Analysis : Padres May Have to Wait for Dividends : Trading McReynolds Draws Comparisons to the Rangers' Rebuilding

By TOM FRIEND

Dec. 13, 1986 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

HOLLYWOOD, Fla. — One day later, the consensus is this . . .

--By acquiring Kevin McReynolds Thursday, the New York Mets helped themselves for 1987.

--By acquiring Kevin Mitchell, Shawn Abner and Stan Jefferson, the San Diego Padres helped themselves for 1989.

--McReynolds, the Mets’ new left fielder, is thrilled to be leaving San Diego and, especially, team president Ballard Smith.

--Mitchell, who grew up as a ruffian in San Diego and who will be the Padres’ third baseman, is convinced he can come home again.

--Abner, a 20-year-old phenom who batted .580 his senior year of high school, thinks he can be the player McReynolds is.

--Abner also thinks Jefferson, the Padres’ new center fielder, is so fast he “doesn’t even touch the ground when he runs.”

--Baseball people think the Padres are the “new” Texas Rangers.

McReynolds probably was the best player to be traded this week (getting the nod over Matt Young and Danny Tartabull). He hit 26 homers and had 96 RBIs for the Padres last season. But Jack McKeon, the San Diego general manager, wanted to create a New Frontier.

Take a look at Texas last year. The Rangers were coming off a last-place finish in 1985 and decided to make youth a prerequisite for playing time. Manager Bobby Valentine--fiery and aggressive--put it together on the field and the Rangers finished second in the American League West.

Now, in San Diego, the oldest starter besides Steve Garvey and Garry Templeton is going to be Tony Gwynn--age 26. Manager Larry Bowa--fiery and aggressive--may be the Bobby Valentine of 1987.

“Oh, I don’t know about the Padres,” McReynolds said Friday. “I really don’t see the Padres doing that well. Even with me there, I would’ve felt that. And I think the biggest reason is Ballard Smith. He’ll hold the team back. To him, winning isn’t that important.”

For sure, McReynolds is not teary-eyed over the deal, mainly because of all the contract disputes and all the comments about his being a lazy player.

He had come to the majors in 1983 after hitting .377 in Triple-A. He hit a home run in his first game and, suddenly, he was Kevin Messiah, not Kevin McReynolds.

But, in that first season, he kept aiming for the upper deck and kept missing with his upper-cut swings. One day that year, then-manager Dick Williams said loud enough for McReynolds to hear: “Now who’s a big shot?”

He couldn’t hit, so now there was a rift. Throughout 1985, McReynolds says, they spoke once, a conversation that lasted a second as Williams said something like “Way to go, Mac.”

When Williams left, Smith became the designated Mac attacker. Smith couldn’t understand when McReynolds turned down a six-year, $4.5-million contract offer in 1985. At spring training that year, Smith walked up to McReynolds’ wife, Jackie, and asked--according to Jackie--”How in the world can your husband do that?”

Then, when McReynolds slumped at midseason last year, Smith came out publicly and said McReynolds didn’t work hard enough. A meeting between the two was suggested and that’s when McReynolds told Smith that he had no business evaluating baseball talent because he’s never in the ballpark watching workouts.

“And shoot,” McReynolds also told Smith, “you’re never in the country either.”

So it was with great satisfaction Friday that McReynolds said, “I didn’t miss Dick (Williams), and I’m not going to miss Ballard.”

Smith had talked with McReynolds’ agent, Tom Selakovich, at the winter meetings here and offered to “bury the hatchet.” Smith also told Selakovich that he would be willing to sign McReynolds to a three-year deal, as long as there was a drug clause.

“That’s a joke,” Selakovich said later. “Kevin McReynolds doesn’t do drugs. If that’s their feeling, that bad apples like Alan Wiggins and LaMarr Hoyt have spoiled everything for everyone else, then I’m glad we’re about to be traded. I’m tired of fighting with them.”

Officially, now, the fight’s over.

However, a newer, more important issue is whether McReynolds can make it in New York. The theme song to his personal music video last year (the Padres made one for him) was ‘Thank God I’m A Country Boy,” and New York City is a virtual country in itself, where the media watches every breath a ballplayer takes. McReynolds is no Steve Garvey, either. After games, he’s usually dressed and out the door before reporters can say, “Hey, wait!”

