from NorthJersey

It turns out baseball players are as touchy about their weight as women trying on swimsuits.

"You think I'm fat?" roars Tony Gwynn from his office at San Diego State University, where he coaches baseball. "I've been hearing that [stuff] for 20 years. I don't want to hear it now."

See what a little pinch-an-inch will do to a guy? For Gwynn, even a .338 lifetime average and a lead-pipe lock for first-ballot admission to Cooperstown can't compensate for a poor body image.

The problem: a tad too much tush.

For Gwynn and contemporaries such as Kirby Puckett, Cecil Fielder, and John Kruk - butterballs who hit a ton - the problem was cosmetic. After all, there always have been plenty of skinny minis who couldn't hit their weight. But baseball is no different than the swimsuit store mirror. What matters is how you look, and it's been that way since Babe Ruth wolfed his last chili dog. Baseball has a long and sometimes hilarious history as the sport the fatties play, and even though some of them play it very well, the national pastime has never been jolly about its perception that size doesn't matter if you can hit, pitch, or catch.

"I'll never look like Alex Rodriguez or Ken Griffey Jr.," Gwynn says, still livid over lipids. "That's what people are used to seeing. If you don't fit the mold of the prototypical baseball player, they think you're out of shape. Whenever I went 0-for-4, the first thing people said is, 'You need to lose weight.' "

Fat and baseball have become so heavy-handed an issue that Gwynn signed a contract for less money than if he were starved, Yankees' prospect Matt Winters lost so much roly-poly he couldn't go deep, and Steve Bechler suffered a drug-induced death trying to fit the mold.

"I became a free agent after 19 years in the major leagues," Gwynn says, "and you know why it was so hard to get that last year's contract done? My own club, the only club I'd ever been with, the San Diego Padres, they wouldn't say. But I knew."

He knew that despite his hard work, his perfect swing, and his 3,000 hits, the Padres always would think of Gwynn being as plump as an Easter ham. And a baker's dozens of major-leaguers, from Ruth to Mickey Lolich to Fernando Valenzuela to Rusty Staub have a legacy that includes extra meat on the bone.

But caving to catcalls of "Fatso" can lead to diminished returns. Rex Hudler, a svelte utility man who played for six teams and is now an Angels' broadcaster, relates Winters' tale. Matt "The Bat" Winters was a first-round draft choice of the Yankees in 1978 who sported a cute roll of baby fat - and got teased for it.

"After three years of being ribbed, he showed up at spring training at 165, about 75 pounds lighter than he'd been," Hudler says. "He was all proud, but he couldn't hit a batting practice home run. He was a player who lost his pop when he lost his weight." Winters didn't make the majors until he was 29, and he played in just 42 games.

Even more disconcerting is the story of Bechler, the 23-year-old Orioles' pitcher who died this spring, in part because he tried to lose weight too fast.

Just as Karen Carpenter's death in 1983 drew attention to the problems of anorexia, so has Bechler's tragedy led to closer scrutiny of ephedra, the weight-loss supplement linked to his demise. And just as a skeletal Carpenter looked in the mirror and saw flubber, nobody cared as much as Bechler that he brought a little extra blubber to the rubber.

Sure, hauling around too many el-bees can really mess up a body - hypertension, diabetes, inability to get a date, you know the rest. But as Gwynn testifies, added bulk actually can boost a baseball career.

"When I came into the league, I weighed 205," says Gwynn, finally calm enough to warm to the subject. "It wasn't until I got up to 225 that I started driving the ball. I needed that extra weight for a perfect hitting base. Me and my hitting coaches knew that. But nobody else could give a crap."

If Bechler is an unfortunate cautionary tale for keeping the weight on, Gwynn is a primo example of where to keep it. He was a moose in the caboose, which is typical of a lot of top boppers, says Tony Garofalo, former Cubs' trainer and co-author of the upcoming training room tell-all, "The Tale of the Tape."

"You use your legs when you swing," Garofalo says. "You generate power in the glutes."

Pitchers are another story, says Garofalo. Call it a butt-vs.-gut split. A lot of the "sure-I'll-have-fries-with-that" pitchers look as if they might have sacks of flour swaying inside their shirts.

History's husky hurlers, such as Lolich (who either appropriately or ironically owns a chain of doughnut shops), Wilbur Wood, and chubby Cubbie Rick Reuschel -and the thick-waisted throwers of today, such as C.C. Sabathia and Hideki Irabu - carry their weight in the strike zone.

Most portly players are pitchers. Don't tax your ERA-calculating muscles trying to figure out why. Scientific experts agree that the two leading causes of getting fat are eating and slacking. Most pitchers work one day in five and eat the other four. Most don't run the bases, and none has to run after fly balls, or run, really, at all. Former Yankees' pitching coach Art Fowler is credited with the wise old saw, "If a pitcher could win games by running, Jesse Owens would be a 20-game winner." Staying slim can be tough when you're throwing split-fingered cheeseburgers down your own pipe and maxing out your aerobic heart rate on a golf cart.

