Call Him Doug

It was just a few days ago that Doug and Jodi Mientkiewicz watched the video again, reliving the moments and memories.

Who can blame them?

Mint-kay-vitch, after all, is the first baseman whose home runs helped propel an improbable U.S. baseball team to the Olympic gold medal while fans in many languages wrestled with the pronunciation of his name. He took more out of Australia, however, than gold.

A discouraging season with the Minnesota Twins in 1999 had left Mientkiewicz down under in more ways than one. He questioned his ability to hit major league pitching, thought about quitting. The Olympics helped restore his confidence.

“He was a different player when he left than when he arrived,” said Tom Lasorda, the Dodger executive who managed the U.S. team. “He was really down, upset, didn’t like the way he had been treated by the Twins, said there were times he was on the verge of quitting. The best thing I could do for him was build up his confidence, encourage him, assure him he had the ability to hit in the majors. I told him that maybe it wouldn’t happen with the Twins but he had the ability to make it happen at the big league level.”

Mientkiewicz, 26, has made it happen with the Twins in a season almost as improbable as what the U.S. team experienced in Australia.

A year after losing 93 games, the modestly paid and comparatively anonymous Twins are 32-16 and leading the American League Central, and Mientkiewicz, who hit .229 with only two home runs and 32 runs batted in in 327 at-bats with the Twins in 1999, has continued to build on his Olympic success. Although battling his first slump with one hit in his last 19 at-bats, he is batting .362 with nine home runs and 35 RBIs as the Twins open a three-game series against the Angels in Anaheim tonight.

“The Olympics were the icing on a great 2000,” Mientkiewicz said before leaving for California. “I had lost my love for the game, much of my confidence. I always thought someone would have to tear the uniform from my back, but I didn’t deserve to be wearing that uniform in ’99. There wasn’t a player in the big leagues worse than I was. I’d lay there at night watching Sports-Center and wonder why I couldn’t do what those other guys were doing. I felt there was nothing to be gained by doing something I wasn’t happy with or successful at, that maybe it was time to move on.

“The Olympics were one of the things that helped restore my confidence and feelings about the game.”

Mientkiewicz batted .414 with nine RBIs and two game-winning homers in Australia. He slugged a two-out, eighth-inning grand slam that gave the U.S. a 4-0 victory against South Korea in round-robin play and defeated South Korea again, 3-2, with a dramatic, ninth-inning homer that put the U.S. in the title game against the vaunted Cubans, whom they defeated, 4-0, on a three-hitter by 22-year-old Ben Sheets.

A demeaned and discounted U.S. team of inexperienced prospects and veteran minor leaguers finished 8-1, upsetting Cuba to avenge its only loss, and now Mientkiewicz and Sheets, 4-4 as a starter with the Milwaukee Brewers, are the most prominent of the seven Olympians at the major league level. The other five: Seattle Mariner reliever Ryan Franklin, Baltimore Oriole infielder Mike Kinkade; New York Yankee reliever Todd Williams; Houston Astro reliever Roy Oswalt and Cleveland Indian starter C.C. Sabathia, an Olympic alternate.

“Considering what he did on a world stage against the vaunted Cubans and pitchers comparable to major leaguers, it’s not at all a surprise to see what [Mientkiewicz] is doing now,” said former Dodger batting coach Reggie Smith, who had the same position with the Olympic team. “It’s no fluke, he has that kind of ability. He saw the Olympics as his ticket to impressing the people he needed to impress, took advantage of the intelligence supplied to us and developed a plan in which he knew what the pitchers were trying to do, knew what he wanted to do, and was able to adjust from at-bat to at-bat, pitch to pitch. He’s fully capable of hitting 25 homers and batting .300.”

What the Twins see, coach Paul Molitor said recently, is a guy who has “learned the difference between hitting to succeed and hitting to avoid failure. He was successful in the minors by going deep into the count. He got up here and pitchers were able to finish him off. Now he’s not just waiting any more. He hasn’t lost any of his discipline, but he’s more aggressive. It’s the best of both worlds.”

As a hitter, Mientkiewicz has long been a work in progress. His father, Len, a master electrician, built a batting cage in the backyard of their Miami home complete with pitching mound, put his son in a Pete Rose-type crouch and threw to him relentlessly every afternoon, pushing him to a point where he almost quit before beginning his high school career as a teammate of Alex Rodriguez.

