PADRES ’91 A SEASON OF TRANSITION : MAKING IT LOOK EASY : Padre Pitcher Andy Benes Had the Fast Track to Success

SAN DIEGO —  You wonder what it’s like to have it handed to you all your life like Andy Benes.

He’s got it all. He’s tall, dark and handsome, a once-upon-a-time pre-med student with a 94 m.p.h. fastball, who now, at age 23 with a loving wife and cute little boy, finds himself on the brink of becoming another one of those baseball millionaires.

Crank up that arm, consider his youth and he becomes the Padres’ poster child for happy days are here again.

But you know what? Every once in awhile Prince Charming likes to roll in the mud.

“Are you going to put this in the paper?” said Karen Benes, Andy’s mother.

It’s either that or the life and times of Andy Benes will read like a resume for knighthood.

“OK,” Karen Benes said, “But as you can imagine, we were not real happy with what happened as parents.”

So noted.

The first time the good-natured, All-American Andy Benes started at quarterback, that’s right, quarterback, for the University of Evansville, he got thrown out of the game. That’s right, thrown out of the game.

“The first play of the game, we’re on our own one-yard line and the coach sends in a running play and I’m not going to go with a running play so I change it to a pass,” Benes said. “I took a three-step drop and a guy hit me from behind and I thought I broke my right arm. I was really scared. I fumbled and they scored a touchdown.

“This same guy is hitting me late on plays as the game goes on, but I threw about four or five touchdown passes by halftime and we’re clobbering them. In the third quarter, I threw an interception, but there’s a penalty for interference. I was going to run over and tackle the guy who intercepted the ball, but I stopped because of the penalty and this same guy comes up and smacks me from behind.

“I got up and threw him to the ground, jumped on him, tore off his helmet and ripped into him. So they ejected me from the game. I think everybody on the team liked me going after that guy, but the coach wasn’t too happy. He had to send in our second-string fullback to play quarterback the rest of the game.”

You see there. There have been rough times for this 6-foot-6, 238-pound athletic wunderkind with the unflagging fastball and unflappable look.

“Rough times?” said Bill Baumeyer, Benes’ American Legion baseball coach. “This was a kid nobody wanted. Baseball was his weakest sport. Hell, I picked him up to play catcher for me.

“But he broke his arm and I developed a couple of other kids at catcher and told him when he came back he’d have to pitch. To show you how smart I am, if he hadn’t broken his arm, I’d have kept him at catcher and today he’d be catching for some slo-pitch softball team.”

But you watch Benes at work and it looks like it all comes so easy. You meet him and you think him calm, cool and collected and yet his best friend is Shawn Abner, the wackiest of the Padres.

You think him born to be a superstar, and yet he was told as a freshman in high school that he would never pitch again. You think of him as a fastball pitcher, and he will talk to you about his changeup.

Just when you think you know Andy Benes, you don’t.

“I didn’t know anything about the guy and I’m trying to find a film of him playing football when I pick up the paper and read where he’s scored 42 points in a sectional basketball game,” former Evansville football coach Dave Moore said. “This is Indiana, and anybody who can score 42 points in a basketball game is a good enough athlete to go to Evansville.

“The baseball coach wasn’t too fired up about recruiting him, so to be honest we gave him more money to come and play football than baseball. You want to know what kind of athlete he was? He was the seventh of seven quarterbacks on our roster and by his sophomore season he was starting.

“I remember it’s our third game of the year and we’ve got 45 seconds to play and we’re down by two points and we need Andy to drive the ball into position for the winning field goal. So he carries us all the way to the four-yard line. But to show you the kind of mistake I make as a coach, I send in our regular field-goal kicker. He misses.

“I should have let Benes kick it. He was our third-team kicker, too. If you know Benes, he wouldn’t have let us lose.”

If you knew Andy Benes way back when, you knew he was a winner, but come on. He was the third pitcher in a three-man rotation on his high school baseball team. He could throw a football and shoot a basketball, but when it came to running, glaciers moved faster.

After his freshman year in high school, he developed elbow problems. A doctor told his parents he was finished as a pitcher. He didn’t take the mound his sophomore season.

“We had the arm X-rayed again and the doctor said this is a miracle, and I said no it isn’t, because I’ve been praying for a year,” Karen Benes said. “His arm just healed and he’s never had a problem with the elbow since.”