But XXL uniforms visible from orbiting satellites aren't confined to the bullpens. Swaying guts and bubble butts pop up just about everywhere. One of baseball's little secrets is that most players actually gain weight as the six-month season progresses.

"Every year, I made it a point to go into spring training ripped," Hudler says. "And every October, I'd have a little roll that grew over my abs."

Former manager Dallas Green blames it on a road that goes on forever.

"Look at a ballplayer's travel schedule," says Green, who managed the Phillies, Mets, and Yankees. "It's a fast-food lifestyle. The clubhouse guys try to put out a decent meal after games, but even then, it's quick food, heavy food, like pasta, and then you get on a plane, and that's not the most nutritious food either. In the lifestyle of the ballplayer, you don't have many chances to sit down and have a fairly decent meal."

Team officials employ a range of strategies to clap a player's cake hole closed. After Sid Fernandez essentially ate his way out of the league, the Mets sent the aptly named Butch Huskey to Duke University's fat-farm boot camp.

Some clubs hit doughboys where it hurts - in the wallet. In 1987, when David Wells was a minor-leaguer in the Blue Jays' organization, Toronto general manager Pat Gillick ordered him to be weighed every day, and fined him $20 whenever his weight topped 220. (A major-leaguer might use $20 to light his Cohiba, but that's enough cash to get a minor-leaguer's attention.) Wells was furious with Gillick, arguing that he was enjoying a terrific season - he would, after all, make the big club that year - and didn't need the distraction of a scale hanging over his head.

Wells, now with the Yankees, finishes the story in his memoir, "Perfect I'm Not! Boomer on Beer, Brawls, Backaches & Baseball.":

"I decided that if Pat Gillick really wanted me to weigh in every day at 220 or less, I should probably go out of my way to make sure I'd never let him down. I leaped into action immediately, hitting the weight room, where I looked long and hard at the treadmills and StairMaster. ... then opened up the back of the team scale and jimmied it to read eight pounds light. The following afternoon I hopped onto that sucker with a big smile on my face. 'Way to go, Dave!' the trainer yelped. 'You've lost six pounds!'

" 'Be sure Mr. Gillick hears about that,' I told them. 'It took a lot of hard work.' "

It wasn't until 2001, when he blew up to 280 pounds after back surgery, Wells writes, that he decided he had to stick a pin in himself.

"Lunch, which used to consist of whatever cheese-covered, deep-fried, or sauce-covered all-you-can-eat entrée I could get my hands on, now consists of broiled chicken or fish or steak with a salsa-covered baked potato and a salad. ... What the hell is happening to me?"

Wells is not the first hefty hurler to wrestle with his weight under the watchful eye of Joe Torre. In 1984, when Torre managed the Atlanta Braves, he had a relief pitcher named Terry Forster who gained instant fame when late-night TV host David Letterman took one glance at his Rubenesque physique and branded him "a fat tub of goo."

"Terry used to go jogging in spring training after we played the game," Torre says. "He'd go on this long run in shorts, with a bandanna on. Half the time, he'd come back with mustard on his shirt."

On the Braves, Torre also managed a zaftig third baseman, Bob Horner, who had $100,000 deducted from his salary and returned to him in increments every Friday if he made weight.

"One day, I put him on the scale the day before his weekly weigh-in," Torre says. "He was six or seven pounds overweight, but he made the weight the next day. I said to him, 'You're going to die of a heart attack. You're crazy.' He would starve himself and do all the things he shouldn't do and he wasn't worth anything to me on the field."

Why would anyone want to force Forster or Horner or any other player to lose weight? Hasn't anybody ever heard of Babe Ruth? You'd think teams would spend their energies force-feeding their players Alfredo sauce, chocolate cheesecake, and goose liver paté to get them in the same league, at least in one statistical category, as the Babe.

Not only was Ruth the greatest ballplayer in history, he was the greatest eater. He was renown for being round, both on the field and the mound. He looms so large on the fatball landscape that it's impossible, 55 years after his death, to separate truth from fatuous fiction. Who would want to even try?

The famous Yankees pinstripes were said to have been designed to make Ruth seem slimmer.

When Ruth ordered steak, Bee Wilson writes in The New Statesman magazine, he'd ask the waiter to toss a few lamb chops around it.

"He thought nothing of eating an omelet of 18 eggs," Wilson said..

That would make Ruth an early apostle of an Atkins-style low-carb diet, except for the Ruthian midnight snack: six club sandwiches, a platter of pig's knuckles, and a pitcher of beer.

"He belched magnificently," Robert W. Creamer claimed in the 1974 biography, "Babe: The Legend Comes to Life."

Ruth was reputed to snarf three hot dogs with mustard before every game. In a sure sign that time marches on, he was forced later in his career to chase the dogs with a glass of bicarbonate soda, which he referred to as his "milk."

