ROGER CRAIG IN THE MOUNTAINS : Humm Baby! That's a Real Nice Hideaway Home, Baby

By BOB OATES

Feb. 28, 1988 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

BORREGO SPRINGS, Calif. — On the top floor of baseball Manager Roger Craig’s new two-story log cabin in the mountains, a hand-carved wooden bridge extends about 20 feet from the master bedroom to his workout room.

And from this bridge, the living room below can be viewed through a railing of baseball bats contributed by the San Francisco Giants, the club Craig manages.

“There’s a bat from each player,” he said the other day. “When I trade a guy, I’ll just take out his bat and get one from the new guy.”

That won’t be easy. It’s a project merely getting to Craig’s mountain-top cabin--which is actually a 3,000-square-foot rustic-modern mansion on a rolling, wooded 41-acre ranch he bought a few years ago.

Made of hand-hewn logs with oak floors and big, square hemlock beams, the cabin sits in the splendor of a grove of oak trees near a 3,600-foot peak in the Volcan Mountains.

The Volcan range edges eastern San Diego County. “When it rains in San Diego, we get a foot of snow here,” Craig said.

His daughter, Sherri Craig-Dickerson of San Diego, said: “You’ve heard of remote and isolated. This is the most remote place in the most isolated place in the West. I have trouble finding my way up here myself.”

Craig, who in recent years has lived in nearby Alpine, moved into his new cabin home this month with his wife, Carolyn. He left for spring training a week later but said he will return on the ballclub’s days off whenever he can.

By air from Phoenix--or from San Francisco, where Craig led the Giants to first place in the National League West last year--it’s about an hour to Los Angeles. A connecting commercial flight takes 40 minutes to Borrego Springs, a desert oasis not far from Palm Springs. And from Borrego, by car, it’s only 40 minutes more, west by southwest, up to Craig’s ranch, if you really want to go there. And if you know exactly where you’re going.

That’s the rub.

The road is continuously uphill, consistently winding, and often scary if unfailingly scenic. And at the end, the last few miles are graveled, rutted, narrow and dust-covered. It is a road that eventually leads nowhere, seemingly, into 5,100 oak trees.

“I counted them one year,” Craig said.

On horseback that time, he was on an all-day ride through his estate, which he calls the Humm Baby Ranch. With its improvements, it is valued now at about $500,000.

Normally, he spends only the cocktail hour on a horse--as he did one final afternoon this month before taking off for spring training.

Climbing aboard shortly after 3 p.m.--with two or three beers in a saddlebag--Craig spurred his mount into a trot as a pair of golden retrievers and his favorite mutt yipped happily at the horse’s heels.

They returned just before dark, as usual--the sleek, obedient horse, the noisy dogs, and their tall, lean master. A craggy cowboy-type who stands 6 feet 4 inches, Craig, as he hopped off, looked even taller in his dusty, old broad-brimmed cowboy hat.

“That’s my meditation,” he said of his late-afternoon ride.

In his four decades in baseball, Craig, 58, has known the good life in some of America’s great cities. As a young man, he pitched in both Los Angeles and New York for the Dodgers and Mets, and in his maturity in San Francisco he is a celebrity in one of the nation’s most sophisticated cities.

Why would anybody forsake all that to live in isolation at the top of a mountain?

“This is me,” he said.

THE OPTIMIST

In recent years, San Francisco has had a winning pair of Roger Craigs. One of them is a 49er halfback, the other manages the Giants. Most sports fans know that. What they may not know is that on the Giants alone, there are two Roger Craigs, or, at the least, one with two remarkably distinct personalities:

--At times, the man who in two years turned things around in Candlestick Park--converting the Giants from a 100-game loser in 1985 to a division champion in 1987--is a reclusive mountain cowboy.

--In his other being, Craig is an uncommonly extroverted, inspirational baseball man. As Sparky Anderson, manager of the Detroit Tigers, said: “Roger is Mr. Upbeat. He’s the most positive and optimistic character I’ve known.”

Some of the first to see this side of Craig were the 9 or 10 pitchers on the Padres’ 1969 staff, where at the end of his playing career he became their pitching coach.