Between his sophomore and junior year he grew from 5-10 to 6-4. By the end of his senior season, he was inducted into Evansville Central’s Athletic Hall of Fame, but still, Indiana didn’t call. Or Notre Dame or any other prime-time Division I university.

He bypassed opportunities to play basketball at Georgia State and Valparaiso to play football and baseball at Evansville. He played tight end as a freshman and then filled in on the basketball team for a month when it ran short of personnel.

“The coach told me to go in and just run around and not foul anybody,” Benes said. “So I went in and immediately fouled somebody. It got my name in the box score.”

He threw 10 touchdown passes and nine interceptions for a football team that won only two games his sophomore season. Although the New York Giants sent a scout to look at him the next year as a prospective tight end, he had by then given up football.

At the same time, his baseball career wasn’t about to inspire a made-for-TV miniseries. After his second year, he was 11-11 with an earned-run average that usually makes strong-armed pitchers into strong-armed outfielders.

“I got married my sophomore year,” he said, “and I know one thing, my wife didn’t marry me for the money I was going to make in baseball.”

However, he was destined to get ahead. It’s like his high school football coach, Mike Owen, said: “I knew he’d be successful, but I thought I’d see him come back to town as a doctor or something.”

Mom and Dad thought highly of their son’s skills, too, but you know Andy, he was good at sports, but really good in the classroom. So no way did they have him pegged to have his own baseball card one day.

“We figured he’d end up in some sort of science when Andy went off to college,” Karen Benes said. “He switched from pre-med to biology, but we did not figure that we’d have a pro ballplayer. It was kind of a surprise to all of us. We just hoped he’d be good enough to play in high school, then, as he did that, we thought maybe we can get a college scholarship out of it. I mean we didn’t foresee this at all.”

Andy Benes is smart, but he didn’t foresee it either. As a sophomore, he married the former Jennifer Byers, an Evansville classmate and tennis player, and then went about the business of pursuing a degree and a nice life.

“I had no idea I was going to play baseball,” Benes said. “It wasn’t like I was an all-star player. I was real happy and doing real well in school.

“I mean I was never a standout baseball player in high school or college. I never threw a no-hitter in Little League or high school or college. Someone always got a hit. I didn’t throw very hard. I had a good record, but I pitched against the weaker teams.”

Fast forward to Robert Redford in The Natural. Lightning misses the big tree and finds Benes’ right arm. Voila, a fastball.

“I started throwing harder. Just like that,” Benes said. “I was maybe in the mid-80s and then I just started throwing harder my junior year. I don’t know how, don’t know why. It just happened.

“Ask the Padres, they probably never heard of me until my junior year in college,” Benes said. “I was 4-6 (with a 5.92 earned-run average) as a freshman and set a couple of records I didn’t want. I gave up 11 runs in one inning at Arkansas and, in the same game, Jeff King hit a home run and broke Kevin McReynolds all-time record there.”

The Padres’ interest in Benes has been well-documented. They took notice of him in Clarinda, Iowa, a small town with a team in the Jayhawk League, during the summer before his junior season.

Benes was playing with the big boys, and some of the big boys had grand plans for the following summer--a trip to the 1988 Olympics. Benes muscled up on his fastball and began to dream.

“I was working at a furniture store for minimum wages and playing baseball,” he said. “My wife was a reserve lifeguard at the pool. She was on call to work, but we didn’t have a telephone.

“That’s how tough it was that summer, but I was getting into it. The competition was tough and these guys were talking about how their coach was going to get them the opportunity to play on the Olympic team. I thought, ‘Man, that would be great, but I’m going back to Evansville and no chance.’ ”

But when he returned to Evansville, he did so with that fastball. He took the mound and struck out the first seven batters he faced on his way to recording 21 strikeouts in his second start. The opposition continued to whiff.

By season’s end, he was 16-3 with a 1.42 ERA, led the nation with 188 strikeouts and had a crowd of scouts around him. The Padres embraced him as the No. 1 pick in the June 1988 baseball draft.

“Nine months after I’m in Clarinda, I’m on the Olympic team,” Benes said. “I go from being a very average pitcher to throwing the ball a little harder to being the first pick in the country to pitching in the Olympics.”

He had it all, but it all came so quickly. So unexpectedly. He had an Olympic gold medal and a contributing victory over Australia in Seoul, the chance to pitch for pay for the San Diego Padres and the fastball to go radar gun to radar gun with Roger Clemens and Dwight Gooden.

