THE FLUID STYLE OF ROD CAREW: IN TOTAL CONTROL AT BAT

ROD CAREW at bat tickles the fancy, unless, naturally, one is sitting in the foe's dugout, or facing him from the pitcher's mound. The California Angels' first baseman, one of the most remarkable and successful hitters of the last three decades, is off to perhaps the best start of any batter in baseball history. Carew was hitting nearly .500 - .500! - after his first 100 times up this season.

Carew is kaleidoscopic at the plate. A left-handed hitter, Carew seems to have an infinite variety of batting stances, each depending on the pitcher and the situation.

One stance has him midway in the batter's box, crouching low, fingers flexing on the bat, as if he's plopped on a milk stool and handling an udder.

A second stance is straight up, like a park statue. A third finds Carew leaning - tilting - far back in the box, bat held flat and nearly parallel to the waist. Sometimes his teammate, Reggie Jackson, can't contain his amusement. ''Lay down, Rod,'' calls Jackson, ''lay down.''

To Birdie Tebbetts, the former catcher and manager and Yankee scout who now keeps his eyes peeled for the Cleveland Indians, Carew hits with a tennis racquet.

''He serves the ball to right field, he lobs it to left, he does about anything he wants with the ball,'' said Tebbetts. ''I have never seen him when he hasn't been in control of the pitcher. Or should I say in control of his own mind at the plate. He studies the pitchers, concentrates on the ball, and has the confidence - the great hitter's arrogance - that every time up he's going to get a base hit.''

Following yesterday's game, Rodney Cline Carew, at the senescent age of 37, was batting .442, with 50 hits in 113 times up. Only Jimmie Foxx in 1932 and Stan Musial in 1958 started a season better - both getting 50 hits in their first 107 times up.

Yet the terrific start this year comes after what must be one of the most disappointing seasons of his career - and one that has added to the criticism by some that this spray, or ''singles'' hitter, doesn't drive in runs like a home-run slugger.

Carew has an ambition to play in the World Series. He has been on four teams that lost in the league playoffs, one step from the World Series. The fourth team was the Angels of last season, who, after going ahead two games to nothing against the Brewers, lost the next three games and the playoffs.

The fifth and final game came down to the ninth inning, with the Brewers ahead, 4-3. The Angels put a runner on second base, with two outs, and Rod Carew coming to bat.

The capacity crowd of 54,968 fans at County Stadium in Milwaukee quieted, millions more watched on television. And Carew faced a hefty hard-throwing rookie relief pitcher named Peter Ladd. Before the game, Carew had called his wife, Marilyn, from her seat in the stands. ''No matter what happens,'' Carew said, ''no tears. O.K.? Someone's got to win, and someone's got to lose.'' ''For the last couple of weeks of the division race and the playoffs,'' Marilyn would recall, ''I was a wreck. All the wives were. It was such a tight race and the games were close and we wanted our guys to win so much.''

Carew, meanwhile, would try to remain cool. When he came to bat against Ladd and with the season in the balance, he didn't feel undue pressure, he said. ''I know I'm going to hit the ball,'' he said. ''I just wanted to hit it hard. After that, you can't dictate to the ball to go into this hole, or to take a crazy bounce over a guy's shoulder.''

He expected Ladd to be throwing as hard as he could. There would be nothing cute - no sinkers, sliders, or floaters - not in this situation.

He lined one foul down the left-field line. He took a ball, and then another strike. All on fastballs. On the following pitch, Ladd threw a fastball waist high and on the outer part of the plate.

He swung and made good contact. He hit it sharply. Just what he wanted to do. The ball took one bounce and landed right in the glove of the shortstop, Robin Yount.

''As soon as I hit it,'' Carew recalled, ''I said to myself, 'It's over.' '' The wives were waiting for the players in the hotel lobby in Milwaukee after the game. ''The players were very quiet,'' said Marilyn Carew, ''and the wives, well, we were all crying. It was like at a funeral.'' Carew, though, said that he tried not to dwell on it. ''You just can't spend any time second-guessing yourself,'' he said. ''We did the best we could - I tried the hardest I could - and there was nothing more we could do.''

And when he arrived home in Anaheim, said Carew, his three children - he has three daughters, Charryse, 9, Stephanie, 7, and Michelle, 5 -were delighted to see him, and to know he didn't have to play baseball any more that year. ''Now you can take us to the mall,'' said Michelle.

''It helps give you perspective,'' said Carew, with a laugh.

Carew was sitting on the dugout bench before a recent game, his long musician's fingers casually holding a bat between his legs, and recalled this.

