B. Rob

No Second Thoughts For O’s For Lead-off Man Brian Roberts

When he was in his first two years of high school, Brian Roberts toyed with the notion of giving up baseball.

It wouldn’t have been an easy step for him to take.

Baseball was Roberts’ life — and far more so than for most basseball-infatuated kids his age.

His father, Mike Roberts, was the baseball coach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Brian was reared on baseball, almost from the time he wore diapers. His father took the helm of the UNC baseball program in 1979, when Brian was just one year old.

The Roberts family has photographs of Brian, at the age of two, standing on the beach garbed in full catcher’s gear.

“It’s all I ever knew,” he says of baseball during his childhood. As a young boy, he would hang out on the baseball field with his father at UNC and even accompany the Tar heels when they played at other schools. “I pretty much lived on that field,” Roberts relates.

“He was always around,” recalls B.J. Surhoff, now a teammate of Roberts but in the 1980s a college star on Roberts’ father’s UNC teams. “He was a little kid. He made road trips with us. He’d take ground balls and come to batting practice in his uniform with his glove and bat.”

But by the time he reached high school, Roberts began to wonder if baseball was the right course to pursue. His father was a hardcore baseball tutor, a disciplinarian, and he could be tough on his son. The intensity of constantly being around the game, combined with his father’s rigidity, caused Roberts to lose some of his desire to play. “I was sort of burned out,” he explains. “It was all I did my whole life.”

Plus, there was the natural rebelliousness of a teenager against a father who was a constant and at times overbearing figure in his baseball life.

“I wasn’t that motivated,” says Roberts. “I didn’t put the work in.” But he stuck with it, and not only remained on his high school team, but also enrolled at UNC and played under his father for two years.

He might have opted to go to another college, or even turn pro after high school. But there weren’t many real options.

At 150 pounds and standing about 5-foot-8, he was considered too tiny to play above the high school level.

So he joined his father’s team at UNC.

“It was tough at times,” he says of playing under his dad. But that awkwardness of playing for a coach who happened to be a domineering father didn’t impede his progress as a baseball player. As a freshman at UNC, Roberts batted .427 with eight home runs and 44 RBIs and broke the school’s record for hits (with 102) and steals (with 47). That performance earned him the nation’s college Freshman of the Year honors. The next year he stole 63 bases, but was playing under a cloud. His father had been informed by the Tar Heels’ new athletic director that he would be fired at the end of the 1998 season.

Once Mike Roberts left UNC, so did his son. Brian transferred to the University of South Carolina, where, in 1999, he led the nation in steals with 67, hit .353 with 12 home runs, and also, finally, sparked the interest of major league scouts. Within a month of completing his junior year at USC, he was playing infield for the Orioles’ Delmarva farm club.

Ironically, the Orioles were able to pick Roberts as a ‘sandwich’ selection between the first and second rounds of the June, 1999 draft, because of the defection of their previous second baseman, Roberto Alomar. When Alomar left Baltimore to go to Cleveland as a free-agent before the 1999 season, the Orioles were awarded the sandwich pick as compensation.

Despite his size — he’s still only 5’8” (thouggh the Orioles list him as 5’9”) and weighs about 170, if that — Roberts obviouslly has plenty of baseball talent compacted into his small frame.

He made it to the big leagues in 2001, just two years after he was signed. The Orioles promoted him when shortstop Mike Bordick went on the disabled list. Though it was a heady experience for Roberts to put on a big league uniform at the age of 23, he now concedes that he wasn’t really prepared to play in the majors.

“2001 was great, to get the opportunity when I did,” he says. “But I wasn’t ready. I had played only 150 games in the minor leagues. I don’t think you realize the importance of those games until you reach this level. It’s hard to balance everything going on when you get to the major leagues.” By that he means not only the play on the field, but all the attention a player suddenly gets from the public and the media. “Everything’s more intense,” he explains. “In the minor leagues, there’s not that kind of pressure.”

At first Roberts responded well to that pressure. He played errorless shortstop for more than two weeks, tied an Oriole rookie record by hitting in 15 c onsecutive games, and was batting .301 through almost 40 games. But then the errors began to proliferate, and the hits began to dissipate. He ended the year hitting .253 with 16 errors in less than half a season. “I struggled real bad at shortstop,” he acknowledges. “I wasn’t experienced enough to do the job.”

Roberts began the 2002 season back at Rochester, but was called up three times that season, usually because of injuries on the big league roster.

