McCall Says He's Ready to Make His Move in the Minors : Baseball: The 6-7 first baseman, who played at Rancho Alamitos and OCC, has compiled some impressive numbers in Class A. Now he hopes the Indians will promote him.

By MIKE DiGIOVANNA

Aug. 16, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

With apologies to the good people of Columbus, Ga., Rod McCall hopes that after this baseball season he never has to see y’all again.

Not that he doesn’t like you or your town--he does. McCall thinks the folks there are right nice, and he loves fishing the local lakes and rivers.

He just doesn’t want to play another season for the Columbus RedStixx, the Cleveland Indians’ Class-A affiliate.

“This is definitely my last season here, and if it’s not, I might hang ‘em up, because I ain’t coming back here,” McCall said. “If there are people that good in front of me, this might be the time to ask for my release and hope to get picked up by another team. I don’t think I should be here.”

Not to worry, Rod. Neither do the Indians.

The Cleveland front office has taken notice of the season that McCall, a former Orange Coast College baseball player and four-sport athlete at Rancho Alamitos High, has put together at Columbus. And his performance--the first baseman is batting .243 with 18 home runs and 74 runs batted in--will most likely be rewarded.

“I don’t think he’ll be in Columbus next year,” said Mark Shapiro, Cleveland’s assistant to baseball operations. “If he comes to spring training (next season) with a good attitude and continues to hit the ball hard, we have to take him to the next level. How high he goes depends on our organizational meetings and how he does in spring training, but he’ll have a shot at double A.”

Shapiro said McCall, 6 feet 7 and 230 pounds, is one of the top five or six power-hitting prospects in the Indians’ organization, but it wasn’t until this season that he began acting the part.

A ninth-round pick after playing one season (1990) at Orange Coast, McCall hit only .163 with one home run and 11 RBIs in his first pro season, for Cleveland’s rookie league team at Burlington, N.C. He hit .217 with five homers and 35 RBIs in 1991 at Columbus but has made drastic strides this season.

McCall, who bats left-handed and throws right-handed, is using a heavier bat this season, but besides that, he can’t think of any major adjustments that have led to the improvement.

“I’m just concentrating on seeing the ball, bearing down, but there have been no major changes,” said McCall, 20.

Shapiro has a pretty good clue. The reports the Indians are getting is that McCall’s mental tools are finally beginning to catch up with his physical tools.

“His work habits have been a sore spot in the past, but he really showed some things during the off-season,” Shapiro said. “I think he’s decided he’s going to work hard and do the things necessary to get to the next level.

“He doesn’t have a major attitude problem, but he’s the kind of guy who wasn’t quite aware of what it took to succeed at this level. He’s such a gifted athlete that things have always come easily for him in the past, but he didn’t have the proper work ethic.”

Mike Mayne, who coached McCall at Orange Coast, could see something like this coming. McCall had a decent season for OCC in 1990, batting .248 with five homers and 39 RBIs, but he was still a project that needed much development.

“I thought Cleveland would have to give him time to fail for three or four years so he would have time to develop,” Mayne said. “He wasn’t good enough to play pro ball, but he was good enough to sign.”

McCall agrees. If he had it to do over again, he said he would have remained at OCC another year. But when the Indians flashed a $50,000 signing bonus in front of him and told him everything he wanted to hear, the minor leagues seemed like the place he ought to be.

“It’s hard, because I didn’t know anyone who really knows the pro game, and no one said much to me when I signed,” McCall said. “They (scouts) kind of talk you into it. They say they like to sign guys young, that this is a good year for you to sign. That’s what happened to me.”

McCall has experienced some growing pains in the minors, and it hasn’t helped that he’s usually the biggest and most athletic-looking player on the field.

South Atlantic League fans, thinking McCall is some left-handed version of Frank Howard, expect him to hit 500-foot home runs every time up, and they’re often disappointed. McCall has hit some prodigious blasts, including a ball that traveled over the train tracks beyond the right-field fence at Charleston, W.Va., and was estimated to have been hit more than 450 feet.

But he just passed the 100-strikeout mark last week, so his whiffs far outweigh his whacks.

“I can hit ‘em pretty far, but if I strike out, the fans get all over me,” McCall said. “I’m only 20, not 30, and they expect a lot out of me. The organization expects a lot out of me. But I’m finally starting to play up to those expectations.”

The high number of strikeouts hasn’t concerned the Indians as long as McCall is hitting a high number of home runs, driving in a lot of runs and adjusting to better pitching as he rises in the organization.

“That’s one of the prices you pay with a power hitter,” Shapiro said. “He has to be more disciplined at the plate, but if he maintains his production, that’s not a problem. There aren’t many power guys around, and when you find guys with the potential to hit the ball the way he does, you get excited. You want to stick with him.”

If the Indians’ investment in McCall pays off in the majors, they’ll be glad McCall stuck with baseball. He actually played four sports during his senior year (1988-89) at Rancho Alamitos: football in the fall, basketball and wrestling in the winter and baseball in the spring. He also had a football scholarship offer to Oklahoma.

McCall was a two-way starter on the Vaquero football team--nothing unusual about that--but the positions he played were an odd mix: quarterback and defensive end. Can you imagine the Rams asking Jim Everett to get around Redskin tackle Jim Lachey and sack Mark Rypien?

McCall, who was 6-5, 210 pounds at the time, also wasn’t your average quarterback. After pitching to a running back, he’d head down field looking to wallop a defender to clear a path.

“There’s not too many quarterbacks who lead the charge on sweeps--they’re usually standing around,” McCall said. “But I hated standing around and doing nothing. I loved hitting guys. When things are going bad here, sometimes I wish I would have played football instead of baseball.”

But there haven’t been as many bad times this season as there were in the past few, and if he keeps hitting the ball, the good times will continue to roll. Cleveland’s high Class-A team at Kinston, N.C., would be the next step up for McCall, but the Indians might promote him to double-A Canton, Ohio, next season.

“That sounds good,” McCall said. “They like the first baseman they have at Kinston (Clyde Pough, who is on the Indians’ 40-man, major league roster), but maybe we’ll share time at Canton. I don’t know what will happen, but I get the sense they like me.”

A lot more than McCall likes Columbus, Ga.