His Happiness Is All in the Family

PEORIA, Ariz. —  A good half-hour into a conversation about what he’s going to do when the left-handers start flinging sliders at him, Ryan Klesko held up a hand. Enough with the theories. Enough with the foreboding statistics. Enough with the quantum mechanics.

The talk was becoming too complicated. Too tiresome.

The fact is Klesko is home again, or near enough to feel its warmth. Traded from the Atlanta Braves in the winter, he stands at first base for the San Diego Padres and in the middle of their batting order. He is exceptionally strong and emotionally healthy and, my, how good it’s going to be to feel the ocean gusts at his back again.

Everywhere he looks there is a familiar face, from the clubhouse that might hold four products of Orange County baseball in the infield alone, to the 1 1/2-hour drive that would put him on his mother’s doorstep, to the south swell that always brought nirvana to a kid raised in the Pacific surf.

The left-handed pitchers out there, those with the evil arm angles and arm speeds that can so damage left-handed hitters such as Klesko, they’ll have to hole up in someone else’s psyche. Klesko has no time for them, no patience at all.

He put his hand down, smiled.

“I have no worries,” Klesko said. “I’m blessed. I make good money, I still have my family around. I go out there and see kids. . . . “

He paused to describe his sister, Pamela, a nurse in the critical care unit at Children’s Hospital of Orange County. Coincidentally, Michelle Nevin, the sister of Padre teammate Phil, recently took a position at the same hospital, where she works with Pamela.

“Pamela gets up every day and takes care of sick children,” Klesko said. “That, that is something. She is my hero. My 0-for-4 is nothing like what those kids have to go through. I am so blessed.”

At a time when such perspective is scarce, Klesko the big-game hunter, the big-wave surfer, the hair bleacher, the heavy-swinging ballplayer, the all-around dude, could hardly stop thinking about those kids, and his family, even as his career changed baseball hemispheres.

He has called his mother, Lorene, in Westminster nearly every day since he turned professional, and he is the doting uncle for Pamela’s three children in San Clemente.

“He’s a very important part of us,” Pamela said. “We’re a very close family. We talk to each other all the time, and it was really hard for him and for us to be so far apart. We’re very excited that he’s going to be so close to home. If he had to be traded, I don’t think he’d have wanted to go anywhere else.”

His front shoulder flies open? OK. He’ll work on it. The .102 batting average against left-handers last season? Abysmal, he admits. So he bought a machine designed to simulate Randy Johnson’s pitches.

In the end, he won’t allow such baseball concerns to consume him. The Padres have spoken to him about being their lead man in the local Make-A-Wish Foundation, and he intends to visit his sister’s patients.

“Those kids,” he said, “they come out to the field, and if I can put a smile on their face and make them feel better just for that one day, make them feel happy, or better for a few seconds of that day, it’s what it’s all about. At that moment, I don’t care about getting hits. I mean, at the time I’m very hard on myself. But when the day is said and done and I look back, my life is just awesome compared to what some other people have to go through. They’re kids, and just hoping they can make it through another day.”

Klesko, who will be 29 in June, attended Westminster High and played on an all-star team or two with Nevin, the Padre third baseman who attended El Dorado High. Nevin was two years behind Bret Boone at El Dorado. Boone is the Padre second baseman. David Newhan, an infielder from Esperanza High, was sent to triple-A Las Vegas on Wednesday. When he returns to the big leagues, as Padre management expects, it will be to spell Nevin or Boone.

And so if Klesko were to reinvent himself, were to become the 40-homer, 100-RBI, 20-stolen base player predicted of him, and were to break free of Atlanta Manager Bobby Cox’s staunch belief that he could not consistently hit left-handed pitchers, then probably it will come in the company of friends and family. It will come with his two nieces and a nephew in the back seat, straight down the San Diego Freeway.

It will come, too, near the headquarters of a clothing company, “Mindless Reaction,” that Klesko created with four high school friends in 1993. They make some of the baggy duds surfers and skateboarders wear, and they just signed a deal to sell their product in Japan.

Oh yeah, it’s good to be back.

“I love San Diego,” Klesko said. “Boonie and I were talking about how awesome it would be if we played for a California team, especially in San Diego. So I’m really excited about it. I’ve never been part of this big of a change, so I really don’t know how it’s going to go. But I’m excited about it.”

It is a time of transition for each of the Orange County players: Klesko as an everyday first baseman again; the free-swinging Boone back in the middle of an order; Nevin as an incumbent at third base; Newhan hoping to spend most of the season in the big leagues, probably in a utility role.

“It’s interesting, an interesting footnote,” Boone said of the county connection, “which really has no relevance to winning and losing.”

Klesko and Boone arrived in the trade that moved Wally Joyner, Reggie Sanders and Quilvio Veras to Atlanta, so the Padres paid for an increase in power with most of their team speed. If Klesko solves a few lefties, however, the Padres have the beginnings of an offense that would open their new ballpark in 2002 with lots of bangs.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if at the end of the year he had 35 home runs,” Boone said. “He can hit.”

A .324 hitter against right-handers last year, Klesko took only 49 at-bats against lefties and 61 the season before. When the occasion against a left-hander arose, Klesko would be so eager to succeed, to buy another day in the lineup, he often would attempt to pull everything, and overswing at that.

Patient and content to hit to the gaps against right-handers, Klesko became a rigid, anxious hitter against lefties. It made him expendable in Atlanta, where first baseman Andres Galarraga has apparently recovered from cancer.

It doesn’t take much. A few poor at-bats, an impatient manager, a veteran right-handed hitter on the bench, Tony Gwynn said, “And bang, you can’t hit left-handed pitching.” It even happened to Gwynn once. As a freshman at San Diego State, he faced the right-handers and Steve Sayles faced the lefties.

More than two decades later, Gwynn has won eight National League batting titles and Sayles is an assistant trainer for the Oakland A’s.

“The key for Ryan is, if he struggles early against left-handers, he shouldn’t be disappointed,” Gwynn said. “He’s got to keep on working on it.”

Klesko has found just the place for it, a lovely little spot where it seems as if every day is a perfect day for baseball. And while some of those days will be complicated by left-handed pitchers with sliders, nearby he will have a sister who is his hero and a family that grounds him. He can live with all of it.

“I love coming back home,” Klesko said. “Who wouldn’t want to come home to play?”