“It’s funny,” he said. “A while back, my wife and I were at the park and some kids were playing baseball. One was hitting and one was fielding and they already had the opening-day lineup figured out.

“They hadn’t seen me, but one of the kids says, ‘All right, Benes is up,’ and it was really weird. They’re playing this game and I’m in it just like I used to play with Larry Bird and I’m at the free-throw line.

“They had me grounding out, but hey, I was happy to make contact,” he said. “After they saw me, they made sure I got a hit the next time.”

If only it was that easy. With the benefit of one year and fifty-four days of major league experience, Benes begins the season with a 16-14 career mark. Although he has only four months of minor league experience, expectations demand results.

“I have 32 times in 365 days to go out there and do my thing,” he said. “If I can’t prepare myself for 32 games, then I better look for another job. But you just want to do so well every time out because you only have so many chances. I get excited. Maybe too excited.

“I feel like I ought to go out and win at least 15 games. But I felt that way last year. How many first-year pitchers have ever won 12 games? Tim Belcher did it. John Smoltz did it. I felt last year I could have easily won that many games. I felt I pitched that well to win that many.”

After opening the season with a 6-4 mark, he allowed nine hits and two earned runs in his next three starts, but didn’t get a decision. His final tab for the season was 10-11.

“He’s done a great job so far,” said Abner, who like Benes, was the first player selected in the June draft (1984 with Mets). “What is he, 23? He’s got a three-point-something ERA and we really didn’t play all that well behind him, so that’s a good year. A damn good first year.

“He’s blessed with a golden arm. He’s got a great career ahead of him. Anybody who’s got an arm like that, you got to turn it up a notch to hit him. When you’re used to seeing 85- and 86-m.p.h. pitches everyday and then you get one of those five or 10 pitchers bringing it ninety-plus, shoot, that’s tough.”

Benes throws darts. When he pitched against Arizona State in the regionals, the radar gun had him throwing more than 100 m.p.h.

“But I’m a long way from Roger Clemens,” Benes said. “I look at him and he’s one of the guys I really admire as a pitcher. I admire Nolan Ryan and Doc Gooden.

“I pitched against Doc last year in New York and that was the greatest. We both left with a 1-1 tie. He struck me out on three pitches and I didn’t see two of them. He got to the plate and I struck him out on three pitches. I mean that was fun.

“The next day I’m talking to a couple of the Mets and I’m telling them it’s just not fair that a guy can throw as hard as Doc. And they’re saying, what do you think we feel like? You do the same thing. I couldn’t believe it.”

Throwing hard earned Benes attention in the latter stages of his collegiate career, but now he finds himself working overtime to become a pitcher. He didn’t learn how to throw a slider until he came to the majors, and now he’s trying to perfect a changeup.

“The days I don’t have my fastball are the days when I have my best games,” he said. “You focus more on throwing the ball in the strike zone and getting ahead in the count. You pitch.

“Two years ago, if I didn’t have my fastball, I’d go out and still try to blow it by everybody. Now don’t get me wrong, there are days when I go out there when I just know I can get it by anybody. There are also days when I think I can just get it by anybody and I turn around and watch it go out of the park.”

The learning process continues.

“If a man had an arm like he’s got, throwing 95- and 96-m.p.h. fastballs consistently over seven and eight innings, can you imagine throwing a straight-change?” said teammate and pitcher Ed Whitson. “We’re talking wrenched backs. Andy throws hard, real hard. But once he learns to change speeds, he will become more effective and more successful.”

But three years ago, he was just trying to make his way through a semester of embryology and bacteriology. A changeup was a night away from the books. Now it’s more than 80 nights on the road.

“Sometimes you just want to stop time and look at all the things that have happened,” Benes said. “Four years ago, I would never have thought I’d be on the field joking around with Will Clark. Unbelievable. Just unbelievable.

“I’m talking to this guy, and man, he’s an all-star. This guy’s a good hitter and I’m pitching to him and I’m getting him out. It’s neat.”

Gee-whiz, golly-gee, imagine how neat it will be for Padre fans if Benes continues to get folks like Will Clark out.

“You look at Andy and he’s a big horse, but shoot, he’s still just a kid,” Baumeyer said. “But one of these days, he’s really going to realize how good he is and that’s going to mean trouble for everybody in the major leagues.”