COUNTRY ROADS : West Virginia’s John Kruk Took a Rural Route to Success With Padres

PALM SPRINGS —  Come and listen to a story about a man and an open sewer and the fourth-best batting average in the National League.

Used to be, through the outfield of one of John Kruk’s summer league baseball fields, wedged in the part of the West Virginia mountains John Denver missed, ran this dirt road.

“Yep,” remembers Kruk, “the road ran from left field out through center field.”

It wasn’t a bad road, either.

“Not really,” Kruk said. “Best thing was, they didn’t let cars drive through during the games.”

But then one summer, some people in town were having trouble with their toilets.

“So they had to dig up this road to put in a sewer,” Kruk recalled. “Dug up all of left field.”

All of a sudden, anybody who played left field needed to learn a new position.

“Teams couldn’t play with a left fielder,” Kruk said. “No place for him to stand.”

At the same time, some players who hit left-handed began going against all baseball wisdom by trying to hit the ball to left field.

“Sure,” Kruk said, “because a ball that went in that big hole was a base hit. Automatic.”

And they wonder why Kruk, despite batting left-handed, is oddly insistent on hitting the ball to left field. As in 23 of 24 career homers to left field. He is one of baseball’s only good hitters who does not pull the ball.

“I don’t wonder,” said Kruk, the second-best hitting (.313) first baseman in baseball last year. “In fact, I don’t really think about it at all. I close my eyes and I swing.”

Meet baseball’s Jed Clampett, baseball’s only player who reminds you of overalls, its only player who has been chewing tobacco longer than he has been playing baseball.

“John Kruk is a great, great talent,” Padre Tim Flannery said. “For a hillbilly.”

Welcome to a world where everything figures but nothing figures, but what the hey, you still can’t beat some of these John Kruk stories with a stick.

John Martin Kruk. Big guy. Blond, probably. Like a Swedish actor or something.

“Wrong,” Kruk said. “I walk down the street and people say, ‘Look at that fat, lazy bum.”’

John Martin Kruk. Grew up in suburban Minneapolis, maybe. Father was a fitness instructor somewhere. Still goes back in the fall and parties with friends down at the lake.

Wrong. He grew up in Keyser, W. Va., about 30 minutes from the nearest interstate highway, and 2 1/2 hours from the nearest big city, Pittsburgh.

“Father works in a bottle factory,” Kruk said. “Where my friends work, when they get home at night, their faces are black.”

John Martin Kruk. After hitting .312 over the last two years and after leading the team with 20 homers and 91 RBIs last season, he’s a San Diego hero. The man who replaced Steve Garvey and all that. A name.

“I don’t think so,” Kruk said. “I drive up to training camp this year and the lady cop wouldn’t let me in the players’ entrance. Told me I had to go around and use public parking.

“I say, ‘I got to park in there. I work in there.’

“She says, ‘Work for who?’

“I say, ‘The Padres.’

“She says, ‘What do you do for them?’

“I say, ‘I play on their team.’

“She says, ‘I don’t believe you.’

“Then she calls for another cop.”

That much figures.

While most of the attention this spring has been placed on the importance of being Tony Gwynn’s finger, or Chris Brown’s psyche, or Roberto Alomar’s tears, Kruk has settled comfortably into the place he likes best.

In the back. Behind equipment bags and laundry hampers.

With mounds of ice taped on a thigh-length bruise. With rows of beard stubble along his jaw line.

Safe in the knowledge that even now, few outside that wedge in that West Virginia mountain would know it’s him.

“You know what I like?” Kruk said. “I like walking with Tony Gwynn across the street from the hotel to the stadium. All the kids with pens grab at Gwynn. Then they look at me and ask if I’m a ballplayer.

“I tell them, ‘No, I’m his bodyguard, and if you touch him, I’m killing you.’ ”

If somebody told Kruk that he was on the verge of becoming the top first baseman in the league, that one day he could be putting up Gwynn-like numbers, even that he could be the key to this Padre season . . . he would about half-die.

“I don’t want to be famous,” he said pleadingly. “We already have a couple of famous guys on this team. We don’t need no more.

“I even hate seeing myself on TV. Every morning I get up and look at my face in the mirror. Once is enough.”

A minute here to separate John Kruk facts from myth, only because facts are often more interesting.

Kruk says he could stand to lose 10 pounds, but he really isn’t that big or fat. He’s 5-feet 10-inches tall and weighs 195 pounds, and most of it is muscle.

“The problem is the way I walk,” he says. “It looks like I could roll over and fall asleep at any minute.”

Although he is not the fastest guy on the team, he is not the clumsiest, either. He is an improving fielder who made just four errors in 949 chances last season. And last season he stole 18 bases, fourth-best on the team.

“The thing about Johnny is, he’s deceptive,” Padre Manager Larry Bowa said. “You don’t think he can take you deep. You don’t think he can steal a base on you, so he does.”

He’s 27 and single and spends half the year in San Diego, but he’s not even in the same species as your basic 27-year-old single San Diegan.

He planned to spend his first winter there this past off-season, and he lasted a month. Didn’t go to the beach once.

