Before he was the Hack Man of Pac Bell Park, before he became San Francisco's gentlest Giant, before he turned as golden as a certain Bay Area bridge, Rich Aurilia was the Phantom of the Metropolitan Opera. To supplement his meager wages in the minors seven years ago, the Brooklyn-born shortstop spent an off-season in Manhattan as a stagehand at the Met. Three nights a week he lugged scenery and struck sets, haunting the famous opera hall until the squeak of dawn. While punching in for the late shift, he would sometimes catch the last act of I Pagliacci or La Traviata. "It seemed everybody in the theater knew what was going on but me," Aurilia recalls. "I had no clue."

Asked to explain his bravissimo performance as a batsman this year-- through Sunday he ranked fifth in the national League in average (.346), first in hits (123) and eighth in doubles (24)-- the 29-year-old Aurilia is equally clueless. "I really don't know," he says, lifting a bemused eyebrow. "I just hope it lasts a whole season."

After a little more than half the season Aurilia has a shot at becoming the first Giant to win a batting title since Willie Mays in 1954 and the first national League shortstop to win one since Dick Broat of the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1960. "He has good bat control, and he's not afraid to hit the ball [anywhere] in the count," says San Diego Padres outfielder Tony Gwynn, who has won eight National League batting crowns. "He [used to] wear us out out, but then he'd play somebody else and go 1 for 8. This year he's hitting everybody."

Everyone but Aurilia seems to have a theory about why the average of this career .270 hitter is suddenly as lusty as Carmen. "If you asked five different people," he says, "you'd get five different answers." So we asked five people, and we got these five answers:

* It's his slot in the batting order, insists Florida Marlins pitcher Chuck Smith. Until this season Aurilia mostly batted seventh, which meant his job was to clean the table, not set it. Following a 22-home, 80-RBI season in 1999, he again led all National League shortstops with 20 home runs and 79 RBIs last year. That made Aurilia the senior circuit's first shortstop since Ernie Banks in 1960 and '61 to have back-to-back 20-homer season. Ever since spring training, however, manager Dusty Baker has been penciling him in as the number 2 hitter, ahead of Barry Bonds. Smith believes the prospect of facing the homer-bringing Bonds has caused pitchers to feed Aurilia a steady diet of fat heaters. "You're not going to pitch him as carefully when you've got somebody like Barry up next," says Smith.

* It's his ability to hit to all fields, insists Baker. Strictly a pull hitter in previous seasons, the righthanded-hitting Aurilia has been slapping the ball the opposite way, spraying it from foul line to foul line. He has accomplished this by shorting a stroke that was as long and looping as a Jerry Garcia solo. "Look at the guys who have won batting titles-- the George Bretts, Tony Gwynns, Rod Carews and Pete Roses," Baker says. "Those guys were perennially on top because they used the whole field. Now you see Richie hitting triples into right center and singles to left, up the middle and down the lines."

* It's his patience at the plate, insists Giants first base coach Robby Thompson. "After five full years in the league Richie has learned to treat every at bat like it was his last," he says. "For the first time, he's not afraid to go deep in the count." Aurilia has learned to lay off not only sliders that are balls but also sliders that are strikes. Impatient and impetuous, he had a habit of hacking at the first acceptable pitch he saw. By working the count, he has cut down on his strikeouts-- from one every 6.6 at bats over the last three years to one every 9.2 this years. "I realized they give you three strikes, and you don't have to swing at the first one," he says. "I used to think the first strike might be the best I'd be thrown. Now I wait for a pitch I can drive."

* It's his maturity, insists Giants broadcaster Duane Kuiper. In the past, one of the joys of watching Aurilia was to see how far he'd fling his helmet after making an out. "Richie led the league in helmet tossing," Kuiper says. "He'd go 0 for 4 and throw four helmets." From their redoubt on the mound, pitchers would watch Aurilia snap and knew they had a psychological edge on him. This year he hasn't flipped his lid once. "It was too little league," Aurilia says. Kuiper thinks Aurilia has become a player who can mask his on-field emotions and remain focused. "As you get older," says Aurilia with a small shrug, "you realize you can't get a hit every at bat or every game." Part of that equanimity may come from the fact that his wife, Raquel, is now in the seventh month of pregnancy. Says second baseman Jeff Kent, "There's nothing like having a baby to mature a man and give him perspective."

