Putting his name in lights

FORT MYERS, Fla. -- If there's a baseball god, Adam Hyzdu will play this season for the Red Sox. And Hollywood's leading Sox fans, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, will be there to cheer him as he emerges from 14 years of chasing his dream down the back roads of second-tier baseball towns from Shreveport to Chattanooga to Altoona to, well, close your eyes and stick a pin in a map.

Hyzdu embodies all that's special about the national pastime and the American spirit. Fourteen times he has reported for spring training, and 14 times he has failed to make an Opening Day roster. He has uprooted his family 51 times during the odyssey (his wife, Julie, has kept count), and he never has earned as much as the minimum major league salary. Yet here he is again, this time with the Sox, smiling through the futility, playing with all the gusto of his first camp, and hoping his 52d move is the sweetest.

Hyzdu (pronounced HIGHS-do) almost feels like a Bostonian, and not just because he played two productive seasons as an outfielder in the Sox system in 1996 and '97. He also has a "disease," as he calls it: his extreme fascination with "Good Will Hunting," the film Damon and Affleck created about a couple of working-class kids trying to make their way in Boston.

Hyzdu knows the movie by heart, as he demonstrated yesterday in the Sox clubhouse by play-acting a bar scene in which Damon's character, Will, upbraids a smarmy Harvard student who tries to wow a couple of women with his scholarly wisdom. While Hyzdu's teammates at nearby lockers pulled on their uniforms and listened quizzically, Hyzdu reeled off a rapid-fire recitation of Will dissing the pseudointellectual: "You're a first-year grad student. You just finished some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison probably, and so naturally that's what you believe until next month when you get to James Lemon and get convinced that Virginia and Pennsylvania were strongly entrepreneurial and capitalist back in 1740. That'll last until sometime in your second year. Then you'll be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood about the pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization."

Hyzdu continues rolling right through the final diss, when Will tells the smart guy he would sadly realize in 50 years that "you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on an education you could have picked up for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library."

Sign this guy up for movieoke.

"I love the movie," Hyzdu said. "But it's [a] disease because most of it is right on top of my head."

So is his passion for baseball, which Hyzdu, 32, has pursued as a pro since the Giants grabbed him in the first round (15th overall) in the 1990 draft, five slots ahead of Yankees ace Mike Mussina. But things rarely have gone his way, as he has recounted in an audio journal he is taping for the National Public Radio station in Mesa, Ariz., where he lives in the offseason. In one of the most poignant passages of the first two chapters, which have aired on NPR stations across the country, Hyzdu whispers goodbye to his 9-year-old, Zach, and tells him he will miss him as he departs for Fort Myers.

But as hard as the parting is, Hyzdu feels compelled to press ahead. He played for brief stretches for the Pirates over the last four seasons and signed as a minor league free agent with the Sox in November because he was told he would have a legitimate chance to compete for a big league job. Quitting never crossed his mind.

"I have a responsibility to myself, my family, and to God to perform to the highest level I can all the time," he said. "That doesn't allow me to say, `Yeah, I can still play the game, but I'm going to quit just because I've been given a raw deal a couple of times.' What is that? What are you teaching your child? What are you teaching the next kid? Things were a little hairy, so I just packed it in. You're not going to grow from that."

Hyzdu has shown flashes of great potential since he set the career home run record at Moeller High School in Cincinnati with 22, breaking Ken Griffey Jr.'s mark. At Double A with the Sox in '96, he led the Eastern League in slugging percentage (.618) and finished second in batting (.337) to Vladimir Guerrero (.360). He was the Eastern League's MVP with Pittsburgh's affiliate in Altoona in 2000, and was named the National League's Player of the Week for July 15-21, 2002, after he went 4 for 5 with a pair of three-run homers and seven RBIs for the Pirates against the Cardinals.

But things never have broken Hyzdu's way for long.

"Some guys in his position would shut it down, but he keeps plugging away," said Trot Nixon, who played with Hyzdu at Double A in '96 and Triple A in '97. "He loves the game and he still believes he's got an opportunity to play in the big leagues. He knows he's good enough and I know he's good enough. It's just a matter of getting that opportunity."

Hyzdu knows the odds are against him since the Sox outfield appears set with Nixon, Manny Ramirez, Johnny Damon, and Gabe Kapler. Several top contenders for bench jobs -- Brian Daubach, Dave McCarty, and Terry Shumpert -- also can play the outfield.

"I understand I'm not the automatic choice by any means," Hyzdu said. "I'm kind of a long shot. But I think there's still a spot or two, and if I'm in the mix, that would be great."

Manager Terry Francona has not counted out Hyzdu. He said he particularly likes the journeyman's ability to play all three outfield positions well.

"You might see Adam on our ball club at some point," Francona said. "We're pretty deep in that area, but we could do a heck of a lot worse [than Hyzdu]. He loves playing, you can tell that, and he just wants to keep going. I don't think the last of his major league time is over."