Jeff Conine: Leading Role

Despite an unfamiliar trip to the disabled list, Jeff Conine makes his presence known

April was a cruel month to Jeff Conine, but certainly not the cruelest of this baseball season.

The reigning Orioles MVP had a lousy opening month, batting just .245 in April, with only one home run.

But at least he played.

June and July have been much crueler to Conine. He's been on the disabled list since June 16 with a strained right hamstring, a nettlesome injury that he's been unable to shake. He suffered the injury two days before, while legging out a rare triple, just his sixth in four years with Baltimore. The injury was supposed to keep him out of action for a couple weeks, but pulled hamstrings can linger on and on, especially if they're not well rested. In early July he thought the hamstring was well enough to begin running again. That turned out to be a mistaken decision. While running, Conine aggravated the hamstring injury anew, putting him on the shelf indefinitely.

Yet the physical pain is mild compared with what it's doing inside the head of Conine. While he's battled a number of injuries, he'd never been on the DL before while wearing an Orioles uniform. It's been an exasperating forced sabbatical.

“It's the most frustrating thing,” he says. “I'm here to play a game, and I'm not able to play it. The competitive side of me is just champing at the bit. I like playing the game, but I don't like watching it. It's frustrating.”

He's been biding his time in the training room, undergoing various types of treatment, rather than adding his accomplished bat to the Orioles' offense. And his absence has been more than noticed by his teammates and coaching staff.

Manager Mike Hargrove says the Orioles miss Conine's hitting, although he believes the team's depth this season can better withstand the loss than it might have a year ago, when the Orioles' bench was a real weak spot. Conine had a remarkable season for the Orioles in 2001, hitting .311 with 14 home runs and 97 RBIs for a team the had the second worst offense in the American League. He also stole 12 bases after swiping a total of just 15 in his previous 10 years in the majors. But what made the year so amazing was that he really never had a slump, other than a brief hitless spell in early July.

“I was pretty consistent last year,” he says, in his typically understated manner.

And that's what made his slow start this year especially tough to take for the veteran, who played for the Kansas City Royals and was a star for the Florida Marlins before joining the Orioles.

“I stunk the first couple weeks,” he says unabashedly. “You're going to go through those slow points sometime through the year. And I had mine right at the beginning.” He bounced back to have a solid May (with eight home runs in the month) and June before his hamstring disabled him.

Conine entered the year with a .296 average as an Oriole and a big league mark of .289, including a couple of .300+ seasons with Florida. How does an intelligent hitter, one who constantly works at his trade as Conine does, go into a slump as he did in April?

“They say it's a game of inches,” he explains, “but you think about how precise you have to be in order to hit a ball squarely. A round ball and a round bat, and you're trying to hit the center of the ball on the sweet part of the bat to hit the ball hard. If there's one little mechanical flaw somewhere, or if your shoulder is hurting that day, and you can't quite get the bat where you need to, there are a lot of things that can go wrong in a swing that will not allow you to get hits or hit the ball hard. And then when you figure out what the reason is, you try to correct it and go on.”

But even for a smart and experienced hitter, figuring out what is wrong, and trying to correct it, isn't necessarily a simple chore.

“You're always making adjustments in this game,” he says. “If something's not working, you try something else. And if that doesn't work, you try something else—until you find something that works, and then you stick with it.”

For most of his career, things have worked for Conine.

The native of Tacoma, Washington, who now lives not far from the Orioles spring training camp in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, took his first swipe at a big league pitch with Kansas City in 1990 but didn't stick for good in the majors until August of 1992. Conine almost immediately established himself as a solid hitter, and he was selected in the first round of the expansion draft by the Marlins in early 1993. Playing primarily left field but also first base for the Marlins in their maiden year, he was an immediate hit in southern Florida. In fact, in the Marlins first game ever, Conine went 4-for-4. He played in all 162 of Florida's games that year and led the team in batting average (.292), hits (174), doubles (24) and total bases (240). That performance netted him a spot on the Topps and Baseball Digest all rookie teams and a third-place finish in National League Rookie-of-the-Year balloting.

He made the NL All-Star team the next two years, and was the game's MVP in 1995, when he hit a game-winning, eighth inning home run.

In 1997 he helped the Marlins get to the World Series and hit .231 in the Marlins' championship win over Cleveland. But Florida quickly disbanded its team after the series and Conine was traded back to Kansas City, the team that initially had signed him off the campus of UCLA, where he was a pitcher—though not a very successful one.

His 1998 season in Kansas City was marred by injuries. He had back spasms, a strained abdominal muscle and a strained left wrist.

Three days before Opening Day in 1999, the Orioles made one of their most successful trades in recent years, acquiring Conine for pitcher Chris Fussell. Fussell went 5-8 with a 6.78 ERA in two years with the Royals but hasn't pitched in the majors since 2000.

