WHO’S ON SECOND? : ALL PADRE SIGNS POINT TO CORA : But If Former Top Draft Choice Fails, Flannery and Ready Are in the Wings

MESA, Ariz. â€”  Joey Cora was taking a small lead off second base the other day when Cleveland second baseman Tony Bernazard leaned over to say: “Hey, Joey! What are your chances of making the team?â€�

“I don’t know,� Cora said. “Maybe Triple-A for me.�

“The hell with you,� Bernazard said. “You can be a regular for these guys.�

Cora then turned his neck all crooked, as if to say “maybe, maybe not.� He is the Padres’ little darling, a 5-foot 8-inch former No. 1 draft choice who has yet to play a full season of Double-A baseball. Yet here he is, starting most of the Padres’ spring training games.

He was still collecting baseball cards a couple of years ago.

“We’re playing the Brewers today,� he said Monday. “And I have a Robin Yount card, a Paul Molitor, a Cecil Cooper. You name it.�

How about a Tim Flannery?

“I’m not sure,� he said.

Flannery--suddenly an old man at 29--is battling Cora, 21, for the starting second baseman job. Flannery--a real, live baseball card (because he’s so funny)--says Cora is the 18th (and probably the best) player he has competed with for the starting second base job. And it wasn’t long ago that Flannery was the Padre second baseman of the 20th and 21st centuries. He never batted less than .345 in the minors. But they keep coming to take him away--Fernando Gonzalez, Sammy Perlozzo, Juan Bonilla, Dave Cash, Alan Wiggins, Mario Ramirez, Bip Roberts.

Roberts was the most recent. But after he played 101 games at second base last year and hit .253, he was taken off the 40-man roster, and the Padres even took away his uniform number--2.

“At least they could have waited until I was dead and gone before taking my number,� he said in tears recently.

Roberts is back in camp this spring, trying to win the job back. His new jersey number is 18, but he’s currently No. 4 on the depth charts.

Right ahead of him at No. 3 is Randy Ready, who probably will platoon with Flannery if Cora can’t cut it. Ready missed practically all of last season when his wife, Dorene, collapsed and went into a coma in June. Dorene awoke, but she is in a rehabilitative hospital with brain damage. Ready has three boys under the age of 3 (including twins), and it makes it difficult for him to concentrate on baseball.

Manager Larry Bowa has said that Cora will play every day if he proves himself this spring. Essentially, it’s his job to lose. But if he loses, Flannery and Ready will be there, and even Roberts could make it--as a utility player.

Flannery says Bowa will have no explaining to do when the decision is made.

“I’m like a grunt in a war,� Flannery said this week. “You don’t have to explain anything to me. When you give me orders, I do them.�

Though there isn’t much “me, myself and I� in Flannery, he wouldn’t be human if he didn’t want to start. In 1978, he batted .350 at Reno, and then he was batting .345 at Amarillo (Double-A) the next year when the Padres called him up and labeled him “savior.�

He went 10 for 65 at the plate.

“They rushed me out of Double-A,� Flannery said. “I hit .176 and it took me two years until I finally felt comfortable again. I thought I’d never get a hit again.�

The next season, he began at Triple-A.

You might think of him now as an “all-field, no-hit� second baseman, but back then he was “all-hit, no-field.� In one Triple-A game, he had four hits and three errors, and his manager, Doug Rader, said sarcastically: “Kid, you’ve got some dynamite dukes.�

Thus, his nickname now is “Dukey.�

The Padres brought him up again in 1981 and then sent him down. That was when it hit Flannery that he might not be the greatest hitter of all time. That was when he learned to accept a utility role.

“I thought I’d be the all-star second baseman for 15 years. . . . But then I realized I just wanted to stay in the big leagues.�

This is his sixth season in San Diego, and crowds love him more than Goose and Garv because he does everything headfirst--diving for grounders and so forth. Whitey Herzog, the St. Louis Cardinals’ manager, mentioned Flannery in trade talks last year, and Herzog says he was told that Flannery was untouchable. The way Herzog heard it, Padre owner Joan Kroc knew her late husband, Ray, adored Flannery’s style, and she decided he would never be traded.

