Failure As Hitter, Mendoza Coaches California Hitters

This is a story about Mario Mendoza. There is no punch line.

A decade after his playing days ended, Mario Mendoza lives on in baseball lore. What Millard Fillmore is to the presidency, Mario Mendoza is to baseball.

You don't have to know Mendoza to know of the Mendoza Line. It's a euphemism for .200. It's also his albatross.

Mendoza traces the origin of the Mendoza Line to Seattle. After five years as a reserve infielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates, Mendoza found himself the starting shortstop for the Seattle Mariners in 1979. This would be his first and last chance to play 120 games, to bat 300 times. Mendoza hit .198, above .200 one day and below .200 the next, straddling what came to be known as the Mendoza Line.

"Bruce Bochte and Tom Paciorek and I, in Seattle, we all had a lot of fun," Mendoza said. "We made jokes about everybody. So they started making jokes about me.

"They started mentioning the Mendoza Line, .200. Bochte mentioned it to George Brett. Brett made it popular. Being a superstar like he still is, he mentioned it to the TV people and all that. They still talk about it."

That rankles Mendoza. He hit .245 the next year and, after a trade to the Texas Rangers, hit .231 the following year. Then he got released. He finally hit, and he got cut.

So he dragged his .215 career average back home to Mexico, played summer and winter ball in the Mexican League - "Down there, I had a lifetime .290-something average."- through his 40th birthday last December. Then the California Angels hired him as the hitting coach for their Class A Palm Springs, Calif. affiliate.

The hitting coach? Next thing you know, the Lakers will hire Wilt Chamberlain to teach free-throw shooting.

"A lot of people, they think, `Mendoza, hitting instructor?' You don't have to be a good hitter to try to help somebody at the plate," Mendoza said. "Myself, I wasn't a good hitter, but I know what a lot of guys are doing wrong at the plate. You know it because you learned it, you were told to do that, you heard a lot of great hitters talk about it. You learn from them.

"You keep those things in mind. You memorize them. And then, when a kid is doing something wrong, you tell him. There's a lot of great hitters who don't know how to teach the kids."

Ted Williams didn't. After four seasons managing the Washington Senators and Texas Rangers, Williams gave up, utterly frustrated his players could imitate his form but lacked the skill to reproduce his results. The same quandary drove Frank Robinson batty in his first managerial stint with the Cleveland Indians.

But Charlie Lau, considered a genius among batting coaches, played 11 seasons in the majors and failed to cross the Mendoza Line five times. Walt Hriniak, the heir to Lau's throne, had just 99 at-bats in the big leagues. Ben Hines, the Dodgers' batting coach, had none.

Mendoza also teaches in the school of "do as I say, not as I did," but his pupils revive the pain of the Mendoza Line. Today's generation of baseball-illiterate players - the Palm Springs players probably didn't know Mario Mendoza from Mario Cuomo - condemns Mendoza to explain his legend again and again.

"A few kids on this ballclub, they just found out," Mendoza said. "Someone told them, `There's Mendoza! There's the guy they named the Mendoza Line after!' They tell these kids, so they come up and ask me, and I have to explain to those guys where it came from."

Remember Crash Davis, the minor league lifer in the movie "Bull Durham"? On a rickety-rackety bus ride through the backwoods of the Carolina League, Davis let slip about his three weeks in the major leagues. Instant reverence.

Same for Mendoza. To the kids of the Palm Springs Angels, Mendoza played in a fantasyland most of them will never see. He's seen the top of the mountain. He's been to the Show.

"Some kids here, they laugh," Mendoza said. "But some others say, `Hey, he played eight years in the big leagues. Even though he got that Mendoza reputation that he couldn't hit, he still played that many years in the big leagues. That means somethng.'

"It makes me feel good when they say that."