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Giants' shortstop hits a quiet .365
Aurilia graduates from hacker to hitter
By Henry Schulman, San Francisco Chronicle, page D1
Talk about flying under the radar.
Rich Aurilia is making a run at two accomplishments unseen since Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, yet outside the Bay Area he may as well be Estes Kefauver. For all but the truest baseball fans, Aurilia is merely Barry Bonds' warm-up act.
But what an act.
By hitting .365 in 63 games Aurilia has a chance to win the Giants' first batting title since Willie Mays hit .345 in 1954, and the first by a National League shortstop since Dick Groat of the Pirates hit .325 in 1960.
Yet who will notice Aurilia come September if that dude who hits behind him keeps jacking balls out of the park?
"By then nobody will really be worrying about it," San Diego Padres right fielder Tony Gwynn quipped. "Everybody will be looking to see if Barry can hit 100 home runs in a season."
Gwynn speaks with authority on batting titles. He's won eight of them, including the one in 1989 he wrested from Will Clark in the season's final weekend. So allow Gwynn to lead the chorus of reason that insists it is too early to think about engraving Aurilia's name on a trophy.
"He's a good hitter, no question," Gwynn said. "Time is the only thing that will tell if he's going to do it for six months. We'll see. I know he's killing us, but it's hard to judge people after three months."
Amen, said Giants batting coach Gene Clines.
"We've got a long way to go to even think he's going to finish the season hitting .350 or .360," Clines said. "It could happen. I hope it does happen, but we're getting too far ahead of ourselves here."
On the other hand, mid-June is late enough to declare that Aurilia's unconscious hitting in 2001 is more tangible than ethereal. Advance scouts have seen him bat 230 times, yet the pitchers who read their reports still can't solve him.
Aurilia's 2001 numbers make his career stats look like a CIA misinformation campaign. He is hitting 95 points higher than his career average of .270 and 84 points higher than his single-year best of .281 in 1999.
Aurilia has struck out 23 times, which projects to 59 for the season. Last year, he struck out 90 times. This year, he has struck out once every 10 at- bats. For 1998 through 2000, his first three full years in the majors, he whiffed once every 6.6 at-bats.
When he takes an 0-for-4 he gets two hits the next day. Just once in 2001 has Aurilia gone hitless in two consecutive starts. He has had four four-hit games, four three-hit games and 18 two-hit games.
"He's just been locked in from day one," teammate J.T. Snow said. "It's kind of rare for a guy to be so hot for this long, almost to the point where you expect him to get two hits every night."
THE ANTI-GWYNN
To win a batting title in this era of expansion and tiny ballparks, one almost has to get two hits every night. That's an intriguing challenge for Aurilia, who has been prone to long slumps and does not display a classic pure hitter's swing.
Gwynn possesses that quick, fluid motion in which the bat acts as an extension of his right arm. Aurilia is the anti-Gwynn. He swings loudly, and when he misses (which is rare these days) one wonders how he stays in his shoes.
But Aurilia has made the stroke work, and that will hardly be the biggest obstacle on his path toward the first batting title for a Giant since the club moved to San Francisco. Gwynn said Aurilia will have to fend off constant questioning from the media, the urge to see where he stands in the newspaper every day and, most of all, his own doubts.
"He's gotten off to a good start," Gwynn said, "but when you start like this in April it's no big deal. In May it's no big deal. All of a sudden it's June and you wonder if you can maintain it for three more months. That's the question you ask yourself when you haven't hit this well before."
Aurilia should get his first glimpse of the spotlight at the All-Star Game next month in Seattle, if the national media can tear themselves away from Bonds. Aurilia leads the NL shortstop balloting and would be the first Giant to start an All-Star Game at the position since Chris Speier in 1973.
This is uncharted territory for this 29-year-old, salt-of-the-earth Brooklynite, and anyone who claims he saw this coming is a liar. That goes for Aurilia, too.
"Am I surprised? Yeah," he said. "If you asked anybody they'd be surprised, including myself, to come into the middle of June and be hitting like this. I have to have fun with this while it lasts. If it lasts a long time, great."
When Giants general manager Brian Sabean was asked if he ever thought Aurilia could hit .320, much less .350, he said, "Probably not. We thought he'd be a solid major-league hitter, but he's worked hard to learn how to excel at the major-league level, which is hard to do."
The million-dollar question is, "How?" How did Aurilia go from a solid "B" student to summa cum laude.
His move to the second spot in the order, which Aurilia did not like at first, has to be considered a factor.
"I still think hitting in front of Jeff (Kent) and Barry, the pitchers' main goal is to try to get me out and not walk me, so I'm seeing a lot of strikes," Aurilia said.
HACKER TO HITTER
But that's not the half of it. Bill Mueller saw a lot of strikes while batting ahead of Bonds and Kent last year and hit .268.
There is a consensus now that Aurilia has graduated from a hacker to a hitter, a more experienced batsman with a better understanding of pitching, his own strengths and limitations, and how to translate all that data into the right swing for each pitch.
"He's more consistent," Sabean said. "He's made more hard contact and cut down on his strikeouts. He's a better two-strike hitter. The guy is able to pass on pitchers' pitches and put the pitchers' mistakes in play instead of fouling them off and winding up down in the count, where you're susceptible to strikeouts."
Manager Dusty Baker's take: "He's staying out of the air, which has helped him hit .350. He's also hitting the ball the other way. Look at most of the guys who've won batting titles -- George Brett, Rod Carew, Pete Rose, guys who were perennially on top. They used the whole field.
"You see Richie hitting triples into right center, singles to left, up the middle and down the lines. More than anything, that goes to balance at the plate, and he's awesome right now."
Aurilia also credits his mental approach now, unlike last year, when he came off a 22-homer, 80-RBI season and tried to hit like Barry Bonds and Jeff Kent instead of Rich Aurilia.
"I started so horribly last year. I was trying to do things that maybe I wasn't capable of on a consistent basis," he said. "Last year, I tried to hit home run after home run, and the next thing I knew I was hitting .220 in June. The mind-set I came out with this year was, don't get into a hole like last year."
With the Giants struggling, the last thing on Aurilia's mind now is a batting title. He doesn't know about Dick Groat, and for now he doesn't care to.
"Yeah, if it happens I'd be real excited about it, to know that all my hard work paid off," Aurilia said. "But this is one thing I don't have any control over. The only thing I can control is trying to have good at-bats, just thinking day to day, about whom I'm facing and what I can do to help the team win."
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