Mientkiewicz went on to star at Florida State, sign with the Twins as a fifth-round selection in 1995 and become more of an upright hitter when his Class-A manager took him out of the Rose crouch. Len Mientkiewicz had released the reins during his son’s successful college career, telling him at one point that he had exceeded his expectations as a son and player, the nature of their sometimes tense relationship suddenly changing from father-son to best friends.

However, the pressure to succeed had rubbed off.

Mientkiewicz was hard on himself and, at times, teammates. He shaved his head in college and shaved his arms in an attempt to snap a slump in double A. He felt he received no support from Minnesota Manager Tom Kelly during his 1999 struggles and went home that winter thinking he would quit, a decision he still was mulling on New Year’s Day morning when he slipped a Metallica tape into the car stereo, listened to the words of the song “Hero of the Day,” and told himself, “It’s time to find out what Doug Mientkiewicz is all about. I’m not going to let you give up.”

He reported to camp in 2000 prepared to make the most of a summer at triple-A Salt Lake City, where he probably should have been the year before. He hit .334, slugged 18 homers, drove in 96 runs, accepted his appointment to the U.S team in August as another opportunity to rebuild his career and found a letter from his wife when he unpacked in Australia.

“She has always had the ability to push the right buttons for me,” Mientkiewicz said. “In her letter she wrote, ‘Don’t you dare go 6,000 miles without doing something special that will put you back on the baseball map. If this is what we’re going to do with our lives, let’s make sure we do it the right way.’ ”

The Hero of the Day had help.

On a team, he said, that bonded like brothers and put patriotism above any personal goals, Mientkiewicz leaned on veterans Ernie Young and Mike Neill for career advice, fed off Lasorda’s motivational talks and said the manager went above and beyond to keep “my name alive in Minnesota” via enthusiastic interviews back to the Twin Cities.

The first baseman, of course, did a pretty good job of it himself, and ultimately carried his success on a long flight from Sydney to Detroit, where he joined the Twins for the final three games of the season and--”brain dead and dog tired”--went six for 14, additional confirmation he had the ability to hit at any level.

With all of that, however, Mientkiewicz said he knew he had to make a quick strike this spring, convince the Twins that 2000 was for real.

Now that he has done that, now that he has had a 15-game hitting streak, leads the Twins in almost every offensive category, knows he has Kelly’s support or his name wouldn’t be on the lineup card every day and seen pitchers of Roger Clemens’ and Orlando Hernandez’s caliber show their respect by walking him in difficult situations, Mientkiewicz said he is still driven by the struggle of ’99 and that he wouldn’t be having this success if it wasn’t for the team’s success.

Although there have been increased demands on his time, Mientkiewicz said that in the small-market atmosphere of the Twin Cities he is still able to take his all-star worthy performance in stride.

“No one expected it and that’s the best thing about it,” he said. “I can still enjoy my privacy playing up here, get away to fish if I want. It would drive me nuts if I had to live in New York, and I would never want to trade bank accounts with Alex [his former high school buddy who has a $252-million contract compared to the $215,000 Mientkiewicz will be paid this year] if I had to put up with everything he does. I like being Mr. Irrelevant.”

Mr. Irrelevant? If that group of Twin Cities youngsters who have room to spell his name on their T-shirts and proclaim themselves his first fan club isn’t enough to convince him he is more than that, there’s always the daily listing of the league batting leaders--and the video from Australia.

“I know that if I never get another hit or play another game in the big leagues, I helped do something special for my country and it doesn’t get much better than that,” Mientkiewicz said. “I’m sure in Anaheim there’ll be the normal abuse that visiting teams get on the road, but I also keep hearing the faint cheer of ‘USA’ wherever we go, and I know that will never go away.

“It’s a great feeling, and I’m very proud.”

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Major Leap

A look at Doug Mientkiewicz’s numbers this season compared to his previous major league years:

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Category 2001 Before 2001 Average .362 .235 At-bats 163 366 Doubles 11 22 Homers 9 2 RBIs 35 38 On-base% .436 .322 Slugging% .607 .328

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Time: 7 p.m.; TV: Fox Sports Net