* It's his approach, insists Kent. "Rich comes to the plate knowing what he wants to do," he says. "He has a game plan and, more often than not, follows it." To date, Aurilia's plan has worked almost 35% of the time. "Thirty-five percent will get you fired in a nine-to-five job," says Kent. "In baseball, it gets you into the Hall of Fame."

Aurilia, who was voted the starting shortstop in last week's All-Star Game, is making San Franciscans forget all the other guys who have played short in that city. That's not hard, considering the position has been home to more itinerants than a Polk Street flophouse. Since Daryl (Big Dee) Spencer first anchored the infield in 1958, shortstop has been manned by such immortals as Eddie Bressoud, Jose Pagan, Tito Fuentes, Hal Lanier, and Jose Uribe.

Until now Aurilia has been only slightly less anonymous. "There's a big piece of me that likes that," he says with a wry smile. "I can go about my business withough anybody bothering me. But a small piece of me feels good to be recognized. It's bound to happen if you have a decent amount of success." He can be painfully modest. Informed that Padres skipper Bruce Bochy calls Aurilia the best overall shortstop in the league, he practically averts his eyes in embarassment.

The soft-spoken Aurilia may have the most expressive body language in baseball. "He can argue loudly with an umpire without saying a word," says Giants broadcaster Mike Krukow. Unhappy with a call, Aurilia will let his shoulders slump, kick the dirt and whip his head from side to side.

Aurilia is not only quietly demonstrative but also quietly generous. When Hall of Famer Willie Stargell died during spring training, Aurilia bought Pop's old teammate, Giants hitting instructor Gene Clines, a round-trip plane ticket from the Giants' camp in Scottdale, Az., to the funeral in Wilmington, N.C. "Rich said, 'Don't argue-- you've got to be there, and I'm making sure you are," Clines says. "In today's game, that attitude's a rarity."

San Francisco leftfielder Shawon Dunston describes Aurilia as a "bad story because he's a good person. You don't hear about him staying out until five in the morning before a game." Yet when Aurilia steps up to the plate at pac bell, he is often serenaded by the stangled strains of the Beastie Boys' No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn."Any time we need an interpreter for The Sopranos, we call Rich," cracks Kuiper.

The son of a nurse, Lorraine, and a stockroom worker, Rich, Aurilia grew up in an Italian enclave of the Gravesend section of Brooklyn, home to one of the country's oldest cemetaries. His youth was misspent playing stickball on the streets. "I can'ts even tell you how much money my parents must have spent replacing windows," he says. The one neighborhood home Aurilia hever hit-and-run from belonged to mafia don Carlo Gambino. "If I had broken his window," Aurilia says, "I would have apologized."

Because of his strong arm Aurilia was turned into a shortstop at 15 by his coach at Xaverian High, Ed Murach. "At that age, if you're a guy that can catch grounders and throw across the field on a consistent basis, that's a good thing," Aurilia says. "I guess I was one of those guys." He still is. Although he's so slow that teammates jokingly call him Speedy, Aurilia positions himself well and catches everything he can get to.

Drafted out of St. John's in the 24th round in 1992 by the Texas Rangers, Aurilia was handed a $5,000 signing bonus and a plane ticket to Butte, Mont., where he began his pro career in the rookie Pioneer league. He hit well at Butte (.377) and the next season at Charlotte (.309) in the Class A Florida State League, but he sputtered at Double A Tulsa (.234) in '94. "I didn't know how to deal with failure," he says. The Rangers dealt with it on Chrismas Eve of that year, swapping him to San Francisco. Aurilia was heartbroken. "I was thinking, Why doesn't Texas want me?" he says. "I should have thought, Some other team wants me more."

For four season he quietly waited his turn, in Triple A Phoenix or in San Francisco, while the Giants brought in a conga line of seasoned shortstops to play in front of or with him: Dunston, Jose Vizcaino, Rey Sanchez. Not until 1999 did Aurilia win the job outright. "Maybe the Giants couldn't get anybody else," he muses. "Maybe that's why they gave me the job."

They almost took it back. last year, with Aurilia mired in an early-season slump, the buzz was that he might be traded to the New York Mets. Encouraged by those 22 homers in '99, he had been trying to park every pitch in the bleachers. "Next thing I knew," he says, "I was hitting .230 in June." He worked his way out of his funk by "just going out and having fun," he says, and he ended up hitting .282 in June and .363 in July to raise his average to .271 by the end of the season. Typically, Aurilia says he's prouder of having dug himself out of that slump of 2000 than of having put up the gaudy numbers of 2001.

In a game too often dominaated by operatic prima donnas, Aurilia is still content just to be part of the scenery.

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