That year, his pitchers, acknowledging the help and encouragement they were getting from him steadily in both professional and private matters, got together before Mother’s Day and paid Craig a unique tribute. They sent him a Mother’s Day card.

“I can understand that,” said his daughter, Sherri, who grew up with a brother and two sisters. “At home, Mom was the heavy who kept us in line. Dad was the gentle, affectionate one who held you and hugged you when you needed it. He was the cheerleader who always made you think positive.”

Cheerleading, however, isn’t easy. It takes a lot out of any person, and in Craig’s case it drains him each year.

“You’ve got to recharge somewhere,” he said. “For me, the perfect place is the mountains.”

Hence an isolated ranch.

“What more could a man want?” he asked, examining his oak grove, as if for the first time.

“My son (Roger Craig Jr.) was the contractor here, and watching him build this cabin made it a restful off-season for me, the best I’ve ever had.

“I told him, ‘If I can manage as good as you build, Roger, we’re in the (World) Series already.’ ”

Speaking of that, Craig not only expects to be there this fall, he expects to win. “We’ll beat Toronto,” he said, blithely.

That would make him the first to earn a World Series winner’s ring in three capacities, player, coach and manager, in five cities. The first four were New York, Los Angeles, St. Louis and Detroit.

“Losing (to the Cardinals) last year will help us this year,” Craig said, putting a typically optimistic spin on the two shutouts he managed in the Giants’ last two starts.

“In baseball, it’s hard to win it all two seasons after you’ve lost everything,” he said. “It’s just too far to go in two years. We’ll get there this year.”

He’s always like that, daughter Sherri says.

“I went to Dad for sympathy one time, but I went in vain,” she recalled with mock bitterness.

“I told him: ‘I’m out of money. I’m divorced. I have two kids to raise. What am I going to do?’

“He said: ‘You have two wonderful kids. You’re a Craig. It’s wonderful to be alive. You’re the luckiest girl I know.’ ”

This was too much for even a member of his own family.

“Dammit, I want to be depressed today,” she pleaded.

“I’d like to help,” he said cheerfully. “But I don’t see any reason for it.”

He’s always like that, Sparky Anderson said.

One summer in Detroit, in the days when Craig was Anderson’s pitching coach and living temporarily in the manager’s condominium, Anderson woke Craig early one morning--and the way they tell it now, this is what they said:

Anderson (shaking Craig’s shoulder): “I’ve just traded (Jack) Billingham.”

Craig (sleepily): “Great. He’s a great pitcher, but if you’ve traded him, that’s great. I mean that.”

Anderson (earnestly): “I want you to tell him he’s traded, because I ain’t going to do it. He’s been knocking me in the papers.”

Craig: “We don’t know that for sure. Are you sure about that?”

Anderson: “Maybe not, but I want you to tell him anyway.”

Craig: “Anything you say, skipper. But let me say this first. When this day is over, Sparky Anderson is either going to have another enemy or another friend. . . . Billingham may be mad at you now, but he’ll love you some day if you’re kind to him today, if you walk up to him and shake hands with him and talk to him, and wish him well, and thank him for everything he did for you here and in Cincinnati. This is a great opportunity for you to make a friend for life.”

Anderson (reluctantly): “Well, I’ll think about it.”

When he’d thought about it, Anderson decided to bite the bullet and inform Billingham himself--in what was, for both men, an unpleasant conversation.

The postscript came a few years later. Out of baseball and getting started in private business, Billingham was in need of advice one day on how to handle a problem with an employee.

He telephoned Anderson.

BASEBALL MAN

According to Roger Craig, his closest friend in San Francisco is Giant General Manager Al Rosen.

Both are veteran baseball men--but strangely, before Rosen hired Craig in late 1985, they had only met once, and that by chance, at the winter meetings.

Since then, they have spent a considerable amount of time talking baseball and winning games, and leading cheers for one another.

