No Type Casting

Bill -- I thought I’d put this on paper and then we can talk about it.... I have become increasingly concerned about the risk and perception of a conflict of interest ...

Just like always, the old baseball writer got right to the point.

For more than three decades, Ross Newhan had used words to cut to the soul of the national pastime, baring its flaws, burnishing its stars, celebrating its truths.

Now, in the fall of 1996, he was aiming those words at himself.

When David was drafted by Detroit out of community college a few years ago, I spoke briefly to you about the potential for conflict

In a single-spaced memo to Bill Dwyre, his boss at The Times, the old baseball writer was writing about his boy.

David Newhan, a clay-stained little infielder, was playing in Class-A Modesto. He seemed destined to move up the system. In a couple of years, he might be in the major leagues.

It was what they’d both envisioned during all those nights playing catch in the side yard of their Yorba Linda home, all those spring days hanging out with the Angels in Palm Springs.

Son on the major league field. Father in a major league press box. Believed to be the first such combination in modern baseball history.

But now that it was becoming a reality, the old baseball writer had to be honest.

How could this work?

What if the father criticized a player who would then confront the son? What if the father criticized an umpire who would exact revenge on the son?

Worst of all, what if some team would not give his son a chance for fear that inviting David Newhan into a clubhouse sanctum would be like inviting in The Times? What if teams feared that no pregame speeches or postgame pillow talk would be safe?

The old baseball writer figured that every parent had two jobs.

To do one right, he had to give up the other one.

Several years before his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, in a move that probably would have removed him from the ballot, Ross Newhan was offering to quit his life’s work for his son.

I have not been able to stop thinking about the potential problems.... I never want to compromise my work here, and never have.... But is blood thicker?

Thicker than the Sunday paper, blood is.

Tonight in Anaheim, after a decade of struggle, David New- han will take the field as the Baltimore Orioles’ leading hitter, and one of the hottest players in baseball.

The Times will be in the press box, chronicling every move of a career fueled by sacrifice.

Ross Newhan? He’ll be sitting in the stands, weaving a new story with a shorter, more majestic byline:

Dad.

*

Of all the noise generated at Dodger Stadium this summer, one of the loudest moments originated from someone who wasn’t even watching the game.

It was June 18, the Dodgers were playing the New York Yankees, Ross Newhan was in his usual press box seat, fashioning one of his columns, when he couldn’t resist.

David had just been signed and brought to the big leagues by the Orioles. That night they were playing in Colorado. The play by play of that game, as usual, was being instantaneously documented on the Internet.

Ross momentarily ignored the Dodgers in front of him, tapped on his laptop, and clicked to the site ... and, oh, what a sight.

David Newhan pinch-hitting.

Ball in play.

Home run.

No cheering in the press box? Right.

“I hear this scream that could best be described as Howard Dean in Iowa,” said Bill Shaikin, The Times’ staffer sitting next to Newhan. “I looked over, and it was Ross. I thought he was yelling at the office. I thought he was yelling at me. I didn’t know what happened.”

When Shaikin leaned back and glanced at Ross’ computer screen, he knew. Soon, all the writers and broadcasters knew, and the familiar murmur had nothing to do with the game they were covering.

It is the Southern California baseball writing fraternity’s dirty little secret.

When Ross’ boy goes deep, we cheer like heck in the press box.

“That’s not really like me,” said Ross, wincing during a recent interview at his home. “But that home run signified so much about the distance that David had come back. Everything was sort of tied up in that home run.”

It was David’s first major league plate appearance after three years and two shoulder surgeries. It began one of the most remarkable 30-day spans by anybody in baseball this season, during which he hit .476 with five homers and 23 runs batted in.

David did more in those four weeks than he had done in his previous nine pro seasons, as he began his season with three major league homers and nine RBIs.

“I’m having a blast, just trying to be the best player I can be,” David, 30, said in a phone interview. “All I’ve ever done is go as hard as I can. That’s all I’m doing now.”

Yeah, just another hardheaded Newhan.

While the father was covering 150 Angel and Dodger games a year for 25 years -- the hardest, most thankless work in this business -- his son was drawing pyramids, connecting three words in magic marker on his mirror:

“Determination. Desire. Dedication.”

Said Sara, Ross’ daughter, David’s sister: “All those late nights, all those seasons that the playoffs made long and longer, I think my father set an example for my brother. He knew baseball was something that was going to take a lot of work.”

The father and son were alike from the start, both quiet, both intense. Both can be pushed only so far before they loudly push back.

When the son was seemingly wronged during a youth soccer game, the father complained so loudly he was ejected from the sideline.

