Right Men for the Job

Tim Salmon seemed to begin life with an 0-2 count, growing up in a broken home after his parents divorced when he was 6--a nomadic lifestyle that included more address changes than a military family--and spending many of his formative years living with a mother who was an alcoholic.

Strike 3 nearly came in 1990 on a hot desert night in Palm Springs, when a high-and-tight fastball shattered Salmon’s jaw, temporarily disfiguring his face to such an extent that his younger brother, Mike, said it “looked like a hand grenade went off in his mouth.”

The odds of a Salmon success story seemed remote.

Children of divorce often wind up in dysfunctional families. Children of alcoholics often become alcoholics. And some players never recover from such vicious beanings.

But look at Salmon now: happily married with a 4 1/2-year-old daughter and 1 1/2-year-old son, a family that is “the priority” in his life; the Angels’ straight-as-an-arrow chapel leader whose only alcohol consumption is an occasional glass of wine with dinner, and a 29-year-old right fielder whose offensive and defensive prowess have made him one of the best all-around players in the game today.

“They say adversity builds character, and every time Tim was faced with a challenge he’d chalk it up as a lesson and build on it,” said Mike Salmon, a former USC defensive back who played briefly for the San Francisco 49ers last season.

“What he went through in life made him stronger. If we were two spoon-fed little rich kids, I don’t know if he would have had the same engine, the same work ethic, that he has now. Maybe that has a lot to do with who he is.”

Just who is Tim Salmon, though? In some ways, the answer seems so simple: He’s a what-you-see-is-what-you-get type whose methodical, almost robotic, approach to the game has helped make him the Angels’ most consistent run- producer since 1993.

Despite his notorious slow starts, Salmon has averaged 30 home runs and 100 runs batted in a year and is more reliable--on and off the field--than a New York Yankee logo. “You can go to the bank on this guy,” General Manager Bill Bavasi said.

Salmon’s baseball mind is remarkably uncluttered. His pregame routine never changes. He won’t hurl a batting helmet after a strikeout, nor will he show much emotion after a homer. His previous at-bat, good or bad, will not affect his next. He’ll tinker with “the feel” of his swing, but not the mechanics of it. He keeps things basic: See the ball, hit the ball.

It’s the same way off the field. Salmon, who is in the first year of a four-year, $22.5-million contract, takes pride in being a clean-cut, upstanding individual, and the Angels never have to worry about him doing anything that would embarrass his family, the team or the game.

A superstar without a superstar ego, Salmon has never complained about a contract, despite being underpaid compared to his peers, and he has never been the center of any clubhouse controversy.

“He’s not going to be the Don Rickles of baseball, the wise guy who is always popping off,” Bavasi said. “Unfortunately these days, those are the guys who get most of the attention. Tim works hard every day and produces. Maybe because he’s so consistent, he’s boring.”

The end result, the Tim Salmon Angel fans will see in right field for the sixth season, may be a monument to simplicity, but the forces that shaped Salmon’s life are so much more complex.

The Wanderer

Salmon and his brother were latchkey kids who spent their childhood moving from one apartment to another while their mother looked for better jobs in places such as Phoenix, Wichita Falls, Texas; Houston and Forth Worth.

Tim hated being the new kid on the youth football team every year because the prime position--quarterback--was always taken. He sometimes envied classmates who returned to two-parent homes, while he and Mike usually came home to an empty apartment.

But Salmon does not expect you to reach for a tissue here.

“We bounced around a lot, but we always knew we had someone to play catch with wherever we were at,” Tim Salmon said of the bond that developed between him and Mike, who is two years younger.

“And the good thing about living in an apartment was you could always round up seven or eight kids for a Wiffle Ball game. Most of the kids we hung out with were just like us.”

Except they all didn’t have mothers who were alcoholics.

“She worked her tail off trying to support us, and that wasn’t an easy job,” Salmon said. “She had a lot of stress, and she turned to alcohol. It wasn’t an abusive situation. We were always taken care of. We were never on the streets. We always had meals to eat.

“But it was just a typical alcoholic home, where things were emotionally tough at times. But what can you do? When you’re 11 or 12 years old, you just deal with it.”

How did Salmon cope? He chose maturity and sobriety. He became a pillar for his brother--”For five years, Tim was the glue of the family,” Mike Salmon said--and vowed to never let alcohol rule or ruin his life.

“I heard all the statistics, that [about half] of those who grow up in an alcoholic home become alcoholics,” Salmon said. “That’s a cop-out. It’s like saying, ‘Why fight it?’ That motivated me to take a negative and make it a positive. Somehow people think a negative will lead to more negatives, but you can turn a situation around.”

Salmon did just that, refusing to associate socially with those who drank and steering clear of bars and nightclubs on the road.

“I need to insulate myself from things because of my family,” said Salmon, who married Marci Hustead in 1989, five months before he played his first professional baseball game. “I don’t want to dishonor them.”

Salmon’s childhood stabilized when he moved in with his father in Phoenix before his first year of high school and remained there for four years. At Greenway High, Salmon developed the work ethic that his brother now compares to that of 49er receiver Jerry Rice.

“If he was in the batting cages until 10 p.m., I’d be there too, and if he wanted to throw until 1 a.m., we would,” Mike Salmon said. “I’ll tell you one thing, it’s no accident his arm is as strong as it is. We’d throw the football all day and all night.”

