DATE: Thursday, June 5, 1997                TAG: 9706050660

SECTION: SPORTS                  PAGE: C1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: TOM ROBINSON

                                            LENGTH:   64 lines

AN OPPORTUNITY . . . BUT ALSO A JOB

Mike Cuddyer got it right. The magnitude of what happened Tuesday, when he and teammate John Curtice were picked in the first round of the baseball draft, made it ``a great time for Great Bridge and the community.''

We all can puff out our chests and brag a little on what two of our own have accomplished, the way we shared in the excitement two years ago when Norfolk's Joe Smith was the NBA's top draft choice.

Watching Cuddyer and Curtice become the second pair of teammates ever chosen in the first round was historic, thrilling and fun.

Now, like it or not, it is about business.

Even as they competed in the state playoffs, Cuddyer and Curtice became commodities; vessels of prime talent with price tags that, in a cockeyed world of riches gambled on raw teenagers, will reach into seven figures for their signatures on contracts from the Minnesota Twins and Boston Red Sox, respectively.

That is why on the day after the happiest day of his life, Curtice could open USA Today and read, in an opinion lifted from Baseball America magazine, that he ``has a sloppy body and bad mechanics.''

In the pros, they pull few punches, even for 17-year-olds staring at the opportunity of a lifetime.

If they sign - and Cuddyer isn't necessarily a slam dunk because of his scholarship to Florida State - Cuddyer and Curtice will be dispatched to low-rent minor league apprenticeships, where they will discover just how little they really know about playing baseball.

The Twins have rookie league teams in Fort Myers, Fla., and Elizabethton, Tenn. Most Red Sox rookies also play in Fort Myers or Lowell, Mass. Wherever they are sent, they will be thrown together with kids who were the best players on their high school or college teams, too.

If they sign, they will be away from home for nearly three months this summer, learning to cope with the most unforgiving team sport, the one with daunting built-in levels of failure and frustration.

If they sign, they will practice and play ball for hours a day, through heat and fatigue, sore arms and legs. They will work like they have never worked before, and find that they must be their own best friend like never before.

They will find apartments, do laundry, maybe cook. They will have curfew on the road and will be fined real money if they miss it.

They will learn to call the man who runs their team ``Skipper'' or ``Skip,'' never ``Coach.'' Coaches are for kids. Managers are for men.

If they sign, they will get such a rush out of wearing a professional uniform, standing beside a dugout and signing an autograph for some little kid that they won't believe it.

And when they take their first paycheck to the bank, they will probably say, in spite of themselves, ``Wow. I'm being paid to play baseball.''

There will be expectations and pressure, of course, for they will be products to be developed on a schedule and later marketed.

If they sign, Cuddyer and Curtice will be spotlighted at every turn, critiqued at each rung of their climb, examined for brilliance and flaws.

Their skin will thicken. It will have to. But as first-round choices, they will receive every chance to succeed, to blossom, to flourish.

So yes, the great, Great Bridge draft made history, and Cuddyer and Curtice will be forever linked, whatever else happens from here.

They have done their part for those who live vicariously through them. They have made us proud.

We can thank them with wishes for the happiest of endings to their baseball dreams.

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