Olerud retired in typical way, with quiet class

Maybe all you need to know about John Olerud is that at 36, after 16 major league seasons and 7,419 at bats, he played his first game in the minor leagues.

But remember, he was the guy with the inside-out swing.

It’s nothing but an old baseball footnote, but Olerud jumped straight from Washington State University – well, from the summer ball Palouse Cougars, to be more accurate – to the big leagues in 1989, without so much as a toe-dip in Triple-A. Since the onset of the free-agent draft in 1965, only 17 players had gone directly to the majors and just three of those – Bob Horner, Dave Winfield and Olerud – never had the undertow pull them back into the bushes.

You might think that’s one of those distinctions to which a player in his twilight years might cling.

Who wants to be pulling on his sanitary socks in a dingy clubhouse in Pawtucket at age 36?

But in truth, there was more drollery in it than desperation. Signed by the Boston Red Sox as a free agent after off-season foot surgery, Olerud had to demonstrate his batting eye was back before he was summoned back into another free-for-all pennant race in the American League East. Naturally, the youngsters with the Triple-A team gave him the senior citizen treatment – John Olderdude, he was called – and a few of them had it in mind to commemorate the occasion with something other than black crepe and a Geritol toast.

“We tried to get the ball on his first minor league hit,” catcher Kelly Shoppach told the Boston Globe later, “but he hit it over the fence.”

OK, so sometimes he didn’t always understate it. But John Olerud stayed in the game on his own terms and left it that way, as well.

On Tuesday, it was revealed that Olerud had retired after a 17-year major league career, though not as an announcement but as an afterthought. At baseball’s winter meetings in Dallas, reporters were grilling Red Sox executives about this and that when Olerud’s name was mentioned among the unsigned free agents.

“He retired,” said assistant to the general manager Jed Hoyer, and it may have been news even to his superiors.

No press conference. No pomp. No tears.

This was truly the man’s style, if anything other than his swing could be described as stylish. He might come to the ballpark in jeans and a T-shirt, with a backpack slung over a shoulder, and he might be the first one out of the clubhouse while more media-amorous teammates were still preening for the TV cameras.

But between the lines – hey, John Olerud was all about between the lines.

The final accounting of a career spent with the Blue Jays, Mets, Mariners, Yankees and Red Sox shows him leaving the game with 2,239 hits and a .295 career average, and a .398 on-base percentage for the Moneyballers. There were 255 home runs among those hits, but that wasn’t Olerud’s mission.

Ted Williams left baseball in a home-run trot. Olerud left it with a single up the middle.

Williams’ name comes up not in comparison but in context, because in 1993, with Toronto, Olerud started off hot enough to suggest he might be the one to assume Teddy Ballgame’s enduring legacy as baseball’s last .400 hitter. Olerud was still there as late as August, but inevitably tailed off to league the American League with a .363 average. Five years later, he hit .354 with the Mets and only Larry Walker kept him from being a batting champ in two leagues.

Then there were the three Gold Gloves he won that probably should have been more, for he was undeniably the most underrated first baseman of his era.

All in all, it doesn’t add up to the Hall of Fame, sadly, even with the two World Series rings he won with Toronto – but knowing Olerud that almost seems like design.

He’d just as soon be in the Hall of Reliable. Colorless and odorless, that’s Ole.

Even when he had the chance to be a participant in some baseball vaudeville, he blew the whistle on himself. It was the anecdote ESPN tried to pass off a few years ago about Rickey Henderson quizzing Olerud, when both were with the Mariners, on why he wore a helmet in the field. Henderson purportedly said, “That’s funny, I played with a guy in New York last year who wore a helmet, too” – the joke, of course, being that it was Olerud who was also Henderson’s teammate on the Mets.

But Olerud, with no need to make Henderson a punch line or himself look like Mr. Mensa by comparison, denied that the exchange ever happened.

The helmet? That was a remnant of the nearly tragic side of Olerud’s story, the part where his baseball career was almost cut short. In 1988, he put together the most remarkable season in the history of college baseball – 15-0 as a pitcher for the Cougs, .464 as a hitter with 23 homers in 66 games. The next January he collapsed in Hollingbery Fieldhouse during a workout, and a month later was undergoing surgery to repair a brain aneurysm.

By the following September, he was making his debut with the Jays, helmet in place even in the field as a precaution, as it’s been ever since.

The wooing and signing of Olerud away from Wazzu is a legend in itself, what with Jays GM Pat Gillick – who later signed him to a Mariners contract – making nine trips to Washington and scout Don Welke dogging him through the Alaska League. It was there that the Welke toted up Olerud swinging at 49 pitches in a row – and never failing to make contact.

It wasn’t until 2004 that his swing finally betrayed him and, with him hitting just .245 with 22 RBIs in 78 games, the Mariners – in a freefall from their three-season run of 300 wins – cut him loose. Of course, all he did was help the Yankees into the postseason later that year and the Red Sox this past season – hitting .280 or better at both stops.

That and be the one thing he’d never been – a minor character.