The Slugger Nobody Wanted

Cecil Fielder leans over his kitchen sink and squirts out a light brown sluice of saliva and tobacco juice, then washes it down the drain with a pull on a thin white tap. It's about 8 in the evening, but the darkness inside his huge new home, in an enclave of huge new homes just outside Dallas, feels more like 3 in the morning. Beyond the kitchen, the only light comes from the distant flickering of a giant-screen television and the spotlights on the driveway. Whenever a car approaches, he turns and peers out the window at the front of his property.

A couple of hours earlier, Fielder, who last year led the major leagues in home runs and runs batted in, got the galling news that Cal Ripken Jr. of the Baltimore Orioles had narrowly defeated him for the American League's Most Valuable Player Award. As if to counter his funk, Fielder, his hair and goatee freshly trimmed, is dressed almost regally in multicolored sweats and immaculate orange-and-white Mizuno high tops. He wears a gold wristwatch and a gold necklace, from which a diamond "51" is suspended.

Fielder, who also finished second in last year's M.V.P. voting, is no novice at feeling wronged. In his own mind, he is forever being demeaned, underestimated and scoffed at. "This is just another reminder of what's happening," he says, and for the next 45 minutes, he moves with sardonic grace from slight to slight, inequity to inequity, his large, wide-open eyes beseeching me to grasp his point.

When I ask about his experiences playing winter ball in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, he talks about the bonus babies, who always came up with an excuse or an injury to get out of going altogether. From his four years as a part-time player in Toronto he recalls the year they sent him down to the minors and, he maintains, purposely delayed calling him back up. As a result, instead of being credited with five years of major-league service, and being only a year from free agency, he's in the books for four years and 164 days. "It's all just a game," he says, "a way of keeping a player down another year."

As Fielder dips and spits, he seems to be savoring the injustices, squirreling them away. It's all part of what he calls "the edge," something he picked up from his ferocious mother, Tina Fielder, 20 years ago, and has been using to great effect ever since, beginning with his days as an overweight Little League phenom.

He offers a bittersweet memory from the minors, a "Get Cecil Fielder Out Night" in Greensboro, N.C. Any time a Greensboro pitcher kept him off the bases, the beer was free for the rest of the inning. Fielder was convinced they chose him so that the rednecks in the crowd could enjoy themselves rooting against a black. Still, he couldn't resist taking them all on. "I said, 'You want to get me out, come on,' " says Fielder with a laugh. "Man I ripped them. I killed them. My first four at bats, I went four for four. Wham, wham, wham, wham. They weren't going to drink off me. My last at bat I think I flew out to left field."

HOW COULD A PLAYER WHO only three years ago was happy hitting taters in Osaka, Japan, have grown so embittered that this season, which begins tomorrow, he may decline the M.V.P. award, should the voters deem him worthy of it? What happened were two of the most productive back-to-back seasons ever, and nothing makes a person feel more underappreciated than genuine achievement.

Two years ago, in his first chance to play every day in the major leagues, Fielder hit 51 home runs and drove in 132 runs. Last year he hit 44 home runs and drove in 133, becoming the first American League player to lead the league in both categories two years running since Jimmie Foxx in 1932 and 1933. The last player to hit more home runs over two consecutive seasons was Willie Mays in 1964 and '65. The last player to drive in more runs in two consecutive years was Jim Rice, in 1978 and '79.

Shortstop Alan Trammell says he and his teammates have been true believers since June 6, 1990, when Fielder hit three home runs off Greg Swindell, who was then pitching for the Cleveland Indians. It marked the second time in a month he'd hit three in one game. The many wondrous blasts since -- the 2 home runs in Yankee Stadium in the last game of 1990 that made him only the 11th player to exceed 50 in one season, the shots knocked completely out of Tiger Stadium and County Stadium in Milwaukee, off the lights in Fenway Park and into the third deck in Toronto -- have only made them more zealous. "We just sit back and go ahhh," says Mickey Tettleton, a Tiger catcher.

His teammates also point out that Fielder isn't merely a slugger but a pure hitter who sends the ball to all fields, and a more-than-adequate first baseman. Although one of the slowest men in baseball, he rarely misplays what he can reach and possesses what players call "soft hands."

