Magglio Ordoñez: White Sox's Superman

<a href=chicagosports.chicagotribune.com>By Bonnie DeSimone Tribune staff reporter

March 29, 2003, 8:27 PM CST TUCSON, Ariz. — Spring 1999, Fenway Park, White Sox at Red Sox. Two out, promising young player on second. Promising young player bolts for third base, is caught stealing. Rally snuffed. Manager shakes head in dugout.

A moment later, Jerry Manuel took his talented right fielder into the tunnel where he could speak to him privately.

"I said, 'Magglio, you're an All-Star, and All-Stars don't make those kinds of mistakes,'" Manuel said. "I was really kind of hot at him. I don't know what it did, but he looked at me real strange."

Thing was, Magglio Ordonez hadn't made an All-Star team—yet.

"I remember that night," Ordonez said. "I needed someone to tell me that. Sometimes you need a push. Sometimes you need somebody to say you're this and you can make that. When they tell you that, you challenge yourself.

"I made All-Star that year. The game was in Boston too."

That exchange from four years ago illustrates the essence of Ordonez, a self-starter who rarely needs someone else to turn the key in his ignition. His career has been a steady upward incline, a rising line drive of the kind he routinely smacks these days.

With near-numbing consistency, Ordonez has batted .300-plus, hit 30 or more home runs and driven in 100-plus runs for four straight seasons. His career-best numbers from last year: a .320 average, 189 hits, 38 home runs and 135 RBIs. In the second year of a three-year contract extension signed in 2001, he will make $9 million this year and $14 million in 2004.

He has been named to three All-Star teams since Manuel's prescient scolding, earned the respect of teammates and opponents, done everything, it seems, except become a celebrity. That's partly by choice and partly because the White Sox have made the playoffs just once during Ordonez's ascent, exiting in the divisional round in 2000.

Ordonez, 29, is a Clark Kent among ballplayers, an amiable, unassuming man who is transformed into something else by his uniform. Off the field, he is a product of his laid-back coastal hometown in Venezuela, a place where life is lived at a Caribbean tempo. At work he is a resolute crusader.

Like the fictional Superman, Ordonez isn't crazy about being recognized when he's in civvies.

"I like my freedom," he said.

He is a known quantity in his native Venezuela and in Chicago, where Sox fans serenade him by chanting "Oh-ee-oh, Mag-lee-oh" to the familiar march from "The Wizard of Oz." But he can move around in Miami, his off-season home, and elsewhere relatively undisturbed.

"Because of his personality, it's probably the way he likes it," Manuel said. "I think he likes to be noticed, but I don't know if he likes the responsibility that goes along with all that stuff."

But that ambivalence doesn't diminish Ordonez's zeal to help lift the Sox to a division title and beyond. They open the 2003 season Monday in Kansas City.

"It's not enough for him to have these numbers at the end of the year and go home and say, 'Look at me, look at what I did,'" Sox general manager Ken Williams said. "He wants to do it on a championship team.

"He wants to win a batting title, and I think he's capable of it. He wants to drive in more runs, hit more home runs, but he wants to do it all in the team concept—which makes him a little different from some other players I won't mention. You don't see many fourth hitters in major-league baseball who will try to hit a ball to the second baseman to move a runner from second to third with no outs."

Ordonez is notably dedicated to his conditioning, arriving earlier than most of his teammates most days, putting in extra time lifting and running. He worked out this off-season with fellow Miami resident Alex Rodriguez of the Texas Rangers in the gym used by the University of Miami football team and hired a track coach to keep up with his speed work.

He is also the kind of person who puts stock in motivational words that might roll off someone else. "I call him 'the Philosopher,'" Manuel said. "He says these things that are a little different but have great meaning to him."

Cheerleading is not in Ordonez's nature, but he searched over the winter for a quiet gesture that would show his desire to lead by something other than example. He asked Sox conditioning coach Steve Odgers to help him design a T-shirt for the team to wear in spring training. Ordonez outlined the things he wanted to express, and Odgers came up with the wording.

