Shy Of Greatness

Just before your first question, he carefully stuffs a manhole-sized wad of smokeless tobacco under his front lip, tightening the bulging chin as if it were armor.

So, are you having fun?

“Gfmflgmfltl,” he says.

It is nearing midnight, and he has just hit another where’d-it-go? ball, high and dark and into somebody’s lap.

He has just raced home from first base on a double, a redwood blowing through like a leaf.

He has just covered himself in dirt while leading baseball’s most unlikely contenders to another victory over another contender.

Yet this is the part Troy Glaus finds most difficult.

This . . . this . . . gmblgltft . . . interview.

“You know who I really like, who I’m really comfortable around?” the Angel third baseman said. “Children. I love children. They don’t want anything. They just look at you like . . .”

At this point, he widens his eyes, and broadens his face, and you realize, in some ways, perhaps a certain 24-year-old is also still a child.

You also realize, he is wearing granny glasses.

“Wear them all the time off the field,” he says. “I wear contact lenses during the game, but then I take them out and put these on.

“People don’t recognize me. They don’t think I’d be wearing glasses.”

OK, he is bespectacled. He chews tobacco off the field. Anything else?

“Dude, I live in Riverside,” he says. “Haven’t been in the water since I was 16.”

So it’s true.

Troy Glaus does fastballs, not fame.

“I go home, and I’m that fat guy sitting on the couch,” he says.

He may one day become this town’s baseball equivalent of Shaquille O’Neal, his cartoon-like greatness equaled only by the charisma to explain it.

But on his schedule, not ours.

It is an itinerary that has frustrated the media this year as it has sought to describe a talent who could one day be the biggest star in this team’s history.

He has the game. He has the ethics. He has the looks.

As the only child of a single working mother who grew up in the San Fernando Valley and north San Diego County before attending UCLA, he has the good local story.

But he has also seemingly had a chip when approached by reporters looking mostly just to increase his popularity.

He has been unavailable, or unhelpful. He has been terse during those happy times when one expects talkative, brusque for someone so bright.

With a month left in the season, you realize, he may be the best third baseman in the American League. Yet you don’t remember a single thing he has said.

So you catch him one night after a game, expecting the worst.

But once again, like one of his ninth-inning swings or throws or sprints, he delivers the unexpected.

He is chatty, thoughtful, engaging.

He is trying.

You trust this is not the work of the mighty Disney publicity machine, but the words of someone growing into his role.

It sounds like those words.

Glaus talks about that slow time frame toward celebrity. It’s one belonging to a 6-foot-5 guy with Hollywood looks who, truth be told, is as shy as a little boy in a new classroom.

“Absolutely, I’m shy,” he says.

It is the time frame of one who has moved to within one homer of Reggie Jackson’s single-season club record by hanging out not with reporters, but something more interesting.

His baseball bats.

“I have one in nearly every room of the house,” he says. “You never know when you want to try a new swing. You never know when something might feel good.”

He’ll feel a good swing one night before going to bed, then dream about it.

“Swinging all night in my sleep,” he says.

He’ll hack through the thick air of his garage, then rush to the stadium.

“Hoping that swing will still be there in batting practice,” he says.

Talking to Troy Glaus, you think of Darin Erstad, so introverted in his first years that he would wince at every question, so engaging now that you can’t keep him quiet.

You think, give him time. This can work.

“I’m still a kid,” Glaus says. “Damn, this is the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do in my life, and they’re letting me do it! How great is that? How can I ever describe that?”

His numbers are good enough to describe some of it.

Which do you like better, his 38 homers or his .401 on-base percentage, more than 50 points above the league average?

Do you like that he has scored only three fewer runs than leadoff-hitting Erstad, or that he is also expected to break the club mark for extra-base hits?

He is second in the league in strikeouts and errors, but the Angels think that eye and arm will only get better.

It is, remember, only his second full season in the league.

“Everybody talks about him being the next Mike Schmidt or whatever,” Angel Manager Mike Scioscia says. “I’d like to think that in 20 years, it is Troy who will be the benchmark for others.”

He’s uncomfortable with the mention of Mike Schmidt.

“I’ve heard Mike Schmidt, and I’m not Mike Schmidt,” he says incredulously. “I’m not even close.”

He is not yet ready, he says, to be the leader of his clubhouse.

“I look over at Mo Vaughn and I think, I can’t do that right now,” he says. “But maybe someday.”

Not now. But maybe someday.

Deep inside, an intensity that sometimes leads Glaus to sit on the bench and examine his glove as if he is talking to it, there is a plan for sharing that intensity with the rest of us.

The children, they get it now.

Glaus says he has done only one autograph show.

“But I would only sign for the kids,” he says. “And I would only do it if those kids got it for free. Man, I love kids.”

He spits tobacco into a nearly full cup. He has similar cups around his house. He promises his girlfriend he will quit.

“I’m just me, you know?” he says, grinning.

Yeah. Maybe we do.

*

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address:

bill.plaschke@latimes.com.

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Halo Power

Troy Glaus is second on the Angel single-season home run list:

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HR Player Year 39 Reggie Jackson 1982 38 Troy Glaus 2000 37 Leon Wagner 1962 Bobby Bonds 1977 36 Don Baylor 1979 34 Don Baylor 1978 Wally Joyner 1987 Tim Salmon 1995* 33 Jim Edmonds 1995* Tim Salmon 1997 Mo Vaughn 1999 Mo Vaughn 2000

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* lockout-shortened season