TODDY BALLGAME

Self-assured and self-contained, a throwback from another era who is more interested, as batting coach Clint Hurdle put it, in substance than style, Todd Helton insists he isn’t driven to hit .400, merely to be the best he can be.

In that regard, batting .393 with 36 games to play and considered to have a legitimate shot at that mythical and elusive .400, the Colorado Rockies’ first baseman reflected on the drive and said, “When the car stops, I’ll get out and see where I stand. Until then, I don’t think it does any good to think too much about it.

“I mean, I get sick of answering the same questions at times, but I don’t feel any stress or pressure. I have the great ability to live one day at a time, which is not to lie and say it doesn’t pop into my head occasionally, but I have the ability to pop it out just as quickly. My focus is strictly on the process, which is my swing and approach, not the result, which is the numbers. I’m only trying to get as many hits as I can to help the team win--not to hit .400. It would be unrealistic to make that a goal or even think you would ever be in this position.”

Unrealistic? Of course, but here he is, at 27 and in only his third full major league season, threatening to become the first .400 hitter since Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941, threatening to hit .400 at a later stage of a season than anyone since George Brett carried the pursuit into September 1980 before finishing at .380, wondering amid it all, “What happens if I hit .399?”

A good point, and his way of asking if he will be considered a failure now if he doesn’t hit .400, if the smallest of fractions will be allowed to mar an otherwise mile-high and most-valuable-player-caliber season in which .393 is currently complemented by 110 runs batted in, 31 homers and National League-leading totals for hits, doubles, total bases, extra bases, on-base and slugging percentages, and the esoteric but meaningful category of fewest swings and misses?

For some, of course, it won’t matter what he hits or where he stands when the car stops.

They tend to degrade his performance already,

putting an asterisk on his accomplishments because he plays half his games in the hitter’s haven that is Coors Field, benefiting from the thin air and spacious

outfield acreage.

Helton is hitting .425 at Coors, but he is also hitting .360 on the road, the NL’s second-highest road average, and his manager, Buddy Bell, is quick to point out that no one put an asterisk next to Williams’ name just because he played half his games in cozy Fenway Park, or on those 3,000-plus hits by Wade Boggs, who played the majority of his career in Fenway, or on any of those 17 American League batting titles won by Boston players.

“You have to perform to do what any of those players did, and you have to perform to do what Todd is doing,” Bell said.

Atlanta Manager Bobby Cox, who got a close look during a three-game series this week, agreed.

“You can’t say the light air is a factor because he’s not hitting tape measures,” Cox said. “He’s hitting bullets. He could be hitting .399 or whatever it is in Atlanta or anywhere.

“Every swing is a line drive. He might be the best hitter I’ve seen since George Brett, he’s that fluid, smooth, well balanced. I mean, I wouldn’t bet against him hitting .400, no joke.”

Said San Diego’s Tony Gwynn, who was at .394 and counting in August 1994 when the players’ strike erased the rest of that season: “The way I see it, .400 is .400. People who know the game know that Coors or no Coors, Todd has been hitting the ball hard. He’s not getting chinkers or 18-hop grounders through the infield. He’s crushing it.”

Helton shook his head when asked about the aspersions because of Coors.

“I don’t resent it as much as I’m just tired of hearing about it and feeling I have something to apologize for,” he said.

“I didn’t build the place. I was merely drafted by the Rockies to play here. I’m not ignorant of the fact that this is a good hitter’s park and that we may have some discrepancies between our home and away averages, but there’s a lot of players who hit better at home than on the road. I shouldn’t have to defend myself or my teammates.”

Helton should have no reason to be defensive. He is a left-handed batter hitting .412 against left-handed pitchers, .334 against right-handers. He is batting .472 in August, including a 19-for-29 barrage on his team’s last trip to raise his average 19 points, an almost impossible jump this late in a season in which he has 455 at-bats. He has also struck out only 42 times, and if there are occasions when he may benefit from Coors, the ballpark can’t help his absence of speed and leg hits, meaning almost all of his hits have to land on the outfield grass or beyond.

Speaking of .400, Atlanta batting coach Merv Rettenmund said: “I think he can do it, primarily because he doesn’t strike out and doesn’t have a strike zone. He can hit the inside pitch, the outside pitch, the fastball, the breaking ball. He can put the barrel of the bat on a lot of different pitches in different locations, and that’s what you have to do today because you can’t stand up there and work the count [because the strike zone continues to differ from umpire to umpire].”

The 6-foot-2, 205-pound Helton refers to his approach as controlled aggression. He hasn’t modeled himself after any one hitter but admires the all-around play and free-spirited style of Mark Grace, whose number, 17, he wears and yearns to similarly shave his head except “my ears are too big.”