During an off-season trip to San Francisco this winter, Craig, as he frequently does, went to dinner with Rosen. The next morning, they met at Rosen’s country club and played golf together all day. Then after a beer, on the spur of the moment, they picked up their wives and went out to dinner again. They didn’t get home until after midnight.

For a guy who’d rather be a cloistered cowboy in the mountains, Craig is surprisingly sociable. This, he said, is a legacy of his North Carolina boyhood.

“You better like crowds when you’re in a family of 10,” J.T. Craig, one of Roger’s five brothers, said from North Carolina. “I think Roger learned teamwork working the tobacco farms down here and the tobacco barns.”

Their father was a shoe salesman. In his best days, during the Depression, he made $40 a week.

“He used to express a lot of confidence in us,” Roger said. “He told us we could do anything if we’d do it the best we knew how.”

Said J.T.: “At supper, Daddy would tell us to forget today, it’s gone, make it big tomorrow. My brother, Roger, has always been a real nice guy who got his upbeat attitude from our daddy.”

Each year, J.T. recalls, the Carolina Craigs could only afford one new pair of pants, which went regularly to the oldest son--J.T.--who passed them along the next year to Wilson, who in turn passed them along to Richard, who passed them to Roger, the fourth son, four years later.

“When Roger was through with those old pants of mine, I always thought he trashed them,” said J.T., whose other brothers were babies at the time. “We kept wearing out the seat, you know, playing ball.

“But last year, I ran into a guy who used to live across the street from us in Durham. He told me: ‘If you ever see Roger, give him my thanks. We were poorer than you guys, you know. I couldn’t have gone to school without Roger’s pants.’ ”

J.T. is a retired mail carrier and amateur historian who traces the family’s ancestry to 1743, when the first Craig came over from Scotland.

“Our great, great, great grandfather fought for America (as a soldier) in the Revolutionary War,” J.T. said.

Then, during the Civil War, the game of baseball was invented. And although Roger briefly maintained the family’s most ancient tradition, wearing an Army uniform in the Korean War, he has been in baseball uniforms ever since--making friends along the way with four gifted, unusual baseball people: Rosen, Anderson, Walter Alston and Casey Stengel.

Craig on Alston: “I still find myself leaning on his inner strength.”

On Stengel: “Casey’s greatest asset was his sense of humor. Every day when I go to work, I remind myself that Casey always found a way to make baseball fun.”

On Anderson: “Sparky taught me that if you want to win, nothing is more important than to never knock a player in the paper.”

On Rosen: “The best thing that ever happened to me.”

As operators, Rosen and Craig were two of the most remarkable in sports last year. Each time the Giants faltered, Rosen picked them up with another trade--dealing mostly for pitchers.

To begin with, he got starter Dave Dravecky and relief pitcher Craig Lefferts after a Giant dive in July. Then after a Giant dive in early August, Rosen traded for relief pitcher Don Robinson. And most significant of all, after a Giant dive in late August, he brought in starter Rick Reuschel.

All had been disappointing elsewhere. As soothed by Craig, Dravecky was 7-4 in San Francisco, Lefferts had 4 saves, Robinson was 5-1 with 7 saves, and, as the Giants finished first, Reuschel finished 5-2.

“Roger Craig is one of the game’s great teachers,” Rosen said.

It took Craig until the early 1980s, when he had already lived a half century, to convince himself that.

In his years as a pitcher, for example, “I could never teach myself the forkball,” he said. “I tried, but I couldn’t throw it.”

In a schoolyard one afternoon five or six years ago he undertook once more to teach it to a group of young pitchers.

“I wanted them to have an off-speed pitch that wouldn’t hurt their arm,” he said.

The best way to learn anything, as any teacher will concede, is to teach it. Suddenly, Craig heard himself saying: “Think fastball.”

That was the key.

For, he said, when a pitch is properly released between two fingers, the index and middle fingers--but thrown like a fastball--it slows down to become a forkball, and drops like a spitball.

“It’s so simple, I think now that I could teach it to anybody,” Craig said.

He just about has. In recent seasons, indeed, he has helped revolutionize the game. Today, five or six years after he first taught it to a small group of kids, Craig’s pitch is thrown on every major league team.

