FIELDER IS REALLY A HITTER : Detroit’s Latest Import From Japan Putting Up Impressive Numbers

SEATTLE —  Cecil Fielder is a non-athlete who can hit.

--PAT GILLICK, general manager of the Toronto Blue Jays

Well, maybe the Blue Jays find Cecil Fielder’s hitting a little hard to take. Maybe they need a reason for not giving him the everyday opportunity he received in Japan and is getting with the Detroit Tigers.

Maybe that’s part of the reason for Gillick’s characterization. A non-athlete? A base clogger?

Fielder hears worse from the fans in the box seats. They look at those massive thighs and the elasticized waist and yell out, “How many times did you visit Mrs. Fields today?”

They call him “Doughnut.”

Fielder good-naturedly laughs at that, as he has been doing to the cynics who wondered how Detroit could dole out $3 million to a Japanese import. As he does when a reporter tells him how his former boss in Toronto has described him.

“That’s weak,” Fielder said the other day. “I’m going to have to talk to Pat about that. He didn’t know me when I was an athlete. It takes an athlete to play basketball. Baseball? No one said you had to be an athlete to play baseball.”

Fielder, 26, played four years of varsity basketball at Nogales High in La Puente, a point guard who dreamed of doing it at the Forum even before there was Magic to it.

“Basketball was the ultimate,” he said. “Baseball was when I rested between basketball and football. I mean, I was a great basketball player. You may not believe it now, but there was nothing I couldn’t do--shoot, pass, dunk, anything.

“I couldn’t really run, even then, but I could run the court and I could dribble. I could do it all.”

A reverie clouded by time? No, said Mac Pace, the Nogales basketball coach then, athletic director now.

“Cecil was definitely a Magic Johnson type,” Pace said. “He could pick up a team with his personality and passing ability.”

Fielder did it so well as a senior in 1981 that he was All-Southern Section and Nogales went 29-0 before losing to Blair in the playoff semifinals at the Sports Arena.

He was 6 feet 3 and about 218 pounds. Now, capable of bench pressing 325 pounds, he weighs 235, according to the Detroit media guide, and those ponderous legs aren’t asked to do anything more than provide a foundation. Who has to run when you hit them as far as Fielder has been? A doughnut could roll around the bases.

“Pat’s right,” Detroit Manager Sparky Anderson said of Gillick. “Cecil can’t run, if that’s your criterion for judging an athlete, but he sure as hell can hit. He can hit better than I ever thought he could.”

Through 51 games and 182 at-bats, Fielder is batting .313. He is tied with the Oakland Athletics’ Jose Canseco for the American League home run lead at 19 and has 47 runs batted in, second to Canseco’s 49. He is second to no one in slugging percentage, extra-base hits and total bases.

His pace projects to 60 home runs, just under Roger Maris’ single-season record of 61 and more than the Detroit club record of 58, set by Hank Greenberg in 1938, but Fielder refuses to deal in predictions and projections. After all, it seems like only five minutes ago that he was a part-time player with the Blue Jays, never sure of when he would get his next at-bat.

“People bring up all kinds of names--Ruth, Aaron, Maris, Greenberg--but I don’t pay any attention to it,” Fielder said. “I’m glad I’m doing well, but I never expected this kind of start, considering it’s been a year since I’ve seen the pitchers in this league. I mean, I’m just trying to go up there with an open mind, get a good pitch and hit it hard.

“I’m not being cocky, but when you have the confidence that comes with playing every day, when you’re strong and have a good swing, there’s no telling what you can accomplish.

“Could I have done this with Toronto if I had been playing every day? I believe I could have, but I also recognized that there wasn’t room. I recognized that they had a great first baseman in Fred McGriff, that at times they wanted to use George Bell as the designated hitter. I never went to the front office and complained. I never tried to burn my bridges. That’s why I think everything worked out for me.

“They knew I was frustrated and wanted to play more, and they worked out the opportunity for me in Japan. I never hesitated when they came to me with it. I mean, it was something they didn’t have to do, but it’s a class organization. I have no bitterness or hard feelings toward the Blue Jays.”

Fielder spent the 1989 season with the Hanshin Tigers, hitting 38 homers and driving in 81 runs, but he credits playing in Japan for reviving his confidence, reinforcing the feeling that he could play every day.

As a youth who idolized Willie McCovey and the San Francisco Giants--”The Dodgers didn’t do anything for me and the Angels were always terrible”--Fielder said he played Little League only briefly.

“I played center field as an 8-year-old and was the fastest guy on the field,” he said.

But by then, he said, he also wore a size-8 shoe, and with each year his shoe size increased until he was 13 and no longer the fastest on any field and no longer interested in a sport he considered boring.

At Nogales, basketball was No. 1, football No. 2. He played linebacker, using instinct to compensate for a lack of speed.

Tiger catcher Mark Salas was also a linebacker at Nogales then.

“When we needed a big play on offense, Cecil would go to quarterback because he could throw the ball 50 or 60 yards and I’d go to wide receiver because I wasn’t afraid to go over the middle,” Salas recalled. “We could both run a little then, but Cecil kept getting bigger and I caught too many games.”

Salas said he thought basketball would be Fielder’s game. Fielder did not go out for baseball until he was a junior, and then only at the urging of his father, Edson, who was an All-Southern Section infielder at El Centro High in 1955 and who perceptively suggested in 1980 that free agency seemed to be having a major impact on baseball salaries.

