Here’s Johnny! Rocker May Be a Rolling Target in N.Y.

NEW YORK —  John Rocker is coming to Shea Stadium tonight. He may be coming on the No. 7 subway train he has elevated to a prominence generally reserved for the Orient Express.

Should the Atlanta Brave relief pitcher insist on riding the subway between Grand Central Station and the stadium in Queens over the opposition of club, baseball and security officials, he will be surrounded by police and arrive to find Shea an armed fortress.

The National League East lead will be at stake during a four-game series between the Braves and the New York Mets, but the concern is that Rocker’s safety--as well as those in his vicinity--could also be at stake when he makes his first visit to Shea since ridiculing a large segment of the city’s population, including foreigners, minorities and gays, in a Sports Illustrated article in December.

“This is like protecting the Ku Klux Klan,” Police Commissioner Howard Safir said. “It’s not something we really want to do, but we have an obligation to protect people from themselves.”

Said Met Manager Bobby Valentine: “What I would say to our fans is, ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’ What I would say is, ‘Don’t compound something stupid by doing something stupid.’ ”

Amid security befitting a presidential visit and in an atmosphere appropriate to Ringling Bros., more than 300 members of the media--comparable to the number covering a playoff game--will be here to record . . . well, the hope is that they have nothing to record where Rocker and his well-being are concerned.

The New York Police Department has built a command center on Shea’s press level and assigned more than 600 officers, some undercover, to each game of the series, about 10 times more than usual. The Mets have screened off and covered the visitors’ bullpen to protect Rocker and teammates from flying objects. Beer sales will end after the sixth inning instead of the seventh, and fans can buy only two beers at a time instead of four.

All of this for a 25-year-old relief pitcher who is only in his second full major league season, who has been so inconsistent that the Braves recently sent him to the minor leagues (bringing him back only because of an injury to reliever Rudy Seanez) and who has been ostracized and called a cancer in his own clubhouse.

Teammates Upset With All the Uproar

Teammates are disgusted by 1) those magazine comments, 2) his failure to show true contrition and let that matter rest and 3) the media spotlight and potential danger to which he has exposed them.

“We usually dread going to New York because of the team we have to play,” third baseman Chipper Jones said. “Now we’re dreading it for all the wrong reasons.”

Said teammate Brian Jordan: “We shouldn’t have to deal with this. I mean, it’s unfair for 24 guys, day in and day out, to have to answer questions and be exposed to this when we had nothing to do to create it.”

In Montreal, where the Braves played on the eve of the series at Shea, they were reluctant to discuss it and hinted they would take no questions about Rocker while in New York.

“I think they reflect what we feel, that this weekend should be all about baseball,” assistant general manager Frank Wren said.

In the Met clubhouse, relief pitcher Turk Wendell took a riot helmet from his locker and said, “I’m ready.”

Said catcher Mike Piazza: “The scary thing is that we’re about to play an important series and it’s as if the games on the field are secondary. The thing I don’t get is he keeps blaming the media for blowing everything out of proportion, and then he keeps saying and doing things to draw attention to himself. It’s ridiculous.”

The Braves recently fined Rocker $5,000 for a verbal confrontation in Atlanta with the reporter who wrote the magazine story. Rocker said the writer had the opportunity to protect him from himself and didn’t.

Yet, Rocker seemed to flaunt his remarks in that story when he was quoted recently in USA Today Baseball Weekly saying he would not take a taxi or team bus to Shea but would ride the No. 7 train--feeding off a Sports Illustrated comment that he would retire before playing for a New York team.

“Imagine having to take the 7 train to [Shea Stadium], looking like you’re in Beirut next to some kid with purple hair, next to some queer with AIDS, right next to some dude who got out of jail for the fourth time, right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It’s depressing,” Rocker said in the magazine article. “The biggest thing I don’t like about New York are the foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?”

