Prospect Remains on Target : Baseball: Pitcher Todd Van Poppel, who conjured up images of Ryan and Clemens as a Texas prep, is slowly making his way through the Oakland organization.

Big crowd here tonight in Las Vegas. Have to pitch well in front of all these people. Todd Van Poppel, both old and young at 21, thinks this as he ducks out of the dugout and makes his upright, measured way to the mound.

Then he catches himself. From the several dozen thoughts soaring and diving through his mind like hawks, he chooses one, and always the same one: making the major leagues. The strategy is to remove all irrelevancies. If he doesn’t, one idea will lead to another and his internal monologue will be off and running, like a song you can’t get out of your head. What he wants to care about today is his curveball and throwing it for strikes. But controlling his thoughts can sometimes be as difficult as controlling his pitches.

Van Poppel has a game plan for his career, a game plan for the season, a game plan for the game. Mostly they consist of stopping himself from thinking. He is closer to being a major league pitcher than ever before, only a consistent curve and changeup away, and the mechanics are already there. Just three years out of a Texas high school, he is pitching for Tacoma, Oakland’s top farm club. Even though it seems he has been at this forever, this is about as fast as the fast track gets. What matters now is staying healthy--and staying patient.

Yet there are those who would call him a failure because he hasn’t stuck in the majors yet. They wonder what happened to Van Poppel, drafted with such fanfare in 1990, lured away from college, compared with Ryan and Clemens and Gooden, paid so much money. They ask why he isn’t in Oakland, pitching for a team that seems to need all the help it can get. Famous for his potential, his steady advancement has so far produced nothing worthy of public consumption. And in the fast-forward world of sports stardom--Shaquille O’Neal has emerged, played in college and become an NBA All-Star in the meantime--Van Poppel appears to be a flop.

Baseball isn’t basketball, and such thoughts are surely unfair. But that doesn’t mean Van Poppel doesn’t occasionally think them, too. When he first signed, he drove himself to please the fans, the media, the organization. He wanted nobody to say a mistake had been made. “You could see it on the mound, if he’d walk somebody or make a bad pitch, the way he reacted,” says Dean Borrelli, 26, who has been his catcher for three professional seasons. “But he has improved 100% in that department. He doesn’t get down on himself anymore.”

Instead, he consciously thinks about not thinking about it. But the fear gets tangled up in the precaution, like a reflection bouncing between mirrors all the way to eternity. Sometimes he catches himself wondering, Which is worse?

*

Thoughts become actions, pitches become outs. The curveball is tonight’s project, but the fastball gets the attention. Steve Bethea, Las Vegas’ second baseman, watches three of them from the best place in the ballpark, the batter’s box. “This guy just throws too hard,” he says, heading back to the dugout.

Borrelli considers passing along the praise in the dugout but decides not to. Todd knows he is throwing well. Why give him more to think about?

“I have a hundred things on my mind every minute of the day, even when I go to sleep,” Van Poppel says later. “Just having my mind working so fast, I develop these thoughts. My first year I thought too much on the mound, way too much. But I have come to understand that sometimes you just have to forget all that. Sometimes you just have to throw the ball.”

Sometimes you lean back and throw the high fastball. Especially when you have one as good as his. It is the high fastball that will earn Van Poppel his millions. Often it isn’t even in the strike zone. “Why do they keep swinging at that?” the umpire asks Borrelli after another strikeout. “He’s throwing 90-something miles an hour,” is the answer. “Nobody has time to see where it is. You try hitting it.”

Van Poppel disappears into the clubhouse, equanimity intact despite six earned runs on nine hits over four innings. The curve had been effective. As usual, one inning poisoned his stat sheet, but he knows that the stat sheet won’t get him to Oakland, his pitching will. He might win 20 games in the Pacific Coast League right now throwing nearly all fastballs, but what would that prove? So he mixes his pitches, works on what he needs to, and sometimes he gets hit hard.

“If you look at my stats for the past three years, I don’t deserve to be here yet,” he says. “But the minor leagues are for development, and the development is coming.” He has no timetable to get to Oakland because a timetable would only make him crazy. He’d be scratching days off a calendar like a convict, wondering how much more he had to learn.

Instead, he has learned to be more patient than he ever thought possible. “It might happen tomorrow, it might happen three years from now, it might happen 10 years from now,” he says. But beneath it all he still wants to prove the Athletics right as soon as he can. He would prefer to pitch every night. When he learns something in one start, it’s a hellish four-day wait before he can put that knowledge into practice. When he has thrown poorly the last time out, he is in for four days of distraction until he can set it right.

During those days, throwing outside the foul lines in the late afternoon or in the bullpen while a teammate is in the game, he fights to stop the unruly thoughts from coming. During those days, his record-setting $1.2-million contract is inconsequential, no solace at all.

*

Van Poppel wasn’t nearly ready to face major league hitters when he was scouted pitching for Martin High School in Arlington, but the radar guns and the movement on his fastball shouted that someday he would be. His manager at Tacoma, Bob Boone, still talks of him in terms of potential. He wonders how many pitchers are in the majors by their 21st birthday, or even in Triple A.

The attention Van Poppel receives annoys Boone, because Van Poppel is far from his most effective pitcher right now. But he also understands it, even as he tries to pretend he doesn’t. He has seen too many pitchers not to know exactly what all the attention is about.

“Where he’s at when he’s at his best is off the map,” Boone says. “He overmatches many more hitters in this league than he is overmatched by. The ability is there right now. It’s just a matter of putting it together, getting consistent.”

