Justice Isn’t Bland : Has Success Gone to the Head of 1990 Rookie of the Year?

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. —  Before the age of satellite television and baseball card shows, it would take a good baseball player years to become a celebrity.

Apparently, Dave Justice has done it in two months.

Oops. That’s David Justice.

“I’ve always been known as David,” Justice announced upon arriving for spring training as the sudden star of the Atlanta Braves. “That’s just the way it is.”

So, the Braves’ media guide and posters and all those baseball books are wrong? So, even his friends in his hometown of Cincinnati are wrong?

“We have always called him Dave,” boyhood buddy Churby Clowers said quizzically. “I think we still do.”

For two months last year, they could have called him Goliath. In a streak that left baseball awe-struck, Justice hit 20 home runs from Aug. 7 until the end of the season.

It was a streak powerful enough to cloud the memory of the man Justice had replaced in right field. If you think that was no big deal, then you’ve never heard of Dale Murphy.

It was a streak that gave Justice 28 homers and 78 runs batted in for the season, and gave reporters the impetus to vote for him as National League rookie of the year.

But more than anything else, according to teammates this spring, it was a streak that gave Justice an attitude.

It was a streak, they say, that caused an intelligent, sensitive 24-year-old man to change more than just his first name.

“Completely different person,” one teammate said recently. “It’s like we don’t even know him anymore.”

It’s not that he arrived wearing gold chains and high-top spikes, after the fashion of Darryl Strawberry or Eric Davis.

It was how he showed up.

The man who tiptoed into right field last Aug. 4, after the Braves had traded the popular Murphy, is beginning his first season as a full-time major leaguer with a swagger:

--”Sweet Swing” vanity plates grace his new Mercedes, which he parks in the circular driveway in front of the team’s hotel.

“There must be 1,400 parking spaces, and he keeps it up there?” one veteran Brave asked.

--Teammates have seen him brush off autograph seekers, which he didn’t do last season.

Last winter, perhaps not coincidentally, his marketing representative said Justice’s top rookie status allowed him to nearly double his $102,500 salary by appearing at such things as baseball card shows.

“Last year, he would have been begging to sign autographs,” another player said. “And now look at him.”

--Justice has started keeping a little black book of people he is blackballing.

Reporters interviewing him are asked to spell their names, which he inserts into an electronic diary. If Justice does not like their stories, those names go into a file that reminds him never to speak to that reporter or newspaper again.

Already one national newspaper is in that blackball file. And that story was, by most accounts, complimentary.

“A lot of people said the story made me look good, but I found some things in it that I didn’t like, and that is that,” Justice said. “Never talking to that guy or his newspaper again.”

Several times during a recent interview, he repeated a warning.

“You better write exactly what I say, how I say it,” he said. “Because if you don’t, I will never talk to you again. Never.”

--Justice absolutely refuses to talk about 1990. He is so emphatic when he says this, he waves his hands as if shooing the memories away.

“I am not talking about last season,” he proclaimed. “That is over with. I am tired of talking about it. Don’t ask me about August.”

The problem with stardom, said Justice, is people. There are too many people who want too much.

“I’ve been on NBC, CNN, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, and everybody thinks they know me,” Justice said. “Everybody wants to talk to me. Everybody wants something from me. If everybody knows too much about you, pretty soon you can’t go anywhere unnoticed, and I can’t deal with that.”

He sighed.

“I never, ever, thought it would be like this,” he said. “After two days here, I couldn’t stand to look at anybody with a pen. It’s not that I’m a jerk, but sometimes, I need to focus on my job.”

He paused and added: “If you know me, fine. If you don’t know me, that’s fine, too.”

Many National League pitchers can be excused for still not knowing him. In a six-year professional career, Justice has played in only 143 major league games.

He has 490 at-bats, 29 homers, 81 RBIs.

When they see him this season, they might treat him differently. You know what they say about the. . . .

“I don’t know what sophomore jinx means,” Justice said. “Really, what are people talking about?”

Sitting next to him in the Braves’ spring training clubhouse was Ron Gant, who heard that remark and winced.

“I don’t know what it means either . . . but it happened to me,” said Gant, an outfielder who was named comeback player of the year in the National League last season after having been a strong candidate for rookie of the year in 1988.

In 1989, his “sophomore season,” he struggled so badly that he was sent to Class A before regaining his form. He hit 19 homers with 60 RBIs in 1988, then nine homers with 25 RBIs in 1989.

“What happens is, your first year the pitcher doesn’t know you, and you see a lot of fastballs,” Gant said. “But your second year, it all changes. You see curveballs, changeups, sliders. They treat you like a totally different player.”

