The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 42

8-D Sunday, March 25, 1990 The Philadelphia Inquirer: Phils' Barrett: A 'kid' who restores belief in baseba BASEBALL 11 By FRANK D0LS0N 1 TCVf Sports Editor without reaping us great financial rewards and he replies, with enthusiasm, "Heck no. This has been the greatest." There is no thought in his mind of giving up his quest for a big-league job. Not now. Not with expansion on the horizon. "You know if you're not playing', you're going to miss it," he said.

"That's the thing, just to get out there and compete, just to try to invent ways of getting better and ways of winning. That's the fun thing. It stinks if you ever have to get caught up in the business end of To Tommy Barrett, baseball is still a game. How many people are lucky enough to be doing something they love for a living? And besides, there's still time for that big-league dream to materialize. "You never know what's around the next turn," he said.

"All you need is that one opportunity. I've been up in the big leagues, but just spot starts here and there. What I'm looking for is that one big chance." If there's any justice in this crazy world, Tommy Barrett will find it. catch his enthusiasm, find yourself hoping, too, that the break he has been waiting for will finally come. If expansion means that the Tommy Barretts of the world will get a chance to play in the big leagues, then how can you be against it? For a guy who's about to turn 30, of course, it's a race against time.

"I'm not getting any he said. "I've spent so much time in the minor leagues, I'd like to spend a little time in the big leagues." Maybe his baseball luck is changing. You'd have thought the spring lockout was the worst thing that could happen to Barrett because it robbed him of valuable exposure. Under ordinary circumstances, Barrett would have thought so, too. But in truth, it was a godsend.

The lockout may have saved the life of his 8-month-old daughter because it kept the family home, in Tucson, for a few extra weeks. "If we would have gone to spring training las we wouldn't have taken her to the doctor when we did," Barrett said. But they were home, and they grow bitter and disillusioned. Tommy Barrett has been there for eight, and there isn't a bitter bone in his body. Not that there haven't been moments of disappointment and discouragement.

"I'm human, you know," he said. "Once in a while, when you're spending time down there and you feel you should be up here, and you see all these other guys pass you up and they didn't do near as well In a twinkling, the smile returned to his face. This was spring training, a chance to play baseball. No time to feel sorry for yourself. "You've got to accept reality, the way the game works," he said.

"It's just good to be back here. I don't know what's in store. It's hard to be real optimistic labout making the Phillies), but they say if I don't make the team, they'll give me every chance to get with another team a trade or something. They've always been fair to me." And he, in turn, has never given less than all he's got. Ask Tommy Barrett if he regrets having devoted all those years to playing this game CLEARWATER, Fla.

Just when you think the old-fashioned virtues are missing from pro baseball, just when you begin to wonder if anybody out there still plays the game primarily for the love of it and the joy of it, along comes a kid like Tommy Barrett to put your mind at ease. Except, of course, Tommy Barrett is no longer a "kid." He'll be 30 a week before the Phillies open the season. And yet, in the ways that matter most in his approach to the game, his enthusiasm the 1989 player of the year for the triple-A ScrantonWilkes-Barre Red Barons remains very much a "kid." That's truly remarkable for someone who has spent eight years bouncing around the minor leagues, from Fort Lauderdale, to Old Orchard Beach, Maine; from Nashville, to Scranton, with assorted stops in between. Barrett is one of those players you have to watch day after day to truly appreciate. Slowly, surely, the realization hits you: Hey, that little guy at second base may not have an abun- knew something wasn't quite right, and they took her.

"The doctors diagnosed it right away," Barrett said. His little girl had a form of leukemia. "We were lucky," he said. "Our pediatrician said she could have died in a week (without immediate medical treatment. So in our case the lockout was a blessing." Barrett's wife and daughter are back in Tucson.

