Olerud's Sweet Swing Is No Longer A Secret -- Relaxed Bellevue Resident Leads Al, Seems Poised To Fulfill Promise

TORONTO - John Olerud's swing is so relaxed, you wonder if he'll lose his grip on the bat. His swing is so sweet that when Don Mattingly went into a slump, he asked to see tapes of the Toronto player at the plate.

Olerud swings the way you want every player to swing, a teammate said.

Going into this season, the Blue Jays' Olerud was something of a cult hitter. He has never batted over .300 in any of his three full major-league seasons. But now the secret is out.

This tall, friendly, quiet, modest, methodical Bellevue resident leads the American League in batting with a .404 average.

His teammates call him Hobbsie. They know that Olerud, who never played an inning in the minor leagues, is a natural, like the mythical Roy Hobbs.

"Nothing he does surprises me anymore," said Larry Hisle, Blue Jay batting instructor.

All batters are supposed to have an idea of where they're going to hit the ball. Olerud seems sure. He reminds you of Wade Boggs that way. During batting practice, on the first ball pitched to him, Olerud eases his bat out from right behind his head and into a fluid little circle around his body, spraying the baseball through a hole between shortstop and third base.

Next, Olerud hits a sizzler down the first-base line. Then, one to right field. Then left. The next time in the cage, the first ball is between short and third, then a sizzler. . . .

He was just as precise in college, where he was the NCAA player of the year as a sophomore at Washington State (he batted .464 and was 15-0 as a pitcher). One of his coaches remembers pitching batting practice to Olerud and watching him hit 50 straight balls between shortstop and third base.

His best friend on the Blue Jays, third baseman Ed Sprague, said Olerud plays golf the same way. Sprague will be blasting drives and irons all over the course. Olerud, with that same effortless swing, will be placing the ball away from a water hazard, then perfectly to the green.

"It drives you nuts," Sprague said. "He lays up and makes par, and I go for it and I'm putting for bogey."

Olerud, 24, takes attention in the same casual way. A joke around the Blue Jays is that teammates put a tape recorder in Olerud's room his rookie year to listen in on him. They had to check it for batteries - there were no sounds at all.

Olerud's only nonconformist act may be wearing a batting helmet at his first-base position. But it's no fashion statement. Olerud was doing some running in his junior year in college when he suddenly had a seizure and collapsed.

"The whole thing was pretty scary," his father said. "You can't think of too many things that make a 20-year-old have a grand mal seizure and bleed into his spinal column. We worried about a brain tumor, meningitis, an aneurysm."

A brain aneurysm is what the problem turned out to be. Surgery took care of it, and there have been no problems since. But it shook him up.

"At that age, I definitely took things for granted," he said. "At 20 years old, I figured the only way I could die was to do something stupid, like drive a car off the road - do something foolish. And I wasn't really the type to get myself in dangerous situations."

He used to be too selective at the plate. His eye was too good. Strikes would pile up because a pitch wasn't in the exact spot Olerud wanted it.

Early on, Olerud's only other real weakness was that as a left-handed hitter, he tried to hit everything to left field. Now Olerud is hitting to all fields, although going the other way is still his specialty.

In the month of April, he became scary. He hit .450. Hisle called it the best month of hitting he had seen in his 27 years in professional baseball. Four of five times up, Olerud would drive the ball. It didn't matter what the count was, what the location of a pitch was, or how many runners were on base.

And it still doesn't matter much. Olerud's journey to stardom is nearly over. He used to have a poster of Don Mattingly in his bedroom. Now he gives him video batting tips.

Olerud's "time has come," his batting coach said.