ROHNERT PARK
The daydream is the very best friend a guy could have, for Blake Aldrete takes it everywhere and it never disappoints or annoys him. It'll happen most frequently when he watches sports on television, any sport. Interestingly enough, he doesn't have to be watching the St. Louis Cardinals where his dad, Mike, is the assistant hitting coach.
"Sometimes it'll happen every 30 seconds," said the SSU freshman pitcher. "It'll just pop in my head."
The dream typically takes on this imagined structure: Mike is a big-league manager, standing the dugout, watching his son pitch for his team. Blake could be watching lawn bowling, for criminey sakes, and the daydream comes.
"I have been having this dream since I was 10," said Aldrete, 19, "when I realized I was pretty good at baseball."
The daydream will reach full-blown euphoria this weekend. Aldrete flew out Friday morning to join his dad in Texas for games 3-4-5 of the 2011 World Series. Along with his mother and sister, he'll stay in the same hotel as his father. Whether he'll be able to get on the field with the Cardinals, that's to be determined. But it's not as if Aldrete's hungry to get on a big league field. That experience he has had for five significant chunks of time.
Mike Aldrete, you may remember, was a corner outfielder and first baseman for parts of 10 big-league seasons. He spent three years with the Giants, the team that drafted him, and three with the A's, along with stints with the Padres, Indians, Angels and Yankees in which he was on their World Series championship team in 1996. Mike Aldrete was a career .263 hitter with only 41 homers but a clubhouse presence that made him dependable, coachable, likeable and, most of all, a good teammate. In this era in which big egos can suffocate the buoyancy of any big league clubhouse, Stanford grad Aldrete was there to be an ear for the troubled and a shoulder for support.
"I never met anybody who didn't like my dad," said Blake Aldrete, 5-foot-10, 215 pounds.
For a month during the summers between seventh, eighth and ninth grades, Blake Aldrete would leave the family home in Monterey and stay with his dad in Phoenix, where Mike was the hitting coach for Arizona. With his brother Michael, Blake was given free reign in the Diamondbacks clubhouse, understanding it was a workplace, not a playground. When no one was using the indoor batting cage, Mike would pitch to his two sons.
One day in that workplace, Arizona outfielder Luis Gonzalez approached Aldrete with a catalog listing all the products made by Easton, a company known for their bats. Aldrete at the time was entering his freshman year at Salinas High School and didn't have a lot of high-grade equipment.
"Pick whatever you want," Gonzalez said to Aldrete, "and I'll get it for you."
After Blake picked up his jaw that had dropped to the floor, he selected a metal bat, gloves, spikes.
So when asked if he ever wanted autographs of players, Blake shrugged. He never has. He received something more valuable: human interaction.
"I don't need their signature to remember them," said the right-handed pitcher.
Blake also doesn't need to write down every bit of advice his father has given them over the years either. He can recite his father's wisdom as easily as his first name.
"Stay within yourself and don't try to do more than what you've got. Don't let the game catch up to you. Don't let it overwhelm you.
"If you strike out in your first at-bat, let it go. You're going to get another at-bat soon. Throw strikes. If you throw strikes, the batters will get themselves out. Don't overthrow the baseball. Take a little off and add some movement and put it over the corners."
What Aldrete values most in learning baseball from his father was his dad's approach to coaching.
"A lot of coaches will say, &‘You're doing this wrong and that wrong. You got to change all this, all that.' Sometimes they would want you to change everything. If you do that enough, it makes it worse for the player. You almost get mad at the coach. My dad always would deal with it this way: &‘Let's improve this. Let's improve that.' My dad is a great teacher."
Mike Aldrete has been gaining a lot of traction these days for his way with people. It is, after all, the most valuable attribute a coach or a manager can possess. Nothing gets in the way of progress more than a coach who puts a player on edge. Baseball is stressful enough between the lines without coming off the field to a coach intent on showing everyone who's the boss.
"My dad's dream is to be the manager of the Giants," Aldrete said. "It's always been his dream."
And for Blake Aldrete to dream of riding one day in a parade celebration down Market Street, a Giants player standing next to the Giants manager who sired him, I think I noticed Aldrete's eyes glaze over. He has, after all, already had a taste of that.
"I rode with my dad in the victory parade through New York," he said, "when the Yankees won the World Series in 1996."
Aldrete, a mid-season pickup that year, hit a couple homers off Boston's Roger Clemens in key games. If they win the Series, overreacting Yankee fans treat every player like Babe Ruth. So, by extension, Blake Aldrete, a month shy of his fifth birthday, felt like the son of Babe Ruth and was rewarded as such.
"They threw rolls of toilet paper at us," Blake Aldrete said, "and my dad and I threw the toilet paper back at them."
For New Yorkers, that's considered a tender moment. For Blake Aldrete, that's the best part of his dream.
You can reach Staff Columnist Bob Padecky at 521-5223 or bob.padecky@pressdemocrat.com.
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