But today, as a positive-thinking gimmick, he calls it something else. He calls it the split-fingered fastball.

THE COWBOY

In the old days, when Roger Craig was playing ball, the kids, when encouraging the pitcher, would say: “Humm babe.”

Later, he and his friends elaborated on the phrase. “To us, a good fielding play was a humm baby,” he said. “So was a good player, or even a pretty girl in the stands. They still are.”

Finally, he carried this expression with him to San Francisco, and there, “humm baby” has become the rallying cry of the new Giants--their daily ovation to positive thinking.

So, inevitably, when Craig settled down as a cowboy with a ranch on a mountain, he called it the Humm Baby Ranch.

Though hard to find in Craig’s forest of oak trees, his new residence is hard to miss when you’re finally there. Resembling an all-wood, century-old mountain inn, it is at the intersection of Humm Baby Way and Roger & Carolyn Place.

A professionally lettered, big city street sign nearby--a Christmas present from his children--so reads.

If you’re still in doubt, there’s a blue pickup truck just now bumping along with a load of hay in the dust of Humm Baby Way, and as it disappears in the flying gravel, you can just make out the rear license plate: “1 HUM BBY.”

The big cowboy from Candlestick Park owns all the land around here up to the highest point of his little mountain, and originally he had intended to build his log cabin smack dab on top.

Humm Baby Ranch was built for the ages. It is Craig’s intention, he said, for at least one of his four children to live there eventually, and then at least one of his six grandchildren.

The message on a Craig car bumper reads: “Happiness Is Being a Grandparent.”

The extreme top of his mountain proved not, however, to be for him. As an experiment last year, admiring the view, Craig parked his camper up there for a night or two, and got the scare of his life. He nearly blew away.

Until then, it had been generally believed, at least in San Francisco, that Craig loves windstorms. As almost his first act as the resident manager of Candlestick Park, he had gathered his players around him in a cold wind, and as they shivered that April afternoon, he had said: “Isn’t this a beautiful day? Or would you rather be playing in Montreal today? Or all summer in Atlanta?

“I think it could be arranged.”

Let the visiting teams beef, he muttered. Positive thinkers would rather play in the wind than anywhere else.

But they wouldn’t want to live there. Bowing to the gales that so often rage through this part of the world, Craig regrouped, moving his cabin site down a ways to the shelter of a large grove of trees, and there it stands today--a long way from Ebbets Field, where as a rookie in 1955 he pitched a three-hitter “in the first major league game I ever saw.”

Reminders of this and Craig’s other triumphs--his World Series wins in Brooklyn and at the L.A. Coliseum--are in the cabin’s big trophy room.

A pool room with a bar is also downstairs. Upstairs, the workout room has every necessary exercise tool.

The master bedroom’s king-size bed is made of peeled logs, long, fat and white. They were rounded off, by hand, with an an adz--the tool that was also used to hew the cabin’s many structural logs, which Craig imported from Washington state.

His son, the builder, put the logs together so efficiently that a single fireplace, an ornament of the living room, heats the whole house

Craig said the catalyst for a brand new log cabin was his wife’s interest in the antique furnishings that dominate the place. For instance, the dark-green view seats on the back porch--which overlook nothing but forests and mountains--were torn out of Detroit’s old Briggs Stadium, now Tiger Stadium, when it was remodeled.

During the winter, Craig leaves his Humm Baby home only to take his wife to the grocery store--”That’s every month or so,” Carolyn said--or to play golf at his new club in Borrego Springs, Rams Hill Country Club.

He said he could play golf every morning and ride every afternoon. On a horse he seems, and looks, as comfortable as Tom Lasorda in an Italian restaurant.

Chances are, Craig is the only baseball manager in the country who invariably carries a rifle during the cocktail hour--at least in the winter--on his afternoon rides. Not that he’s a hunter--but this is rattlesnake country. And the first day he was here, he won a close game by pitching a rock at a rattler.

“I don’t want to have to do that again,” the cowboy said. “These days, my fastball isn’t that good.”

His split-fingered fastball never was.