But Jack McKeon, Padre general manager, says he never told Herzog such a thing.

Flannery’s biggest problem might be that he’s a worrier. Last year, all the tension of losing and being named the team’s player representative to the Major League Baseball Players Assn. gave him headaches and chest pains. He underwent a brain scan, just to make sure that everything was all right. It was.

He realizes that this year might be his last chance to play every day, as Cora is so young and so good. He wants to start, he says.

But he has no problems with the utility role.

“You have to be old and crazy to do it (the utility role),� Flannery said. “I’m still crazy, and now I’m getting a little old. . . . I hope he (Cora) hits .300, steals 60 bases and leads us to the pennant. I hope he leads us to the World Series, man. I’ll take that World Series check. You get the check whether you’re sitting or playing. Listen, when I put down my (1984) World Series check on my house, they didn’t say, ‘Wait a minute, you only had 124 at-bats this season!’ �

Cora has a team-high 35 at-bats this spring.

“He’s a No. 1 pick,� Flannery said. “It’s his job to lose. That’s baseball. No. 1 draft picks get a chance to make the club.�

Cora says he wouldn’t mind playing Triple-A in the Pacific Coast League.

“I’d get to go to Hawaii for free,� he said.

To tell you the truth, he’s a little scared. Bowa had him lead off in the first spring training game of the year, which surprised Cora. He was facing the Angels’ John Candelaria in front of a big crowd, and said his knees were shaking.

“I tried too hard,� he said.

In that first at-bat, he hit a ball to the warning track. His head was spinning, he said. He came up later and didn’t notice that Bowa had flashed the take sign. All he cared about was doing something big.

A big mistake.

Bowa called him into his office and screamed at him. What had always impressed Bowa was Cora’s smart play, but what had gone wrong?

“Since then, I’ve been doing the little things,� Cora said. “He hasn’t talked to me hard since then. I’ll always remember. If I make it this year, that’ll be the turnaround. I was scared. I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to do.�

He had learned to play in Puerto Rico, where his father is a Padre scout. The Phillies drafted him out of high school, but his father wouldn’t let him sign. Cora had a 4.0 grade-point average in high school, and he was ordered to go to college. He enrolled at a Puerto Rican university.

“I’m a good student, I know that,� Cora said. “I’m cocky about that.�

But the summer before school started, he was playing in an American Legion tournament in Ohio and heard that Vanderbilt University needed a second baseman. And he had always wanted to study in the United States.

He didn’t speak English. A friend took him to a Vanderbilt football game, and Cora kept wondering why the quarterback never threw the ball to the wide-open receivers.

“He can’t,� said his friend. “They’re linemen.�

Cora spent three years at Vanderbilt and would have stayed if the Padres hadn’t taken him so high in the draft. He batted .324 in his first minor league season and was moved up to Double-A Beaumont last season.

Then he got stabbed.

It happened after a game in San Antonio. Cora says he usually takes his time getting out of the clubhouse, but he was planning to go out to dinner with one of the San Antonio players, so he dressed quickly. He said he was waiting for the team bus when he saw that three local kids were inside the bus, throwing things around. Cora told them to get out.

They left.

Cora was then joined by teammates Candy Sierra and Eric Hardgrave. They were chatting when Sierra said: “Joey, look!�

The three local kids had come back with seven of their friends. Cora said they hit Hardgrave over the head, knocking him to the ground, and that Sierra had a knife held to his throat. They pushed and punched Cora and stabbed him in the abdomen.

He missed most of the season and said he never was completely healthy until the year ended.

“A bunch of stitches there,� he said, pointing to the lower left side of his stomach.

A switch-hitter, Cora finished with a .305 batting average and 24 stolen bases. The Padres brought him to this spring camp as a non-roster player. Says McKeon: “I like the kid.�

Cora is his own critic. He wears Air Jordan sneakers, but he says he isn’t so fast that he flies.

