Big Deal in More Ways Than One

Shawn Green is returning home, which is big anyway you measure it. Big trade. Big contract. Big pressure and expectations.

It is a challenge the former Tustin High outfielder and Newport Beach resident wanted and welcomed.

Will he handle it better than Eric Davis and Darryl Strawberry, who both learned how tough it is to go home again?

The Dodgers are banking six years and $84 million on it, convinced that Green will be the left-handed run producer they have long needed and mistakenly thought they acquired in the deal for Todd Hundley. They are convinced that Green brings the “character and integrity,” as General Manager Kevin Malone put it, that Raul Mondesi . . . well, Malone didn’t say that Mondesi lacked it, but as Dodger Chairman Robert Daly said, “acquiring a player who wanted to be here for a player who didn’t was critical.”

Rebuilding in the aftermath of a disappointing summer, the Dodgers sent Mondesi to the Toronto Blue Jays on Monday after reaching the contract agreement with Green.

A sad day, said Dave Stewart, the Blue Jays’ assistant general manager, in that “you cultivate a young player only to lose him” through baseball’s ugly and unforgiving economics. Maybe, said Stewart, a club will have to declare bankruptcy before meaningful changes are made.

But as a former big game pitcher familiar with pressure and expectation he also said there are no maybes about Green’s ability to cope with the challenge that now confronts him.

“He is a premier player, a five-tool talent,” Stewart said. “His statistics tell you what kind of player he is, but there are not a lot of kids walking the earth who are a better person than he is.”

A model citizen who needed only a few hours to remind Daly of his younger son, “who I love dearly. I was unbelievably impressed.”

So much so that the former Warner Bros. chairman, in an auspicious debut to his new role and still cognizant of star power, agreed to a contract averaging $14 million per year, second only to new teammate Kevin Brown’s $15 million.

Green will actually receive $16 million in the fifth and sixth years of the deal, which is a record, but only until Ken Griffey Jr. and Alex Rodriguez sign their next contracts. There is no equating soaring salaries with statistical reality, but Gordon Lakey, a longtime Toronto scout now with the Philadelphia Phillies, agreed with Stewart and said, “There are not many complete players, but Shawn has become one. He’s made a lot of strides in all areas. He makes any team a better team.”

Slated to bat behind Gary Sheffield in the cleanup role, Green has hit 77 homers and driven in 223 runs in the last two years. He hit 42 homers with a .309 average and 123 runs batted in last year when he led the American League in total bases, extra-base hits and doubles. He now patterns himself after Don Mattingly, the former New York Yankee first baseman, but learned the rudiments of hitting--and old school work ethic--from his father, Ira, who operates an instructional school called the Baseball Academy in Santa Ana.

Ira and his daughter, Lisa, attended Monday’s news conference and said the family was gleeful to have Shawn playing at home. The nightly pass list at Dodger home games--Green would leave 40 or more tickets when the Blue Jays played in Anaheim--could be a problem but “it will be spread out over 81 games and my wife [Judy] and I have always attempted to be a buffer so that Shawn could focus on the game. We’ve always been very protective.”

As a 13-year-old Orange County resident, Green had one leg over the Anaheim Stadium railing and was prepared to storm the field with thousands of other fans when Dave Henderson deprived the Angels of a victory over the Boston Red Sox in the 1986 championship series with his infamous home run in the ninth inning of Game 5, but Green said he was never a full-fledged Angel fan and did not list them among the clubs he would accept being traded to when he rejected a five-year, $48-million contract offer from the Blue Jays.

“We never talked to the Angels,” Toronto General Manager Gord Ash said, pointing out that “for a long period of time there was no one to talk to” because of the absence of a general manager. “Shawn also said the Angels were not a club he was interested in going to, although I don’t know why.”

The Blue Jays were on the ropes--unable to meet his contract terms and unwilling to get only draft choices as compensation if he left as a free agent after the 2000 season.

Green told Ash he would listen to the Red Sox, Yankees, Colorado Rockies and Chicago Cubs, but it never got that far. Toronto wanted an established player, and the Dodger offer of Mondesi and Pedro Borbon was the best Ash received. Green, in turn, wanted the Dodgers first and foremost, wanted what he called the exciting opportunity to play at home, the potentially “gratifying opportunity” to help restore Dodger pride and prestige by making a “big impact statistically and helping elevate the performance of some of the other players.”

He called it the perfect fit, or as his father said, “what better situation? Like most of you guys, I thought the Dodgers would win the West. A lot of their guys had off seasons and they kind of underachieved, but I think Shawn looks at it as a situation that only needs to be tweaked a little here and there and that he can help get the team back to what it once was.”

Tweaked? Well, the Dodgers may need more than that. They would still seem to have significant questions at vital positions up the middle, but as Daly noted, Green is a building block, a potential cornerstone, the type player who should make an impact on and off the field. In fact, Green will donate $250,000 each year to the Dodger Dream Fund designed to restore youth baseball fields in Southern California and an unspecified annual amount to the Players Assn.’s Trust for Children.

Green also said it was important to him to be traded to a community with a large Jewish population such as New York or Los Angeles.

“As a Jewish athlete I think it’s important to interact with the fans, and the Dodgers, of course, have a rich tradition with Sandy Koufax,” Green said. “I want to be able to have a big impact, but not just on the Jewish community but the community in general.”

Meanwhile, Daly couldn’t stop raving over the newest Dodger. “We wanted the best ballplayer, and we acquired a wonderful man in the bargain,” he said.

Some would say that $84 million isn’t exactly a bargain, but market value is market value, and Green, who turns 27 Wednesday, got his birthday wish.

Big? In so many ways.