In 1921, Babe Ruth's Home Run Candy made its debut. Ruth, however, was forced to abandon the venture under threat of legal action. The Curtiss Candy Company already had the Baby Ruth bar on the market.

Ruth wouldn't eat everything put in front of him. He didn't savor certain vegetables. Creamer writes about a formal dinner party where asparagus salad was served. When the Babe was offered the dish, he demurred.

"Don't you care for the salad, Mr. Ruth?" the hostess asked.

"Oh, it's not that," the Bambino replied. "It's just that asparagus makes my urine smell."

"They didn't care about nutrition," says Jerome Holtzman, Major League Baseball's official historian and a sultan of understatement. "If he played today, Babe Ruth wouldn't be so big. He was very slender as a youngster. But he was kind of big for his time."

One of the Babe's National League contemporaries was another gluttonous galoot of gargantuan appetites, Hack Wilson. One of the first in a long line of robust sluggers, Wilson stood 5-feet-6 and tipped the scales at just under 200 pounds, with a chest like a hot water heater and arms like pythons. He was shaped like a cartoon character, with an 18-inch collar and size 6 shoes.

From the era of Ruth and Wilson until the time of free agency, players generally didn't work out much at all, unless you count the exercise their elbows got. Lifting weights was expressly forbidden, the conventional wisdom being that muscles robbed the major-leaguer of the flexibility he needed to swing, throw, and eat a lot.

Says Phil Pepe, the longtime New York sportswriter: "Being in shape wasn't as important in the old days as it is today. Players routinely came into spring training out of shape and had to run off the pounds. In the off-season, they didn't do anything."

Pepe remembers a rare attempt by the Yankees, in 1962, to provide nutritional food in the clubhouse for the players after a game. The spread consisted of boiled eggs, celery stalks, carrot sticks, and soup.

"The players hated it," Pepe recalls. "Most of them skipped it and went to a restaurant."

Before the 1980s, ballplayers didn't make enough money to devote themselves full time in the off-season to the improvement of their bodies. So they didn't. It was in 1980 that Green's Phillies became the first team to hire a conditioning coach, Gus Hoefling, who'd burnished Steve Carlton to a fine buffness. The Phillies won their only world championship that year.

Says Green: "Now everybody wants to have a pretty body."

Green may be right, but that doesn't stop the next generation of big-leaguers from carrying on the tradition of carrying a lot of weight. Prince Fielder, Cecil's son, was the Milwaukee Brewers' first-round draft pick last summer. He's a 6-foot, 18-year-old first baseman who ballooned to 300 pounds when he was still in high school.

His family hired one of the newfangled personal trainers, and last season, playing Class A ball at a pillow-hard 260 pounds, Fielder the Younger hit .326 with 13 homers and 51 RBI in 73 games.

Though Little Big Daddy obviously inherited his shape cannonballing into the gene pool, some big-boned ballplayers can't escape destiny. Just as first-rate athletes, such as Gwynn and Rick Reuschel will never deliver the chiseled, art-class-model bod everybody wants, a percentage of champion eaters are deceptively trim.

Holtzman claims that Ron Blomberg, the relatively unfat designated hitter who played for the Yankees and White Sox, was a legendary scarfer, reportedly having once disposed of an 80-ounce steak.

Curious to confirm the story, Holtzman, who at the time covered the Sox for a Chicago newspaper, invited Blomberg to a Chinese dinner to see if the ballplayer could really devour by the hour.

"I out-ate him," Holtzman says. "He was done, and I took another helping. He couldn't have been that big an eater."

Some tsk-tskers might cast a gimlet eye on pursuits such as competitive eating, especially when it involves ostensible role models such as baseball players. Fortunately, John Kruk is not one of them. Kruk once was chastised by an older woman for smoking and drinking and generally acting like a sloppy porker who perhaps assumed that as a professional athlete, he had a responsibility.

"I ain't an athlete, lady," Kruk replied. "I'm a baseball player."

* * *

Who says ballplayers don't care about their weight?

Reached at his home in Florida, Hall of Famer Whitey Ford was less than thrilled to address the subject.

"I'm not fat," Ford snapped, claiming that he was just about to slip out for a slimming round of golf. "Why don't you talk to David Wells?" Wells, who may never speak again after embarrassing recent events, couldn't be reached for this story. Neither could Mickey Lolich.

Lolich, if you remember, was the portly portsider who won 217 games for the Tigers, Mets, and Padres in the 1960s and '70s, and three more in the 1968 World Series, for which he was named MVP. Lolich operates a chain of doughnut shops in the Detroit area, which apparently need no publicity. A baker's dozen messages left on his voice mail were not returned, and efforts to contact him through the Tigers were unsuccessful.

"I think you may have some difficulties [getting people to talk]," said a spokesman for one major league team. "It is such a sensitive topic, and some people may be reluctant to talk about other players being overweight."