The little girl is making progress; the outlook has turned from bleak to hopeful. And Daddy is here, getting ready for his ninth season as a pro baseball player, trying to concentrate on doing his job the way he has always done it. He reads about those mind-boggling, big-league salaries like the rest of us do. Heck, his brother is aboard that big-league gravy train. "I'm playing for peanuts and I've got my brother playing for millions," he said, and he laughed.

"Hey, it's great. I wish all the guys were making a million dollars." Some ballplayers get stuck in the minors for three, four years and they dance of raw talent, he may not have great power or the strongest arm in the world, but he has an uncanny knack of finding ways to help his team win baseball games. So here he is, Marty Barrett's kid brother, back in the Phillies' camp this spring, still smiling, still hustling, still eager to be part of the game he loves. And if, as expected, he once again winds up as the 25th man on a 24-man team; if it's back to the Lackawanna County Multi-Pur-pose Stadium in Moosic, where he hit .340 last year, he'll continue to smile and hustle and hope. Tommy Barrett is enough to restore your faith in baseball.

Talk to him for a while and you 'W 'X' If rules are made to be broken, why not smash them? 1 Jr. iiV ii TOWST 'J Jayson Stark on baseball 2 Special to The Inquirer JONATHAN WIGGS Rolando Dearmas giving instruction in Spanish to Dominican players in the Phillies' minor-league training camp. ungry players Dominicans bring empty bellies, big dreams to U.S. the period in late April when teams have to cut down from 27 to 24 players. But one deal that looks hot is a Brewers-Red Sox swap that could send second baseman Marty Barrett to Milwaukee for the Nick Esasky-like Rob Deer.

The Brewers have almost no healthy middle infielders. Also still alive is a Seattle-Atlanta deal in which the Braves would get former Phillies reliever Mike Jackson. Mariners general manager Woody Woodward would become the first man in baseball to trade Jackson twice. (He sent him to Seattle for Phil Bradley when he was the Phillies' GM.) But he turned down an offer of Andres Thomas, Joe Boever and Derek Lilliquist, so this one might take a while. The Phillies might want to heave a sigh of relief that they didn't spend millions on Royals pitcher Mark Gu-bicza, the pride of Penn Charter.

A week after signing a three-year, $7.4 million extension with the Royals last year, Gubicza complained of. shoulder problems. He missed his" final two starts last year, and then had to stop the first time he tried throwing on the side this spring be-: cause of "discomfort" in the shoulder In Joe Carter's first round of batting practice as a Padre, he crushed a transcontinental home; run that came down in the parking-lot right on top of teammate Rob Nelson's car. Nelson's license plate reads: "Hit 1 Deep." i Trivia answer: Phillies slugger Steve Jeltz has the lowest career avr erage of any major-league player .213. But he's making progress.

He was at .208 at this time last year. You probably think of the Royals as a team of contact hitters, huh? Well, according to the great Stats Inc? book. "The Scouting Report: Royals hitters ranked 1-2 in highest! percentage of swings that missed. Bo? Jackson was first, naturally, at 38.6-percent. But Danny Tartabull was a' surprise runner-up, at 33.3 percent Just for comparison's sake, Wade-Boggs missed 5.4 percent of the time' he swung.

Is there any doubt that: the A's have something special about them? All their players were in camp' 1 by Tuesday. And on the first day of! workouts, Carney Lansford handed out T-shirts that read: stinks. Stay focused." Braves farmhand Ramon CaraballOv flew from the Dominican Republic to Miami last week, then asked the cab'' driver to take him to the Days Inn.J Nothing strange there, except that-the Days Inn he wanted was in West' Palm Beach. The fare came to Now that the three-inning rule is-in effect, former Pirates wild man' Steve Blass says he wants to make a comeback at age 47. Asked if he seriously thought he could pitch three innings, Blass replied: "I can't even watch three innings." The Allen Lewis baseball quiz Who was the last major-league 20-game winner to lead his league in wins and losses in the same season? Answer to last week's question: The only major-leaguer to lead his league in home runs for three differ-' Item: Because of shortened spring training, baseball changes rules for first two weeks of season.

