He’s Weathering It All Just Fine

PITTSBURGH —  And now, here’s Andy Van Slyke with the sports.

Andy?

“Hey, thanks very much and hello again, everybody. Well, a home run and double by me off of 20-game winner Tom Glavine carried the Pittsburgh Pirates and me to a 5-1 victory over the Atlanta Braves here Wednesday night in Game 1 of the National League championship series.

“I was great.”

No, Andy didn’t actually say that. Andy didn’t actually do the sports report on Pittsburgh TV Wednesday night. Why not? Because nobody asked him to do the sports report, that’s why not. On the other hand, Andy recently did do the weather report on a Pittsburgh TV news station. Why? Because somebody asked him to do the weather report, that’s why.

And how was he when he did the weather?

“I was great,” Andy said.

Andy Van Slyke is a baseball screwball. He takes his work very seriously and takes little else very seriously. His skills as a center fielder are seldom in question, but you have to keep watching him through binoculars from time to time, just to be sure there isn’t a beanie copter atop his cap.

When a beach ball, for example, got away from someone in the crowd at Three Rivers Stadium during Wednesday’s game, Andy had to stroll over and retrieve it. For some guys trying to concentrate on their jobs, this is exactly the sort of distraction they don’t need. Andy, though, scooped up the beach ball, dribbled it twice and finger-rolled it over the fence, then scrawled in the air with two fingers to chalk himself up two points.

Later, between innings, a long, long, long white limousine left the bullpen and drove toward his position in center field.

Andy couldn’t take his eyes off it. He made a big show of peering through the smoked glass. All of a sudden, the Pirates’ parrot mascot came climbing out in a tuxedo, along with seven or eight similarly dressed dancers, spilling out of the limo like the Marx Brothers out of their steamship stateroom.

“That’s the longest car I’ve ever seen,” Van Slyke said later. “I think there was a bed in it. Manute Bol’s going to rent it next time he comes to Pittsburgh.”

Nobody has ever accused Andy Van Slyke of being too tight for a big game.

His home run and double came in his first two at-bats of the playoffs, and his eyes lit up at the sight of Glavine’s pitches like a child’s eyes at the zoo. For some reason, even though both men are left-handed, Van Slyke has this thing about Glavine. He owns him. He hits him like a machine in a batting cage.

You ask some people about certain pitchers and why they hit so well against them and they automatically give you the old toothless saw about being lucky or: “Next time, he’ll probably strike me out every time up.”

Not from Van Slyke, you don’t.

Here’s Andy with the sports:

“Tom Glavine, at this point of my career, I happen to hit better than some others. I’m just glad he’s not on L.A. or some club that’s not in the playoffs.”

Andy fancies himself a swashbuckler, the Pirate of Pennants. The thing is, he has never played in the playoffs the way he imagines himself playing. He isn’t reluctant to be the hero. Andy doesn’t avoid the spotlight; he basks in it. He’s about as shy as a stripper.

Therefore, it disappointed him that he never homered in the 1985 league championship series for St. Louis. Nor did he hit one in 24 playoff at-bats with Pittsburgh in 1990. Matter of fact, Andy and his fellow muggers from Pittsburgh’s murderer’s row, Bobby Bonilla and Barry Bonds, did not hit much of anything in last season’s postseason.

That’s why he was so delighted when Glavine served him up a big, fat, slow breaking pitch of some kind--slider, curve, Andy wasn’t sure--in the very first inning, which Andy deposited in exactly the same place he made the layup with the beach ball. And next time up, he whacked one off the wall on one hop, so far that Atlanta’s center fielder should have sent a limo for it.

Andy said he thought that might help him, Bonilla and Bonds to relax.

Last year, Andy said, he pressed so much: “I’d swing and try to hit a three-run homer when there’s nobody on base. That’s tough to do.”

Uh, yeah.

And Pittsburgh needs some punch from its 3-4-5 boys to make it to the World Series. Atlanta--with Dave Justice, Ron Gant and Terry Pendleton--has the same problem.

“The way Doug (Drabek) was pitching tonight, it didn’t matter if Ruth, Gehrig and Mantle were up there hitting 3-4-5,” Van Slyke said.

Andy gets paid a lot of money to hit and catch baseballs for Pittsburgh. The day before this game, his teammate, Bonds, speaking on behalf of another teammate, Bonilla, suggested that Andy’s ability to get such big money qualified him as “The Great White Hope.” Bonds wondered why or when Bonilla would get the money he deserved.

That really angered Andy. Sure it did.

Back to you, Andy:

“I thought about putting a dollar sign on my uniform instead of a number,” he said. “Maybe I’ll write ‘The Great Hope’ on the back instead of my name.

“Yeah. I like that.”

Andy Van Slyke, reporting live, Pittsburgh Pirate sports.