His approach has undergone several modifications, of course, since he first picked up a bat in the backyard of his home in Knoxville, Tenn., and received some early instruction from his father, Jerry, a former catcher in the Minnesota farm system. In those early years, Helton said, he wasn’t much into baseball history or records, and if he had passing knowledge of Ted Williams, “Growing up where I did, I focused on who the Tennessee quarterback was at the time.”

For a brief time, it was Helton.

Acceding to his parents’ wishes, he rejected an offer from the San Diego Padres to be their second-round draft pick coming out of high school to play football and baseball for the Volunteers, although his heart was never in football the way it was in baseball.

He would often miss a football practice or meeting to hit in the batting cages. However, he started three games at quarterback in his junior year of 1994 before injuring a knee and losing the job to Peyton Manning.

“The injury had nothing really to do with it,” Helton said with a laugh. “They’d have probably told me to fake an injury so Manning could play. I mean, football was more like a job to me. Baseball has never been that and never will be.”

Helton and his wife, Kristi, met while dissecting frogs in a biology lab at Tennessee, and the Rockies assured Helton he would never have to do that for a living when they selected him in the first round of the 1995 draft, signed him for an $892,000 bonus and ultimately gave him a four-year, $12-million contract--the largest ever for a first-year player--after he dealt with the pressure of replacing Andres Galarraga and batted .315 with 25 homers and 97 RBIs as a 1998 rookie.

Helton had the tendency that year, while finishing second to Kerry Wood in rookie-of-the-year balloting, to punish himself if he had a bad game, sometimes going without dinner, but “I came to realize that over 162 games you’re going to have bad games, you’re going to have failures, and the key to it was how quickly you adjusted and recovered. I came to realize that doing something stupid, not having dinner, hurts more than it helps.”

He would also keep extensive records on every at-bat to the point that “I knew the pitcher threw sliders 42% of the time and on what count, things like that. I do a lot less of that now. I mean, if I’m doing badly, we always have tape I can look at, but if I’m going good, seeing the ball well, I don’t like to over-analyze or think about it too much. All I’m doing is going up and reacting, and I think that may be one of the reasons I’m doing so well.”

Another may be a conversation Helton had with Hurdle on Aug. 11 last year. Helton would finish his second full season with a .320 average, 35 homers and 113 RBIs, but at that point he was on a one-for-18 slide that dropped his average to .288, the Rockies were struggling under lame duck Jim Leyland and Helton’s dedicated work ethic--and confidence--had begun to waver.

Essentially, Hurdle challenged Helton to take his game and focus to a higher level, telling him he had to be bigger than the situation, and that for Helton it came down to a one-on-one confrontation with the pitcher. Hurdle told him he had to be locked in from the time he left the dugout, giving the pitcher “no room to breathe.”

Over the last six weeks of that season, while hitting .387, and through the first five months of the current season, while leading the big leagues in hitting, Helton does not wait for his next at-bat in the on-deck circle. He stands almost halfway between the on-deck circle and batter’s box, staring at the pitcher, putting himself in the pitcher’s vision and mind-set.

“I firmly believe that a lot of at-bats are determined before you get in the box,” Hurdle said. “I firmly believe you can empower a pitcher at times by your body language and how you react to certain situations. I told Todd, as I’ve told other hitters, that they have to let the pitcher know that they’re locked in from the time they leave the dugout. Don’t let him see you sweat. Don’t let him think you’re bothered. If you’re going to explode, if you have to let it out, go up the tunnel like Brett would.”

Helton credits Hurdle with a hidden psychology degree and an ability to communicate that “I can only envy.” The Colorado batting coach was educated in the hard reality of frustration and failure after making his debut with Kansas City in 1977 amid rampant predictions that he would be baseball’s next superstar.

He was also a teammate of Brett’s in Kansas City, and he credits Helton with sharing “the passion and drive to succeed that all elite players have, the important ability to accept failure and categorize it as a one-time thing. Obviously, Todd has a very big comfort zone right now, but he’s not consumed in any means by this .400 thing.

“Realistically, he doesn’t expect to hit .400, and I don’t expect him to hit .400. What we do expect is a good game plan every day . . . and I think his biggest strength this year is that he doesn’t allow one at-bat to leak into the next, one game to leak into another. He’s a kid who could play in any era in all aspects. I mean, he doesn’t have the ‘me’ disease that you see so often in sports now. He’s more about substance than style.”

Helton drives a truck and returns to Knoxville in the winter. Last winter, concerned about his .240 career average in April and thinking he was bulking up too much with off-season weight work that “affected the time it took me to get ready in the spring,” he hired a personal trainer, Charles Petrone, and focused on a dual program of strength and flexibility. The result was a .340 April.

“I always felt that if I had a good couple months at the start of the season I could have a good season overall,” Helton said, obviously doing better than good.

