silence around the house,” said brother Scott.

Like many talented players in the Yankee system, though, Luke was eventually caught up in George Steinbrenner’s triple-A Columbus shuffle. He struggled there last year before the Yankees decided they had no more room.

In 1996, he had come within hours of getting his first major league at-bat when the Yankees’ game against the Cleveland Indians was rained out, just before he was sent back down.

Last November, a couple of months before his 27th birthday, he wondered if he would ever get another chance.

Then Fred Claire called.

The Dodger boss said he knew he had made the right move when, several days after acquiring Luke, he phoned the trainer’s room to ask if any players had shown up for optional early-winter workouts.

“Just Matt Luke,” was the answer.

He phoned again the next day, asked the same question.

“Just Matt Luke,” was the answer.

It was the same the next day. And the next.

Luke made the team with a terrific spring and should stick around awhile with his penchant for the dramatic. In one of his three pinch-hit at-bats, he singled to start a game-tying rally.

The Dodgers desperately need a left-handed hitter off the bench who can do that.

And for you Hollywood types, imagine this:

A star who could actually benefit from plastic surgery, but declines.

A guy who refuses to change the way he looks.

A guy who, instead, has changed the way others look at him.

Some say that birthmarks are the kisses of angels. These days, you get the feeling, Matt Luke would buy that.