Starting pitchers qualify for a win by working three innings instead of five. CLEARWATER. Fla. What the heck. If baseball is going to rewrite the rule book for a couple of weeks, why stop with just one rule? After all, it isn't only starting pitchers who need a break.

What about the hitters? Don't they deserve to have a rule or two bent in their favor too? "I've got an idea," Von Hayes said. "Why don't they lower the fences 10 feet for the first two weeks?" "How about every base hit counts as two?" suggested Randy Ready. "Two for the price of one. That way you could actually have guys hitting more than 1.000." "Let's just play sudden death," said noted free thinker Don Carman. "Let's just do it 'first team to score wins' the whole first month.

You could make up that first week of the season in about an hour. There'd be a lot of pressure, though. If a pitcher goes ball two on somebody, you bring in a reliever." All right, we admit it. We're carrying this thing a little too far. But no one in the game seems to be able to recall any other instanceof baseball changing its rules for two weeks, under any circumstances.

It may make sense to keep pitchers from hurting their arms by trying to go five innings before they're ready. And managers seem to like it because they won't have, to second-guess themselves about using a pitcher who is ready to go only three innings. "How could I send a guy out there to pitch," wondered Sparky Anderson, "who knows that all he has a chance to do is lose?" But even if baseball has done this for all the right reasons, it seems wrong to Nolan Ryan, who needs only 11 wins to reach 300 for his career. "Maybe I'll only win 11 games," Ryan said. "And one could be a three-inning victory.

That 1300 winsl is baseball history. It's not right." "It's weak," White Sox starter Jack McDowell said. "It's like giving the hitters four strikes because their eyes aren't ready." This week's trivia question: Among players who have more than 1,000 career at-bats, which major-leaguer has the lowest career batting average? Answer below. We're closely monitoring the Last Player to Report to Spring Training competition. Entering the weekend, the two contenders were St.

Louis' Pedro Guerrero and Detroit's Gary Ward. Guerrero is the favorite because of his long track record of missing at least the first two weeks. But Ward took a page out of the Steve Jeltz guidebook by not showing up for five days and not even calling the Tigers, who owe him a guaranteed $530,000 this year. Then there's Orioles rookie Jay (Brother of George) Bell. He wins our Excuse of the Week Award.

Bell didn't report until Thursday. He told the Orioles he couldn't leave before then because his wife had sent all his clothes to the cleaners. White Sox player representative Steve Lyons says the reason his venerable teammate, Carlton Fisk, wasn't elected player rep was because Fisk talks too slowly. "If he had gotten up to say something during this lockout, we'd have blown the whole season by the time he finished his sentence," Lyons said. "Then he'd have gotten on the phone to call all of us about what happened in New York.

That would have killed the 1991 season." Lyons said Fisk had to report late last week because "it probably takes him four days to He's driving down. He left Chicago on Monday. So league in the Dominican is considered by many baseball people to be more competitive. "Puerto Rico has motels, tourists," Dearmas said. "People speak English.

There's Burger King. The Dominican doesn't have that, just baseball outstanding baseball." Since the 1950s, the Dominican Republic has been considered a sort of Wild West by professional baseball, not only because of the enthusiastic abandon with which its natives play, but because of the constant panning for talent done by American teams. Typically, young Dominican players are rich in ability but unschooled in fundamentals. U.S. dollars go far in the Dominican.

Most of the young players are signed for between $1,000 and $4,000. Virtually every major-league team has a half-dozen or so Dominicans among the first-year players at its minor-league camp. Scouts who work Latin America tell stories that illustrate how signings sometimes come about there. For instance, if a much sought-after shortstop is nervous about leaving home without his second baseman, the second baseman gets signed, too, even if he is no-hit, no-field. A team occasionally signs one brother so it can land another.

