Friday, July 18, 2003 | 8:58 a.m.
John Shoemaker is not prone to wild mood swings, laughing and howling when the baseball is bouncing kindly for the 51s, or snappy and sullen during losing streaks.
He likes privacy. His wife and two daughters visited during from Florida the All-Star break this week, their first time in Las Vegas, and they went to shows for three consecutive evenings. Shoemaker did not want those shows revealed.
"I don't want people to know what I'm up to," he said. "But they were family shows."
He can be dry and a cliche machine, to the lazy few who don't dig deeper. He strives to offend nobody, the embodiment of a company man who has been with the same organization since 1977.
Anyone who can make that claim with the Dodgers, whose ownership transition -- another one is on the horizon -- and inept front-office moves have created havoc in recent years, is doing something well.
Shoemaker, 46, has skipped around the team's minor leagues as a player, coach, manager or instructor, and his appointment to Triple-A Las Vegas, as manager, in the offseason represented his highest ascension yet for the Dodgers.
He takes great pride in his patience, but even that has his limits. Shoemaker said he has learned a few things about himself this season, which hit its theoretical halfway point this week with the All-Star break.
"I'm pretty much a guy who likes to worry about the small things, because I don't think anything is small," he said. "I've understood that, at this level, small things are not really what are most important.
"Here, it's most important that they get the job done and, hopefully, advance to the major leagues. They don't need to be babied or extra-worked to death."
At Triple-A, he said, players can be given space. Daily work on the fundamentals do not necessarily need to be drilled, as they do at Single-A and Double-A.
So Shoemaker said he has tried not to be wound so tightly.
That changed May 22.
The 51s had won 21 of their first 28 games, soaring in the Southern Division of the Pacific Coast League. They had lost consecutive games only once, then that happened twice over a six-day span.
The team went to Tucson, beat the Sidewinders, 11-7, in the opener, then were defeated in back-to-back games, 8-0 and 10-7.
Before the fourth and final game of the series, on Thursday, May 22, Shoemaker gathered his players for a rare meeting and revealed a side of him that, he said, they hadn't seen ... or heard.
"I just felt like we weren't playing up to our capabilities and, maybe, our focus had become a little distracted," Shoemaker said. "We weren't playing professionally, and we all needed to redirect our focus and energies toward the game, toward every pitch.
"They didn't have to be preoccupied with things that just happen, or things we couldn't control ... play harder, run harder, be more aggressive. I'm not the type of person who does a lot of screaming or yelling, but it was a stern message. The team understood."
Larry Barnes, who had returned from a stretch with the Dodgers a day earlier, launched three solo home runs that Thursday night at Tucson Electric Park, powering the 51s to a 3-1 lead going into the bottom of the ninth.
It crumbled in a big way, when 34-year-old Japanese pitcher Masao Kida yielded five runs -- four earned -- without getting anyone out in a 6-3 defeat for the 51s.
Recalling that scene, Shoemaker did not even name Kida. At that time, the 51s had lost ace closer Steve Colyer, among others, to the Dodgers, and the Las Vegas bullpen had been tapped frequently in previous games.
Shoemaker only referred to Kida as "a certain pitcher."
"We made a decision ... and it didn't work out really well for us," he said. "Who knows? Maybe with a different pitcher, the same thing would have happened."
Following that stunning defeat, Shoemaker said he sensed a palpable degree of frustration and dejection in the visitors' clubhouse of Electric Park.
"It was a tough loss for us," Shoemaker said. "They had played well. After a meeting like that, you just hope you can win a game. But there were a couple of physical errors, a couple of mental errors.
"And, maybe, there was an error in our judgment, using a certain pitcher in the ninth. That was a group of guys that was really down, they were really upset."
Shoemaker, however, was not displeased, even after holding what he termed the most critical meeting of his short Triple-A managerial career only hours earlier.
Late that night, he saw a roomful of players who cared, who wanted to win badly. They bounced back, winning 10 of their next 16 games, and they're sticking close behind PCL-best Sacramento.
"If you have a lot of guys who want to win, they can help pull the others with them," Shoemaker said. "If they just worry about themselves, then your team won't do well. These guys pull for the team first.
"They'll sacrifice themselves, and their stats, to benefit the team. When you have a lot of guys like that on your team, you won't have many problems. That's what we have, a lot of guys putting themselves first."
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