By the time he arrived in Baltimore for the final three games of last season, no one was ruling out anything. Vada Pinson, a coach for the Tigers who would be fired the next day, still thought Fielder might get the 6 he needed to join Babe Ruth as the only slugger to hit 50 in consecutive seasons. And when, with only a game left, the commentator Jim Palmer jokingly asked Fielder if he could hit six that afternoon, a teammate, Pete Incaviglia, said, "Just get him six at bats."

The home runs may make all the highlight films, but Fielder is proudest of those 265 runs batted in. "I wasn't up there all the time trying to go deep," says Fielder. "I was up there trying to get my ribbie. The object of the whole scenario is to get the man in."

Fielder's huge production helped take Detroit from last place in 1989 to second in 1991. Nevertheless, Fielder spearheads an offense that reflects his weaknesses as well as his strengths. Last year five Tigers -- Fielder, Mickey Tettleton, Rob Deer, Lou Whitaker and Travis Fryman -- hit more than 20 home runs, and a sixth, Tony Phillips, had 17. Unfortunately, except for Whitaker, all had more than 90 strikeouts, with Fielder contributing 150, down from a league-leading 182 in 1990. As a team, Detroit led the majors in both home runs and strikeouts, while posting the American League's worst batting average.

Gene Guidi, a sportswriter for The Detroit Free Press, says the offense, although frequently devastating against opponents' weaker pitchers, relied too much on home runs. He recalls Sparky Anderson saying, "What are we trying to do, nuke the other team or win ball games?"

"I DON'T THINK TORONTO LIKED my body," says Fielder. "They thought I was too big to play every day."

Rocking toward the mound, huge cleats raking the dirt, enormous forearms waggling a black-headed bat, his uniform stretched so tight you can almost read the lid of the tobacco tin in his back pocket, Fielder has the impossibly inflated lines of a cartoon bully. Even his head seems a half size big for his helmet. Yet as he sits on a worrisomely flimsy plastic chair in a corner of the visitors' locker room in Baltimore, it's easy to see why so many professional evaluators of athletic flesh underappraised his.

But if Fielder has a civilian-looking body, his will is rock hard. Last year the 6-foot-3, approximately 270-pound Fielder was one of only three major leaguers to appear in all 162 games. "I didn't want to give them an excuse," says Fielder. "If I get hurt, it's always the weight. A stud gets hurt, it's just one of those things."

Fielder never stops anticipating and answering his detractors. "It takes a lot of heart to play this game," he says. "You have to want to prove something to somebody." He keeps repeating one line: "The worst thing in the world is somebody being able to say 'I told you so.' "
When a Fort Worth columnist, Galyn Wilkins, reacting to Fielder's $3 million contract in 1989, wrote that he wanted to throw open his window and scream, Fielder's wife, Stacey, pasted the articles in a scrapbook. When Toronto's general manager, Pat Gillick, who had sold Fielder to Japan the year before, tried to minimize his mistake by calling Fielder a "base clogger" and a "nonathlete," Fielder responded with seven home runs against the Blue Jays, including three in his first game back in Toronto Stadium. "I think he got every starter on the staff," says Fred McGriff, who won the first-base job over Fielder in Toronto before being traded in 1990 to the San Diego Padres. The two remain close friends.

Fielder is still nursing the last sweet chuckle he had at Wilkins's and Gillick's expense. "Oh, I'm a nonathlete," he said the day before the M.V.P. voting, as he carefully assembled burritos for a line of visiting in-laws. "Well, take that then." And a moment later, licking some sour cream off a finger: "I don't think anyone's screaming out of any more windows or giggling behind the Tigers' backs."

Phenomenal back-to-back seasons like Fielder's are rare; players often seem to let down after a big year. But it's hard to get complacent when you feel you don't get any respect. "Every year it's something," says Fielder. "My weight, my this, my that." And every time Fielder steps to the plate he gets an earful of fat cracks from those witty folks in the expensive seats.

Even during the final nostalgic innings in Baltimore, where the Orioles were playing their last game in Memorial Stadium, fans shouted, "Get in the sauna!" and "Cheeseburger!"
"Cecil will want to kill them," confides McGriff, but Fielder keeps it all under wraps. Home run or strikeout, he shows little emotion. He doesn't woof and he doesn't moan. He thinks there's something faked about players who get hysterical over an out when they make hundreds of them a year.

That ethos of understatement makes Fielder a player's player, admired without exception by teammates and opposing players. Says Dave Bergman, a veteran ballplayer: "He's sensitive. He's caring. He doesn't like to see a teammate struggle. I can't say what he thinks of me, but I consider him one of my best friends on the team."