The shirt bears this manifesto on its front:

Great teams possess great leaders

Leaders step up when opportunity and circumstance call

Get ready, your chance will come

Together: All of us are better than one of us

And these more specific marching orders on its back:

Chicago White Sox 2003

Championship Season

Commitment to Team

Commitment to Discipline

Commitment to Excellence

It's verbose, unlike the man himself. When Ordonez is asked to reveal his own heart's mantra, in his first language, he pauses before uttering one lyrical, multisyllabic word:

"Perseverancia."

Perseverance. "That's the most important," Ordonez said. "I was not really that good a player when I was in the minors. I was like everybody else. Nobody knew my name. And I did it. That's why I'm here, because I had discipline and I never gave up."

It took more than a single bound to leap this tall building.

Soccer player too

Ordonez grew up in Coro, an old colonial city of 150,000 on the northern coast of Venezuela that is a departure point for the resort islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao.

"People over there, they're not hungry for money," Ordonez said. "They work to eat and buy clothes, and that's it. Life is simple. You never know how long you're going to be alive, so you have to enjoy."

He returns home each winter for a visit, and though his family was unaffected by the recent turmoil there, it troubled him.

"I was worried about all the people there," Ordonez said. "It's hard for me and everyone else, because we don't make any decisions. I never believe in being political, only doing the best you can. When I play, it's for my family and my country. Sometimes it's the only positive thing they see."

Ordonez is the youngest of seven children, and his lineage is a typical South American mix of European, indigenous and Latino. His father, Maglio, "gave me an extra 'g' for luck," Ordonez said. He named his own son Magglio Jr. and his daughter Maggliana to continue the tradition.

The elder Ordonez worked construction and drove a cab. He did not encourage his other three sons, all bigger than the 6-foot Magglio, to play baseball.

"Maybe he saw something in me he didn't see in them," Ordonez said.

As a child Ordonez played two sports, the national pastime of baseball and the continental passion, soccer. He idolized Italian soccer star Paolo Rossi, who scored six goals in the 1982 World Cup, and flamboyant Argentine Diego Maradona.

If Venezuela had not been so overshadowed by the nearby soccer behemoths of Brazil, Argentina and Colombia, he might have chosen to pursue a career as a striker. He still follows the sport and is a fan of the elite Spanish club Real Madrid.

Instead, he began playing organized baseball at 13 and was invited to the Houston Astros' academy in Valencia, Venezuela, at 17, along with future big leaguers Bobby Abreu and Richard Hidalgo.

For three months Ordonez and the other prospects shared hotel rooms and cabs, washed their clothes in the sink and tried to impress. When the Astros released him, his roommate, Melvin Mora, who soon would sign with Houston, thought they were making a mistake.

Mora contacted a White Sox scout he knew, the late Oscar Rendon, and told him Ordonez deserved a second look.

"We're all like brothers," Mora, now an Orioles outfielder, said of his pivotal assist.

(Ordonez demonstrated a similar loyalty when he arranged for a private plane to bring the pregnant wife of fellow Venezuelan Jackson Melian, a Cubs minor-league outfielder, to the United States this winter so she could deliver their baby away from the civil unrest at home.)

Rendon made a date to meet Ordonez at the ballpark the next morning at 9. The scout was late. Ordonez had been waiting since "about 5," he remembered, with his bag packed to go home.

"I almost left," he said.

After seeing Ordonez throw and hit, Rendon made a couple of phone calls. Within a day, Ordonez had signed his first contract, for a $3,500 bonus plus $500 a month. He did a stint in the Dominican summer league, then reported for duty with the Sox.

Help from Joshua

One of his earliest mentors was former White Sox hitting coach Von Joshua, who worked with him at nearly every level as the two moved up through the ranks together.

"I had him in my first working group in spring training," said Joshua, now a Cubs minor-league hitting instructor. "I was new with the organization and I wasn't saying much. He was the first guy I ever spoke up about. They were going to send him back to Venezuela and I said, 'Wait a minute, you guys.'"

Ordonez's chief problem was his stance, which he altered frequently.

"It was Willie Mays one day, Carl Yastrzemski another, Hank Aaron another," Joshua said.

