A second chance
Giles fulfilling potential at second base

By Bill Zack   --   The Macon Telegraph   --  April 29, 2003

Midget. Tom Thumb. Pygmy. Squirt. Marcus Giles has heard them all, and none of them were complimentary. When you top out at 5-foot-7 ("I'm definitely not 5-8," Giles says) in a 6-foot world, you either spend your life craning your neck or you shrug and move on.

"It's never mattered," said Giles, whose .363 batting average is the National League's second-best. "You can't live your life saying what if? You live by the hand you're dealt. I'm not going to waste my time wishing I was 6-2."

No one could have imagined, certainly not the Braves, that Giles would be the league's best second baseman during the first month of the season. Granted, he may not belong to the same category of second basemen who have won Gold Gloves and been named MVP, but he is well on his way to joining the likes of Jeff Kent and Fernando Vina.

"I don't know how he made such a huge improvement," marveled Brewers manager and former Braves coach Ned Yost last weekend. "He's picked up two steps in his range. He's everywhere right now. And with him coming up in front of Sheff, Chipper, and Andruw, that's no fun either."

Remember, Giles' name was bandied about this winter in a proposed trade with the Padres. The rumors, apparently, were more fiction than fact. The Braves' brass told the Padres and other callers that Giles, who grew up in the San Diego area, was not available.

The early returns suggest GM John Schuerholz's decision to keep Giles, a choice he admits he made as much with his heart as his head, may prove to be his best judgment of the winter.

"There's something about the guy, about his work ethic, his determination, his grit, that you want to bet on," Schuerholz said. "You have an instinct. You have a gut feeling. Sometimes you bet on the right horse and sometimes you don't. This time we did."

Schuerholz says each time he considered moving Giles, 85-year-old scout Al Kubski's words rang in the back of his mind.

"Al called me up before the draft and said, 'John, this guy will be as good a player as his brother. He's a tough kid, he can hit, and he works hard,'" Schuerholz remembered. "Al's done that maybe two or three times over the years. He's not a guy who cries wolf. He's a good scout."

Forget for a moment that Giles batted .230 last season and lost his job before he suffered a severely sprained ankle in late May. Dismayed by his propensity for strikeouts (68 whiffs in 213 at-bats last season), manager Bobby Cox played him sparingly down the stretch, then went with veteran Keith Lockhart as the regular second baseman against the Giants in the Division Series.

Brian Giles, Marcus' older brother by seven years and the Pittsburgh Pirates left fielder, recalled how frustrated his kid brother was following the team's quick ouster from the playoffs.

"He was disappointed not to play in the postseason," said Brian, who still refers to his brother as "Welby," after the 1970s TV doctor, Marcus Welby. "But he also understood that Bobby was going with a combination that had won a lot of games. Marcus was frustrated because of a lot of different things last year."

Don't ever make the mistake of telling Giles, who will turn 25 next month, that he can't do something. Whether it's because most of his teammates have always towered over him or because the fire in his belly was lit early, he is driven to succeed. He goes about his business like a throwback to a different era, when a player's value was measured by his commitment to the game, not the size of his contract.

Giles is a dirt player, a blue-collar, lunch-pail type who isn't afraid of perspiration and calluses. Giles, Cox said, reminds him of Mark Lemke, whose play at second base during the 1990s set a high bar for the team's infielders.

Giles could always hit. But the defensive side of the game mystified him. Drafted in the 53rd round in 1996 and signed for a $40,000 bonus, the same year shortstop Rafael Furcal was signed, he set an improbable course for the majors. He batted .329, hit 37 home runs and knocked in 108 runs for Class A Macon in 1998, and was named the league's MVP. He was also charged with 25 errors.

"He had 20 errors in the first half," said Braves first base coach Glenn Hubbard, who was a coach at Macon in 1998. "I challenged him to cut his errors in half in the second half."

Recognizing that no one was likely to cut him any slack, Giles was out early before every game to take grounders on Macon's sun-baked field. He was charged with just five errors following the All-Star break. "I guess it's an old and stupid saying, but you can do whatever you want, it's just a matter of how hard you want to work for it," he said.

Giles had his moments last season. He hit a pair of home runs and knocked in four runs against his brother's team, the Pirates, in September. But his best time was in Richmond, Va., where he played third base during a rehab assignment and picked up some pointers from Mike Hessman, the team's regular third baseman.

"You either catch it or you don't. It's all reaction," Giles said. "I learned how to keep my hands and wrists loose. I enjoyed taking ground balls there. It got to be fun fielding ground balls. Now when I go to play defense, I'm excited."

The results have been immediate, and impressive. Giles made a play on Brewers pitcher Ben Sheets last Friday night, backhanding a grounder behind second base and making a jump and throw that was reminiscent of Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter.

"He's a guy who takes more pride in his defense than his offense," left fielder Chipper Jones said. "The one knock on him was his defense. He knows he's going to hit, so he goes out and spends a majority of his time on his defense. You have to respect that."

Giles has handled 132 chances in the early going and been charged with one error.

"He's not a no-field, all-hit second baseman, which is the label he was given," said Brewers broadcaster Daron Sutton, son of Hall of Fame pitcher and TBS broadcaster Don Sutton. "His ability to develop into a quality second baseman may have been underestimated by his opponents, though I don't think it was by his own manager and coaching staff. You still have all the guts and grit, but now there's a little bit more of a Royce Clayton, a little bit of the smoothness to go along with the guts and grit."

It is easy to forget that Giles, the No. 2 hitter ahead of Gary Sheffield and the Jones boys - Chipper and Andruw - can carry his own bat in this lineup. He has never lacked confidence in his hitting, but he needed to develop some patience at the plate.

"If there's one big thing I need to work on in my offensive game, it's to cut down on my strikeouts and the only way to do that is be more patient," he said. "Not swinging at balls puts you in more hitter's counts and then I get a pitch I can handle. Swinging at all those bad pitches, you get yourself out."

Giles is a guy who never lets his bats out of his sight. But he is just as apt to be carrying his glove as swinging a bat when he leaves the clubhouse now.

"I've always thought he would hit," Schuerholz said. "We didn't know if he'd make himself into a major league second baseman. He has."