Says Milwaukee pitcher Bill Wegman, who gave up two homers to Fielder last year: "The guys you hate are the ones who flip bats and don't move until the ball is in the seats. Fielder doesn't act like every home run is an important moment in the history of sports. He understands the game."

Fielder figures if he doesn't embarrass pitchers, they won't throw at his head. "If I was out there showboating," he says, "I'd expect to get hit." Fielder has never charged a mound. The closest he came was in spring training in Japan, after he was hit by a pitch. "I walked halfway and said, 'Listen, if you ever do that again, I'm going to kill you.' "
In all these particulars, Fielder contrasts markedly with his rival and only peer as a power hitter, Jose Canseco of the Oakland Athletics, who tied him for last year's home-run crown. Although Fielder has recently hit the sports pages, and it feels as if Canseco has been there forever, the two have been competing since rookie ball in 1982, when Fielder made his debut in Butte, Mont., and Canseco made his in Idaho Falls, Idaho.

Where Fielder applies himself with a stoic grace and a smattering of rancor and depression, Canseco is obsessed with the length of his home-run shots, and routinely disparages other players while speaking highly of himself.

Fielder can't put a number on the percentage of power he puts into his cut, but it seems much less than Canseco's, and his swing is looser, more fluid. "You don't have to swing hard," he says, "to take the ball out of the yard." There's a fine line between staying stoked and what Fielder calls "getting too geeked," and for a power hitter it's essential to stay on the right side of it. Go to the plate with murder in your heart, you end up topping a pathetic little dribbler to the mound. "Try to crush," says Fielder, "you almost never do."

THE NOTION THAT Fielder's last two seasons arrived without warning is uninformed. The 28-year-old athlete has dominated every league he has ever played in, from the American to the Japanese Central, from rookie ball in the Pioneer League to winter ball in South America, going all the way back to his San Gabriel Valley Little League.

Edson Fielder, a California all-section high-school player who ran a small janitorial service called Ed Fielder & Sons, began pitching batting practice to his oldest son while he was still a toddler, and before the family evacuated Los Angeles for La Puente, about 20 miles to the east. It was in Los Angeles at the age of 3, according to Tina Fielder, that Cecil first took Edson out of the yard. As the ball sailed over the roof of their two-story apartment building, she says, her son squeaked, "Look Ma, Willie McCovey."

Relative to his peers, Fielder was even bigger as a boy, and from the beginning his size was used against him. "It was always, 'Look at that big fella,' " says his younger sister, Kaory Fielder. An enormous black youth, a foot taller and 50 pounds heavier than his peers, isn't always going to be hailed as a hero, but Fielder was treated like a villain.

"Like most top Little League athletes," says Tina Fielder, "Cecil was turned into a pitcher. And he was a very good pitcher -- such a good pitcher, in fact, that all the parents passed around a petition saying that if Cecil pitched they wouldn't let their children play." Kaory Fielder recalls that her brother would regularly strike out half a dozen batters in a row, and afterwards some outraged parent would ask to see his birth certificate.

Fielder's athletic talents and temperament are his father's, but it was his mother, the business manager of a Mazda dealership, who gave him his avenging mission. She impressed on her son the idea that sheer talent might not be enough. "Maybe I was too cynical," she says, "but I think a lot of the things I've been saying are starting to ring some bells."

His sister says: "Mom was always telling him that if he wanted something he had to take it. Now. Today. And that whatever people throw at you, you have to use it."

By the time Fielder was 13, he was 6 foot 1 and 175 pounds, and had fallen hard for basketball. And although Fielder's basketball career ended in high school, and his bat will earn him $4.5 million this year, he is at heart a basketball player. "If you can play hoops," says Fielder, "that's it."

McGriff says Fielder was forever begging high-school acquaintances to confirm how good he was in basketball. And Fielder makes a special point of telling about an appearance on a cable sports show that broadcast an old photograph from The San Gabriel Valley Tribune showing him dunking a basketball.

On the diamond, Fielder is understated and businesslike. He hits his home runs, touches his four bases. On the court, Fielder, a point guard, had an aura and charisma that his high-school basketball coach, Mack Pace, compared with Magic Johnson's. "He was a complete player, a wonderful passer," Pace says.

Says Kaory Fielder: "He was so bad, he'd get the ball in his hands and his face would light up."

