“He has the potential to be the next Babe Ruth without the vices,” says Rice baseball coach Wayne Graham.

The Houston Astros certainly thought so. This January, after Berkman played only two years with the team, they signed the former Rice outfielder to a $10.5-million-dollar, three-year contract, which is unprecedented in the 40-year history of the Astros. A player usually qualifies for arbitration after three years of service with an organization.

But the Astros felt that Berkman was a rising star, especially after his outstanding performance last season. In his first full year with the Astros, Berkman had a batting average of .331, which tied him for third best in the National League, with 34 home runs and 126 runs batted in. He led the league in 13 offensive categories, including 55 doubles, and was named to the all-star team as a reserve. At the all-star game in Seattle, future Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn hailed Berkman as one of “the next great hitters.”

Berkman’s presence off the field also contributed to the Astros’ decision to sign him to a long-term deal. Working with Methodist Hospital, he began a program called Berkman’s Bunch, which gives local children free baseball tickets and autographs from the star himself. Berkman also gives motivational talks at his church.

A day after signing the contract, Berkman is at Rice’s Reckling Field. He is dressed in his usual casual manner: jeans, a Nike T-shirt, tennis shoes, and a Rice baseball cap. The new goatee slightly conceals his baby face. He is relaxed though a bit tired, but that doesn’t stop him from talking. A natural storyteller with a sense of humor, Berkman can call up one yarn after another.
“It is kind of a relief just to know that the team thinks enough of you to want to keep you around,” he says. “I would like to play for the Astros until I retire.” Houston, he says, is his adopted hometown, and it is only a few hours from Central Texas, where he grew up.

Lance Berkman was born in Waco and moved to Austin at the age of six. Berkman was an infant when his baseball life started. His father, Larry Berkman, who played baseball at the University of Texas during the late ’60s, began coaching Berkman almost from the day he came home from the delivery room. Larry remembers that Berkman would finish his milk bottle in “one continuous slurp” and then hurl it over the crib with his left hand.
Being left-handed was not a problem, but when Larry handed his son a plastic bat at the age of two, Berkman swung right-handed. “It was really distressing to me because there are not too many baseball players who throw left and hit right,” his dad says. “But then I had an epiphany,” he explains. “The idea dawned on me to make him a switch hitter.”

From that day on, Larry had his son hit from both sides—every day. By the time Berkman was six or seven, he was hitting off a tee in the garage one day, and the next, against a tire that hung from a tree in the backyard. He would hit 50 times from one side and 50 times from the other.

The work ethic that Larry slowly instilled in his son soon became such a part of Berkman’s life that he did all his hitting exercises without any nagging. “My father always told me that to be successful at anything, whether it was baseball or tiddlywinks, you have to be willing to pay the price,” says Berkman. “You have to be willing to do more than the kid down the street if you want to be better than he is.”

And Berkman became better than most kids his age—he made the all-star team every year. Early on he displayed a talent for power hitting. When he was in the Mustangs, a league for nine- to 10-year-olds in Austin, Berkman hit his first out-of-the-park ball during practice with his father.

“My father threw the ball,” Berkman says, “and I knew I hit it good. There was a Sonic Drive-In behind the fence, and a guy who worked there parked his car right behind the fence. And I’ll be danged, that ball went over the fence and smoked that windshield and completely shattered it.” His father showed him the right thing to do by paying for the windshield.

Being a big kid and athletic, Berkman tried his hand at pitching. In Little League, the best players are almost always asked to pitch. But Berkman didn’t have a strong arm and was too wild to hit the strike zone.

“He was a horrible pitcher,” admits Larry. Every time Berkman took the mound, his father says, he would walk the park after the opposing coach caught on to his weakness and told his players not to swing. “Virtually everyone who tried to make him a pitcher gave up on him,” Larry says.

If Larry taught Berkman the mechanics of baseball, he also taught him the importance of sportsmanship. During one Little League game, Berkman’s team had the contest won “six different ways,” when according to Berkman, the umpire made a bad call at home and caused his team to lose. “I ran up to the umpire,” he says, “and I started kicking dirt on his shoes. My dad grabbed me by the neck and pushed me against the dugout wall and told me never to do that again. Ever since then, I have treated umpires with more respect.”

By the time Berkman got to high school, he says, he had complete knowledge of his own swing. He had read The Science of Hitting by Ted Williams cover to cover about 100 times and had incorporated his philosophy. “Most hitting faults,” Williams writes, come “from a lack of knowledge, uncertainty, and fear, and that boils down to knowing yourself.” Berkman explains that he had hit so much up to that point that he could tell when his swing was off and could adjust it.

In his last two years of high school, Berkman moved with his family from Austin to Garden Ridge, a small town north of San Antonio, where he attended New Braunfels Canyon High School. There, he played varsity baseball, and as a senior, he hit .539, with eight home runs and 30 runs batted in, but his team never made it to the playoffs. That may be a reason why no other school, except Rice, offered him a scholarship.

Rice found Berkman in 1994 through a Texas Ranger scout named Randy Taylor, who told Rice baseball coach Wayne Graham that Berkman would not be drafted into the pros because, although he was a good hitter, he was an average runner and thrower.