“Son, you can go out and make a lot of money in that game,” Fielder recalled his father telling him.

Not two years later, he was offered the chance to play baseball at a basketball school, Nevada Las Vegas. He accepted briefly but discovered he was more comfortable closer to home and returned to attend Mt. San Antonio College.

His development there was so swift that Kansas City scout Guy Hanson, for whom Fielder played on a winter league team, recommended him to the Royals, who made him their fourth choice in the 1982 draft.

He hit 20 home runs in 69 games at Butte, Mont., that summer and was traded to the Blue Jays in February for outfielder Leon Roberts. Fielder spent parts of the ’85 and ’86 seasons with Toronto before spending all of ’87 and ’88 there, hitting 23 home runs in 349 at-bats. Though once seen as the heir to Willie Upshaw at first base or Cliff Johnson as the designated hitter, Fielder never filled either role full time.

“We would have never sold Cecil to Japan if we had been that high on him,” Gillick said. “If you want to say we mis-evaluated you can, but he never really figured in our plans.

“He wasn’t going to play ahead of Fred McGriff at first base, and as a platoon DH, which is how we would have used him, I don’t think he would have come on as he now has.

“He’s the type player who has to provide a lot of offense to compensate for the things he can’t do. It’s tough to play him defensively on a synthetic surface, and he’s a base clogger. He can’t go from first to third on a hit, and you have to pinch-run for him with the game on the line, which means you’re using two players for one job.”

The Tigers, of course, are in a different situation than the talent-rich Blue Jays. Detroit is rebuilding after 103 losses, and first base was a starting point. Without help there, the Tigers were looking at a platoon of Gary Ward and Dave Bergman.

Thus, they made free-agent offers to Kent Hrbek and Pete O’Brien before Fielder accepted a two-year deal, exercising an escape clause in his two-year contract with the Hanshin Tigers.

“I was tempted to stay, but when Larry Parrish was released (by the Yakult Swallows) after having 20 or so homers and 100 (RBIs), I wasn’t real comfortable with the security, no matter how long a contract I had,” Fielder said.

Parrish, ironically, has replaced Fielder as Hanshin’s power hitter, a player typical of those who go to Japan near the end of their careers in the United States.

For Fielder, however, in his prime, Japan was do or die.

“I mean, I felt I could still play in the States, but I knew that if I didn’t do well over there I’d never get another chance here,” he said. “The big thing was developing the confidence and feel of playing every day, learning to relax with the zero for fours, trying to take something positive out of every game. My confidence may have been down some when I went there, but playing every day changed that.”

Facing primarily breaking-ball pitchers, Fielder also developed a better feel for the strike zone and a better understanding of discipline and patience, stemming from a sense of isolation in a foreign culture.

“It was easy to get flustered and frustrated, but I tried to stay on an even keel,” he said.

Said Seattle Mariner Manager Jim Lefebvre, who spent five years in Japan: “The American player has to recognize that he’s there to provide power, to provide a service. I don’t care what anyone says, you’re never accepted there, never allowed to be a star. The last thing in the world they want is for an American to beat them. They’ll never give you a ball to hit with the game on the line. They’ll nibble, they’ll throw a forkball with the count 3 and 0.

“It’s a test of patience for the American player, and I know what Cecil means when he says he learned a lot about himself. I talked to him the other day and told him I have a lot of respect for him, the way he’s come back and done so well. I mean, this guy is an awesome sight right now. We’ve looked at all the tapes and there’s not one way to pitch him.”

Fielder has struck out once every 3.6 at-bats, and it is theorized that he remains vulnerable to the high fastball.

However, his three home runs in a spring training game against the St. Louis Cardinals eased his manager’s doubts, and he has averaged a home run every 4.3 at-bats during the regular season, including three in one game against the Blue Jays--just a few hours after McGriff popped for dinner on a bet as to which of them would hit the most home runs last year.

“When I saw him in spring training, I figured that if he hit 30 home runs and batted .230 it would be great,” Manager Anderson said. “I was half right. He’s going to get the 30 homers, but I think he’s capable of batting .260 to .270. He has a good understanding of the strike zone and he uses the entire field. I mean, he’s so strong he can hit it out of any part of the park. He hit a home run to left-center in Arlington (Texas) and literally turned the wind around.”

Fielder, enjoying a quieter lifestyle, lives in Arlington with his wife, Stacey, and 6-year-old son, Prince. Golf has replaced basketball as a passion. His parents have moved from La Puente to Rialto, where his brother, Craig, is attracting scouts to Eisenhower High. Craig, according to his older brother, has inherited his mother’s lean form and has bona fide speed.

Meanwhile, the non-athlete isn’t doing badly, but isn’t gloating about it, saying the only people he has anything to prove to are Texas sportswriters who “went too far” in their personal criticism and cynicism when he signed the $3-million deal with Detroit.

As for Gillick, Fielder smiled again and said: “It’s not my game to be able to run. My game is hitting the ball hard and driving in runs. That’s not to say it wouldn’t be bad to have some speed. I mean, it’s a shame for a guy like Bo Jackson to be that big and have that much speed, but you can only do what you can do. I’m not worried about what I can’t.”