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Westward MO

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

It pierces the bright blanket of snow on Mo Vaughn’s cul-de-sac, this jet-black, eight-foot-high, wrought-iron fence that surrounds Vaughn’s three-acre lot and is penetrable only through an electronic gate in the driveway.

It’s the only house in the neighborhood with a fence and it’s probably the only one with a state-of-the-art security system. Four cameras, mounted at various angles, project what they see onto a pair of televisions in Vaughn’s family room.

No, the fence isn’t wired--it won’t zap some unsuspecting autograph seeker or overzealous TV cameraman--but it does give Vaughn’s home the feel of a fortress. And the truth is, that’s how the place has felt to Vaughn for the last year and a half.

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It was here that Vaughn shielded himself from the white-hot media glare of last year’s drunk-driving arrest, and where he found solace during a contentious 18-month contract dispute with the Boston Red Sox, and where he immersed himself in video games and could just be “the big kid” his friends describe him as, instead of Mo Vaughn, superstar slugger, Boston icon, and the object of so much scrutiny in these parts you’d swear his name was Kennedy.

Vaughn could have stayed here, because, despite all that swirled beyond that fence, there is still comfort in being home. He could have re-signed with the Red Sox, continued a glorious career that included a 1995 American League most-valuable-player award and two playoff appearances, “and I would have retired very angry,” Vaughn says.

Instead, Vaughn burst through that gate, zoomed past Boston all the way to Anaheim, signing a six-year, $80-million contract with the Angels in November, and it’s as if those shackles the first baseman felt around his ankles had been ripped off.

“I lay awake sometimes and wonder how I ever made it through this whole situation,” Vaughn said, alluding to his bitter feud with the Red Sox front office. “But I did.

“It’s nice to be leaving; it’s a liberating feeling.

“I’m excited, because I’ve played through the worst of times. Now I’m with a team that wants me. I can just be myself in Anaheim and do my job.”

Vaughn, 31, never set out to become this bigger-than-life figure in Boston. He prides himself on being a “regular guy,” on treating everyone equally.

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His home is spacious--more than 6,000 square feet--but hardly ostentatious: about 3,000 square feet is devoted to an indoor batting cage, with a pitching machine and six video cameras trained on home plate, and a fully equipped health club, all of which amount to an office in the home for a professional baseball star.

“I’m not too good for the next person,” Vaughn says.

The son of educators--Vaughn’s father, Leroy, was a high school football coach and a middle school principal, and his mother, Shirley, an elementary school teacher in Norwalk, Conn.--Vaughn was reared in very disciplined environments, from home to high school to college.

“His parents would kick him in the rear when he needed it,” said Kevin Morton, a former Red Sox pitcher who grew up in Norwalk and went to Seton Hall with Vaughn. “He wasn’t a silver-spoon kid by any means.”

Says Shirley Vaughn, laughing, “He wasn’t even plastic-spoon fed.”

But when you hit .320 and average 39 home runs and 120 runs batted in from 1995-98 in a sports-crazed city; when you’re an outspoken team leader with a reputation for performing in the clutch and elevating the play of others; when you delve so deep into the community you’re credited with helping to bridge the gap between blacks and whites in a city notorious for racial discord, and when a local teacher calls you “the voice and ambassador for Boston’s inner-city kids,” well, you get treated differently.

Vaughn embraced the city, pouring his sweat and muscle into the Red Sox and his time, effort and money into numerous charities. The city responded with a bearhug of its own. It just might have squeezed too tightly.

Vaughn’s transgressions--he got into a fistfight with teammate Mike Greenwell in 1991, he fought a street-gang member in a Providence nightclub in ‘95, and he was arrested for but eventually acquitted of drunk driving in ‘98--were always front-page and top-of-the-hour news in Boston.

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He once questioned whether the Red Sox were committed to winning and railed against them for signing lesser players to long-term deals while ignoring their best hitter. The rift between him and General Manager Dan Duquette drew a variety of media opinions and attacks.

“I’d been here so long, things became stale,” Vaughn said. “It just kind of wore out. This move had to be made.”

So, Vaughn is now gearing up this month for spring training with the Angels, a team in desperate need of a September surge and one that hasn’t won a division title since 1986.

In Vaughn, the Angels have the power hitter and clubhouse leader they crave, a player who thrives on pressure--he hit .412 with two homers and seven RBIs in last season’s division series against Cleveland.

“When I played, we had guys like [Carl] Yastrzemski and [Jim] Rice who were expected to do big things, and everyone else could relax knowing that,” said Rico Petrocelli, a former Red Sox infielder who managed Vaughn at triple-A Pawtucket.

“Mo can absolutely be that type of player in Anaheim. Those guys are going to love Mo because he’ll do the job, he’ll work hard, he’ll encourage guys. He can put a team on his shoulders and take it for a ride.”

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For this, the Angels shelled out many tokens--Vaughn’s contract is worth two-thirds of what Disney paid for the franchise in 1996. But in Vaughn, the often-wayward Angels have finally acquired a free agent in his prime, a polished player and person who has been shaped by a long list of authority figures and experiences, beginning with his parents.

