The Port Arthur News
May 01, 2008 10:18 pm
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Editor’s note: The following column from the Best of West collection was originally published in the Port Arthur News on June 9, 2004.
Doug Recio can’t help but chuckle when he reads some of the tall tales being written about Lew Ford and his baseball adventures with the Minnesota Twins. Various reports have referred to Recio’s one-time star at Port Neches-Groves as goofy, flaky, odd, zany, loopy and off-the-wall.
“Sounds pretty much like the Lew I remember,” says Recio, who left Port Neches for New Braunfels not long after Ford’s graduation. “He was a great kid to coach and he worked hard, but he just drove me crazy with some of the things he did.”
Ten years later Ford is driving American League pitchers crazy. Entering Tuesday night’s game against the Mets, he was eighth in the AL in both batting average (.328) and on base percentage (.406). Though Lew’s cooled down from an early season rampage that had him hitting a league-leading .418 at one point, he continues to be an offensive catalyst for the Twins.
Ford’s latest hitting streak is seven games and he’s started to hit with power. Three of his seven home runs have come in the last 10 games. Usually batting in the leadoff spot, he’s also collected 10 doubles and two triples, while driving in 31 runs.
Among the many who have been impressed with Ford as a player is former Beaumont Golden Gator shortstop Ozzie Guillen, who is now the manager of the Chicago White Sox.
“That kid in left field is a going to be a great player,” Guillen said, after a series between the Twins and White Sox. “Talk about (Torii) Hunter and Jacque Jones, but that kid is a pretty good player. Good outfielder, good arm and a pretty good player. He will get better and better every day.”
For every superlative about his play, however, there’s a wacky story that belies the fact the 27-year -old Ford made 1,400 on the SAT and earned an academic scholarship to Texas A&M.
He’s missed flights, run the wrong way out of the clubhouse when told he was needed as a pinch-runner and asked why fans were booing him when they were chanting, “Lew, Lew, Lew” after a home run. Once, after showing up with an iron-shaped burn on his stomach, he was accused of trying to iron a shirt while wearing it.
Twins manager Ron Gardenhire tells the story of asking Ford to get ready to pinch hit. “I heard this huge crash back in the bat room,” Gardenhire said. “I looked around the corner and Lew’s sprawled on the floor. He wiped out (when his spikes hit the concrete floor).
“I had to stay back there with him because I was laughing too hard to manage the game.”
Recio, who also managed Anaheim Angels relief pitcher Ben Weber at PN-G, can relate.
“We had a big game against Nederland one night,” he said. “Lew was always pestering me to play in the infield and I wanted to keep him happy. So I put him at third base. A left-handed hitter from Nederland hit the ball off the end of his bat and the ball went toward third spinning real crazy.
“Lew never flinched. The ball went between his legs. I swear he never saw it. He was still looking at the batter and the ball was rolling in the outfield. When he was in a zone, he was in a zone.”
Recio said his only surprise with Ford being in the major leagues, and playing like he belongs, is that it didn’t seem he was really serious about pursuing a baseball career.
“He was a great talent. He could run, hit, hit with power and throw. Physically he was in the top two or three players I ever coached. He knew the game and played with reckless abandon. But he never appeared to take it seriously, like it was something he would do later on. He wanted to go to A&M to be an engineer.”
Ford, after he got to A&M, decided to try to make the baseball team as a walk-on. Recio happened to bump into Aggie pitching coach Jim Lawler at a clinic in Waco.
“It was really funny,” Recio said. “Lawler grabbed me and took me behind a curtain. He said ‘we have one of your players and he’s a little strange.’ I don’t think they knew what to do with him. They wound up sending him to Blinn Junior College.”
Recio lost touch with Ford after that. The next thing he heard came from his son, who was playing at Texas Lutheran College. Ford, by that time, was starting to get the attention of major league scouts while wearing out opposing pitching for Dallas Baptist.
“The Texas Lutheran pitcher threw Lew a real slow curve and he swung and missed and started spinning around in the batter’s box like a top. He went around three or four times, acting like a clown. Everybody was laughing at him. Then he hit the next pitch about 450 feet for a home run.”
One of the wildest Ford stories came to Recio from a guy who claimed to have attended a major league tryout camp where the unflappable PN-G ex showed up.
“I don’t know if it’s true, but it sounds a little like Lew,” Recio said. “The guy told me they kept calling Lew’s name to hit and he wasn’t there. Finally he pulled up and got out of his car wearing baseball pants pulled up to the knees in the old-fashioned style. But he didn’t have any socks to go with them.
“According to the story, he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and smoking a cigar. Somebody told him they were calling him to hit. He grabbed a bat, stepped up and hit 7 of his 15 pitches over the fence. That’s Lew. With him, you never know what’s coming next.”
Perhaps that’s why Minnesota columnist Bob Sansevere recently wrote , “Ford is sort of a cross between Yogi Berra, who once said “you can observe a lot by just watching,” and singer/ditz Jessica Simpson, who said she believed buffalo wings were made from buffalo.”
Meantime, you have to wonder what the coach from Texas A&M is making of all this.
Bob West can be e-mailed at rdwest@usa.net. His Sportsrap radio show airs Mondays at 8:05 p.m. on KLVI (560-AM).
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