The article triggered a nationwide debate. Rocker was vilified as xenophobic and homophobic by critics and suspended and fined by major league baseball. Others, even if they didn’t agree with him, defended his right to express his opinion and argued that he was guilty merely of political incorrectness.

As he reflected in the Met clubhouse the other night, Valentine said, “What we’re trying to figure out is what someone was thinking when they said what they said. It seems to me he wasn’t thinking or is incapable of thinking. I don’t know. I just hope this is over sometime soon. I hope it’ll blow over this weekend and my faith in our fans will be rewarded and not destroyed. The most regretful thing that could happen is to have this remembered for something other than a four-game series. That would be a crime against the game.”

Said Piazza: “I’m sure the crowd will be loud and rowdy. That’s what New York baseball is all about.”

Campanis, Schott Remarks Recalled

This isn’t the first time baseball has had to clean up the mess from racist remarks by one of its own. When Dodger vice president Al Campanis made racially insensitive remarks on national television in 1987, he was fired. Marge Schott, owner of the Cincinnati Reds, was suspended for the 1993 season after making racial and ethnic slurs.

Baseball isn’t the only sport to have to face the issue. When golfer Fuzzy Zoeller made oblique references to Tiger Woods’ ethnicity after the 1997 Masters tournament, he lost key endorsement deals and withdrew from tournaments under public pressure.

Rocker, of course, was a villain here before the magazine article. He made disparaging remarks about the city and fans during last year’s playoff with the Mets and World Series with the Yankees, taunting the fans from the field as much as they taunted him from the stands, bringing down derisive chants on himself and teammates. Manager Bobby Cox unsuccessfully tried to get Rocker to button it. Bring it on, the pitcher said, adding that booing inspires him.

Perhaps, but as Valentine noted, Rocker is performing in a major arena. It’s impossible to have security at every seat or on every street. If he insists on riding the subway, however, he will be accompanied by a car full of police, with others at every station between Grand Central and Queens. It’s also possible that the Rocker train would be converted to an express, making no stops.

Said Sandy Alderson, the commissioner’s executive vice president of baseball operations: “The number of people who have advised him not to take the No. 7 train is exceeded only by the number of people who take the No. 7 train.”

Whether Rocker will listen is uncertain. Met third baseman Todd Zeile rides the 7 to Shea almost every day that the team is home.

“I do it because it’s easy, fast and convenient,” he said. “I don’t do it to make a spectacle of myself.”

Rocker, of course, doesn’t have to ride the train to be a spectacle, or the talk of a town also caught up in the Yankees’ attempt to acquire Sammy Sosa from the Chicago Cubs. The New York Post has been running a countdown to Rocker’s arrival, and former Mayor Edward I. Koch, in an interview with The Times, said that Rocker must be off his rocker to have created this kind of caldron.

“What person who deals with the public would rationally want to alienate so many people who would normally be there to cheer him on?” Koch said.

” . . . I don’t understand it. He could be a great candidate for the human surgery in the human genome project. They could take out his ethnic-sensitivity gene because it’s clearly deficient, and they could also take out what’s left of his heart while they’re at it.”

Perhaps, popular novelist and Long Island resident Susan Isaacs said in an interview, Rocker might benefit if he spent more time in New York.

After all, she said, basketball player Latrell Sprewell, who choked his coach when he played for the Golden State Warriors, joined the New York Knicks and became “a mensch.”

Can Rocker become an equally good fellow?

He probably won’t have the opportunity during a series in which one of those uniformed Braves will actually be a member of the Atlanta Police Department.

The Mets will give youngsters a 24-page comic book in which a villain named Larcenous Vein threatens to blow up the No. 7 train only to be thwarted by the Mets’ interracial lineup, with relief pitcher John Franco pounding the hated Larcenous and henchmen into outer space with his bat.

The Mets insist that their villain has no relationship to anyone living or dead and that the distribution this weekend was a mere coincidence.

Of course. Believe that and you win a year’s free ride on the 7 train.

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Times staff writer Josh Getlin contributed to this story.