Janicki Sees Opportunity to Restore Angels’ Faith in Him : Baseball: He once showed great promise but an injury set him back. This spring, he will try to restart his march toward the major leagues.

ANAHEIM — Pete Janicki lay frightened inside a cold, steel chamber, awaiting the medical apparatus that would produce images of his right elbow.

In less than an hour, the magnetic resonance imaging test results would divulge whether Janicki would have a professional baseball career.

“I’ll never forget that day as long as I live,” Janicki said of that morning nearly six months ago. “Everything was going through my mind while I was laying there. It was like my whole life was passing before me.”

Janicki allowed his mind to ruminate throughout his entire baseball experience . . . the five years his dad refused to let him play baseball . . . the day he pitched a three-hitter in El Dorado High’s championship game . . . his three-year career at UCLA . . . the June day he was drafted by the Angels . . . the Olympic trials . . . to the moment his elbow went numb.

It was his final college game, he knew, that had caused the ordeal. If not for that game against Mississippi State in the NCAA regionals, he would not be missing out on the Olympics and he would not be laying in this tube while hundreds of thousands of dollars evaporated from negotiations.

The diagnosis: a stress fracture of his right elbow.

Dammit, his friends and family later told him, he should not have been pitching that game in the first place. Hadn’t he just pitched 12 innings two days before? Hadn’t he pitched a school-record 150 1/3 innings during the season? And now UCLA Coach Gary Adams was asking whether he could pitch one more time?

“I could have said, ‘No,’ and maybe that would have been the smart thing to do,” Janicki said. “Maybe I should have thought about my future. But the team needed me, we needed to win that game.”

Janicki pitched seven shutout innings in UCLA’s victory that day, yielding only two scratch singles. He walked off the mound, serenaded by a standing ovation from the hometown Mississippi State fans.

“You know something,” Janicki said, “even after what happened, getting that stress fracture, I’d do it all over again. Those were seven of the most enjoyable innings I’ve ever had.

“I’ll never regret that day, ever.”

Guts and courage do not show up on the radar gun. There’s no checklist on scouting charts to judge a pitcher’s heart. If there was any doubt about Janicki’s competitiveness, however, it dissipated that day.

“He had a great arm and a good body for a pitcher,” said Dan O’Brien, Angel senior vice president/baseball operations, “but most of all he had the makeup. There’s no doubt in our mind he was the guy for us.

“Everyone in our organization who has seen him pitch knows he has the potential to arrive in the major leagues in a very quick time.”

Janicki will showcase his talent in four weeks when he makes his Angel debut at spring training in Tempe, Ariz. The Angels are planning on starting his career at Class-A Palm Springs, and if everything progresses well, finishing the year at double-A Midland, Tex.

Janicki, considered the top pitching prospect in the organization, has other ideas. Instructed to refrain from virtually every physical activity during the winter to rest the elbow, Janicki began throwing lightly this month under the Angels’ supervision. He was told to take it easy until spring training, but every once in a while, when no one’s looking, he’ll crank one up.

No problem. Janicki still is able to throw the ball in the low 90s, he has retained his nasty split-finger fastball, and he’ll soon work on developing his curveball to big league standards.

“I don’t want to sound presumptuous,” Janicki said, “but I don’t think it’ll take that long before I’m in the big leagues. I think I can be there by next year, and certainly be in their plans going into the spring of ’94.

“I feel stronger than ever right now. It’s like all my nagging injuries finally have healed. Even that hip-pointer I got from water skiing two years ago has gone away.”

Janicki closed his eyes, momentarily allowing his mind to recapture the feelings of anxiety that had troubled him. Then his face showed relief and appreciation.

“You know something,” he said, “the injury might have been the best thing that ever happened to me. It’s like it woke me up. The only time I even iced my arm after games is when I lost.

“Maybe somebody was trying to tell me something, to get my head straight, grow up a little bit.”

Certainly, it figures to be the most beneficial hiatus since Janicki was in grammar school. He was only 5 at the time, but he still remembers the afternoon his father abruptly stopped hitting popups to him, and screamed: “No more baseball for you! You can’t see well enough!”

John Janicki said he feared for his son’s safety. Pete had cataract surgery in his right eye at the age of 2. Today, he is legally blind in the eye and struggles with depth perception.

“I was really mad,” Pete said, “and I wasn’t going to give up. I kept throwing tennis balls against the garage door for the next five years. I even played a 162-game schedule of whiffle ball every year with a kid down the street.”

Said John Janicki: “He darned near ruined my garage door with those tennis balls.”

Five years later, Pete’s oldest brother, John Jr., pleaded with his dad that Pete be given another chance. John took a look, requested a Little League manager to assess his son’s talents, and the rest is history.

Janicki and neighbor Phil Nevin helped lead the Placentia Little League team to the local championship. He posted an 18-3 record at El Dorado and pitched a three-hit shutout in the Hawks’ Southern Section championship game. Then he rejected a $50,000 offer from the Boston Red Sox to turn pro and accepted a scholarship to UCLA.

“I was just too immature to go professional out of high school,” Janicki said. “I mean, I was still playing mailbox baseball (swinging a bat at them from a moving car) in Yorba Linda. . . . Well, not that I still don’t.”

It took one season at UCLA for Janicki to realize, “There has to be another step besides this. It was too easy.” The most difficult task was not pitching, but finding a creative way to pay the monthly phone bill.

“Good thing I kept a baseball card collection since I was 3,” Janicki said. “I used a lot of those cards to pay off my phone bill. I even sold my Nolan Ryan rookie card for $300.”

Growing up five miles from Anaheim Stadium, Janicki and his entire family have been die-hard Angel fans. They, too, were distressed over the Jim Abbott trade, and yes, they can recite the horrid details of Game 5 of the 1986 American League playoffs.

“They’ve always been my team,” Janicki said, “thick and thin. The Dodgers? I hated them. I would never want to play for the Dodgers. I would have signed with the Angels out of spite.”

Janicki just wasn’t sure the Angels wanted him. Although he was their first-round pick in the 1992 June free-agent draft, selected eighth overall, the Angels became squeamish when Janicki withdrew from the Olympic tryout camp.

“My elbow was still sore,” Janicki said, “so I probably shouldn’t have even been there in the first place.”

The Angels, not knowing whether Janicki would ever pitch for them, were reluctant to shell out a hefty signing bonus. Negotiations became acrimonious at times. Janicki even threatened to return to UCLA, but deep inside, he knew he wasn’t going back.

“During negotiations,” Janicki said, “they kept talking about Bill Walton’s feet and how he had stress fractures and never came back. I thought it was stupid to bring that up, but I can’t blame them for being real conservative.

“I didn’t have much leverage, and besides, my neighbors were going to come over and shoot me if I didn’t sign. The way I figure it, the money’s going to come later. If I reach the potential I want to reach, this money will be nothing.”

The Angels wound up providing a three-year major league contract that could pay him $585,000, but included only a $90,000 signing bonus. Janicki, who turns 22 next week, promptly used the money to buy his first car, a Mazda RX-7, and an engagement ring for his fiancee, Deidre Dunkin.

“I thought I was the best pitcher in the draft,” Janicki said, “and to me, they’re still getting the same guy. Now, I plan to prove it.”