Garvey Wants Better Finale Than Role as Injured Padre

Imagine Neil Diamond making his last concert appearance as the opening act for Cyndi Lauper or Paul Newman bowing out as an extra in a saloon fight or Sugar Ray Leonard getting a last pay check as Hulk Hogan’s buffoon.

We’re talking woeful endings to wonderful careers.

We might have had just such an ending here in San Diego over the weekend. What happened Saturday night at the stadium may well be baseball’s version of Secretariat finishing his career in a claiming race at Agua Caliente.

The situation was this. A pitifully sad baseball team was in the ninth inning of what would be a 6-0 loss. To pinch-hit in such a circumstance is a chore simultaneously thankless and hopeless.

This assignment went to a player who has: the National League record for most consecutive games played, the major league record for consecutive errorless games at his position and the major league record for best career fielding percentage at first base. He has been named most valuable player twice in 10 All-Star appearances and has been MVP twice in five League Championship Series. He has had six seasons with 200 or more hits and has hit 272 career home runs.

This mop-up task went to a man who will someday be enshrined in the Hall of Fame.

Steve Garvey.

“I lined out to center,” Garvey said Tuesday. “It would have been nice if it had fallen in, because it would have given me 2,600 hits. But what will be will be.”

That is the way Garvey must approach the future. What will be will be and what won’t be won’t be. The problem is that there is a possibility there won’t be a future for him as a baseball player.

That role he played last Saturday night, a bit player in a bad play, could have been his last. He went on the disabled list Monday and will undergo surgery on his left shoulder Saturday. Surgery will knock him out for the remainder of the 1987 season, and he will be 39 years old in 1988.

If this should be the end, and Garvey insists it isn’t, it is no way to go--not with a .211 average, one home run and an obscure role as a pinch-hitter.

Guys of Garvey’s stature are supposed to go out with thunder, not disappear like one wispy cloud blowing over the horizon. They are supposed to go out with game-winning hits, tipped caps and standing ovations.

There were 47,000 fans at the game Saturday, at least at the beginning. They came as much to collect beach towels as to watch a baseball game, and they went away without an inkling that they had witnessed what was surely Steve Garvey’s last at-bat as a Padre and perhaps his last at-bat in baseball.

That’s the kind of year it has been for Mr. Garvey. Very early in this season, he was given a seat on the bench and basically told: “We’ll wake you up when we need you . . . if we need you.” John Kruk and Carmelo Martinez would play first base, and Garvey would sit out the last few months of his Padre years. An extension of his Padre contract was unlikely before the injury.

“Looking at the season in spring training, I thought there was a possibility that exactly what happened would happen,” Garvey said. “You start slow and you have to make changes. The Padres have to evaluate their younger players for ’88 and ’89.”

Obviously, Garvey was not a “younger player” who needed evaluation--at least not by the organization. Garvey is at a stage in life where he must undergo an evaluation from a different direction.

His own.

As much as he has done in baseball and as well as he has situated himself outside baseball, is there any reason to try to continue his playing career in 1988? This would seem to be a question to consider at some length.

However, Garvey has already come to a conclusion that Saturday night’s line-drive out to center field was not the conclusion of his career.

“I would like to play next year,” he said. “I have a feeling I can still perform, and I’ve always projected 1988 as being my last year. If I have a different role, such as starting against left-handed pitchers and pinch-hitting, that’s fine with me. If I know I can’t perform to specific capabilities, then I won’t play.”

Then it has not occurred to him that Saturday night’s at-bat might be his last?

“I don’t look at it that way,” he said. “I look at the immediate situation and focus ahead on the positive rather than look back at the negative.”

And 1987 certainly has been a negative for Steve Garvey in every sense, from his diminishing role on a last-place team to an injury that will likely cast him into the free-agent market as damaged goods with a rehabilitating shoulder.

As orchestrated as his life seems to be, this was not the manner in which Garvey envisioned ending his career.

“Surely not like this,” he said. “Gosh, I have been blessed. I’ve had a wonderful career. The more I think about it, the more I realize how many of my dreams have been answered.”

He hesitated, perhaps the reality of 1987 intruding upon his thoughts.

“I just have a feeling,” he said, “that there’s a different ending out there.”