NO ROOKIE AT LIFE : Huntington Beach’s David Tinkle Battles Back

SARASOTA, Fla. —  To all outward appearances, David Tinkle is having the time of his life as shortstop for the Kansas City Royals’ rookie team.

On the field he’s turned quite a few double plays, his old signature at Ocean View High School in Huntington Beach, and he’s swinging the bat the only way he knows how--well.

Off the field he never lacks buddies or ideas to fill free time.

He’s checked out the marshmallow-eating alligators at Myakka River State Park, visited the waveless Florida beaches with their “sand like white flour” and investigated most every center of night-life in the greater Sarasota area.

Tink, as he is known around extended spring training camp, tends to have a song on his radio--or at least playing in his head--and a reputation for performing his locally renowned break dances under almost any circumstances.

But his new teammates have no way of knowing what his old California friends know: This one-man entertainment center actually is a person on the rebound.

In the past year, Tinkle has been forced to weather the best of times and the worst of times.

His passage into adulthood has been bittersweet. The emphasis so far has been on the bitter, though this consummate survivor would not choose to label it that way.

An enthusiast, he loves many things. But two always were on a different plane from the rest--his father and baseball, the only constants in a childhood that was more like a constant adventure in moving.

Tinkle, his father and baseball became a happy, inseparable trio the day Dan Tinkle put a plastic bat in his 2-year-old’s hands and trained the toddler to hit left-handed--a shrewd future asset in a ballplayer who naturally throws right.

Through thousands of games and thousands of miles, Tinkle and his father pursued baseball like hunters on a strange, big-game safari spanning a decade.

Each year they moved a step closer to the day when Dan Tinkle would see David play professionally. The quest wove them--the smallest family unit possible--tightly together.

The pursuit climaxed after David’s stellar senior season at Ocean View, where he was the heart of the 1985 Sunset League championship team.

The long-sought trophy was bagged the day the Kansas City Royals made David the seventh choice of the seventh round of the free agent draft in June.

He eventually signed last August for a package worth almost $30,000, he said, more than half in cash. For a kid who felt lucky in high school if he had “$10 to spend on the weekend,” this was the real arrival.

But it wound up being just the setup for a crushing departure.

If life gave generously to Tinkle out of one hand last summer, it came back almost immediately to rob him with the other. The scales in these sort of things never quite balance out.

He still has a bright baseball future. But the person who would have savored it most will not see it.

He got the action, he got the motion

Yeah, the boy can play

Dedication devotion

Turning all the night time into the day

It’s a coincidence, but an apt one, that Tinkle’s name describes the sound of a baseball breaking a window. People heard quite a bit of each in the various Detroit neighborhoods where he grew up, and moved around almost every year.

Later, in Huntington Beach, he would hear his nickname in the metallic sound of an aluminum bat hitting a ball--tink.

The first images David Tinkle brings to mind are three kinds of birds. He could pass for Larry Bird’s better-looking little brother, and his lanky, 6-foot 1-inch frame suggests a leggy shore bird.

His persona on the field resembles former Detroit Tiger Mark Fidrych, a.k.a. The Bird.

The positions are different, but the blond curly hair under the cap, the open grin, the uninhibited enthusiasm, the hyperactivity, the habit of talking to the ball--all the same.

Tinkle often acts out his feelings. After striking out against the Phillies rookies one day, he turned from the batting box and hit himself on the helmet with his bat.

“Most guys who don’t know Tink think he’s real strange,” said his roommate and best friend, second baseman Brian McRae. “People here, they can tell people from California right off. I don’t know how they do it. They’ve got some kind of stereotype about Californians.

“He is different. He’s unique. He’s himself. He doesn’t like doing things normally.

“When he’s getting ready (for a grounder), he’ll be hitting himself in the chest, like where the ball could hit him,” said McRae, son of the Royals’ Hal McRae. “And he talks to himself when the ball’s hit. He’ll say, ‘Stay down . . . step and throw.’ He just exaggerates a little bit. Other people think it; he acts it out.”

Tinkle’s early knack for baseball, wholeheartedly supported by his father, grew into a family industry and provided them with a healthy distraction from a difficult financial situation.

Thanks to baseball, David had a traveling wardrobe to rival that of Imelda Marcos and a schedule that read like Federal Express.

Little Leagues, city leagues, school leagues, colt ball--anybody with a team, an opponent and a claim to a couple of hours of field time could attract the services of Dave Tinkle, the hobo of Motown youth baseball.

He grew polished, especially in hitting, as he ricocheted around in his diamond-shaped orbit.

“I’d play on five or six teams at a time,” Tinkle said. “I’d get it all set up perfect--like I’d find a league that played Monday-Wednesday-Saturday and then another that played Tuesday-Thursday and . . .

“I don’t know how I did it, but I did. When I was 13 or 14, I had about six uniforms hanging up in the car. We’d go all the way across the city for a game and after, we’d rush all the way back for another one.

“He was my biggest and best fan, my dad.”

Dan Tinkle had no material legacy to leave his fair-haired son, the product of his second short-lived marriage--no money, no property, no job in a family business.

