Partners In Prime -- Two Seattle Guys, The Same Age, Leave The Area For The Coasts To Seek Acting Fame And Fortune. After More Than 10 Years Following Different But Equally Circuitous Paths, They're Both Now Seen By Millions Every Week In Hit Sitcoms - On The Same Network, The Same Night, One After The Other. You Already Know What They Look Like, But What Are They Really Like? -- Casey Sander: Years In Sports Give Him `Grace Under Fire'

All he ever wanted to do was play major-league baseball.

So when the California Angels drafted him at age 17 straight out of high school, Casey Sander figured he'd found his field of dreams . . . until an eye injury and a torn-up knee forced him to leave baseball after only three years.

No problem.

It just so happened that the University of Puget Sound football coach had been following Sander's career and offered him a football scholarship to UPS when baseball failed.

Four years and a degree in communications later, Sander - a graduate of Nathan Hale High School - was teaching English at Curtis High School near Tacoma and coaching football at UPS.

End of story.

Except that at 25, Sander dropped everything, packed up and headed to Los Angeles. Thirteen years later he is a costar on ABC television's Top 10 series "Grace Under Fire."

It all started when Sander decided that if he couldn't be a professional athlete, he would be a sports announcer. So he signed on as a communications major and took a drama class to fill a credit requirement.

The acting class required that students audition for a play. Without any previous experience, Sander auditioned - and got the part.

"I got bitten by the acting bug," he said. "I guess it was a lot like playing sports - the discipline, the practice.

"I wasn't happy teaching after that. One day I was sitting around a table with a bunch of teachers who said they basically lived for the time off. And I started thinking that I didn't want to be 35 or 45 and never do something that was burning inside of me.

"I stuffed what I owned in the back of my 280Z and left," he said.

Two years, he promised himself. If he didn't make it by then he wasn't going to. So he called up the only person he knew in Los Angeles. She told him she was working up a scene to do for her agent, and would he read it with her? Sure, he said.

"So we worked it up together and they ended up firing her and hiring me," Sander said. "That's how I got my first agent and that was also my first rude awakening to how things are done in Hollywood."

But it was almost a year before he earned his first dollar as an actor, and a lot more years before he found a niche in Hollywood.

"I would work bartending from 6 p.m. to 3 a.m., then go home and get up at 9 a.m. to chase auditions," he said. "As the years went by I took acting classes and hooked up with an influential improvisation group called the Groundlings."

He landed the small part of Rock Lanagan, foreman of the K. and B. Boys, on ABC's hit "Home Improvement." It was there that the producers of "Grace Under Fire" saw his work. After an audition with more than 100 other actors, Sander won the role of Wade Swoboda, the husband of Grace's best friend. Comic Brett Butler stars as Grace, a sassy single mom.

"They wanted to make him a right-wing Vietnam vet who wasn't screwed up from the war, but was patriotic with an eclectic side," Sander said. "Huh, I thought. Well, I wondered what to do and finally thought of pottery. I throw pots, so they incorporated that into the show as one of Wade's hobbies."

A solid man with a football build, Sander is the last person you might expect to find behind a potter's wheel. But, Sander says, it's a hobby of nearly 20 years.

"When I was in college, I lived in the weight room by day and then threw pots all night," he said. "My first year in L.A., I sold all the pots I threw to create some funds for my existence. For the pots on `Grace Under Fire,' we buy or rent from the first shop I worked with when I came to L.A."

Besides acting and pottery, Sander's life is centered around his wife, Susie (whom he met in his bartending days, when she was a cocktail waitress), and their two children, Max and Mimi.

But despite the success of `Grace Under Fire,' which hit No. 1 in the weekly ratings last month, Sander remains humble and thankful.

"It gives me a little security, where for 13 years I didn't know where my next paycheck would come from," he said. "The next thing is to try to do as John Goodman has done and continue to be on a show on a daily basis and keep your name out there, but still keep the door open for larger roles, maybe in film."

Sander still has family in the Seattle area and a home (fondly dubbed "the shack") on Discovery Bay, where he brings his wife and kids each summer. No phone, no television . . . just crabbing, clamming and fishing, he said. Despite the years in L.A., Seattle still feels like home.

"The Northwest is the most beautiful place in the world and please don't hate Californians for coming up here," he said. "Everyone comes to their senses some time."