The (Adopted) Son Also Rises

Maurice Samuel Vaughn has always known he was adopted as a baby, but he has never tried to contact his birth parents.

“Who needs any more parents than the ones I’ve got?” Vaughn says.

Indeed, Vaughn never had to look far for role models. His father played briefly with the NFL’s Baltimore Colts, was a coach and teacher and worked nights to earn a doctorate.

His mother taught grade school for 35 years, bringing students home most afternoons for free tutoring. Six years into the couple’s retirement in Midlothian, Va., Shirley is still a tutor.

They reared Mo, who has two older sisters, to be self-reliant, sending him to summer camp when he was 8 and putting him on buses--alone--to visit relatives.

“It was part of our plan to develop independence and confidence in himself,” Leroy Vaughn said.

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At 15, Mo went away to Trinity-Pawling, an exclusive boarding school near the New York-Connecticut border. Though he was a four-year varsity starter in football, basketball and baseball, Vaughn got no special treatment back home, spending summers in Norwalk in a variety of odd jobs, from operating a jackhammer to laying pavement to collecting trash.

Shirley taught Mo to bat left-handed when he was 2, and Leroy insisted he play in a senior baseball league--for players 30 and over--when Mo was 15, so he would face tougher competition and more breaking balls.

But sports were only a part of Vaughn’s upbringing. So were the teachings of Martin Luther King and the struggles of Jackie Robinson.

“We told him to never forget who he was, regardless of how well you do financially, and to not turn your back on anyone,” Leroy said. “We taught him to never back down if you know you’re right.”

Vaughn learned. Maybe too well.

“If there’s one thing I regret, it’s that I was so outspoken in Boston,” Vaughn said. “Sometimes even the truth is better left unsaid. I’m going to try not to be so controversial with the Angels.”

The Vaughns rarely missed Mo’s athletic events, and they were regulars at Red Sox home games. They will be in Arizona for spring training and will live in Orange County during Angel home stands.

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For a guy raised to be independent, Mo is close to his parents, talking with them almost daily and surprising them with visits to Virginia.

“He’ll walk in unannounced, jump in bed with us, and we’ll talk for hours,” Shirley Vaughn said. “He still likes to cuddle and hug. He walks tough, but he’s just a big teddy bear.”

Mo Vaughn, all 6 feet 1, 240 pounds of muscle and tattoos, shaved head and hoop earrings, jumping into bed with his parents . . . that must be a sight.

“I can’t jump as hard because I’m bigger now,” said Vaughn, who has never been married. “You only have two parents, and we are very close. I still kiss my dad. I hear friends say they wish their family was like mine. There’s something to be said for that.”

Leadership School

About 60 miles separated Vaughn and his parents when he went to Trinity-Pawling, a predominantly white school with an annual tuition, at the time, of $18,000, but Vaughn said going away to school was the best thing that happened to him.

“I was 15, washing my own clothes, learning how to deal with people,” Vaughn said. “I was on scholarship, so I had to work in the kitchen. I had a lot of responsibility. That helped me thrive in college and the minor leagues because I had already been on my own.”

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Trinity-Pawling requires students to wear coats and ties, attend classes six days a week and go to chapel every day. There, Vaughn began to develop into the leader he is known for being today.

By his junior year, Mo was team captain in three sports. Before his senior year, he was voted one of six school prefects, Trinity-Pawling’s elected student council members.

“He would always look after the underdog kid, the minority kid,” said Miles Hubbard, the school’s athletic director and basketball coach. “When he spoke, other students listened. He did it quietly, not obnoxiously. I understand he’s still that way today.”

Well, not always.

“When I was coming up, I didn’t have a lot of veterans giving me tips,” Vaughn said. “I’ve always been able to pass on words. I’ll say some things every day, like, ‘You’re going to keep swinging at that [bad] pitch, aren’t you?’

“I’ll say little nagging things, annoying things, positive things, to let people know I care. I struggled my first two years in the big leagues and no one said a damn thing to me. As a veteran, you’ve got to pass on knowledge.”

Mo demands effort from teammates--just as his parents demanded it from him. A .400-hitting shortstop-catcher at Trinity-Pawling, Vaughn would have been drafted after high school, but Shirley told teams not to waste their picks.

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“My son is going to college,” she said.

Even when he signed with the Red Sox after his junior year at Seton Hall, his father thought of education.

“Mo signed for $120,000, and his dad whispered in my ear, ‘You think we can get another $5,000 for school?’ ” said Matt Sczesny, who scouted and signed Vaughn. “He could buy a college now.”

Yes, but he hasn’t given back to one particular college: his alma mater.

The Big Chill

Seton Hall baseball Coach Mike Sheppard strolls his campus in South Orange, N.J., showing a visitor all the Vaughn-related landmarks.

Beyond right field is the roof of a house he hit with a drive estimated at more than 500 feet.

There’s the batting cage in the basement of Walsh Gym, where Vaughn spent so much time “I’d have to knock on the window late at night and tell him to go to bed so he could get up for class,” Sheppard said.

There’s the squash court where he threw balls against the wall for hours, practicing his fielding.