Conine, meanwhile, has quietly become one of the Orioles most productive and proficient players over the past four years.

It didn't seem likely that would be the case when he first joined the club in April of 1999.

Although he always had been a regular in his career, the Orioles branded him as a utility player when they acquired him. They did the same the following year. But in his first two seasons in Baltimore, Conine received as much or more playing time than most regulars, playing in 139 (1999) and 118 games and getting more than 400 at-bats both seasons. And last season he was second only to Jerry Hairston in number of at-bats, while playing four different positions (first base, third base, left field and right field) as well as serving as designated hitter and manning the clean-up spot for most of the season. Not bad for a guy who was supposed to be a utility man.

In fact, it wasn't initially easy for Conine to accept his designation as a utility player when he first came over from Kansas City.

“It was tough, especially when you feel like your talent allows you to be a starter, and you feel like you're capable of being a starter, and that's what you want to be, you want to be up there all the time,” he recalls. “It was a difficult transition at first. It was something that I hadn't been accustomed to. But once it was laid out in front of me that that was my job, and that was my role, then eventually I got use to it and I accepted it. But things have worked out well, and I've gotten a lot of playing time.”

He says that quickly being able to assert himself in Baltimore as a player who deserved regular playing time was “not only gratifying to myself, but to the people who had the confidence in me and put me out there every day.” Now, however, Conine is struggling to cope with a benching that he can really do nothing about as he agonizingly waits for his hamstring to heal. It's especially tough because Conine, like many ballplayers, has spent his career playing through injuries.

“We're always going out there with injuries,” he says. “You play a 162-game season, it's a marathon. If you were to sit out every time you had something bothering you, you'd play maybe half the season. Really, you don't go out there too many nights when you feel completely 100% from head-to-toe, with nothing bothering you.”

This time, however, he can only be patient. Playing on his hamstring at this point, even if he somehow felt it were manageable, would likely only make the problem worse. The team trainers caution about coming back too soon from a hamstring problem, as Conine painfully learned when he tried to run on it before the injury was fully healed. He now says that he will have to wait at least a week and a half before testing the hamstring after the medical staff deems it healthy again.

Debilitating injuries are one of many factors that tend to force ballplayers reluctantly to begin thinking about what they might do after their playing careers end.

“My wife and I have talked a lot about that lately,” says Conine, who is 36. “We just don't know yet. I have to sit back and evaluate and make a decision.”

He signed a two-year contract extension with the Orioles in March, so his decision on a post-playing career isn't imminent, but Conine says it's never too soon to start planning ahead. “It's going to come sometime,” he says of retirement. “You don't want it all of a sudden to be your last year and not have any plans on what you're going to do with the rest of your life. So, obviously, we've thought about it.”

One idea would be to continue in baseball, but that isn't a certainty. When he was in college Conine was an economics major and was interested in the stock broker/money manager business. But he no longer sees that career in his future. He and his wife Cindy, who both are world-class racquetball players, are the parents of a six-year-old daughter and two sons, five and two. Regardless of what he does down the road, Conine's immediate concern is retur ning to the Orioles' lineup.

He could have become a free agent after this season, and his skills with the bat make him an attractive player to teams in contention for the post-season. Yet Conine says he wants to continue playing in Baltimore, even if the team is not yet ready to make it to the playoffs.

“Nobody in here likes to lose,” he says of the team's status the past four years as an also-ran. “I've got a job to do, and I go out there and do it to the best of my ability, whether it's for the best team ever or the worst team. You take some pride as an athlete preparing the same way you would no matter what team you're on and performing the same way you would no matter what team you're on. We all put on the uniform hoping to go to the post-season. The year I went to the playoffs [1997] was the best, most exciting experience of my life. You want to do it again if you've been there, and you want to get there if you haven't been there. If it comes late August or early September and you're out of it, it sounds selfish, but you've got to play for yourself almost at that juncture, and obviously still do what it takes to win.”

Conine likes being on a team with young players and enjoys his role as a veteran willing to lend his wisdom and experience. “It's refreshing in a way to see the young talent come up and develop,” says Conine. “I like to help out when I can and provide a little guidance here and there, if asked or if needed. I like that role.” He finds it no harder to relate to younger players than he did when, a few years ago, most of his teammates were closer to him in age. “We're playing a kid's game,” Conine says. “I don't feel any older than anybody else in here. This game keeps you young. I don't feel like I'm any different from anybody else in here.” He also can't think of a better place to play than with the Orioles.

“I thoroughly enjoy playing here in Baltimore,” he says. “The fans are awesome. We've probably got the best facility in the big leagues as far as a baseball field to come home to. You know eventually things are going to turn around, and we're going to contend for a playoff spot. And I'd love to be here when that happens.”