Some say that is why Justice might be acting like a totally different player this spring. Call it a defense mechanism.

“A lot of people have said he’s changed, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing,” said Mike De Sola, an executive with Prime Time Sports Marketing. His agency represents both Justice and the Dodgers’ Strawberry.

“I think he has a lot more confidence in himself, but the second year is hard, and he’s going to need that confidence,” De Sola said.

Said Justice: “I know my second year is going to be harder. It has to be harder. But I don’t consider that a jinx. Who knows, maybe I could totally bomb. (Pause) But I won’t.”

Some think that a flop season would be a fluke because of Justice’s swing, which really is as smooth as his license plates claim.

It is so smooth that Manager Lou Piniella of the Cincinnati Reds once compared him with Ted Williams.

“With that kind of swing, the only way he isn’t going to hit the ball is bad luck,” said Bobby Cox, the Braves’ manager. “The pitchers will get to know him better, but Dave is a smart guy. He can adjust.”

And certainly, opposing pitchers can do nothing to harm Justice’s arm. Last season, he had some of the most spectacular assists in the league from right field.

“People ask me if I strengthened my arm and I just smile,” Justice said. “I’ve always had this arm.”

Justice, naturally gifted at 6 feet 3, 200 pounds, also claims he has always been on this track to stardom.

Outstanding test scores as a youngster helped him skip two grades in school, resulting in his high school graduation at 16. And it was not just any high school, but an elite private school in Kentucky, across the Ohio River from his suburban Cincinnati home.

“Everybody thinks that because I went to high school in Kentucky, I am from Kentucky,” he said. “I want to make the point that I know nothing about Kentucky. I would spend 30 hours a week in Kentucky, and that was it. I am from Cincinnati. Get that right.”

He attended Thomas More College (it’s in Kentucky, too) on a basketball scholarship and was planning to quit baseball during his sophomore season when he was convinced by friends that he could be an even better baseball player.

“This wasn’t anything I ever thought about,” he said of baseball. “This wasn’t even myfirst love.”

Within a couple of years of devoting himself to the game, though, he was chosen by the Braves in the fourth round of the June 1985 draft.

Thus began a five-year climb through the minor leagues, a trip that began when he hit 22 homers with 105 RBIs in 127 games at Class-A Sumter, S.C., and Durham, N.C., during his first full pro season.

Make a note of those numbers. Justice said it upsets him that people who scan his career statistics frequently forget to total his figures from the two teams. He said he hates it when people insist that he never hit more than 12 homers in any one season before last year.

“I do believe you better add those two numbers to get it right,” Justice said.

He got his first chance last season when first baseman Nick Esasky developed vertigo. But Justice could not successfully switch positions, committing 10 errors in 69 games at first base besides batting only .243 with eight homers and 28 RBIs.

When Murphy was traded, Justice was, uh, served. After returning to right field, he hit .330 with those 20 homers and 50 RBIs in the final two months of the season. There was one 12-game stretch immediately after the trade in which Justice hit 10 home runs and drove in 20 runs.

“That was the most amazing run I have ever seen in baseball, and I have seen a lot of them,” Cox said. “When he wasn’t hitting home runs, he was hitting rockets. Everything he hit was hard.”

Added catcher Greg Olson: “During that time, it was like nothing could upset him. It was like he was in the clouds.”

But you can talk about that streak now and easily upset him. Or mention that he hit .320 with 19 homers and 48 RBIs at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium last season, while in only 11 fewer at-bats on the road, he hit .239 with nine homers and 30 RBIs.

“People say that is because Atlanta is a launching pad, and that is wrong,” Justice said. “Look at Riverfront Stadium. Now that’s a launching pad. Or Chicago, Wrigley Field. You telling me that’s not a launching pad?

“I hit the ball better in Atlanta because I just see it better. That’s all there is to it.”

But as quickly as Justice gets irritated, he is soothed. There still appears to be a bit of wide-eyed innocence in him, and occasionally it comes out.

“When he comes in town to play the Reds, we still hang out in the old neighborhood,” said his buddy, Clowers. “We sit around and play Nintendo, and he tells me what all the big league pitchers are like. Still seems like the same old Dave.”

And Justice was recently thrilled when a photographer stopped by his locker to autograph a poster he had designed for Justice. It was a poster of Justice’s big swing hitting a sweet home run.

“Look at this picture, did I get all of that one?” he asked no one in particular. “I mean, did I get all of that one? Whoooo-eee!”

The child in Justice laughed. Moments later, the baseball star shrugged.

“You know, not once has anyone in Atlanta told me that they are mad because the Braves traded Dale Murphy,” he said. “Not once.”