His family, for the most part, gives Carew his diversion from the ball park and sometimes even from his own, deeply sensitive nature. In the game against Oakland recently when he went 4 for 5 and hit a grand-slam homer, he called home afterward and told his daughter Charryse.

''Daddy,'' she said. ''I had the same stats.'' He thought she was kidding. She wasn't. In her Bobby Soxers' softball league, Charryse Carew also went 4 for 5 and belted a grand slam. Some of the girls who pitch against Charryse Carew must surely appreciate how someone like Bob Stanley, the Red Sox' ace relief pitcher, feels about her father. When asked what kind of success he has had with Carew over the years, Stanley, who has been facing Carew for seven years, replied, ''Success? Rod owns me.''

A goodly number of pitchers admit to being in Stanley's category in relation to Carew. Now in his 17th season in the major leagues, still graceful, still fluid, Carew has a .331 lifetime average. Second to him among active players is Brett, at .316. Carew has won seven batting titles - his first was in 1969, and then he won six in seven years in the '70s. Only four men have equaled or surpassed his number of batting titles: Rogers Hornsby and Stan Musial, seven each, Honus Wagner with eight, and Ty Cobb, 12.

Despite this, Carew has suffered the criticism of some sportswriters, and been jeered by some fans. One of the jabs at Carew is, as mentioned, that he does not hit in the clutch - that is, that he doesn't drive in a lot of runs. ''That's damn stupid,'' said Tebbetts. ''He's a lead-off hitter mostly. A guy in that position is supposed to get on base, or keep a rally going - or start one. That's exactly what Carew does.''

Carew's high for runs batted in was in 1977 with the Twins when, batting third and fourth in the lineup, he knocked in 100 runs. Last year, batting first, he had 44 runs batted in.

A team statistic last season showed that Carew batted .239 with men in scoring position. ''That's a phony statistic,'' said Tebbetts. ''The only thing that means anything along those lines is what a batter does with a man on third with less than two outs. Then, it's his responsibility to somehow get the runner in, by hitting it past a drawn-in infield, or uppercutting to hit a fly ball so the man on third can tag up and score. And in 17 years of watching Carew, I have rarely seen him not get the runner in in a situation like that.''

In a clutch situation, Dennis Eckersley, the Red Sox ace starting pitcher, says he would rather face a power hitter than someone like Carew.

''The big hitters air it out,'' said Eckersley. ''You have a chance of striking them out. With Carew, you know he's going to hit the ball - and probably hit it hard. You just hope it goes at somebody.''

This season, Carew has had a better start even than in 1977 when he finished the year at .388 - with 239 hits in 616 times at bat. He was just seven hits short of becoming the first batter since Ted Williams in 1941 to bat .400 or better.

Carew is healthier than he has been in seasons past. He played almost all of last year, for example, with two cracked bones in his right hand, the guiding hand of the bat for a left-handed batter. He was virtually hitting one-handed, and still managed a .319 batting average, third in the league, and at one point hit in 25 straight games, the longest streak in the majors in 1982. And it was the 14th straight season Carew has hit over .300, an achievement bettered by only five other players.

Despite this, at Anaheim Stadium he has been the target at times of the condemnation of some fans. Just before the players' strike in 1981, the Angels were obviously disappointing the fans and were booed. Carew told a reporter that he felt the fans were fickle. Not all the fans, but some. It is not an earthshaking insight, to say the least. Yet the story received throbbing headlines locally, and Carew became a prime target of abuse. It became so foul, in fact, that he had to be escorted by security officers to his car after a game.

Now, with the Angels at the top of the American League West and Carew leading the league's batters, he is cheered. Proving, ironically, his original contention.

The Carews have lived in Anaheim for five years now, ever since the parsimonious Twins traded Carew to California - before he could become a free agent. The owner of the Angels, Gene Autry, who used to warble ''Tumbling Tumbleweed'' for a living, opened his saddle bags, it is said, to pay Carew nearly $1 million a year. It is doubtful that even a one-time cowboy troubadour would keep money in saddle bags, but it is true that he paid Carew that sweet salary.

(An aside: Carew hit only 3 homers last season and has just 87 for his career. Tebbetts, among other baseball people, feels that Carew could have hit 25 or 30 homers a year if he had wanted to - he's that strong. Did Tebbetts think Carew perhaps made a mistake and should have gone for more homers?

(''If you audited his bank account,'' said Tebbetts, ''I'm sure you'd find that he followed the right path.'') This is the last year of Carew's five-year contract with the Angels. Carew has said that he might retire, or that he might move on.

It is unlikely that with, surely, some five good seasons left in his bat, he would call it quits. Especially for the recompense he commands.

