Rookie utility player learned versatility on and off the field
This A’s road trip will be a significant one for Chad Pinder, who next week will be making his first-ever appearance at Camden Yards as a big-league player.
Pinder grew up an Orioles fan in Poquoson, Va. His father, Chris, played in Baltimore’s system and Pinder got his first taste of the majors when they’d visit the Orioles’ clubhouse and dugout to see Chris Pinder’s former minorleague trainer.
And it was while watching an Orioles game on TV that
Pinder decided on his future.
“I remember getting pizza with my dad after a high school game, watching the Orioles play, that’s the first time I said aloud, ‘This is what I want to do. I want to play baseball,’ ” Oakland’s rookie utilityman said. “So the Orioles and Camden Yards have a special place for me. It’s going to be very cool going back there.”
For the son of a former pro player, Pinder has a most unusual relationship with his father. Most ex-ballplayers provide floods of unsolicited advice, or worse, serve up constant criticism when their sons follow in their footsteps. Not Chris Pinder. “To be honest, my dad and I don’t even talk about baseball. Which is good,” Chad said. “We keep things separate, which is something we really enjoy and pride ourselves on. Our relationship is father-son, it’s not baseball. We don’t talk about the games after the games. Never, ever, ever. Not once in my career has that happened, which is a blessing.”
Maybe that’s because Chris was a pitcher. “If you want to call it that,” the elder Pinder said by phone. “I was a lowlevel closer. I couldn’t hold these guys’ jockstraps.”
Chad, 25, his older brother, Clark, and younger brother, Chase — who was drafted by the Cardinals in June — all turned out to be infielders rather than pitchers, maybe because of all the hours their father spent pitching to them. He didn’t have any ambitions that any of them would wind up in the pros, though.
“You know with kids, you get them hitting off the tee, you throw them an underhand toss and see the swing and think, ‘Hey, that’s natural looking.’ But you have no idea where it will end up,” Chris said.
Chris was careful to make sure his sons knew how to play everywhere, one reason Chad feels so comfortable playing in the outfield, something of an unexpected development for the A’s this season.
“We’d take Chad, Chase and Clark and rotate them through all the positions, and I’d hit them grounders, flyballs,” Chris said. “They all got familiar with everything. Our line was: ‘You’ve just got to get in the lineup.’ ”
Pinder looks so good in right field, in fact, there’s talk that might be a full-time position for him some day.
“It’s so funny when Bob Melvin puts him in the outfield — I giggle because this kid has a gun,” Chris said.
Chad’s versatility is not a surprise to his younger brother.
“He’s just a really good allaround athlete,” Chase said. “His senior year, he said, ‘I’m just going to go play football,’ and he hadn’t played since he was 8. We were like, ‘Are you serious?’ He already had a commitment to play baseball at Virginia Tech. He winds up starting at wide receiver after not playing for 10 years.”
Chris, a senior sales rep for a biomedical technology company, didn’t make it beyond Double-A, but he did have some impressive minor-league teammates, including Jim Thome and, in both college and in the minors, onetime roommate Jerry Dipoto, now the Mariners’ general manager.
Thome ran into the Pinders at the Triple-A All-Star Game in Charlotte, N.C., last year; Chad wound up spending an hour and a half talking hitting with the future Hall of Famer.
“It was pretty special,” Chad said. “He said, ‘Remember, at the end of the day, you’re just competing at the plate. There are so many things that go into the game now with scouting reports, but it’s you versus the pitcher. You’re competing.’ That’s the biggest thing I took away: Sometimes the information can paralyze you, but when it comes down to it, you’re in the box. He’s on the mound. You’re battling.”
The Pinder family, which also includes mom, Beth — vice president of sales and marketing for a housing company — and daughter Avery, 17, describes Chad as the jokester of the family, with a sense of humor exactly like his father’s.
Chase recalled Chad laughing and not at all worried two years ago when they were on a rowboat caught up in a current and heading for Chesapeake Bay, even as Pinder’s friend Mark Montgomery, a pitcher with the Cardinals’ Triple-A Memphis team, was freaking out. And when another friend came to rescue them, Chad stubbornly stayed to row the boat home: with a paddle, a broomstick and his hands.
“It took him two hours,” Chase said. “Chad just wanted to prove he could do it.”
There’s another side to him, too: Throughout college, including when he returned to finish his degree in communications, Chad worked with Special Olympics athletes, even asking his coach, Pete Hughes, if he could leave practice early one day a week and take a different player with him each time to go to Special Olympics bowling. Chad remains in contact with several of the Special Olympians he befriended, exchanging texts weekly.
And for all of his baseball accomplishments, which include a 460-foot homer into the upper reaches of Mount Davis this year, his father takes the most pride in his kind nature.
“Chad’s always had a soft heart,” Chris said. “If he saw seven or eight kids playing and one is off to the side by himself, he’d go sit with that one. That’s just very heartwarming for a parent.” Susan Slusser is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sslusser@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @susanslusser