Saturday, May 03, 2008
Avs skipper always in focus
Aaron McFarling
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Jim Pankovits slides open a drawer in his desk. "I tell you what," the Salem Avalanche manager says, reaching for something.
"There's been some strange things written about me online."
He pulls out a thick stack of envelopes. All arrived in the past few weeks. All are unopened. It's mail from fans who admired him as a Houston Astros infielder. He still gets these -- lots of them -- almost two decades after he played his last big-league game.
"There's one story I've read online about me," he says, pulling out a letter opener and slicing an envelope. "I mean, there's a baseball card where I'm..."
His voice trails off as he begins thumbing through the contents of the fan letter.
"Anyway, I'm taking my batting gloves off or something and I'm standing like this" -- he holds both hands together down around his thighs -- "and somebody online said that during a rain delay or a pitching change, I took a leak in the outfield of some big-league ballpark. And that was online. I couldn't believe it."
He slashes through the second envelope.
"Here it is," he says.
He holds up the 1989 Upper Deck card. There's a young Pankovits shot from the waist up, cradling two bats in his right armpit. His hat is crooked. His lips are pursed, creating an unflattering expression of bewilderment. Both hands duck below the bottom of the frame.
"I mean, I'm obviously not even in the outfield," he says.
The 52-year-old manager sighs.
"I was taking my gloves off," he says again.
The lesson here? Snapshots can be deceiving.
But you'd know that already if you were in the Avalanche clubhouse at 1:30 a.m. Wednesday. You would have seen Pankovits and his staff still there, still searching, still stewing from the game that had ended hours before.
The manager's Tuesday night snapshot -- in which he followed the home-plate umpire to the dugout, argued a game-ending call and bumped him -- will likely get him fined by the Carolina League. But it's the 12 hours that surrounded that moment that define him.
The extra work with the catchers in the early afternoon. The tutorials during batting practice. The in-game scheming, geared as much toward winning as development. And finally, the postgame planning session that lasted long after many managers would have thrown up their hands and gone home.
The snapshot says Pankovits is crazy. The context says he cares.
"It's hard on all of us when you're struggling to win ballgames and something like that happens," said Avs first baseman Jimmy Van Ostrand, referring to the controversial third-strike call with the bases loaded in the 12th inning that sealed a 6-5 Kinston victory. "It's always nice to know that the guy that's the head of everything cares about us and has everybody's back. He does, and we know that."
They should. In his third and final season as Salem's skipper, Pankovits is logging as many hours as ever, trying to make a young team competitive.
So far, the Avs have been. They entered Friday game with Myrtle Beach at 12-14 and just 312 games back of the Pelicans in the Carolina League's Southern Division. They've done it despite an unsettled pitching staff and a roster shy on big-name prospects.
It didn't matter Wednesday against Kinston. With Tuesday's bitter loss still fresh, the Avs played one of their finest games of the season, flashing great pitching and defense in a crisp 5-0 victory.
Such a rousing recovery says something about the mental toughness of the players, but it also says a lot about the manager. Pankovits, formerly the Astros' minor-league defensive coordinator, stresses glove work constantly.
"It's a passion of mine," he said. "I think the last two years here, we've worked our butts off defensively, and it's paid off. We've had pretty good defensive teams that seem to give you a chance to win every night."
And they'll try that formula again this year. Perhaps the biggest source of hope is Pankovits' track record of steady improvement throughout the season. In both 2006 and '07, the Avs compiled winning streaks of at least a dozen games in the second half.
That's a product of hard work and the same scrappy, results-driven mindset that made Pankovits a fan favorite during his five-plus seasons in the major leagues.
"I'm very fortunate to work for the Astros in that a lot of their minor-league philosophy is to develop winning players," Pankovits said. "Not just major-league players, but players that know how to win. Players that know how to move a runner from second with no outs. Players that know how to take pitches when you're down two runs late in the game."
Pankovits tasted plenty of winning at an early age.
This summer, Pankovits will head to his hometown of Richmond for the 40th reunion of the Tuckahoe team that was runner-up in the 1968 Little League World Series -- a time he calls "one of the nicest, most special experiences" of his life, but he's had plenty of others.
His 13- and 14-year old team finished second at the Senior League World Series. His American Legion team advanced to that organization's World Series. And in 1975, his University of South Carolina team lost to Texas in the finals of the College World Series.
"Three second-place finishes," he said, smiling. "The ultimate bridesmaid."
He wants a title. And that may be a lot to ask, considering the Houston organization has little incentive to send and keep top prospects in Salem. After all, the Red Sox will likely be arriving in town in 2009. This is it for the Houston affiliation.
Pankovits knows this is it for him in Salem, too.
"That's going to be a sad day," he said of the season finale. "I've enjoyed it. Hopefully the Red Sox will appreciate what they'll have here. Because it's a great place to develop players, no doubt about it."
Not a bad place to develop managers, either. Snapshots, context and all.