Few of the Dominican minor-leaguers will follow in the footsteps of Juan Samuel, Alfredo Griffin, George Bell and Tony Pena and become prominent major-leaguers. But those who make it give hope to those who want to. Many Dominican players prize even minor-league jobs. The lowest pay in the minors $850 a month is about double what the average grown man in their country earns. "I've seen teenagers supporting families," said Dearmas, who often helps the players iri the mechanics of mailing home their paychecks.

Last year, Dearmas had a player who could not write at all; this year, he has a player who stopped attending school at age 7. The players' parents work as farmers or drivers or laborers or, sometimes, not at all. Before going home, the players invariably stop at discount stores and load up on designer blue jeans and basketball shoes for their siblings, Dearmas said. The flight from the Dominican to Florida the first time on a plane for the seven players who were listening to Dearmas was an exciting adventure, except for Rosa-' rio. 17.

"I thought my heart was going to come out of my mouth," Rosario said through Dearmas. Medina whose brother Facaner is a second-year player in the Phillies' farm system was asked to compare Dominican and American ballplayers. "The Americans are like giants," said Medina, who is generously listed as standing 5-foot-9 and weighing 160 pounds. "But we are quick quick." Of the seven players, all but one Arias are infielders. Medina's brother played last year for Martinsville, the Phillies' team in the Appalachian League, a rookie circuit.

Dearmas is the manager of that team, and many of the first-year Spanish-speaking players wind up playing for him. The Phils have two Spanish-speaking coaches in their organization Carlos Arroyo, with Batavia, a team in the single-A New York-Penn League, and Ramon Aviles, with Reading, which is in the double-A Eastern League. And the organization also has a second Spanish-speaking manager Nick Leyva, skipper of the big-league team. One of Dearmas' goals is to teach a new word or phrase to each of his first-year players each day. He starts with the basics hit-and-run, sacrifice bunt, take the pitch.

"The kids that seem to advance through the minors the fastest are the kids that pick up English the fastest," Dearmas said. "The smarter players are the ones who get ahead." Dearmas remembers when Juan Samuel first came to a Phillies' minor-league camp. "He was just like these kids," the coach said. "Scrawny. Couldn't speak English.

He started eating the American food, and I watched him grow. He got big and strong. He learned English. The next thing I knew, he was a major-leaguer." Dearmas' first-year players looked at him blankly as he told the story of Samuel. Had he told it in Spanish, they would have understood it very well.

By Michael Bamberger Itiijtntt-t sunt WrHrr CLEARWATER, Fla. The seven Dominican-born, first-year professional baseball players rail-thin and dark-skinned and wide-eyed sat obediently before their Spanish-speaking coach. They were teenagers, away from home for the first time. None of them could speak English, and a couple of them could barely read or write. One held rosary beads against his maroon Phillies jersey.

The seven had arrived at the Phillies' minor-league spring-training camp with a shared dream to play American baseball. German Arias, Patricio Medina, Porfirio Pena, Francisco Rosario, Dagoverto Tapia, Domingo Tejeda and Alberto Vicente all from the same town (Bani) and all signed by the same scout (Wilfredo Calvino) listened closely to Rolando Dearmas, their padre local. As Dearmas, born in New York to Cuban-born parents, talked, a visitor limited to English could make out only a few words Latino, Americano, Picadilly Cajeteria, Howard Johnson's. This was on a shiny morning earlier this month at Carpenter Field. Dearmas was laying out the Phillies' ground rules in the beautiful cadences of fluent Spanish while the traffic on U.S.

19 purred beyond the diamonds. The youngsters, tugging on their silver religious medallions and on the webbings of their well-worn gloves, looked awed when they heard about the Picadilly's all-you-can-eat policy. "Where we come from," said Vicente, 18, using Dearmas as a translator, "all we eat is rice and beans and not much of that. That's why we're so skinny." Despite the country's poverty or maybe because of it baseball is a consuming interest in the Dominican Republic, which shares an island in the Caribbean Sea with Haiti. When American ballplayers want off-season work, they often go to Puerto Rico to play winter ball.

