mikesmate
Would love to be Piazza's Fling
USA
Posts: 522
(2/21/02 7:31 am)
|
 Family That Plays Together
Alomar's parents a key to his success
By T.J. QUINN
Daily News Sports Writer
PORT ST. LUCIE
Roberto Alomar was 18 months old when he could first pick up a tiny bat and recreate the batting stance of his father, Sandy.
When he was two, he knew the names and numbers of the players on his father's team, the California Angels.
And when he was six, the youngest child of Maria Alomar told her he was going to be a major league baseball player.
"I told him, 'That's fine, but I want you to get a college education,'" she said yesterday from her home in Salinas, Puerto Rico. "He said, 'I'm not going to college because I'm going to the major leagues. That's what I'm going to do. I don't need college.'
"It was eerie."
 All in the Family: Roberto Alomar credits his career to his family.
His career has gone beyond eerie. The boy who always had a bat or glove in his hand has become, at 34, one of the most accomplished players in the history of the game. He has made 12 All-Star appearances, won 10 Gold Gloves (the most of any second baseman in history), and owns the highest fielding percentage (.987) of any second baseman in American League history.
When the Mets acquired him in an eight-player deal with Cleveland in December, the baseball world was stunned and the Mets were reborn. Yesterday Alomar put on a Mets uniform for the first time and took batting practice with new teammates Mike Piazza and Mo Vaughn, and said he, too, has been reborn in the only job he ever wanted.
"I feel like a little kid," he said.
The Alomars are bound by red stitches — Sandy Sr., now a coach with the Chicago Cubs, played in the majors for 15 years and Sandy Jr. is a six-time All-Star. But "Robert," as his parents used to call him, is the one who lives and dies for baseball.
"He was born with something special," Maria Alomar said in Spanish, through a translator. "Sandy (Jr.) was more all-around, a sportsman, but Robbie was more baseball — more bat and ball. At a year and half he was already so focused on the game."
Maybe some of it was in the genes, Sandy Sr. said yesterday, but Roberto sweated and bled for baseball like no one he ever knew, and he said his son earned his instincts through work, not just talent.
"He always wanted to go to the ballpark," the elder Alomar said from Cubs training camp in Mesa, Ariz. "He was crying all the time because I would say, 'No, this time you have to go to school,' because school was the most important thing to me. One time he hid in the back of our station wagon when I was driving to the park — he was about seven, eight. He was under a blanket in the back and I didn't see him until we were halfway there. What could I do? I took him to the park."
Both parents were coaches to him. Sandy taught Roberto to study the game and to find weaknesses in the opposing team. And when Sandy was on the road, Maria was the one who corrected Roberto's swing.
"She'd say, 'You're not swinging the bat right, you're too low, you're too high, you're jumping,'" he said.
Roberto says he still calls his mother every day and she still offers advice.
"Like a good friend who is always going to tell him the truth," she said. "I never scream at him, because it doesn't do any good to scream at Robbie, anyway."
They did, however, speak to him in the firmest tones in September 1996, after seeing him spit in the face of umpire John Hirschbeck.
"I don't condone what he did, but he did it out of a reaction," Sandy said. "I called him right away and I explained to him that he was going to pay the price, but we were behind him. We told him he had to stay confident and to play, but he was going to pay the price."
When the 1997 season began, Roberto served a five-game suspension and then was booed whenever he stepped to the plate or made a play. But both parents speak with great pride of how Roberto became close friends with Hirschbeck and has helped raise money to fight adrenoleukodystrophy, the disease that killed Hirschbeck's son John Drew.
What hurt Sandy the most about the incident and its fallout was a television show he saw a week later, in which a psychologist said behavior like Roberto's had to be the result of his upbringing.
"I've been married 38 years. I never had a problem with my wife, never touched my wife, we never had a problem as a family," Sandy said. "We have a wonderful family. I don't see how someone could say that."
Family was the most important thing in their lives, he said, and still is to this day. But with all that said, he might not talk to Roberto about baseball this year as much as he's used to. Family is family, and they stuck together through everything. But baseball is baseball, he said, and they both have jobs to do.
"This year he's in my league," he said. "It might be a little different."
Red Eye: Jeromy Burnitz arrived in camp yesterday, but headed straight to bed. He took a red-eye flight from San Diego and reported to camp with flu symptoms and an earache. Bobby Valentine said Burnitz is expected to work out with the rest of the team today, when the Mets have their first full-squad workout.
Second Chance: Alomar is accustomed to hitting third in the lineup, with 1,618 at-bats in that spot out of 1,748 total in the past three years. But with the loaded Mets offense, he will probably hit second on most days. Alomar was expected to grumble about the change, but yesterday he went right to Valentine and said it did not matter to him where he hit.
Original Publication Date: 2/21/02
 
|
Re: Family That Plays Together 
Email This To a Friend
Topic Commands
Click to receive email notification of replies
Click to stop receiving email notification of replies