He Sticks Sock in an Old Theory

The trouble with Jim Edmonds is, he has center field so screwed up no one can play it.

Don’t get me wrong. Jim Edmonds is a fine, fine player, a near great.

That’s just the trouble.

You see, we all know what a center fielder is. Good field, no hit, and all that stuff. A wizard with a glove, a wimp with the bat. Or, if not a wimp, at least a guy to whom hitting comes hard, needs cunning to make it.

Wait a minute! Don’t tell me about Willie Mays, Duke Snider, Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio and all of those other cannons who were wizards in the field and Hall of Famers at the bat. They were aberrations, exceptions that prove the rule.

Your prototypal center fielder was, say, a Terry Moore. He took care of the line drives, the fly balls, the throwing to the cutoff man. He was your basic center fielder. He left the hitting to his left fielder, fellow by the name of Stan Musial, or his right fielder, guy named Enos Slaughter. That’s a center fielder. The bat is a prop. He cons his way to first base. Any way he can.

Anything else louses up the chemistry. Can I tell you something? Don’t hit me, but you want to know what might have happened on the old Yankees if Joe DiMaggio’s brother, Dominick, was on the team with him?

Dominick might have played center field is all. Joe would have moved over to left. Or right. Dom DiMaggio was that good. Besides, he was a center fielder all the way. He played the position for the Boston Red Sox for 10 years. He ended up almost 300 homers behind his brother Joe. He even wore glasses, but a line drive never got past him. He chiseled his way on base, but he turned homers into outs in right-center at Fenway.

So, in a way, Jim Edmonds is an impostor. Know why? Because he hit 58 home runs in two years, he drove in 107 runs one year, he batted .304 last year and he is batting better than .300 this year.

Now I ask you--what kind of center fielder is that? He’s a right fielder, is what he is. Those numbers prove it. A third baseman, maybe. Third basemen need power. Center fielders only need gloves.

Tris Speaker is usually held up as the old-timers’ idea of a center fielder. Old Spoke, as he was known, had this trick of playing shallow center field so that he could cut off even singles and turn them into outs--and he could still get back for the long ones. But he never hit 58 homers in two years. He hit only 117 lifetime, and that was--are you ready?--22 seasons!

So, Edmonds has got it all backward. He’s ruining it for center fielders everywhere. Who does he think he is--Mays? Snider?

Brett Butler is a center fielder. Butler doesn’t wear out the fences. He hit 21 homers lifetime in the American League and has 33 lifetime in the National. Butler knows the position well. But he wears out pitchers. A 10-pitch at-bat is nothing for Butler. He could foul off a bullet. Pitchers today are ready for the shower after 100 pitches. And, some nights, 40 of them are to Butler. He wears out the grass in front of home plate too.

I went down to the Angels’ locker room recently to talk to Jim Edmonds about his hitting. He didn’t exactly frown, but somehow he changed the subject. Edmonds wanted to talk about his fielding. How he played the hitters, what you looked for on the crack of the bat, how to estimate the falling rate of a long ball, when to leave your feet diving for a ball.

I wanted to know how he handled the curveball. I meant when and where to hit it, but Edmonds told me that when he knew the pitcher was going to throw a curve, he moved to the right or left as he expected the batter to pull it.

It was only a few days later that I found out I had been after the wrong thing. In a game in Kansas City, Edmonds made a catch so incredible it would not only be a credit to either DiMaggio, it ended up being compared to--and even being hailed as better than--the famous catch Mays made in the 1954 World Series.

Now, if you remember that World Series 43 years ago, you will recall Mays turned his back on home plate and ran out toward the 460-foot mark and caught a drive off the bat of Vic Wertz. (Incredibly enough, that game was won by the Giants on a 10th-inning home run--by Dusty Rhodes--that went only 258 feet.)

Since that is generally considered the greatest catch in baseball history, you can appreciate the degree of difficulty of Edmonds’ catch (even though right-center in Kansas City is only 375 feet from home plate and dead center only 400).

A colleague, Randy Harvey, thinks Edmonds is more to be compared to the Dodgers’ Pete Reiser, who was so aggressive in pursuit of fly balls he was in traction much of his career, and the modern-day “warning track” was put in outfields because Pete never seemed to know when the wall was going to come between him and the ball.

Edmonds has much the same trouble, even with the warning track in place.

Smacking into walls may yet turn him into a true center fielder. Because he usually bats hurt.

Edmonds, resting an injured knee this weekend, has 14 home runs, is batting .303 and has walked only 27 times. If he continues on that path, they may run him out of the center fielders’ brotherhood. A center fielder’s job is to make outs, not hits--and certainly not homers. Edmonds has even been a designated hitter of late. That’s the ultimate disgrace to that ancient and honorable fraternity of banjos.