But the professional winter Phils' starters take field in intrasquad game with a dirt-flying slide. McDowell's sinker ball sank well, and Ruffin looked sharp against the four batters he faced (one of whom reached on an error, one of six in the game). Today, the Phillies will play another intrasquad game. Boudreaux gave up four runs in four innings in the losing effort. Von Hayes showed a fine effort in' making a sliding, diving catch of a Victor Rosario fly ball.

Dykstra had his uniform dirty before the first inning was over. He began the game with a sharp single over the first-base bag and promptly stole second ent clubs was Reggie Jackson. He led the American League with 36 homers for the A's in 1975, with 41 for the Yankees in 1980 and with 39 for the Angels in 1982. First with the correct answer was J. Geisel of Lansdowne.

The person with the first correct answer this week will receive an Inquirer T-shirt. Send answers to Allen Lewis, Box 2431, Clearwater, Fla. 34617. Include shirt size. By Michael Bamberger hiqintcr Mod Wrih-r CLEARWATER, Fla.

Manager Nick Leyva used his expected opening-day lineup in an eight-inning, rules-to-the-wind Phillies intrasquad game yesterday. The eight starters produced four hits. In the lineup, Len Dykstra batted first and played center field; 'Tom llerr batted second and played second base; Von Hayes batted third and played right field; Ricky Jordan batted fourth and played first base; John Kruk batted fifth and played left field; Dickie Tlion batted sixth and played shortstop; Darren Daul-lon batted seventh and caught, and Charlie Hayes batted eighth and played third base. The regulars played a team of second' and third-tier players and lost. 5-2, before an estimated 1,200 spectators, who were admitted free at Jack Russell Stadium.

Little Jim Vatcher had a big day for the winners: a solo homer off Don Carman in the second and a leadoff double in the fifth. The 5-foot, 9-inch Californian played for the Phillies' double-A team in Reading last year and batted .327. Nine pitchers from the 40-man roster were used in the game: Jeff Par-rett, Roger McDowell, Ken Howell, Floyd Youmans, Scott Service, Bruce Ruffin, Carman, Pat Combs and Dennis Cook. Each pitched one inning, with only Carman and Youmans allowing runs (one each). Minor-leaguer Bob Scanlan pitched three scoreless innings in the winning cause, and his colleague Eric Phillies' spring-training schedule WITH INQUIRER SPORTS Monday: Detroit Tigers at Lakeland.

7:35 Tuesday: Boston Red Sox at Clearwater, 1:05: Boston Red Sox at Winter Haven, 1:05 (split squad) Wednesday: Toronto Blue Jays at Clearwater, 7:35 Thursday: St. Louis Cardinals at St. Petersburg, 1:05 Friday: St. Louis Cardinals at Clearwater, 1:05 Saturday: Houston Astros at Kissimmee. 1:05 Sunday, April 1: Houston Astros at Clearwater, 1:05 Monday, April 2: Pittsburgh Pirates at Clearwater, 1:05 Tuesday, April 3: Toronto Blue Jays at Dunedtn, 1:05 Wednesday, April 4: Pittsburgh Pirates at Bradenton, 1:05 Thursday, April 5: Cincinnati Reds at Clearwater, 1:05 Friday, April 6: Toronto Blue Jays at Ounedin.

1:05 Saturday, April 7: Cincinnati Reds at Plant City, 1:05 Sunday. April 8: Pittsburgh Pirates at Clearwater, 12:05 ne prooaoiy ne in Indiana by Friday. He's probably got the car on cruise control at 20 miles an hour." His teammates call this Steve Lyons "Psycho." Now you know why. It looks as if the first big flurry of trading won't start until right before.