Fielder was a four-year starter on a team that lost only 10 games, and in his senior year went 29-0 before losing in the finals of the season-ending sectional tournament. "It wasn't just some team that was thrown together," Fielder says. "There was Randy Downs, who is 6-10. He played at Colorado, and Pete Williams, 6-7, who played for the Denver Nuggets and is now playing in Turkey." As a senior, Fielder was named the most valuable player in the San Gabriel Valley, an area with about 38 high schools.

"I could play ball," says Fielder with uncharacteristic urgency. "There's no question about that. Shoot, pass, dunk, there was nothing I couldn't do. But I just couldn't get that high tout." At 6 foot 3, 215 pounds, it's hard to say there was anything drastically wrong with his body. But the shape that has given him so much trouble in baseball may have been an even more serious liability in basketball.

"I knew it just wasn't going to happen," he says. "I would have to be like Quinn Buckner, a strong small guard, and you know these days small guards are like, 6-5. If I had pursued basketball, it would have been a tough hustle."

Thus, for Fielder, deciding on baseball was a hard-nosed career decision. He wasn't exactly in love with the game, but it seemed to offer the best prospects. "I knew I could hit with power," he says, "so I figured that was the sport I could do something in."

Guy Hansen, the scout who signed Fielder for the Kansas City Royals, concurred. He thought Fielder had the fastest bat speed he'd ever seen. In the summer of 1982, when he was 18, Fielder was drafted by the Royals and shipped off to Montana to play for the Butte Copper Kings in the Pioneer League.

Fielder has never looked at baseball as more than a job. "People don't know me," he says. "If I can walk around this house and see these folks smiling, that's all I care about." He is referring to Stacey, whom he met in high school and married when she was 18, and their 7-year-old son, Prince, who both parents are convinced will one day eclipse the father.

"You just watch, he's going to be the awesome one. He's what his dad calls an at-lete," says Stacey, mimicking Fielder's highest designation. "No question," says the boy's father, who last summer often took his son with him on the road, where he was adopted by the entire team.

A daughter, Ceclyn, was born Feb. 22, and the Fielders may adopt a third child. Fielder says he'll never leave his kids, even if by some chance he and Stacey should ever divorce. "If we have to," he says, "I can sleep upstairs, and she can sleep downstairs."
IN THE LOWER DEPTHS, baseball hardly differs from any other starting job. The pay is lousy, a couple hundred a week, and your fate is entirely in the hands of middle-aged men who can only guess what you might be able to contribute. For seven years, Fielder looked on powerlessly as he was traded, brought up, sent down, shipped off to South America and finally given up on and sold to Japan, in large part because the players he was competing against looked better in their underwear.

In Butte, the prettier physique belonged to Joe Citari, who like the 230-pound Fielder was a power-hitting first baseman. While the 19-year-old Fielder hit .322 and led the league in home runs and total bases, Citari's numbers weren't much worse, and his body more than made up the difference.

"Citari was an Adonis," says John Schuerholz, the Kansas City general manager at the time and now the general manager of the Atlanta Braves. "He looked like he was chiseled, a big, strong, good-looking kid." Tommy Jones, the Kings' manager, says, "Citari just looked like a ballplayer." When at the end of that season, Kansas City had to give up one of them to acquire Leon Roberts, a veteran outfielder they needed for their championship drive, they chose to part with Fielder.

"They figured if Fielder had that kind of body at 19," says Hansen, "what was he going to look like at 30?" Of course, Fielder has got as heavy as they dreaded, and it hasn't made an ounce of difference.

For the next two years, Fielder played in the smallish Southern cities that host the South Atlantic and Carolina Leagues, which in Fielder's descriptions sounded like the concentric rings of a redneck hell. "People would come and talk about your mother, calling you names you don't even want to say," Fielder says. "The organization has a responsibility, too. They know what kinds of towns they're putting their players in."

According to the dynamics of heckling, a heavy black player is going to get far more racist abuse than a thin one. But except for one hot day in Asheville, N.C., where, after a doubleheader of nonstop taunting, he hopped the fence and asked his tormentor exactly what his problem was, Fielder never lost his temper. He just kept hitting home runs, driving in runs, using whatever they threw at him.

By the middle of 1984 he was playing Double-A in Knoxville, Tenn., and by July of the following year, when he was 21, Toronto jumped him to the majors. In his first at bat Fielder hit a double off the wall, and in 30 games batted .311. His aggressiveness wasn't lost on Toronto's corps of veteran sluggers. "A lot of guys arrive in the majors, and they're afraid to swing the bat," says Lloyd Moseby. "But here was this kid straight from Double-A, and he was taking some cuts."