After 15 years’ service, the railroad laid him off and in Detroit’s depressed economy, it wasn’t easy for a man pushing 45 to get a toehold in a new career.

He did odd jobs and he trained to become a refrigeration and air conditioning repairman, but found it hard to get union work.

Out of this cycle of financial adversity, an unusual idea took root.

Besides the physical gifts and the attention he already had passed on to David, Dan Tinkle recognized that he had one more contribution in his command.

That was freedom--maybe just another word for nothing left to lose--but in the Tinkle philosophy, a symbol of everything to gain. Maybe Detroit was too old and cold and settled in in its ways, but California . . .

He and his son would just pack the car and drive to Los Angeles, a place almost better known for its home-grown ballplayers than its oranges, the city of hope.

One day when David was in 10th grade, they left.

The immediate destination was Huntington Beach, where a lifelong friend of Dan Tinkle’s owned a little flower shop. Of course, the long-term destination was different--the major leagues.

David still speaks with respect and amazement of the sacrifice his father made to bring him to high school baseball’s promised land.

“That gave me my future,” he said. “My dad did that for me. Me and my father came all the way across the country just for me.

“He made the move for me because he had heard that California had the best baseball.”

Perhaps the job market would be better here, too; in any case, it couldn’t be much worse.

Half the plan panned out perfectly.

“The first day I drove into California from Detroit I walked into the school and looked up and saw a sheet that said, ‘Baseball Signups,’ ” David recalled.

“So I ran across the street to our apartment and got my equipment and tried out and made varsity.”

If breaking into the starting lineup of one of Southern California’s best programs as an unknown sophomore turned out to be fairly easy for one Tinkle, finding well-paying work as a rookie in the refrigeration business did not for the other.

“When he came out here, he didn’t have much experience and they didn’t have any openings for him,” David said. “But he said, ‘What the heck, I’ll mop floors if I have to. I don’t care.’ ”

So Dan Tinkle took a job as a food service deliveryman for the Huntington Beach Union High School District. It allowed flexible hours. His 6-4, 210-pound figure became a fixture behind the screen at Seahawk games, and his outgoing personality made him well-liked.

“His dad was at all the games,” Ocean View Coach Bill Gibbons said. “He was a very devoted father. His whole life was wrapped up with David and vicariously enjoying his success. It’s a real emotional high seeing your kid realize all that recognition and success. Any father in his situation is entitled to that.

“He was very supportive of the program and very positive toward David. He literally lived and died with David’s success.”

With Tinkle at shortstop as a junior, the Seahawks went to the quarterfinals of the CIF Southern Section 4-A playoffs for the first time in school history.

When he was a senior, the team outlook was pretty dim. He was the only returning starter, and pitching was scarce.

“We were picked last and after the first round (of league play), we looked like last,” Gibbons said. The team was 1-4.

“I don’t think anybody in his wildest imagination could have envisioned us winning the league,” Gibbons said. “After spring vacation, we were just talking about how to get any respectability at all.”

Tinkle pitched, played shortstop and center field as Gibbons tinkered desperately with his lineup.

“I never found him ever unwilling to do things in the best interests of the team,” Gibbons said. “To take a senior shortstop and move him to center field, you could expect a possible tantrum on the part of the player or an objection from the parents saying it’ll interfere with his future.

“With him, it was, ‘No problem, coach. I’ll do whatever’s necessary to help the team.’ To me, that shows character.”

After vacation, Tinkle moved back to short and the Seahawks went on to win 14 of their next 16 games, upsetting Mater Dei, the top-ranked team in the nation, on the way.

They finished 21-8, losing to eventual CIF Southern Section champion Fountain Valley in the playoff semifinals.

Tinkle hit .582 in the playoffs and was named to the All-CIF team. With second baseman John Savidan, he moved into the CIF record books with 22 double plays on the season, fifth best in Southern Section history.

Away from the field, many aspects of Tinkle’s life were different from his teammates’.

“David had a hard life in the sense that things were never given to him; what he had, he earned himself,” Gibbons said.

“The other kids had cars, and he didn’t. That can’t be easy for a kid in his senior year. But he was so wedded to baseball, he didn’t really care about other things.

“He simply walked everywhere. You’d see him around town with his bag and two or three bats and gloves slung over his shoulder, walking along.”

The players liked to kid Tinkle about how he lived out of his huge red duffel bag.

“We called it Tinkle’s Sporting Goods because he’d have about five bats, six gloves and batting gloves, all kinds of cleats, some practice shirts and everything else in there,” pitcher Craig Anderson said.

“He’d had a tough life. I’d been over to their house, and their living room was smaller than my bedroom.”

After Tinkle was drafted, the postage-stamp apartment he and his father shared drew scouts for signing negotiations. His father was in his glory.

“He liked it so much,” David said. “He was my agent, just me and him. He was so excited.

“We lived up on top of this doughnut shop at Slater and Beach. We just had a one-room apartment and these scouts would come over, and they’d be in the living room and he’d be pacing around in the kitchen.