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But there is no Mo Vaughn Field. No Mo Vaughn Weight Room. No Mo Vaughn Clubhouse.

“I’ve got the second-highest paid player in baseball, and he has yet to make a donation to the program,” said Sheppard, who also coached Craig Biggio and John Valentin. “The rest of the guys gave 10% of their signing bonuses. It’s not for me. This is not a revenue-making program.”

It’s not a matter of giving for Vaughn, who had a .417 average with 57 homers and 218 RBIs in college. He has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless hours to charity.

It’s a matter of principle. He and Sheppard haven’t spoken for three years.

There’s no question Sheppard, a former Marine in his 29th year at Seton Hall, played a major role in Vaughn’s development. The framed 1995 Sports Illustrated cover of Vaughn in Sheppard’s office says it all: “To Shep, There’s only one way to play the game. I was taught by the best. Mo Vaughn.”

Vaughn says Sheppard taught him about “mental toughness, that you have to execute at all times, in baseball and in life.”

Baseball wasn’t the problem. Life was. It started in college, when Sheppard would hound Vaughn for being late for practice or missing class.

“He says I got on his . . . “ Sheppard said. “I got on everybody’s. The better they were, the harder I worked them.”

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It got worse after college. After every one of Vaughn’s off-field incidents, Sheppard called Vaughn and said, “Wrong place. Wrong time. Wrong people.”

Said Vaughn, “I’m not some 18-year-old college kid, but he wants to treat us that way. I got tired of arguing with him and stopped taking his calls.”

The frosty relationship appears to be thawing, though. Sheppard asked a reporter for the phone number of Vaughn’s personal assistant. And Vaughn said, “It would be a shame” if he and Sheppard didn’t reconcile.

“In the back of my mind, I think about him and smile at a lot of the things that have happened in my career,” Vaughn says. “Because he would have liked the way I had done them.”

Except for one.

Lane Change

Vaughn was driving home from the Foxy Lady strip club in Providence on Jan. 9, 1998, when his pickup truck smashed into an empty car in the breakdown lane of Interstate 95 near Norwood, Mass.

The 2 a.m. crash on a foggy night demolished the car and flipped Vaughn’s truck. Luckily, no one was hurt.

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“If he hurt someone else, they wouldn’t have had to tell him to go to jail,” Shirley Vaughn said. “He would have gone straight there and locked the door.”

State troopers testified that Vaughn failed field sobriety tests but refused to submit to a breath analysis. After deliberating for 2 1/2 hours, a jury acquitted Vaughn of a drunk-driving charge last March.

Vaughn emerged from the ordeal a changed man.

“Whether I was right or wrong, I was wrong because people were able to perceive me in a certain way,” said Vaughn, whose reputation as a role model took a beating. “I got hit on the chin, but I just had to take it.

“I worried about what the kids would think, because I’d warned them about these situations all the time, and there I was. It made me realize the impact I can have, and that no matter what, perception is always going to be fact.”

Leroy Vaughn said Mo’s social pace “is about one-third of what it was” before the arrest, a change he applauds. But Vaughn’s already-strained relationship with the Red Sox deteriorated dramatically.

Vaughn fumed when no team officials attended the trial or offered support. The Red Sox, instead, asked Vaughn to undergo alcohol evaluations. Vaughn later accused the team of hiring a private detective to monitor him.

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That set the stage for last fall’s ugly divorce. Boston didn’t make an offer to Vaughn in the 15-day period in which it had exclusive negotiating rights, fueling Vaughn’s belief that the Red Sox didn’t want him.

After the Angels stunned Vaughn with a six-year, $72-million offer--accompanied by a seven-page letter explaining how much the team wanted him--Boston countered with a five-year, $62.5-million offer with an option for a sixth year.

Critics ripped the Red Sox, claiming they had offered just enough to show fans they wanted Vaughn but not enough for Vaughn to accept. Vaughn was ripped for being greedy.

Vaughn eventually snubbed the Red Sox, and today he is an Angel with at least one semi-devilish thought.

Last year, Duquette, the Boston GM, stood in Fenway Park and spoke of how great it was going to be to see Nomar Garciaparra and Pedro Martinez in the 1999 All-Star game, which will be played in Boston. There was no mention of Vaughn.

“That will always be in the back of my mind,” Vaughn said. “I want to be at that game, and I will do everything in my power to get there.”

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Even if he has to run through a wrought-iron fence to do it.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Mo Vaughn at a Glance

FAST FACTS

Age: 31

Height: 6-1

Weight: 240

Bats: Left

Throws: Right

Position: 1B

***

1998

At-Bats: 609

Average: .337

Hits: 205

Runs: 107

Home Runs: 40

RBIs: 115

Doubles: 31

Triples: 2

Walks: 61

Strikeouts: 144

Stolen Bases: 0

Errors: 12

Fielding %: .991

***

CAREER

At-Bats: 3,828

Average: .304

Hits: 1,165

Runs: 628

Home Runs: 230

RBIs: 752

Doubles: 199

Triples: 10

Walks: 519

Strikeouts: 954

Stolen Bases: 28

Errors: 99

Fielding %: .988

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