Green Putting a New Spin on Second Season

Shawn Green has recaptured the swing, silencing the doubters who emerged last season. He has acclimated to a new league, new pitchers, new environment--in the familiar surroundings of home. As a player and person who is more comfortable in the background, one of the cast, he is learning to live with the expectations inherent in a six-year, $84-million contract and being the right fielder for whom Raul Mondesi was traded.

Now, in his second season with the Dodgers, leading this sudden playoff contender in runs, home runs and runs batted in, engaged to be married in November, feeling settled at home and home plate, back, he said, where he wants to be in every way, the baseball aspect comes down to what he has found to be the toughest part, maintaining that swing, the redemptive level he has re-achieved.

“As good as I feel right now, I know you never figure it out,” he said. “That’s the thing. I thought I had it all figured out that last year in Toronto, but all of a sudden I come here, come home, only to lose that feeling I had at the plate. I mean, it’s kind of scary. It can throw you back to earth in a hurry.”

Green got up, persevered.

Now, it’s generally agreed, he’s back to being the player the Dodgers traded for, the player, agent Jeff Moorad said, “they believed would be a cornerstone for their future.”

At 28, the former Tustin High star is batting .288 with 30 homers and 84 RBIs. He has driven the Dodgers into first place in the National League West by homering in seven of the last eight games and already has six more homers than last year, when he hit .269 and drove in 99 runs. In 1999, his final year with Toronto, Green batted .309 with 42 homers and 123 RBIs.

Dodger Stadium isn’t the hitters’ haven SkyDome is, but there was more to last year’s slide than field dimensions and/or the way fly balls carry. Even when he hit well early, Green said, he didn’t feel right.

“I kept telling myself, ‘This is great. I’m hitting well and don’t even have my swing,’ ” Green said. “I kept thinking, ‘When I get my swing it’s going to be incredible,’ but it never came. It was strange. I just never felt right at the plate.”

There were industry whispers that he never would, that maybe he was too soft and weighed down by the dollars and high expectations in Los Angeles, that the demands of playing at home conflicted with the comfort of Toronto. Wasn’t he always on the phone to Carlos Delgado, the Blue Jays’ first baseman?

Green sat in the Dodger Stadium dugout the other day and said he still talks to close friend Delgado frequently, that they support each other. He added, however, that he receives support from friends in Southern California as well, that nothing should be read into his international phone bills, and that he never became so frustrated last year that he second-guessed himself for signing the long-term contract with the Dodgers--a requisite to the trade.

“I felt then and I feel now that coming out here was the right situation for me,” Green said, “but obviously, when you go through a struggle like I did for most of last year, there’s a tendency to look back and say, ‘Hey, I had things going pretty good a year ago and now I go to the plate and just don’t feel right.’ I think that one of the things that factored into it was that this wasn’t a situation where I was unhappy in Toronto or asking to be traded. I was comfortable there and felt I was coming into my own on the field and in the clubhouse.

“Suddenly, I’m in a whole new situation with new expectations. I mean, it’s one thing to come home and another to come to a new league with new ballparks and new environment. I almost felt like a rookie or younger player again. I almost felt like I had to reestablish myself. Not to the extent of having to win a starting job in the big leagues again, but to be considered a different caliber of player.

“I had the contract weighing on me, the feeling I had to live up to it and the trade. It was like having a new role, being in a new world. All of a sudden, I was the guy everyone was relying on and expecting great things from.”

Of course. There was the contract, the trade, the credentials Green had produced in Toronto. Expectations followed.

“We all told him to relax, that we didn’t expect him to carry the team, but there was obviously a lot of self-imposed pressure,” Chairman Bob Daly said. “Now you can see the difference. I just think he had to become more comfortable and familiar in the environment. I didn’t see a lot of him in Toronto, but people say he’s swinging like he did there.”

Said Manager Jim Tracy: “Shawn is totally acclimated in his surroundings now. He’s more comfortable, more confident. The transformation from one league to another takes time. In Shawn’s case, he was not only changing leagues but coming home and changing leagues. Sometimes it takes longer, but he’s there now.”

Green agrees, but it wasn’t as if he simply pushed a button. He re- grooved his swing with the help of a batting tee.

In Toronto, when he was having conflicts over playing time and batting mechanics with then-Manager Cito Gaston early in his career, he found relief with the tee, something he could do by himself. Now, Green regards the countless hours he spends hitting balls off the tee almost mystically, saying, “It’s like meditation and relaxation for me, where I develop my rhythm. It’s the most important thing I do every day and the only thing I do [in a baseball context] all winter.”

The goal, Green said, is to hit line drives up the middle--”if I’m doing that my mechanics have to be good”--and to produce backspin, creating greater carry. Last year, amid the struggle, Green started to swing bigger and harder, resulting in topspin rather than backspin and a lot of warning-track outs on pitches he believes he should have hit out.

Green said he has also developed trust and respect for new batting coach Jack Clark, and that his whole life--a series of changes last year--has become more settled with his engagement to Lindsay Bear. Call it destiny. A friend had arranged to introduce them, only for them to meet on their own in a Newport Beach restaurant two days before.

The result of all this is that 2000 is becoming a distant memory.

Green helped carry the Dodgers when Gary Sheffield and Eric Karros were sidelined earlier this season and has joined Sheffield in something of a power-hitting team within a team, “feeding off each other,” Green said, “and hopefully taking some of the pressure off the rest of the lineup.”

Funny how things change. A year ago, the new Dodger was having a tough time escaping the pressure. Now he’s helping deflate it. The Dodgers are appreciative, and so are all those kids behind the dugout who scramble for the batting gloves Green tosses in their direction after every home run.

“Huge difference,” Green said, comparing one July to another, as if comparing topspin to backspin.