Gradually, he got Ordonez to settle into a version of his current pose, with feet planted wide and right elbow held high, but not too high.

"Cambio esta stance, tu esta muerta," Joshua threatened half-seriously in his middling Spanish. Change this stance and you're a dead man.

Williams gives Joshua a lot of credit for Ordonez's development.

"He didn't just take the time to discuss mechanics; he took the time to sit with him in the dugout and prepare him mentally as if he were in the major leagues," the general manager said.

Ordonez was brought along slowly, perpetually hanging on as a fourth outfielder behind shinier-looking faces. He spent three seasons at the Class A level, two in Hickory, N.C., and one with the Prince William Cannons in Virginia.

He learned his first English by watching closed-caption broadcasts of ESPN's "SportsCenter." He tried to learn to hit breaking balls, too, but wasn't always successful, batting .216, .294 and .238. Williams, then troubleshooting the Sox farm system, once found Ordonez sitting in the Hickory dugout with tears in his eyes after striking out four times in a game.

Winter ball would be a saving grace. Ordonez pushed himself year-round, returning to Venezuela to play for the Caribes Oriente team in Puerto la Cruz. It was also there that he met his wife-to-be, Dagly.

Fred Kendall, a Colorado Rockies instructor who managed Ordonez in Hickory and in Venezuela, said playing in his home country against varied, tough competition boosted his confidence.

"He was one of the younger kids who could hold his own," Kendall said. "His field awareness was above average, even then."

But after Ordonez's 1996 season with Double-A Birmingham, the Sox elected not to put him on the major-league roster, leaving him unprotected that November and meaning any other team could have taken him in the December Rule 5 draft.

Although Ordonez batted only .263, he had started hefting a 40-ounce bat and used it to swat 18 home runs, a significant number in the Barons' spacious park. That winter he was voted most valuable player of the Venezuelan League. The next season he had a monster year at Triple-A Nashville, beating out future Sox teammate Jeff Abbott for the American Association batting title in the last week of the season.

"Hindsight is 20/20," said Duane Shaffer, the Sox's senior director of player personnel. "He had all the tools, but nothing stood out. We made a mistake, and we were lucky no one else took him.

"He stayed in the background for four or five years, plugging along. We were always looking at somebody else. But it might have been a blessing in disguise. It gave him a chance to grow without the attention."

He is an ill-kept secret now.

"I don't know how much better he can get," Sox first baseman Paul Konerko said. "He never looks bad. He looks like he knows what he's doing all the time. He can throw, hit and run. There's only a few of those guys.

"He knows what it took to get here, and he's never going to get away from that. He doesn't read his own headlines. For a guy who puts up the numbers he does, he's pretty low-maintenance. But if he keeps doing what he's doing, eight years from now he'll be up with the legends. I'm just glad I have a front-row seat to see it."

Student of hitting

Ordonez thinks before he speaks, and when something defies expression for a moment, he rubs his forehead, hard, willing the words to come out.

This is what he does when he talks about hitting, a subject he will never finish studying.

"People think hitting is easy," he said, looking pained and earnest, massaging furrows into the space above his brow. "Hitting is not easy."

And similarly: "Being a leader is a really, really hard thing to do."

And on this year's All-Star Game, in his home ballpark: "I don't want to talk about that because I'll put too much pressure on myself. Hopefully I'll be there."

He may make the game look simple, but Ordonez knows he has a tendency to overthink, to be overly hard on himself, to refuse to relax. He gets a dreamy look when he describes three days he spent on the ocean off the coast of Venezuela on his boat last winter, anchoring at a deserted island, spearfishing with a few buddies.

But that is a rare exception. Most of the time Ordonez either is playing baseball or contemplating it.

On this particular week in Tucson, he was living by a particular set of aphorisms, the ones Manuel finds so intriguing, a way to measure the depth of Ordonez's still water.

"I don't look for the game; I want the game to come to me," Ordonez said. "Wait for your pitch, wait for the situation and be patient. It's going to come.

"When you play the game like you're supposed to play, the game's going to come to you."

It has, after a long wait.