TheGlobeAndMail.com

October 6, 2007

Driven Tulowitzki relishes role as Colorado's will-to man

JEFF BLAIR

PHILADELPHIA -- Troy Tulowitzki has a man-crush on Derek Jeter - and come to think it, could there be anybody better for a young major-league shortstop to emulate?

They are easy on the baseball sensibilities, these Colorado Rockies. They are indefatigable, the winners of 16 of 17 games heading home for tonight's third game of their National League Division Series against the Philadelphia Phillies.

Ready for their close-up? Damned straight - and when that occurs don't be surprised if Tulowitzki is wearing Driven, a fragrance from Avon being hawked by Jeter, the Yankees' shortstop.

Tulowitzki wears the number 2 - just like Jeter. He walks up to the plate to the same music and has a similar batting stance. However, he does not habitually reach back with his right hand the way Jeter does, as if calling timeout while he taps the edge of the plate with his bat. He is unabashed in his admiration of Jeter, and, according to assistant general manager Bill Geivett, when the Rockies swept the Yankees during an interleague series at Yankee Stadium, Tulowitzki showed up in the clubhouse with a bottle of the cologne.

Some of his teammates took it as a joke. Others?

Well, they weren't certain.

Tulowitzki would be the hands-down winner as the National League rookie of the year were it not for the fact that Ryan Braun of the Milwaukee Brewers put up simply absurd offensive numbers.

Tulowitzki's 24 home runs (two of which were hit during a three-game interleague series at the Rogers Centre in Toronto) are the most by an NL rookie shortstop and the second most in major-league history, surpassed only by Nomar Garciaparra's 30-homer season in 1997. He led the majors in fielding percentage at his position as well as chances, putouts, assists and double plays and started 155 of the team's 163 games, including the one-game playoff against the San Diego Padres. He has played the team's past 63 games.

Oh, and the Rockies no longer talk about needing to find a position for him. He was taken in the 2005 draft seventh overall out of Long Beach State, right behind the No. 6 pick, left-hander Ricky Romero from Cal State-Fullerton, who went to the um, er ... ah ... Toronto Blue Jays.

Yes, Tulowitzki would look all right at short for the Blue Jays, who didn't get a chance to land Braun because he went to the Brewers with the pick in front of them. At any rate, the Blue Jays were fixated on pitching and still thought they had some middle-infield depth with Russ Adams and Aaron Hill, but Rockies scouting director Bill Schmidt, the club's head of scouting since 1997, knew he wouldn't make it out of the first round.

"That was probably one of the best college drafts since '84 and we just saw a big, physical kid who could hit and whose intangibles were off the chart," Schmidt said. "If we had to move him to, say, third base, well that would have been okay. Our thought was we might do it down the road. But his defence at short - yeah, that's surprised us."

Tulowitzki is all arms and angles and Tiantesque twirls when he fields the ball, but the end result is usually a laser throw to the bag. All by design, of course. Tulowitzki talks of wanting to "be an exciting player and do things that people thought were special on the field."

Good for him. Good for baseball fans.

"As a kid, I was always on the field, trying to do things that the other kids had never seen before, whether that's spinning and throwing, or jumping and throwing," he said.

But Tulowitzki is no designer shortstop. Check out the uniform after a game. He's twice substance as he is style. It is reflective of what Rockies general manager Dan O'Dowd describes as Tulowitzki's "will to ..." And that's all he calls it. Will-to.

"Will to do anything, will to do any word you pick," O'Dowd said. "I deliberately leave it unfinished, because you can add whatever word you want. Troy has a will to do it."

His manager, Clint Hurdle, says Tulowitzki plays with an infectious edge and that, more to the point, he gets "very, very gutsy as the game goes on."

Hurdle tells a story of walking through the Rockies' clubhouse when the team was "about nine games under .500" and hearing somebody saying to a group of teammates, "Enough is enough, let's play like a good team."

"I expected it to be a 35-year-old guy with 10 years experience," Hurdle said. "Instead, it's the kid [Tulowitzki]. So that kind of caught my attention."

When the Rockies left town after their series against the Blue Jays, Toronto general manager J.P. Ricciardi, manager John Gibbons and several of the players talked of the lineup in terms usually reserved for the stronger American League lineups - "length" and "strength."

There is a relentlessness to the way Tulowitzki, Matt Holliday and Todd Helton, in particular, work over opposing pitchers. If you want a good World Series, here's a hint - adopt the Rockies today.

And if you want to see the way the game's supposed to be played and are tired of the same old faces, check out the kid at shortstop. He's driven.