April’s Blowers Hits Showers Ex-Seattle Third Sacker Finally Hits For Dodgers

Reggie Smith was pulling out his hair and, to put it politely, Reggie really should go easy on that. The object of his frustration was Mike Blowers, the Los Angeles Dodgers new third baseman, who is a terrific guy and a hard worker but was missing more pitches than a blind umpire.

Blowers had come to L.A. from Seattle, where he and his wife Nicole grew up, and where he made his bones at the hot corner for the Mariners. Though he was not considered as torrid a batsman as, say, Ken Griffey Jr. or Edgar Martinez, or as valuable a signee as Randy Johnson, he drove in 96 runs, smacked 23 homers and batted .257 last season - enough to qualify for the Dodgers vacancy at third.

Yet as nice a guy as Blowers is, he had Smith’s head in a tizzy.

“I didn’t know Mike and I didn’t want to go and make wholesale changes,” said the Dodgers hitting guru. “But I had to do something. I had to get him to explain to me what he was doing. It was a struggle.”

Then Smith did a little sleuthing. Poring over Blowers’ statistical profile, Smith discovered that this was nothing new; Blowers had been driving other hitting coaches bonkers around the same time of year.

“Just about the same number of at-bats last year, he started coming out of it,” Smith said.

So it happened again. Blowers blossomed. To mis-coin a phrase, April sours bring May Blowers. If that makes you cringe, remember that the inspiration for it is Blowers’ career .203 average in April.

Entering Wednesday night’s game against the Mets, Blowers was batting .333 on the current homestand, improving his overall average this May to .255.

Why the stumble? Why the turnaround?

“It’s a combination of things,” said the 30-year-old Blowers. “Part of it was me just getting comfortable in L.A., then being with a new team, then a new manager and coaches, then a new park and facing all new teams …”

Fortunately, Smith had patience, and much of the scrutiny on the Dodgers was being placed on other areas - their spring-training boasts, the slumps of more established Dodgers such as Eric Karros and Raul Mondesi, and more recently, Brett Butler’s cancer. So Blowers could work out of his funk gradually.

“It was probably harder on Reggie, just because he really hadn’t seen me play before other than on videotape,” Blowers said. “A hitting coach can look at a guy he knows, a guy he’s familiar with, and tell immediately what he’s doing differently. With me, he was pulling his hair out.”

That hair again. It can rest underneath the blue cap for now.

Blowers may not be able to reproduce his career-high numbers of last season - before Wednesday, for instance, he had only one home run and 11 RBIs but it’s a certainty that he won’t have to muddle through another April in 1996.

If Blowers is re-signed by the Dodgers after this year, it will be up to him and Smith to avoid another crawl out of the gate.

This entire Dodgers experience has been one enormous adjustment for Blowers. He and Nicole had to give up somber Seattle for sunlit L.A. He still is learning the National League pitchers and the parks.

“I’d been in the American League for four years,” he said, “and I was familiar with everything. That makes it easier to come up with a game plan every night. But I feel I’ve made strides.”

It’s a bit early for the Dodgers to start speculating about who will play third next year. There hasn’t been a real fixture at the position since Ron Cey. The bag seems cursed, and whoever patrols its perimeter usually seems to sign his own ticket out.

“If I go out and do the job I’m capable of doing, I’ll be that guy,” Blowers said. “I’d love to be that guy. But I can’t worry about that. I’ll just do what I can do and see what happens at the end of the season.”