Salmon hit .381 with a .905 slugging percentage as a senior in 1986 and was named Phoenix high school player of the year, but Arizona State was recruiting mostly California players then and ignored the local kid.

Salmon went to Grand Canyon College, a small Baptist school in Phoenix, and had three superb years, never hitting below .356 and averaging 17 homers and 64 RBIs.

The Angels chose Salmon in the third round of the 1989 draft, and Salmon negotiated a $60,000 bonus without the services of an agent. He spent that summer at Bend, Ore., in the short-season Northwest League, and suffered a broken nose when he lost a pitch in the sun and was hit in the face.

But that was nothing compared to the 1990 beaning, which almost ended his career.

Picking Up the Pieces

Mike Salmon was asleep in Phoenix when he got the call from Marci at about 1 a.m. “She was hysterical,” Mike recalled. “I could tell by the tone of her voice it was bad. I crawled out of bed, and 10 minutes later I was on I-10 going 100 mph through the desert, sobbing all the way.”

A 1-2 pitch from Riverside’s Carey Woodson ran in on Salmon, playing for Class-A Palm Springs, and hit him in the face, breaking his jaw. But when Mike Salmon arrived in the hospital at about 5 a.m., it seemed much worse.

“I couldn’t see any form of his lips,” he said. “Marci was passed out on Tim’s lap, and there was a suction tube in his mouth so he wouldn’t choke when he was sleeping. I bawled for an hour. I thought he’d look like the Elephant Man, that he’d never look normal. . . . I still get choked up every time I talk about it.”

A plastic surgeon pieced Salmon’s face back together and, after a six-week diet of milkshakes, Salmon, much to the amazement of those around him, pieced his baseball career back together. Three months after the beaning, Salmon was playing at double-A Midland, Texas.

“I’m sure when everyone told him he’d be an idiot to keep playing baseball, it just went in one ear and out the other,” Mike Salmon said. “He’s as stubborn as a mule. He just won’t quit.”

The beaning left an indelible mark on the young outfielder, though.

“I recognized that I had to take my at-bats more seriously,” Salmon said. “Sometimes you get so caught up in your swing, your stance, staying in on the curve or slider . . . you’re focused on everything except the ball. I figured out this is a dangerous game, that I need to focus on seeing the ball and hitting the ball.”

The next year (1991) at Midland, Salmon saw the ball but often missed it. He struck out 166 times and was a streaky hitter who would club four homers one week--he finished the season with 23--and go hitless the next.

And those who know Salmon now as a model of composure might not have recognized him at Midland, where he once threw a batting helmet that caromed off a wall and into a teammate’s face.

“Guys laugh now because I don’t cuss or get mad, but I can remember snapping and throwing all sorts of stuff and using terrible language in Class-A and double-A ball,” Salmon said.

“But I finally realized you have to conserve your energy for your next at-bat, that sometimes you can get so frustrated you’ll take yourself out of your game. I saw how guys would waste at-bats because they were still so ticked off about their last at-bat.”

A conversation with Angel minor league batting instructor Gene Richards, who stressed emotional control and confidence and advised Salmon to stop accepting so much advice on hitting, helped solidify Salmon’s new approach. Salmon enjoyed a breakthrough 1992, hitting .347 with 29 homers and 105 RBIs at triple-A Edmonton.

Salmon was promoted to the big leagues that August, he was American League rookie of the year in 1993 (.283, 31 homers, 95 RBIs) and has been the foundation of the Angel offense since.

Man or Machine?

Angel shortstop Gary DiSarcina calls it “Timmy World,” the little planet Salmon seems to be on every day, but one his teammates can only orbit.

Salmon sticks to the same routine at the park, allotting blocks of time to disperse tickets, sign balls, get dressed, speak to the media, receive training-room treatments, stretch, hit, soft toss and so on.

His teammates can set their watches by him, and they know not to disrupt his tunnel vision, especially if he’s on one of his tears, when he’s crushing every pitch in sight.

“We just leave him there,” DiSarcina said. “It’s where he does his best work.”

His daily visits to Timmy World help Salmon cope with the stress of the game.

“The closest comparison to being a big league player that I’ve heard is being a trader on the New York Stock Exchange, those guys who are just frazzled at the end of the day,” Salmon said. “That’s how I feel, and that’s what you have to hold down.

“People don’t realize that sometimes you’ll wake up at midnight and run an at-bat over and over in your mind, that some nights you dream about who you’re going to face the next day. That’s the normal life of a player the fans don’t see.

“And your family takes a beating during the season. It’s tough on your kids when Daddy comes home after a 10-day trip at 4 a.m., but he has to sleep until noon and then leave two hours later. . . . After the last game of the season, it’s like opening the shades. You can finally exhale and relax.”

Salmon was still holding his breath after the 1997 season, though. His wife was found to have thyroid cancer last May and needed at least nine months of treatments after having the thyroid removed to determine if the operation had been a success.

“Even when the doctors said there was a 95% survival rate, that meant nothing until she survived,” Salmon said. “There were a few days [before the surgery] where my mind ran wild, where I was thinking of all the worst-case scenarios.”

It was another challenge for Salmon, and, like the obstacles he overcame as a youngster and a young ballplayer, this one was cleared: Doctors gave Marci a clean bill of health in January.

“It gave me a chance to evaluate it all, to put things in perspective,” Salmon said of the ordeal. “I realized that 30 or 40 years from now I will care more about having my wife around and my kids raised right than being a major league baseball player.”

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