“‘Sand is too hot, water is too cold,” he said “What do I want to go there for?”

His idea of relaxing is lying on a couch in front of a television.

“The usual stuff,” Kruk said. “Game shows, ‘Sanford and Son,’ ‘Leave it to Beaver.’ ”

Recalled Flannery: “This winter, I set him up with this beautiful girl, really sweet. It fell through when he realized he would have to leave the house and actually get into his car and drive somewhere.”

Come and listen to a story about a man and his hometown buddies and a minor disturbance in Three Rivers Stadium.

On his first trip to Pittsburgh with the Padres in 1986, Kruk left more than 50 passes for his buddies.

No big deal, except nobody had ever seen his buddies.

“We look up in the stands behind the dugout and there’s this big rowdy group of people with eye patches, no teeth, huge bellies,” Flannery recalled. “It looked like the cast from ‘Deliverance.’ I ask Kruk if they are from his hometown and he says, ‘Yeah, and those are just the women.’ ”

Late in one of those first games, Kruk was called from the on-deck circle so Gwynn, in a rare day off, could pinch-hit.

Understand, many of Kruk’s buddies had never seen a game and had never heard of Gwynn.

“Suddenly I heard this screaming, racial slurs, everything,” Gwynn said. “I turn around, and its Kruk’s people, hollering, hooting. They couldn’t understand how anybody could replace their Johnny.”

Gwynn said he didn’t really get sore until after the game, when he returned to the clubhouse.

“I remembered I had given Kruk my game tickets,” he said. “His people had the nerve to curse me out from my seats.”

Said Kruk: “I was really sorry, but you got to understand my people. Really good people, just from a different world.”

He explained: “Last year, after one of those games, I noticed that one of my buddies, who had been cut in the eye by a bottle a few days earlier, no longer had his stitches. I said, ‘What happened to your stitches?’

“Another buddy said, ‘We got all excited and took them out about the fifth inning.”

Out of that past, though, has come more than just beers and laughs. Kruk left Keyser with a work ethic that has taken him through five long minor-league seasons before he was even invited to big-league spring training. Nobody thought he could do anything but hit.

It has carried him through five years in the Mexican winter league, a place few big-leaguers go unless there is nowhere else. It was the only place he could work on his fielding.

It has stayed with him even today, even in the most innocuous of habits. During spring training, just look at his baseball pant legs. They are pulled low, as low as George Hendrick used to wear them. For the last two years, once the regular season started, the Padres have ordered him to tug them up and show more sock, more flash. He has obeyed.

But this year, perhaps because you don’t mess with team leaders about their britches, they have not asked. And he will not change.

“I don’t care how I look. It just feels better low,” Kruk said. “I wear them high, they cut off the circulation in my ankle. I get a double and by the time I get to second base, my leg is falling off. Looking good ain’t worth that.”

Said Bowa: “He reminds me of an old-time ballplayer. Plays that way, looks that way.”

Kruk’s biggest weakness as a hitter involves left-handed pitchers, and frequently last year, Bowa would bench him against tough lefties. It will happen again this year, but not as much.

“He’s getting better at it. He can handle the guys who throw hard,” Bowa said. “But the guys who trick you, guys like Bob Knepper, John Tudor, they still give him trouble. We’ll still give him a break now and then.”

Kruk, who could complain, does not.

“Why complain? He’s the manager, I ain’t the boss. I’ll never back-talk the boss,” said Kruk, who shrugged. “I didn’t come to the big leagues on no yellow brick road. If I did, it’s sure got a lot of potholes.”

Come and listen to story a about a man and a gun and major-league diplomacy.

When the frustrated Kruk decided to leave foreign San Diego for the comforts of Mexico last winter--”Nothing else to do”--Padre management was a wee bit concerned.

Not only did Kruk not need winter baseball, but for the previous four years, it had not needed him.

“The fans there hate him more than anyone, because he is by far the best American and the best player,” said a club official.

“I get booed everywhere I go,” Kruk said. “I’ve been hit with ice, beer bottles, beer. The better I get, the more I am hated.

“People ask if there is pressure in the big leagues. The other day some guy told me I stunk. I laughed at him. Compared to Mexico, big league fans are pacifists.”

But last winter, for $7,000 a month and all the excitement “Sanford and Son” could not give, Kruk went back one last time. Rest assured, it will be the last time.

“This year was the worst,’ he said. “Once I chased some fans out of the stadium after they decked my buddy with a beer bottle and wound up with a gun in my neck. It was a cop. He told me to get back in the game or he’d kill me. I said, ‘Fine.’ ”

That convinced him. After he got into an argument with an umpire that resulted in his being banned from the league--Kruk threw his glove in disgust and it hit the umpire--he flew back to Keyser. There, in the middle of one of those mountains, he built a house where he will spend the rest of his winters.

A couple of thousand square feet. Acres and acres of land. An underground swimming pool.

“The biggest house in the county,” he said proudly. “Ought to be. Cost $100,000.”

Somebody asked him if he had a view.

“Hey,” he said, “I am the view.”