“You’d probably think that if I don’t do a good job in New York, the media will kick my (rear) and roll me through the mud,” McReynolds said. “But this is a team that just won the World Series. If this team doesn’t get production from one player--whether it’s me or someone else--it won’t hurt the team.

“As far as living there, I won’t have to be in the city much. Bob Ojeda (who is also represented by Selakovich) lives 30, 35 minutes from the city.”

Selakovich, by the way, asked the Padres for an $875,000 contract this week, and the Padres laughed. But Selakovich says now: “I’m glad I’ll be dealing with a real front office again in New York. I bet we get a three-year contract in a month.”

Mitchell is taking the trade a little harder. The Mets discovered him when he was playing sandlot ball every weekend in the Grossmont area of El Cajon. He signed the contract on a bench, went to the plate to swing and immediately got hit in the hand by a pitch.

“Gosh,” said Met scout Harry Minor. “I’d thought he broke his wrist and we’d blown it.”

Instead, Mitchell became an integral part of last year’s championship team and is saddened to leave.

At first, though, Mitchell had what Met hitting coach Bill Robinson described as a “bad attitude.”

“I sat him in front of me and told him how much I disliked him,” Robinson said last summer. “I jumped all over him. I told him about life. I told him baseball doesn’t owe him a damn thing, and if he didn’t change, he’d be out of the game.”

Mitchell, who had been been part of a gang in Southeast San Diego, apparently got the message.

“I was brought up not to take no mess off nobody,” Mitchell said Thursday. “That was a tough neighborhood in Southeast San Diego, and you had to watch out for No. 1. But, in New York, I learned a lot about respecting other people. I’m a whole different person--attitude-wise, temper-wise. I walk away from things now.”

On the field, he has tremendous talent. In the sixth game of the World Series last year, he came to bat with two outs in the bottom of the ninth with the Mets trailing. He was facing ex-teammate Calvin Schiraldi.

“Right before, I’d been in the clubhouse, because I usually didn’t bat against right-handers,” Mitchell said. “There were two outs and it looked impossible. I was undressing. But they called me into the game, and I’d been Schiraldi’s roommate in ’83. He always liked to talk crazy to me, like ‘Mitch, if I ever face you, I’ll bust you in with fastballs and then throw a slider away.’ Well, I have a good memory, and that’s what he did. I hit a slider for a base hit.”

And Mitchell scored the tying run.

As for the future, he’s excited, though he only played two games at third base last year (one was in San Diego).

“I’ll start taking ground balls right away,” he said Thursday.

Another question is whether Abner and Jefferson will be ready right away. Abner is only 20, and one American League general manager, requesting anonymity, said Abner is a big name with average tools. However, the scouts who talked with McKeon said he was a big name with big tools.

“What kind of player am I? I’m going to hit 20 home runs, bat close to .300 and get a bunch of RBIs,” Abner said Friday. “. . . I have petty good speed. I run a 6.6, 6.7 in the 60-yard dash, but the Mets never ran me. I guess they didn’t want that role for me. But I feel I can run. I stole 13 bases in as many games at instructional league this year.”

Abner said his best position is center field, but he will be given a chance to be the Padre left fielder this year. If he’s good enough, Bowa said, he’ll play every day. But if he’s not quite ready, they’ll send him to Triple-A.

“I want him playing every day somewhere,” Bowa said.

Jefferson, though, should be the center fielder from the beginning. He is playing winter ball in Puerto Rico, and former Padre Manager Steve Boros (now the Padres’ assistant general manager) has already gone down to see him.

Steve Schryver, the Mets’ director of minor leagues, said of Jefferson: “He was perhaps the most exciting player in our farm system, but he was a little inconsistent day to day. I don’t know, he’s got a good chance to be a .300 hitter and steal 25 or more bases.”

Overall, Thursday’s trade meant more to McKeon than anyone.

He was fed up with his slow, somewhat lackadaisical team. Even Bowa said this week: “I want my players to show emotion, and it’s no secret the Padres have been an unemotional team.

“It’s almost like they’ve fallen into that Southern California (laid-back) atmosphere.”