To Garvey, the Show Must Always Go On, and Look Good, Too

Steve Garvey emerges from the trainer’s room after a pregame rubdown and stretchout, reeking of heat balm. He has a spring in his step and every hair is in place.

He is ready to slip into his gray, pinstriped business suit and put in another day at the office.

This is good news for the Padres, since Steve Garvey is the franchise.

Before Garvey, the San Diego Padres were a team unsteeped in tradition, unless mediocrity counts as tradition.

Before Garvey, the most famous Padre wasn’t even a Padre, he was a chicken.

There’s a rumor that someone once asked the famed San Diego Chicken, then the team mascot, why he wore a chicken suit instead of a Padres’ uniform, and he replied, “Because I don’t want to look silly.”

Now the Padres have a pennant, genuine poultry (Goose Gossage) and pinstripes.

They have dignity and credibility and even fans. Everything started falling into place on about, oh, December 21, 1982.

That’s the day Garvey left the Dodgers and signed with the Padres.

Meanwhile, back in the visitor’s clubhouse at Dodger Stadium Sunday morning, Garvey is chatting at his dressing stall when Goose Gossage ambles over.

“Hey Stevie,” Goose says, “you got those glasses?”

Stevie?

Stevie Garvey?

In Garvey’s 13 seasons with the Dodgers, I doubt that anybody ever called him Stevie. Half the guys on that team, harboring assorted resentments or jealousies, never even talked to Garvey.

Now he is, on appearance at least, among friends.

Garvey still seems out of place in any baseball clubhouse. He is a dignified businessman in a room full of rumpled, unruly kids whose parents split for the afternoon and told them to play with some balls and bats and chewing tobacco.

But in this clubhouse, the other players seem to accept Garvey, and everything is cool.

Maybe they simply appreciate Garvey.

If you want a rock around which to build your team, your franchise, you could do worse than a guy who over the last 12 seasons has batted between .282 and .319 every year.

With a glove, he is unspectacular but spectacularly steady. He went into this season with a major league record 188 straight games without an error, before dropping a foul pop the first week.

It might be corny to say Garvey sets an example, but then Garvey is a corny guy.

For instance, he can look back at his National League record 1,207 consecutive games played and say, “That was a personal commitment, a philosophy.

“Playing every day is an obligation. Forty, fifty thousand people come out, expecting to see you play. If one of those fans comes out, only sees one game all year and you don’t go because of a headache or hangnail, I feel bad, it’s on my conscience.”

Now that’s corny, but it’s from the heart. What would happen if that kind of corny attitude spread around a whole team? Maybe that team would win a pennant.

So the Padres accept Garvey as one of the boys, just as the Lakers long ago accepted a brash kid named Magic Johnson, allowing him his eccentricity and enthusiasm and corniness.

If nothing else, the Padre players owe Garvey a huge debt of gratitude for their new wardrobe. When Garvey was negotiating with the Padres, the talks touched on the possibility of the team junking its atrocious uniforms.

Garvey, a style-conscious guy, might never admit it, but I guarantee you he was embarrassed to wear the Padres’ Halloween suit. If he didn’t get it written into his contract, I bet he got a handshake agreement from General Manager Ballard Smith that the Padres would get new uniforms as soon as possible.

“Ballard Smith and I discussed some possibilities,” Garvey says.

This year the Padres got the new unies--dignified, classic pinstripes, with belts, dark shoes, white sanitary socks.

Business suits.

Garvey was one of the players who contributed to the design concept.

“We gave him (Smith) some input,” Garvey says. “I suggested pinstripes might be good.”

After what the Padres used to wear, plaid on sackcloth might be good.

“When you don’t have a good team, you do a lot to promote, to attract attention,” Garvey says. “When you have a championship team, you try to understate all the extraneous elements.”

A teammate squeezes through the knot of reporters gathered around Garvey to get to his own locker.

“Steve Garvey must be here,” the teammate says, pretending to be irked at the inconvenience.

But there is no tension here, no resentment.

How could you get mad at a guy who replaced a chicken as the symbol of your ballclub?