Sizemore's Star Too Bright To Hide - Cleveland Plain Dealer

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Bud Shaw
Plain Dealer Columnist

It is almost perfect that Grady Sizemore shares the city with a proclaimed Chosen One and another self-proclaimed.

Stealth celebrity befits him in ways no longer available to LeBron James and long ago dismissed as unappealing by Kellen Winslow Jr.

The trouble, though, is Sizemore’s 2006 season. It has unmasked him. It threatens to ruin his hopes of carrying a profile so low it’s the envy of witness protection plans everywhere.

What to blame? The bobblehead? Those league-leading 120 runs scored for starters.

The doubles, triples, home runs and stolen bases. A season that conjures Tris Speaker.

White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen blowing his cover by calling him the best player in the league.

Sizemore is reminded of that all over again on a rainy afternoon at Jacobs Field and sinks even deeper into the chair in front of his locker, a locker located close enough to a pillar to hide him from view.

“Sometimes I still feel like I’m on the outside watching this all happen,” Sizemore said Wednesday.

“You’re out there playing with guys you emulated growing up. Sometimes I still feel like the little brother who’s tagging along.”

Yep.

The little tag-a-long who dives all-out on a wet warning track to catch a baseball in a September game the Indians are losing, 10-1, in a season lost somewhere around late May.

The runt stealing home last year with two strikes on Travis Hafner.

The extra baggage covering the outfield with such abandon that C.C. Sabathia shakes his head and says, “I can only imagine how he played football.”

So can Rick Neuheisel only imagine. Neuheisel was the head coach at the University of Washington who recruited Sizemore out of high school after Sizemore set school records for yards gained and interceptions.

He played five positions. So where to use him? College coaches make safeties of quarterbacks all the time. Sizemore was such the athlete Neuheisel dared to do the opposite a season after winning the Rose Bowl. Only Montreal waving a $2 million signing bonus derailed Neuheisel’s plan.

“It’s very conceivable he would have played [quarterback] as a freshman,” Neuheisel said Wednesday from Baltimore where he coaches the position for the Ravens.

“He just had that swagger about him.”

Neuheisel says there’s no reason to think Sizemore couldn’t have played somewhere in the NFL.

Instead, Neuheisel, a baseball fan, follows Sizemore in the box scores.

He watched Sizemore in the All-Star Game while telling his kids, “Hey, he’s been to our house.”

The All-Star Game aside, Sizemore is having an insider season.

That’s what happens to great years that don’t have October to give them broader context. Managers appreciate him most of all.

“He’s going to show up every day and not ask anything in return,” Kansas City’s Buddy Bell said before Sizemore hit his 24th home run Wednesday. “Unfortunately, we’ve gotten to a situation where guys have to be complimented for hustling. This guy plays with his heart. Obviously he’s got a lot more talent than a lot of people. But he doesn’t waste any of it.”

Bell sees the hint of George Brett in Sizemore — his reliability and flair for the dramatic. Derek Jeter comes up, too.

“Like Jeter . . . he looks like he’s out there playing in his backyard,” said the former Indians’ player and coach.

Joe Carter owns the only 30-30 season in Indians’ history with 32 home runs and 31 stolen bases in 1987.

Sizemore could be the next. While that suggests a middle of the order hitter, he’s more valuable at leadoff. Too much good happens with Sizemore at the top of the order. It’s like playing LeBron . . . OK, it’s nothing like that.

LeBron stands alone. That makes Sizemore the second best show in town.