YUMA, Ariz. — To understand San Diego Padres pitcher Bruce Hurst, friends say, is to look at his game face. Such a face for such a devoutly religious guy.
"Nothing personal, but the day that I pitch is my day, and I want to be left alone," said Hurst, baseball's hottest free-agent prize last winter. He came to San Diego from the Boston Red Sox for $5.25 million and the trust that he can help the Padres win a pennant.
"On the day I pitch, I don't want anybody talking to me about anything but the hitters," Hurst said. "I don't want to be bothered, not even by teammates, unless it's about the game. In Boston they said that four out of five days, I was the nicest guy in the world. But on the fifth day, watch out. They were right."
The reason for this is as simple as the smile and clothes and haircut of the Mormon from Utah.
"The mound is where I can compete," he said. "It's my chance."
Translation: Not once on the mound has anyone jeered him for not drinking a beer. Not once has he been hit with a pack of cigarettes. Not once has anyone sneaked a girlie magazine into his locker and then sneaked away snickering.
When Hurst is pitching, teammates don't care that he doesn't join them at bars or poker games. They don't care that he refuses to undress in the clubhouse when female reporters are present, running instead to the trainer's room or a closet.
And when he's pitching, Bruce Hurst does not get homesick. He does not think about eating ice cream with his wife and playing with his children and talking on the telephone with the rest of his family in small-town St. George, Utah. He does not worry whether one day somebody will ask him to make a choice between baseball and the rest of his life, which he says will be no choice at all.
Throughout a 13-year pro career in which he has felt so tormented he threatened to quit several times, and actually did quit once, the mound has been more than Bruce Hurst's place of employment. It has been his refuge.
"Even in high school, my favorite class was P.E.," Hurst said. "I was tall and thin and had big feet and a big nose. I wasn't Mr. Handsome. I wasn't one of the 'cool' ones. But once on the field, I could compete. Out there, I loved to compete."
He still does. Hurst is coming off his best year with the Red Sox--18-6 with a 3.66 earned-run average--and joins the Padres as one of baseball's top left-handers.
If it's control the Padres want, Hurst has struck out 1,043 and walked just 479 in his eight-year big league career. If it's consistency, only once has Hurst won fewer than 10 games in each of his seven full big league seasons, and only once in the last six years had he started fewer than 33 games.
The Padres also hope to be in a few big games this season, at which point Hurst might also be their man. In seven postseason starts, including three in the 1986 World Series against the New York Mets, he is 3-2 with a 2.29 ERA and 37 strikeouts compared with just 12 walks.
Padre pitching coach Pat Dobson said: "What we got in Hurst is a guy who will beat a team 1-0 to break your four-game losing streak. That kind of guy."
What they also got was a 30-year-old man who describes an entertaining off-season night as, "Playing hoops for a couple of hours, going down to the 7-Eleven for a Big Gulp, and then bringing it on home."
Listen close and you also hear rebellion in this voice, perhaps even a trace of anger. In that voice is a part of him that dares you, with your assumptions that nice guys can't finish first, to just watch.
The voice warns, don't look at the mound for something that isn't there, look for his game face.
"I read somewhere that I would have trouble in San Diego with all the pressure on me because of my 'delicate psyche,' " Hurst said. \o7 Delicate psyche? \f7 Nice phrase. Give me a break. Just because I don't smoke, don't drink and don't swear doesn't mean I can't fight and I can't compete.
"Delicate psyche, huh? What a laugh. I don't care what they say about me because they don't know me."
Pause.
"Well, OK, I do care," he said. "It makes me mad that because of my choice of life style, people are waiting, waiting, waiting--and then, \o7 wham!\f7 --I slip up and all of a sudden I have a delicate psyche.
"Slumps happen because I'm a human being. But that doesn't mean I'm also not a fighter. I wouldn't have made it this far if I wasn't a fighter."
Hurst is not the only one who thinks that. His brother Buck, who is 10 years older, was recently asked about the odds against Bruce ever reaching this place.
"Good grief almighty," said Buck from St. George, near where he runs a hardware store. "To be right frank about it, I don't know how Bruce ever even stayed in baseball, much less done what he's done.
"How many times did he quit? Oh, about a million."
--On a cross-country drive to his first spring training camp in 1977, Hurst kept saying that he wanted to quit.