Along the way, Van Poppel is in for some ugliness. Pacific Coast League fans come out to watch him pitch--he is one of the few visiting players a spectator might have heard of--and often leave disappointed. They see pitching lines in the newspaper such as last Thursday’s 1 1/3 inning, 9 hits, 10 runs, 10 earned and two walks and a 1-4 record and 8.29 ERA this season and can’t help but pass judgment. And it isn’t just the fans. “That’s not a name that comes up as frequently as it did about a year ago,” one American League general manager says. “We just don’t have cause to think about him very much.”

After three years of professional baseball, Van Poppel ponders whether the learning curve has started to flatten. Maybe he has learned too much too quickly and isn’t yet mature enough to handle it all. Or maybe he has grown up too fast and needs to calm down and enjoy himself. These are thoughts, theories, explanations, and even though there is nothing that really needs to be explained, they fill an idle hour or two in the bullpen, or while eating a coffee-shop lunch alone. Don’t think Van Poppel hasn’t worked his way through all of them and more.

The original plan had been three years at the University of Texas and then pro ball. Van Poppel sent a letter to each major league team before the June draft in 1990, warning them of his intentions so none would waste a pick. The Athletics, defending World Series winners, had the 14th choice as compensation for free agent Dave Parker. They asked only this: If we take you, can we come to Arlington and talk? Van Poppel agreed but discouraged them. The plan was Texas, the College World Series, the Olympics. It was laid out like a military offensive.

The first 13 teams passed on him. The A’s chose him, then flew in with the soft sell. There would be no pressure and no timetable. There didn’t have to be; these were the World Champions.

He asked baseball people for advice, and they told him to prioritize. What was his No. 1 goal? That was easy--the major leagues. “I realized the best way to get there was to sign out of high school and go through the A’s system,” he says. They hardly talked money until he had already committed. It wasn’t the issue.

“After I agreed to sign, I said, ‘OK, what do I get?’ ” Van Poppel says. “And they were very fair to me.” The two sides had been talking ballpark money along the way, and at the end, the ballpark was big enough to accommodate them both. The contract was the largest a high school player had signed.

That first summer, he was 1-1 with a 1.13 ERA in the Northwest League and 2-1 with a 3.95 ERA in the Midwest, which are fine numbers. In 1991 he led the Southern League with 13 losses and won only six games, but he had a 3.47 ERA. Late in the season he was called up to Oakland and started once, on September 11, thereby becoming the first high school player of his draft class to make a major league debut. He allowed seven hits and five runs in 4 2/3 innings--but struck out six.

Last year, a weak right shoulder put him on the disabled list from late May through the end of the season. He had won four of six decisions at Tacoma and wanted to keep pitching, but the A’s wouldn’t let him. You’re not throwing 100%, they said, and when his fastball topped out at 73 m.p.h. one evening, he had to admit they were right. “They shut me down,” he says. “I would never have shut me down, but they did. And it was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

He revamped his weight training and spent the winter preparing himself for success. He is so prepared now, it’s frustrating. He can’t stop thinking about it.

*

Teammates have been jealous of Van Poppel from the beginning, even though he is anything but boastful. He has more talent, a brighter future, a lot more money. He is the only Tacoma Tiger who travels with an economics textbook. “It’s not like you can just put it in a savings account anymore,” he says. He came very close to buying 3,000 acres of ranch land last winter. “I have to write something off my taxes. But it just wasn’t the right piece of property.”

They hardly know him, really. He is a half-dozen years younger than most and a world apart. They have bills to pay and families to feed. He gets monthly reports on his investments. Some of his teammates, pushing 30, have become embittered wondering what their minor league careers have been about. He can’t leave his hotel room on a recent afternoon because he has paperwork to do.

“I’m lucky because I come from a big city,” he says. “I know that even though signing autographs is important, getting my work done is more important. I sign as many as I can, but then I have to go. When you see a guy from a small town, he’s just overwhelmed and he might not know when to stop. I’ve thought about this a lot. I’m lucky I’m able to handle all this. It’s one reason I am where I am.”

His teammates remember their own lack of discipline at his age and shake their heads. Most don’t resent him as much as wonder. “He knows how he wants to be, and he doesn’t let anything change that,” Borrelli says. “He’s got a path, and he doesn’t step off that path, almost like a guidebook. It’s not a normal 21-year-old attitude to be so focused and not step off the path.”

Van Poppel’s best friend back home is a hunting buddy with whom he says he has nothing else in common. He doesn’t drink, and until last December he wasn’t legal to, anyway. And he doesn’t go to teammates or anyone else for advice. He is not standoffish, just stubborn. “If I have a problem, I’m going to fix it myself,” he says. “I’m not going to talk to a lot of people about things. I don’t want to be dependent on people because they won’t always be there.”

Or else he looks to Nolan Ryan. His fastball might be reminiscent of Ryan’s (and his control problems, too, at such an early age), but the affinity runs far deeper than pitching mechanics. Van Poppel admires Ryan more for what he has done off the field than on it. Ryan lives on a ranch, pitches in Van Poppel’s hometown, has an unblemished reputation. When Van Poppel’s mind is busy with a difficult problem, he sometimes thinks, well, what would Nolan Ryan do?

“He’s just about a perfect role model,” says Van Poppel, who spent his teen years watching Ryan pitch. “Nobody’s perfect, but he’s about as close as you’re going to get. Just about everyone else will have at least one incident somewhere along the way, a barroom brawl or something like that. Maybe it only happened once, but it happened.”

The Rangers will be moving out of Arlington Stadium, and Van Poppel would like to pitch there before they do. Perhaps pitch against Ryan. That would mean getting to Oakland this season, Ryan and the ballpark’s last. “But only if I’m ready,” he says. “I’ve made up my mind that the next time I go to the majors, I’m going up to stay.”

He forces himself to concentrate on what’s important. He consults the game plan in his head. He strains to banish the irrelevancies. A hundred thoughts at once, but one all of the time.