DAN WILSON ARTICLES PG. 8
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Bat to the future

It was only the first day of camp, and it was only coach John McLaren on the mound, but Dan Wilson did some things with his bat Thursday he hadn't done in a while ... a long while. He drove the ball well to the opposite field, dropped a couple of liners into right and placed a few balls just inside either line. He even hit one or two out. Manager Lou Piniella watched and oohed: "Wilson's got that Valentine's Day swing, a sweetheart." Lee Elia, back as team uncle and part-time hitting adviser for the first time in three years, watched one shot sail out of the practice park and wondered: "Did we move the fences in?" Piniella countered: "No, with Wilson up, we break out the juiced baseballs." The give-and-take is not scripted, but there is a rationale to the repertoire. With Elia back, the Mariners have begun the campaign to make Wilson first comfortable and then a contributing part of their lineup again. The catcher was an American League All-Star in 1996, and his stat line since was a sight only a skier would appreciate: down, down, down and down again. He hit .285 that All-Star year, then .270, .252, .266, and last year fell to .235. Meantime, his homers also have done a dot-com: 18-15-9-7-5, and RBI 83-74-44-38-27. What happened? A number of things, but seemingly most hurtful was that Elia left after the 1997 season. He was virtually forced out of the organization by former General Manager Woody Woodward and was replaced by Jesse Barfield, who never connected with a number of players in his two years. After hitting .287 and .280 as a team in Elia's last two seasons, Seattle fell to .276 and .269 in 1998-99. Gerald Perry, who came in as hitting coach last season, stopped the drop and got a team without Ken Griffey Jr. to hit .269 again, as runs bumped from 859/859 under Barfield to 907 despite the move to pitching-friendly Safeco Field. Wilson, who had gone from .216 to .278 to .285 working with Elia, was foremost among those that Barfield could not help. Yet Wilson said little about what was more than coincidence. "I don't knock people," he said after a workout last week. "I don't know if it would be fair to anyone to bring them into this, fair to Jesse or to Lee. I'm a professional, and I've been playing a long time. I should be able to master my own problems.'' But Wilson acknowledged his troubles corresponded with Barfield's time with the ballclub. As he put it: "Jesse was a good hitting coach, and Gerald is an outstanding hitting coach. But it's good having Lee back to work with Gerald (Perry) and me. Sometimes when you click with a coach, a lot of things come into play mentally. However, I'm not here to blame people. Ultimately, I'm in control of my own destiny." Elia agreed. "It's no one's fault, things happen," he said. "A guy gets off a certain daily routine or preparation or work ethic. It has an effect you may not see at first, but it takes a toll." The start of the trouble, Elia said, could be going hitless in a series with a couple or three hard outs, and the next team you face has scouted what seems to be a successful way of getting you out. "You see more of the same pitches, you try to adjust," Elia said. "You start pressing a bit." Wilson got too pull conscious. As Piniella described it, "He started to swing around the ball, not inside it. He's at his best when he's got that nice right-center field stroke, and he had lost that increasingly. Then last year he seemed to lose confidence, too." Watching last season from the Toronto side as Blue Jay bench coach, Elia noticed that Wilson had lost the fundamentals they had worked so hard to establish years earlier. "We've started a program to get them back," said the veteran coach, in his 42nd year in baseball. "Both Gerald and I (want) ... to get him comfortable again, which is a huge part of success." Elia spent time in Seattle in January with Wilson and Perry, who has no problem with Elia's assistance. "The idea is to get the best from our hitters," Perry said. "Danny had a productive relationship with Lee years ago. When they started working together I just step aside and listen. I can learn, too." The key to Elia's coaching technique is the batting tee, which can be set low or high, in or out. Elia's routine is built around a session of hitting off the tee every day before a hitter takes pregame batting practice. "To me, it's fundamental to building a good swing," Elia said. "You build consistency and bat speed. Get off the program and you're vulnerable to bad habits. "You have to stay with the program, like a golfer that shoots 68-70 but before he goes home he hits another bucket of balls." The coach ticked off two things that should help Wilson. The first is the fact he has hit well in the past, and knows he can hit if he's swinging well. "The other plus for us is that Danny has a great work ethic," Elia said. "You don't have that and your exercise is just a waste of hot water and towels." In his seasons of struggle, while his work ethic held up, Wilson wondered if he'd ever get his good swing back. "Over the years I've vented occasionally," he said. "I did get frustrated. The game is frustrating when you run into funks. You know it's a game of second chances ... but also a game of `what have you done for me lately?' "You always know it's a mental game. But until you go through a tough time or two, you don't fully understand what they mean by that." In regard to the delicate balance that is baseball performance, physical vs. finesse, technique vs. temperament, Wilson now qualifies as a Zen master, an expert in the inner game of ball. At times in his trouble he worried about working too hard, and developing what he calls "paralysis by analysis." "As you try to think through your trouble, you're aware that the best results often seem to come when you're not aware of what you are doing or how you are doing it," Wilson said. "But in the end I'm not receptive to backing off. I've always believed in hard work. You just have to be careful not to cross the line into the area of overworking it." At no position is the delicacy of the sport more in play than catching. No player can afford to take offensive woes onto the field with them, because a lapse in concentration can hurt one's team. But in catching, such a mistake could be fatal, a poor pitch called in a win/lose situation. "Danny's got the extra burden of being a catcher, having to work with the pitching staff," Piniella said. "But no matter how badly he might be doing offensively, he's always done his usual good job of that." For Wilson, playing well in the field was a saving counterpoint to performing poorly at the plate. He is regarded as one of the game's premier receivers, annually among the best at throwing out runners, last year 39 percent, seventh best in the majors. "It's a grind each day, and you try to do something to contribute to a team win," Wilson said. "There is a certain amount of joy you take in winning, in achieving something as a team. In fact, the only thing that helps when you struggle hitting is that you can help your team in any way, a bunt, a play, a throw." Helping his team to the postseason three times in six years has eased Wilson's burden of notoriety made so much of during the nationally-televised ALCS against the Yankees last year, of going 0-for-42 lifetime in the playoffs. That stood as baseball's worst ever, but he snapped it with a single in Game 6 of the New York series. "People tell me all the time that Bob Costas talked a lot about it last year," Wilson said. "But I feel that I was having a poor performance and you can talk about it. You can't look at it any other way. "Where being talked about is really tough is when they bring character or integrity into it, and I don't think anything was said of my character." His take is that his team was in the playoffs for him to go hitless. "So going back to what we said of contributing to team success, at some point something worked right, I must have done something to help," Wilson said. "That's this game. You may have had a bad day or even a bad year. But today is a new day, another game. And this is a new season, another chance."

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