Wanting a left-handed hitter, Graham signed Berkman. After seeing him play one high school game, Graham immediately knew he had made the right choice. “At hitting, he was mechanically about as good as you can get,” explains Graham. “And he was big enough to have a legitimate hope that he would be able to hit a home run. It was obvious he loved to play, and he had a good attitude towards the game.”

Thus began a relationship that even now remains close and caring. “The two coaches who had the biggest impact on me were my dad and Coach Graham,” says Berkman. His dad, explains Berkman, taught him the physical side of the game, Graham the mental. “Graham is a master at knowing how to push those buttons to get you to toughen up mentally,” he says.
Berkman still remembers his freshman year, when he was having a slow start and was in the middle of an 0–17 at bat. “Man, I was in a panic,” says Berkman. “I was worrying that I couldn’t play in college, and I thought coach was fixing to cut me.”

Instead of chewing him out, Graham reassured him that he would remain a starter. He told his young player that he could and would hit. “That gave me a world of confidence that he believed in me as a hitter and that I should believe in myself,” says Berkman. “From that point on, I went on a tear at the plate.”
That season and each succeeding one, Berkman continued to improve. As a freshman, he batted .322, as a sophomore .398, and as a junior .431. He ended his career with a .385 batting average, nine points better than Jose Cruz Jr.’s old record of .376.

In his sophomore year, Berkman again experienced Graham’s motivational talks. It was December, and Berkman had been playing intramural football, so the coach called him to his office and told him to stop playing because he might get hurt. Berkman agreed then went right out and played again, and that same day he broke his collarbone.

“I really let him have it,” says Graham. “I told him, you will play on opening day. I don’t care if it is still broken. And he got well in time to play.”

Another story that Graham and Berkman like to tell, each with a slightly different version, is the so-called TCU incident. This is Graham telling the story: Berkman is playing left field when he misjudges a ball and starts running hard. Berkman gets to the ball but in the process steps in the only hole in the field and then gets his leg lodged in the chain link fence. When he gets loose, he discovers that the ball is stuck inside a paper sack that has blown onto the field. He plucks the ball from the sack and before he throws the ball, the sack goes flying in the air and he throws the ball right into the sack. The ball and the sack go about 30 feet, looking like a duck has been shot.

“At that point, I decided he needed a little inspirational coaching,” says Graham. “For the rest of the year, he never stepped into another hole, and he never got his leg caught in a chain link fence, and he never threw another ball into a sack,” Graham says facetiously. “So that was obviously good coaching.”

At Rice, Berkman was on a team that accomplished a lot of firsts: his team won Rice baseball’s first Southwest Conference championship, the Western Athletic championship, the first regional, and the first berth to play in the college world series.
Of those accomplishments, Berkman says, winning the last Southwest Conference championship in 1996 was the highlight of his career. What the Owls did was nothing short of remarkable. That year, the Owls had placed next to last in the conference. But because it was the last year of existence for the Southwest Conference, all seven school members were invited to the tournament. The Owls beat baseball giants Texas A&M, Texas Tech, and the University of Texas twice.

Berkman finished his last year at Rice in 1997 in an amazing fashion. He led the nation in home runs at 41 and batted in 134 runs, both a Rice and Western Athletic Conference record. He won a host of honors, including National Player of the Year. The Houston Astros drafted Berkman in the first round and were only too grateful to have him. Team owner Drayton McLane Jr. told the Houston Chronicle that when it was the Astros’ turn to pick in the 16th spot and Berkman was still available, the management broke into a cheer and gave each other high fives.

Although some players stay as many as seven years in the minors, and many never go to the show, Berkman spent a total of only two years in the minors before he started his first full year in the major leagues. His father, who is a lawyer and an agent for Momentum Sports Group, helped in negotiating Berkman’s multimillion-dollar contract.

Despite his fame and material success, Berkman, at age 26, has managed to keep everything in perspective. His considers his wife, Cara, and daughter, Hannah, who is less than a year old, the best things to have happened to him. “If you gave me a choice between being married or being a baseball player, that is a no-brainer,” he says. “I would be married any day. I just love it.” Cynthia, Berkman’s mother, is responsible for his sense of right and wrong and for his faith. Says Larry, “Lance would not be the upright young man he is without his mother’s tutelage, love, and constant supervision.”

His brother-in-law, Jake Baker, who played with Berkman at Rice, says that Berkman remains a humble man, enjoying the simpler things in life. “He enjoys being out at the ranch, hunting, fishing, riding horses, and being with his family,” says Baker.
And helping others is still a priority for Berkman.

“I believe in the Bible, that we are supposed to help widows and orphans and the community in general,” says Berkman. “We are supposed to utilize the gifts that God gave us to better others, not ourselves. This is my philosophy. That is the truth.”

The truth is that when Berkman slams a ball over the fence, he gives his fans plenty of joy, just like the Babe used to do. The rest of what he does for them is that something extra that makes him special.

—By David D. Medina
—Photos by Tommy LaVergne