And then, although neither of them wanted it to happen, Roberts’ career as an Oriole became intertwined with that of Jerry Hairston. Both young Orioles were seen as major league caliber, but only at second base. Roberts’ stint filling in at short for Bordick in 2001 convinced the Orioles that he was better suited for second than short. His defense has improved dramatically since then, but he doesn’t have a strong enough arm to play regularly at short. The same goes for Hairston, in the minds of club officials.

That presents the Orioles with a dilemma. If Roberts gets the nod to play second, they likely will trade Hairston. If Hairston wins the second base job, Roberts is likely to be dealt. Over the past two years, the Orioles have been treading water on this decision, in part because of serendipity. In both 2003 and 2004 (in spring training) Hairston was injured. That allowed Roberts to handle second base chores. When Hairston came back from his broken finger injury this season, Roberts stayed at second, and Hairston served as DH or played in right field, a new position for him. Hairston has gone along with the arrangement without complaint. But he does not want it to continue. He wants to play second. So does Roberts.

“If we’d like to choose the best situation possible, we’d both like to be on different teams playing second base,” says Roberts. “But you can’t always get what you like.”

The funny thing is, Roberts and Hairston are close friends. They both have moved to Scottsdale, where they work out together every day in the offseason at Mark Verstegen’s Athletes’ Performance training center. They are religious Christians. They truly like each other.

What they don’t like, though, is being asked to talk about the situation that pits them against one another when it comes to the second base job.

“I don’t really think about it any more,” says Roberts, although he can’t avoid the subject when the media continually bugs him about it. “Two years ago, I thought about it a lot. Now, we’ve both established that we can play every day. And we have been in the lineup together. There are situations like this on every team. So people may be making a bigger deal out of it than on other teams.”

Roberts and Hairston have discussed the situation between themselves. “It hasn’t affected our relationship,” says Roberts.

But in the back — or maybe even the front — of their minds, bothoth Roberts and Hairston know that one of them, at some point, is likely to be traded. Yet they try to play baseball without letting that thought interfere with their performance.

“At this point we’re half way through the season,” Roberts observes. “The last thing we worry about is where we will be tomorrow. The more you realize that you have to let go of things you don’t have control over, the better off you are.”

For Roberts, the 2004 season has been, in his own words, “up and down.” He began the year hitless in his first 16 at-bats. But then he went on a tear, raising his average over .300 and, for a brief spell, leading the American League in stolen bases. His average then plummeted again, and at the end of June he was hitting .258.

“I feel like I’ve made improvements,” he says, particularly on defense. “You take the bright spots and work hard on the tough areas. There’s still a long way to go this year. I could end up at .310 or .210. Your average is going to fluctuate 30 points all the time.” When I was 0-for-16 at the beginning of the year, I’m sure everybody panicked. Then I went to .310. As long as you keep your confidence, you’re okay.”

Hitting leadoff, Roberts can be a catalyst for the Oriole offense. When he gets two or more hits a game, the Orioles play .565 baseball. When he doesn’t, the team has a .373 winning percentage.

But speed is the attribute that Roberts really contributes to the offense. Through the first three months of the season, he ranked second in the league in stolen bases. In games in which Roberts has stolen a base, the Orioles are 14-4.

“I love running the bases,” he says. “I enjoy being given the green light and stealing bases, but it’s also important to be smart about it, knowing when it will help your team and when it won’t. Running went by the wayside over the last 10 years, as home runs became so popular. But I think it’s coming back, and a lot of managers see value in it.”

One reason Roberts moved to Arizona in the winter is because he hates the cold. He also loves golf, and Scottsdale has a golf course virtually every other block. In his spare time, Roberts also enjoys going to movies and reading books, particularly those involving religion or biography. “I just like reading about people,” he says. “We go through hard times, so I like to read how other people handle the situations they go through.”

Today Roberts is the Orioles’ starting second baseman, but he’s smart enough to know that a major league job never is really secure. “Playing at this level, you just can’t take it for granted, or it will jump up and bite you,” he says. “You have to take it seriously and work hard. What I didn’t understand at first was when people would say, ‘The hard part is not getting here but staying here.’ Now I understand that.”

Although he’s only 26 Roberts also knows that his baseball career won’t last forever. He’s contemplating completing his degree work in radio broadcasting. Roberts already has had plenty of experience on one side of the camera and microphone as a player. One day Orioles fans might find hims on the other side as a broadcaster.