Despite his quick ascent, Fielder's weight became just as big an obstacle in Toronto as it had been in Kansas City. John McLaren, his minor-league manager, says the angriest he has ever seen Fielder was in Barquisimeto, when he tried to follow an order from Gillick to "get the big man on the scale." McLaren gave up after three days of refusals. Asks McLaren, "If he takes off 25 pounds, what's it going to gain him, half a step?"
Even when people aren't harping on it, Fielder's weight is often the basis of fundamental assumptions about him. For example, every coach describes him the same way. A big, easygoing fellow. A gentle giant. Nothing bothers him. Always got a smile on his face. McLaren was evoking that mix of traits when he gave Fielder the nickname Big Daddy, a title McLaren had previously bestowed on another large black first baseman named John Mayberry.

In Toronto, Fielder once again found himself vying with a perfect physical specimen in Fred McGriff, who at 6 foot 3 and 215 looks like a scaled-down N.B.A. power forward. After platooning the pair for three years, Toronto decided to go with the left-hand-hitting McGriff.

Since McGriff has proven to be a top player, even Fielder concedes it was an easy mistake to make. But how could a team give up on a young player who in his first 506 major league at bats hit 31 home runs and drove in 84 runs? "They went on a wing and a prayer," says Tina Fielder, "and they chose the wrong wing and the wrong prayer."

In Japan, where they are always looking for a big bopper, Fielder's power attracted attention. And after the 1988 season, the Hanshin Tigers of the Japanese Central League bought Fielder from Toronto. McGriff heard the Blue Jays got $750,000 for his old friend and says it must have seemed like found money. "They were probably jumping up and down, going, 'Look what we got,' " says McGriff. Fielder's fiscal condition also improved. His new two-year contract bumped his salary from $125,000 to more than a million, what Fielder calls "serious iron."

Going to Osaka was still a gamble. At 26, Fielder was the youngest player with major-league experience to play in Japan, and until then very few had ever made it back to the major leagues. Spend a couple of seasons hitting a juiced-up ball out of bonsai stadiums, where it's 280 feet down the lines and 385 to dead center, and you get "Japanized."

And the Japanese feel no loyalty toward the two imported players, called gaijin, allotted each roster. Less than half have their contracts renewed, and few stay for long. The special status that Fielder has today in Japan is all after the fact.

When Fielder got off to a slow start, reporters called him ogata senpuki, the big electric fan, and TV commentators rued the departure of his predecessor, Randy Bass, a real hitter. "Every day there was a picture of Cecil in the paper striking out," says Fielder's fellow gaijin, pitcher Matt Keough.

Then Fielder, who looked even bigger in Hanshin Tiger stripes, started erupting. He became the first player to reach the back of the Tokyo Dome, with a 500-foot shot that bounced off a "King Kong" movie poster. "I hit the monkey in the leg," he says. He hit two balls out of Yokohama Stadium in one game.

Fielder wasn't going deep on 5-foot-8 guys throwing submarine style. To support his contention that the Yomiuri Giants of Tokyo have the best pitching staff in the world, Keough points out that Bill Gullickson, who won 20 for Detroit last year, was only Tokyo's sixth starter in 1989. "They had a whole slew of them," agrees Fielder. "Makihara, Kuwata, Miyamoto and those boys threw gas."

Even when they have good stuff, Japanese pitchers are notorious nibblers -- at 3-0, they'll throw a curve over the outside corner -- and as the only offensive threat on an abysmal team, Fielder could go weeks without seeing a strike. He kept swinging anyway, and discovered that he could easily cover pitches he had thought were beyond his reach. That, even more than the sight of Fielder exploding at them from deep in the batter's box, is what intimidates pitchers. There are no dependable holes in his swing.

Says Seattle Mariner pitcher Rich DeLucia: "The scouting report comes in and says don't give him this, and don't give him this, and definitely don't give him this. Pretty soon there's not much left."

To limit their corrupting influence, Fielder and Keough were not expected to travel or stay with their teammates or even to befriend them. Under these circumstances, the only real teammate a gaijin has is the other gaijin. Keough says it wasn't unusual for a Japanese catcher to tell an opposing hitter what an American pitcher was about to throw.