“No, I’m not that fast,� he said. “I don’t think I’m that fast. I’m not a Vince Coleman. Hey, did we sign Tim Raines? I hope so. That way, I don’t have to steal bases. Oh, I can run better than average. Average is Carmelo (Martinez).�

Cora on Flannery: “I respect him, oh yeah. He’s been here six years, a long time. Every year, there’s second basemen of the future, and he’s always there in the end. You’ve got to respect that.�

Cora on competition: “I don’t expect more than going to Triple-A. Flannery can play, and so can Ready. Bip is good. He has a year under him. They’re all above me, so I don’t mind going to Triple-A.�

But Ready and Roberts don’t exactly have the inside track. Ready--distracted with his family problems--lifted weights over the winter but could not play winter ball. He’s supposedly a big hitter, but he has hit only a few singles here and there. He struck out looking Tuesday with the bases loaded.

“It’s still early,� Ready said.

Amos Otis, a Padre roving instructor, says Ready looks just like former Dodger and Cub Ron Cey, but Ready isn’t nearly as good as Cey in the field. He has been tried at third base as well as second, and when asked what was his favorite position, Ready winked and said: “The bathtub.�

Roberts hasn’t done much winking this spring. He is depressed that he has been used mostly as a pinch-runner. He has only three at-bats in “A� games.

“Three at-bats? The writing’s on the wall,� Roberts said Tuesday. “I’m not a dummy, you know. . . . I honestly don’t know if I have a shot. But you can’t make the team with just a few at-bats. I can’t worry about it, though, because it looks like it’s already predetermined.�

Roberts on Cora: “He’s got talent, and if that’s who they want to go with, fine. But I can match skills with anybody. I’ve improved my skills a lot from last year. If they can’t see that, there’s nothing I can do.�

Basically, it’s coming down to Cora versus Flannery. For Flannery, some things don’t change. In a recent “B� game that started at 10 a.m.--�B� games are usually for youngsters--he slid headfirst into third and was diving for line drives.

As for Cora, he posed for his first big league baseball card Tuesday.

Padre Notes Free agent Tim Raines said Tuesday that he’s still interested in playing for the Padres, even though Ballard Smith, the Padre president, terminated negotiations with Raines’ agent Monday. “I’m not sure it’s over,� Raines said. “I think it’s up to them. It’s out of our hands.� Raines said he was not annoyed at the Padres. “I’d still like to play there. Anything’s possible, I think.� Raines also said he might even sign for less than $1.2 million a year, which is what he and his representatives offered to sign for Monday. Meanwhile, Raines’ agent, Tom Reich, says negotiations with the Padres are over. “It is definitely over. Nothing could be more over. There will be no more negotiations with San Diego.� . . .

The telephones never stopped ringing at the Padre offices Tuesday, as Padre fans voiced their displeasure over Smith’s decision not to sign Raines. “We’re letting customer relations handle the calls,� said Elten Schiller, vice president in charge of business operations. He said some fans have called to cancel season tickets, but their money can’t be refunded if they have already paid for the seats. What did Schiller’s office tell angry fans? One secretary told an irate caller: “There’s nothing I can tell you. That was Ballard Smith’s decision.� . . .

The Padres lost to the Cubs Tuesday, 4-3. They trailed, 4-1, entering the ninth, but then pinch-hitter Kevin Mitchell hit a two-out RBI single to cut the lead to 4-2. Runners were on first and third when rookie Randell Byers pinch-hit. Byers--facing Cub reliever Lee Smith--lifted a bloop single to left, scoring Tim Flannery from third, but Mitchell was called out trying for third. “He was safe,� Manager Larry Bowa said. “They (the umpires) wanted to get out of here, so what can you do?� Mitchell wasn’t supposed to be sliding anyway. He has had continual back pain after being hit by a car on Feb. 22, and he found out Monday that he has a bruised kidney. Doctors told him to take a few days off, but he begged Bowa to play. “I wasn’t supposed to slide or do anything hard,� Mitchell said. “. . . But you’ve got to try to win, man.� . . . In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, first baseman Steve Garvey was wearing a strange green cap during batting practice. Asked how he would describe it, he said: “It’s a truly Irish beanie with a shamrock on the top.