Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 10, 1994 TAG: 9404100055
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Confusion overwhelms him when he gets behind the wheel of a car.
"I've spent all kinds of money on gas since I've been here," said Smith, who joined his fifth team in 13 years during the off-season. "I can't find my way around town. I can see the ballpark but I can't get to it."
The judgment of distances is now a mystery to him.
"I had no idea how far it was from the bullpen [at Oriole Park at Camden Yards] to the mound," he groaned.
Unseen forces threaten him.
"I don't want some guy who has me on a Rotisserie team to kill me on the way from the ballpark back to the hotel," he said. "I don't want to cost anybody $200."
Chores that were once a snap for the the 6-foot-6, 269-pounder from Caster, La., are no longer so.
"I never take all my warmup pitches anymore," he said. "At my age, I don't want to leave all I have in warmups."
The perils of the baseball geriatric set Smith can expound at length on. At age 36, a guy knows that his time draws nigh when instead of some shower clogs and a towel, the clubhouse guy issues him a cane and an economy-sized bottle of Geritol.
So it didn't come as any great surprise to Smith that last winter, as he moved into yet another period of free agency, the phone wasn't exactly jumping off his desk with activity.
Forty-six saves for two teams in two leagues (the St. Louis Cardinals and New York Yankees) in calendar year 1993 must not have had the same cachet such a feat once had.
Nor did a total of 401 acts of rescuing distressed teams from hazardous circumstances. That sum of saves is more than any human has ever accomplished before.
But that didn't mean diddly to real baseball people because everybody knows what the situation is.
Smith has lost his fastball, experts agreed.
As Smith has so wryly observed, aside from 46 saves a year ago, he must have had one deuce of a dreadful season.
Yeah, boy. The big dude mucked up his calling so badly last year that he converted 18 straight opportunities at one point and had more strikeouts (60) than innings pitched (58) for the seventh time in his career.
And it came to pass that the phone rang but thrice. There were the Cleveland Indians, the Seattle Mariners and the Baltimore Orioles.
After a quick study of the prospectuses, Smith went with the denizens of Camden Yards. After slogging through half a life with heartbreakers and stomach churners such as the Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox, Smith figured it would be nice to spend his golden years working for new Baltimore owner Peter Angelos, a man whose pockets leaked treasure with every step.
Angelos was one busy businessman during the off-season, hiring the likes of mercenaries Chris Sabo, Rafael Palmeiro and Sid Fernandez for something like $42 million and pulled the plug on former closer Gregg Olson, who had a club-record 160 saves and an ailing and iffy elbow.
When a man has a hole in his bullpen, there are riskier investments than Lee Smith, who obligingly signed in the lower right-hand corner.
At $1.5 million ($2.5 million with incentives) he came cheap.
The big fellow has saves against every single one of the big league clubs, one of only two firemen (Jeff Reardon is the other) to do that. Starting the year, Smith had saves in all but three major league ballparks and he made that two when he required a pair of pitches to bail out the Birds for a 6-3 victory over the Kansas City Royals at Camden Yards on Opening Day.
Through Thursday, he had two saves in two appearances, a notable performance for a man alleged to have no fastball.
Looks like Smith is going to like it at Camden Yards, even if overzealous security personnel hounded him for identification upon his first arrival.
"I didn't know I was supposed to have ID just to get in the yard," he said.
Smith has other anxieties. With five guys who hit 20 or more home runs last year (Cal Ripken, Jr., Harold Baines, Chris Hoiles, Sabo, and Palmeiro) Smith is concerned that the Orioles are going to score so many runs and be the authors of so many blowouts, that the short reliever will never get in the ballgame.
That would be a shame for Smith because he can make himself right at home in Camden Yards, especially with that shaggy prairie they call an infield.
"Oh man," he said of the groundball engulfing flora. "I'm going to put the fertilizer on it myself."
Such groundskeeping will have to wait until he is able to negotiate that tough Baltimore geography and find his way to the ballpark, though.
by CNB