“He’d be lookin’ through the door and saying, ‘They’re conniving out there to see what they can get you for today, Davey.’ I loved it, it made him so happy.

“When I signed, he said, ‘I don’t know if you’ll make it to the big leagues, but my dream for you was to sign a professional contract.’ ”

Tinkle had been at Royals rookie camp two weeks when he got a bad feeling one August day.

“That Monday we had a game and it went into extra innings,” he said. “I had four chances to win the game. Every time I got up, there were two outs and guys on second and third and I’d ground out or pop out or line out.

“I blew it every time and it ended up in a tie after 13 innings. That wasn’t me. I knew something wasn’t right.

“We were up in Bradenton and when we came back to the locker room, they said I had a phone call.

“I went into the manager’s office and it was my dad’s best friend. He said, ‘Your dad died this morning . . . ‘

“I dropped the phone and fell apart. I let it all out and cried for a while.”

He had lost his father, his best friend, his agent, his stat man and No. 1 booster in a single blow.

“He kept saying, ‘But I just talked to him last night! I just talked to him,’ like it couldn’t be true,” remembers JoAn Joyce, the secretary at the Royals complex.

The school district had asked Dan Tinkle to fill in on a different job that morning, perhaps because of another employee’s absence.

While his son played against the Pittsburgh Pirates rookie team on the other side of the country, Dan Tinkle was digging a ditch near electrical wiring at Westminster High School.

He apparently suffered a fatal heart attack. David believes a passing motorist saw him and called the police, who tried to revive him. But he was dead on arrival at the hospital.

“There were some (safety) questions,” David said. “Maybe they shouldn’t have sent him out by the side of the road by that wiring. He was a ways from the school. I don’t think they were supposed to send him out there by himself.”

David had called his father the night before. David’s last words to him were, in hindsight, exactly the right ones.

“At least I got to tell him I loved him,” David said. “You could almost write a book about this, really. I’d just turned 18 and become an adult. I miss him so much.

“He changed his life because of me. All his life, all he wanted was for me to have the chance to sign a pro contract. I fulfilled what he wanted, and two weeks later, he went and died on me.

“It hurt so much.”

The tragedy knocked Tinkle out of rookie camp. He went back to Huntington Beach alone for the sad task of sorting through his father’s belongings and settling his affairs.

When that was finished, he flew to Detroit for the funeral. He was reunited with his mother, who helped raised him through elementary school, his 13-year-old brother, as well as his older half-brother and sister from his father’s first marriage.

The Royals paid him a compliment rare for a rookie by extending an invitation to fall invitational camp, a session for top prospects. But he had no heart for it and turned it down.

For the first time in 10 years, he went months without picking up a glove or bat. The baseball junkie withdrew cold turkey.

He worked cutting Christmas trees and shipping them to sell in Texas. He also undertook a happy project he calls “modernizing up my family,” courtesy of his signing bonus money.

He bought his mother, who lives in a government project in Taylor, a $1,500 sofa and love seat, a stereo and a VCR. After he saw his grandfather watching a tiny black-and-white television, he bought him a 19-inch color remote TV. He paid to have his younger brother sent to a private school.

As winter passed, the grief healed and baseball started to exert its former allure.

In late winter, he made a trip to California to work out with his old high school teammates. He drove a new red and silver van, luxurious enough to be a living room on wheels with a refrigerator, a bed, red velvet swivel chairs and a stereo.

Upon seeing it, Anderson made the connection immediately: “He’s moved up from his duffel bag to his van.”

It was an accurate insight. Tinkle’s relationship to the vehicle is that of a snail to its shell. His father’s passing wiped the concept of home off his psychic map.

“I don’t think he feels comfortable anywhere,” McRae said.

“Home to him is wherever there’s a baseball game,” Anderson said. “He’s 18 and he’s totally on his own.”

And after all the violence and double talk

There’s just a song in all the trouble and the strife

You do the walk, you do the walk of life

Tinkle, dancing around at shortstop like a tennis player anticipating a hard serve or yelling to his outfielders between batters, likes to play the role of team motivator.

He also has an empathy for players with problems and often stays up late talking to them, and listening.

“Some things happen to you when you first become an adult that make you a better adult,” he said. “I’m 18, but I think like a 30-year-old.

“A lot of people, bad things will happen to them and it’ll stay with them. When something bad happens, you have to go through it and when it’s over, use it for future reference.

“All the things that have happened, I take them in and think about them and put them in perspective, instead of just throwing them out.”

He remembers things his father used to say and applies them in carrying on their conquest of the majors.

“Royal blue forever,” he says.

The club is pleased with his progress and expects in June to assign him, along with McRae, to its Class-A team in Eugene, Ore.

Dan Tinkle would have been so proud. David sometimes thinks about the things he never got to do for his father, such as putting a down payment on the blue BMW down the street that his father used to admire.

“What makes a difference is knowing he died the happiest he was all his life,” David said. “That makes it a little easier. It’s not like I disappointed him.

“He gave me something, and I gave him something back before he passed away.”