Carew is not foolish about money. He is careful with it now that he has it. He has not forgotten his boyhood in Gatun, Panama. He was so poor that at school he would walk beside the wall of the corridor because he was embarrassed at the sound made by the flapping soles of his only pair of shoes.

And with a father who, he said, beat him and abused him and finally left the home, Carew remembers that it was on the ball field that his talents flourished. ''I felt there,'' he said, ''like I was king.''

He has never squandered his abilities. Carew, lean at 6 feet tall, still trains hard. His weight - about 178 - is nearly the same as when he broke in to the majors 17 years ago. ''Sickening, isn't it?'' said Marilyn Carew, with undisguised envy.

Carew says he still takes extra batting practice and still practices bunting diligently. He remains one of the best bunters in the game. He bunts the ball with a backspin, so that almost no matter how close the third baseman plays, he can usually beat out a hit. In the year he batted .388 he bunted safely nine times with two strikes on him. He has also stolen home 17 times, the last time in 1981.

''Now,'' he said, ''the pitchers always stretch when I'm on third. I don't think I'll steal home again - unless I have to.'' He doesn't, of course, run quite as well as he once did, but he says he runs smarter. ''I'm more conscious of where the outfielders are playing when I'm on base, and I don't take such wide turns anymore running around the bases. I'm still learning.''

But it is his hitting that continues to set him apart. A telling example of Carew's virtuosity at bat came in a game last Tuesday night against the Red Sox at Fenway Park. Carew had been on the bench resting a sore knee, the result of a collision at first base a few days before. It was the top of the ninth now, the game was tied, 5-5, and the Angels' manager, John McNamara, sent Carew up to pinch hit.

The pitcher was Luis Aponte, a 28-year-old right-handed reliever with a little more than a year's major league experience. Carew, in the red-billed plastic batting helmet glistening under the stadium lights, gray uniform, and red baseball shoes, crouched near the back of the batter's box. It was probably taken from somewhere in the middle of his batting-stance book.

Carew had faced Aponte before and had observed him. He is aware of how some pitchers will throw a fastball close to overhand, but drop a little for their slider and drop even more for their sinker.

Carew's eyesight is sharp enough to follow the rotation of the ball - at up to 90 miles an hour - from the moment it leaves the pitcher's hand just 60 feet 6 inches away. ''He picks up the ball better than most,'' Eckersley had said. ''And his wrists are so quick that even if you fool him, he has time to recover.''

Now, Aponte threw a slider down and in. Carew saw it clearly and fouled it down the first-base line. ''It was a nasty pitch,'' said Carew. ''A good pitcher's pitch. I knew it wasn't the kind of pitch I could do much with. Some hitters will try to do what they can with even a pitch that's tough. I don't. I can foul it off, or just take it.''

Fred Lynn, the Angels' slugging outfielder, said that every hitter generally gets one pitch each time up that he can hit. The good hitters consistently take advantage of it. He had said that this season, Carew was getting hits on that one pitch. And that first against Aponte was not for him.

Nor was the second, a ball. The third pitch was another good one by Aponte. ''It was a sinker down at the outside corner,'' said Carew. And he fouled it down the third-base line.

The next pitch was a forkball that broke wickedly inside at the wrists. Carew, who had choked up on the bat with two strikes, strode, then halted his swing.

Ball two. ''Last year,'' he said, ''I couldn't have stopped because my hand hurt so much. I'd have punched out and walked back to the dugout.''

''It was a perfect pitch,'' Aponte said after the game. ''I think any other hitter in the big leagues would have gone for that 1-2 fork.''

Now it was 2-2. Aponte threw four more strong pitches. None was to Carew's liking and, with uncanny bat control, he fouled off each one. ''I could sense his frustration now,'' said Carew. ''He had thrown me some great pitches, and I was still standing up there.'' It was true, and Aponte would acknowledge that he had ''thrown Carew everything but the kitchen sink.'' Then Aponte wound up and whistled in a fastball. Carew saw it as clearly as if it were a cantaloupe tossed to him. The ball came in waist high and a little on the outside of the plate. Delicious. Carew smacked it in the alley in left-center. It hit the wall at 390 feet on one bounce.

Carew pulled up with a double, and scored when Juan Beniquez, the next batter, singled. It decided the game. The Angels won by that 6-5 score. ''I didn't give in to him,'' Carew said afterward of Aponte. ''I made him give in to me.'' It was a very fine job - for many baseball followers, the stamp of Rodney Cline Carew.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/16/sports/the-fluid-style-of-rod-carew-in-total-control-at-bat.html?pagewanted=all