Whether he can end the 59-year .400 drought is uncertain--after all, there have been 11 presidents since ‘41--but he may have the schedule in his favor. The Rockies play 22 of their final 36 games at Coors, and Helton is hitting .439 in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, San Diego, Los Angeles and Atlanta, where the Rockies play their final 16 road games.

However, this is not Mark McGwire chasing the shadow of Roger Maris and knowing that if he has 60 homers today, he’ll have 60 tomorrow no matter what.

Helton’s average changes with each at-bat, and he acknowledges that maybe his thoughts have leaked a little lately, that they have been in the wrong place, that .400 has drifted across his mind (was that really Todd Helton bunting in the late innings against Atlanta Tuesday night?) and that it won’t happen again.

His psychologist and batting instructor is there to remind him: Have fun, let it fly.

“As Todd and I have talked, hitting .400 is something for him to embrace, not fight or battle and make more than it is,” Hurdle said. “There’s only a handful of people who have ever been where he’s at, so enjoy it. I mean, it’s all good no matter how it ends.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

THE 400 CLUB

Eight players have hit .400 since 1900 (and 13 times in all), with the last being Ted Williams, above:

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1941 Ted Williams .406 1930 Bill Terry .401 1925 Rogers Hornsby .403 1924 Rogers Hornsby .424 1923 Harry Heilmann .403 1922 George Sisler .420 1922 Ty Cobb .401 1922 Rogers Hornsby .401 1920 George Sisler .407 1912 Ty Cobb .409 1911 Ty Cobb .420 1911 Joe Jackson .408 1901 Nap Lajoie .426

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Chasing .400: Hit and Miss

PLAYERS WHO HAVE HIT .400 SINCE 1900

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Player Year Team Avg. Nap Lajoie 1901 Philadelphia A’s .426 Rogers Hornsby 1924 St. Louis Cardinals .424 George Sisler 1922 St. Louis Browns .420 Ty Cobb 1911 Detroit Tigers .420 Ty Cobb 1912 Detroit Tigers .409 Joe Jackson 1911 Cleveland Indians .408 George Sisler 1920 St. Louis Browns .407 Ted Williams 1941 Boston Red Sox .406 Rogers Hornsby 1925 St. Louis Cardinals .403 Harry Heilmann 1923 Detroit Tigers .403 Rogers Hornsby 1922 St. Louis Cardinals .401 Bill Terry 1930 New York Giants .401 Ty Cobb 1922 Detroit Tigers .401

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NEAR-MISSES

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Player Year Team Avg. Lefty O’Doul 1928 Philadelphia Phillies .398 Harry Heilmann 1927 Detroit Tigers .398 Rogers Hornsby 1921 St. Louis Cardinals .397 Joe Jackson 1912 Cleveland Indians .395 Harry Heilmann 1921 Detroit Tigers .394 Tony Gwynn 1994 San Diego Padres .394* Babe Ruth 1923 New York Yankees .393 Babe Herman 1930 Brooklyn Dodgers .393 Al Simmons 1927 Philadelphia A’s .392 Ty Cobb 1913 Detroit Tigers .390 Al Simmons 1931 Philadelphia A’s .390 George Brett 1980 Kansas City Royals .390 Ty Cobb 1921 Detroit Tigers .389 Tris Speaker 1925 Cleveland Indians .389 Tris Speaker 1920 Cleveland Indians .388 Luke Appling 1936 Chicago White Sox .388 Ted Williams 1957 Boston Red Sox .388 Rod Carew 1977 Minnesota Twins .388 Al Simmons 1925 Philadelphia A’s .387 Rogers Hornsby 1928 St. Louis Cardinals .387 Tris Speaker 1916 Cleveland Indians .386 Chuck Klein 1930 Philadelphia A’s .386

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HIGHEST SINCE GEORGE BRETT IN 1980

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Player Year Team Avg. Tony Gwynn 1994 San Diego Padres .394* Larry Walker 1999 Colorado Rockies .379 Tony Gwynn 1997 San Diego Padres .372 Tony Gwynn 1987 San Diego Padres .370 Andres Galarraga 1993 Colorado Rockies .370 Wade Boggs 1985 Boston Red Sox .368 Jeff Bagwell 1994 Houston Astros .368* Tony Gwynn 1995 San Diego Padres .368 Wade Boggs 1988 Boston Red Sox .366 Larry Walker 1997 Colorado Rockies .366 Wade Boggs 1987 Boston Red Sox .363 John Olerud 1993 Toronto Blue Jays .363 Larry Walker 1998 Colorado Rockies .363 Mike Piazza 1997 Dodgers .362 Wade Boggs 1983 Boston Red Sox .361

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*Strike-shortened season