"We had to go to war together," Keough says. If someone threw anywhere near Fielder, Keough would respond like a mother goose, knowing that if one thing led to another, he had a very large man covering his back. Keough recalls a game in Koshien Stadium, where, after knocking down the Chunichi Dragons' top hitter on consecutive pitches, he saw a dugout of Dragons start his way, then abruptly lose interest. "Big Daddy was running full tilt from first," he says, "and they didn't want any part of him."

Fortunately the hostilities were often relieved by slapstick. The Japanese love baseball. They just don't get it. Position players overpractice to the point of exhaustion, pitchers overthrow to the point of injury and managers are constantly signaling for bunts. Says the poker-faced Fielder: "I said: 'Hey, you all do what you got to do. I'm going to do what I got to do, and if what I do don't help you all win, well I'm sorry.' "
At the end of the year -- in which he finished first in slugging (.628), third in home runs (38), third in runs batted in (81) and ninth in batting (.302), despite missing the last month with a broken finger -- Fielder exercised an escape clause in his contract. Hanshin called his bluff, convinced no American team would want a player once he'd been tainted by Japanese ball. Indeed, Fielder's availability didn't exactly trigger a feeding frenzy. But the Detroit Tigers, who'd just finished 30 games out of first place, and had already failed to sign free-agent first basemen Kent Hrbek and Pete O'Brien, were sufficiently desperate to take a chance on him.

Fielder's agent, Bob Gilhooley, points out that, for once, Fielder's weight was of no consequence when he arrived from Japan. The question was whether he would be any good. It was only after Fielder started tearing apart the league and the columnists started filing that his heft became news again. At that point, even Sparky Anderson said something about trying to get him in at 230 the following spring. Since then, he has had the good sense to leave well enough alone.

Fielder's start was regarded as an aberration, the result of pitchers who temporarily underestimated his ability to get around on major-league fastballs. "Maybe they thought they could gas me," says Fielder, "but hey, they should have known. I mean, in 175 at bats" -- with Toronto in 1987 -- "I had 14 jacks. The bottom line is I can hit. All those things they say I can't do, I know I can hit."

By the end of May, Fielder was leading both leagues in home runs and three months later was on track to surpass 50. Hank Aaron, Reggie Jackson and Mike Schmidt are just three of the game's great sluggers who have never hit 50. Lou Gehrig and Harmon Killebrew twice managed 49, but couldn't get one more, and as Fielder neared the threshold he also began to feel the pressure. Part of the difficulty is constantly being asked about it by reporters. In his case a great many of them were from Japan, where the story was given tremendous play, since it seemed to validate the quality of the Japanese game. Suddenly, the gaijin was one of their own.

When Tina Fielder began reading quotes that the number didn't mean anything to him, and that whether he got it or not, it had already been a great season, she caught a plane to Detroit. "We talked about why 50 was important," she says, "the reasons for achieving such a goal." She reminded him of all the skepticism that had surrounded his year, the unflattering quotes from Gillick and so on. "I told him it wasn't important for the money or even the glory, but that 50 is something they can never take away from you. Of course, Sparky doesn't like to see me. You see, Ces has never hit a home run when I was in the park."

Tiger Stadium that night was no exception, but in the Bronx, in the last game of the season, Fielder pulled off one of the game's trickiest feats -- he crushed when he was desperately trying to -- and got his 50th and 51st home runs.

After the season, Fielder was edged for the M.V.P. award by Rickey Henderson of the pennant-winning Oakland Athletics. The rationale was that the M.V.P. should go to a player who helps his team win, and although Fielder's output had greatly improved his team, they still finished four games under .500.

When Fielder arrived in St. Petersburg, Fla., the next spring, he was visibly heavier, but conjecture that he was eating himself out of the game was defused by another huge year that included a significant decline in his strikeouts. "The only difference," says Tony Phillips, "is he never got hot. Last year he was going deep two, three times a game. This year, he just got his seven or eight a month. For him that's his quota."

Again Fielder's numbers weren't enough to convince the M.V.P. voters, and what bothered him so much that night outside Dallas was that the award went to a player on a team that had fared far worse than the one he'd transformed the year before. Says Fielder, "All of a sudden the rules changed."

None of which came as much of a surprise to Tina Fielder, and soon after the vote was announced the two had another little chat. "I told him, 'No one believed you the first year,'" she says. "'After two years they're still not convinced. This year you got to shove it down their throats.'"