The son’s junior college baseball team apparently was victimized by so many bad calls, the father drove past the umpires in the parking lot, rolled down his window and filled their ears with his best Tommy Lasorda verbiage.

And now that the son has made it big and it’s time for the father to give an exclusive soul-baring interview to the newspaper that has provided him with food, shelter and scorebooks for the last 36 years?

Like pulling teeth.

Yeah, just another hardheaded Newhan.

It took me several years to persuade Ross to write a column about his son, an acclaimed piece that appeared a couple of months ago, and now he was wondering, wasn’t that enough?

Um, not when your son has become George Brett since then, no.

Ross was uncomfortable with the idea of this interview. He only reluctantly approved the reprinting of the blandest parts of the 1996 memo, and only because his wife, Connie, already had spilled the beans about its existence.

Ross didn’t want to talk about himself. He didn’t want to put more pressure on David.

If it wouldn’t have looked downright weird, we’re guessing he would have blown us off altogether.

“I’m just another dad,” he said.

“That’s the whole point,” we said.

*

As readers of The Times know, Ross Newhan’s offer to give up his baseball columnist’s job in 1996 was refused.

“I had some trepidation about the situation, and I knew at some point we might have to make a decision,” said Dwyre, The Times’ sports editor. “But until David was an established major leaguer, I wasn’t willing to make it. Ross was too good to allow him to walk away before it was necessary.”

So for the next seven years, as David struggled with injuries and lack of playing time in stints with the San Diego Padres and Philadelphia Phillies, Ross gritted his teeth and did his job.

“Sure, I was worried about what he wrote,” Connie said. “I would look over his shoulder and see him writing something bad about some team and think, ‘Well, OK, that’s another place David can’t go.’ ”

While the father was criticizing the Dodgers’ ownership, his son was spending a summer rehabilitating the shoulder in Vero Beach, Fla.

While the father was questioning the Padres’ owner, the son was bouncing around the Padre organization.

But a funny thing happened on the way to double-career suicide. As industry types realized the similarity between Ross and David’s work ethic, bridges weren’t burned, they were built.

“The makeup of the two men is the same,” said Kevin Towers, the Padres’ general manager. “Everybody sees they are both good people. Nobody that I know sees what they do as a conflict or a problem.”

Dennis Gilbert, special assistant to the chairman of the Chicago White Sox, agreed it was an unusual situation saved by one virtue.

“Both guys have such integrity, that’s the only way it works,” he said.

Ross’ transformation from baseball writer to baseball father was slow, beginning with David’s major league debut in San Diego in 1999.

“We’re sitting in the stands, he came into the game as a pinch-runner, Connie and Sara stood up and clapped, but I didn’t know what to do,” Ross said.

Indeed, in all of his adult years, he had never cheered at a major league game.

“I just sat there,” he said. “In the beginning, I sat there a lot.”

As that night at Dodger Stadium showed, he has now learned how to cheer. But in many ways, he still can’t be a regular baseball dad.

Other players will occasionally bring their fathers into the clubhouse. Ross will not enter a clubhouse if David is there.

“I don’t want to use my position for any sort of privileges that other dads don’t have,” Ross said.

Other players listen as their fathers ask them about clubhouse gossip. Ross will entertain none of that, not wanting to put either of them in a potentially uncomfortable position.

“I told David, ‘I don’t want to hear any of it, we don’t go there,’ ” Ross said.

And that dream of son on the field and father in the press box? Forget it. When David is on the field, Ross will not go into the press box.

Said David with a laugh: “Except when it’s raining. I saw him go up there in Baltimore when it was raining.”

For his part, David has played the baseball writer’s son well.

He’s always accessible, usually tries to say something smart and believes there are no dumb questions.

“My dad’s business has been very good to our family, and I respect that,” he said.

David is funny, once telling San Diego reporters after he was called up, “I had read a few things, but as everyone knows you can’t believe what’s in the paper.”

He’s also honest, once saying that he never became a sportswriter because “I’ve heard my dad cuss at the computer too many times.”

And this week, finally, he will be home, where his father will be waiting for him in the shadows, not with a notebook, but a hug.

Ross retired from full-time work this summer at 67. He now writes once a week, and he has barely missed an Oriole inning since cutting back.

Said David: “It’s been nice.”

Said Ross: “It’s been really nice.”

The ink-stained hands are no longer reluctant to clap. The deadlines are now measured in innings. It was like the old baseball writer figured all along. Printers’ ink is intoxicating. Blood is thicker.

*

Bill Plaschke can be reached at [email protected]. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.