By John Klima

Luis Gonzalez came to play baseball at night, but during the day, he belonged to the man. The boss built homes, and when June arrived, it meant he could hire cheap hands. If a kid didn’t know what to do, that was fine. The boss would bark, and that might make the kid feel like he’d have to walk home. Gonzalez was playing in Alaska. He lived in Florida. That would have been an awfully long walk.

You have to pay your dues to play in the big leagues, and in the long road of amateur baseball, that price often involves college players participating in summer leagues. These few months are a taste of the minor leagues before playing in the minor leagues. It’s often the first step into playing every day, swinging with wood bats, taking bus rides, playing with strangers, playing in small towns, and living on fast food and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. It’s also another indication that playing baseball for a living comes with a set of conditions all of its own, and while it may be a great job, it doesn’t mean politics aren’t involved. These are the lessons that college summers taught some Dodgers about baseball before their big league summers began.

“My first year, I was an assistant to a home builder,” Gonzalez recalled. “That was quite an experience. I knew absolutely nothing about stuff like that. He would ask me to get tools and I had no clue. I was running to the truck and hoping I pulled the right thing out of the box.”

It’s hard to imagine Gonzalez swinging anything except a bat. But there was a time when he was still feeling his way through the game, establishing himself at the University of South Alabama, and seeking a higher challenge by signing up to play for the North Pole Nicks of the Alaskan Summer League in 1986 and 1987.

Today, NCAA sanctioned wood bat summer leagues are a staple of the path to the big leagues. But when Gonzalez was coming up, there were only two real options: the venerable Cape Cod League and the Alaska League. When Gonzalez played, most college summer teams were still using aluminum bats. The Cape didn’t go to wood until 1985. Still, Gonzalez had the challenge of facing players from the West Coast, who he had never had played against. He fondly recalls the two summers he spent in Alaska, even the moments when he wasn’t sure which tool the boss wanted him to bring.

“I played with a lot of guys from Southern California, and here I was, a kid from a small school in Mobile, Alabama,” Gonzalez said. “All my teammates were from places like USC and UCLA. For me, it was huge mentally because I was in the Sun Belt Conference. I played against South Coast Conference schools, and this gave me an opportunity to play against a lot of guys from the Pac-10. It was like playing against the other side of the country.”

The experience turned into a positive Gonzalez brought with him to professional baseball. The two summers he spent in Alaska, he said, helped him when he signed his first professional contract in 1988 and went to the New York-Penn League. He lived with the same host family for two years in Alaska and developed a strong relationship that he maintains today.

“It was an eye-opening experience because it was really the first time I left home for a long time,” Gonzalez, now 39, said. “We started the season in Washington. I remember on the flight from Washington to Fairbanks, the families were meeting us there. It was almost like an adopt-a-kid type of thing where they knew who you were and you didn’t know who they were. You walked off the plane and basically there’s a family there, and it’s ‘Hi, we’re your parents for the summer.’”

Years later, Gonzalez says the experience was worth it.

“It helped,” he said. “When I got drafted, I did the same thing. I lived with a family the first year I was there. The summers in Alaska made the transformation a lot easier.”

Andre Ethier went through a similar transformation – and a similar part-time job – when he went to the New England Collegiate Baseball League after his freshman year at Arizona State. From his home in Arizona, he arrived in Keene, N.H., a small New England town where the baseball field was surrounded by a red barn in center field and a bog behind home plate. The large mosquitoes were known to devour bare skin and gave the team its nickname, the Swamp Bats.

“I had just finished my first year of college ball, and by the end of May, I was out at the airport getting picked up by my host family, the Sweets from Northern New Hampshire. They took me to an 1870-something built, typical New England three-story home with a basement. I lived in a pretty nice little den and loft. I had a little TV and a nice little bed and chair. I had no car.”

Players were required to work jobs, so Ethier, like Gonzalez, worked construction. He spent his days refinishing walls. He spent his nights hitting with wood. “You had the constant high of paint thinner you could smell all the time,” Ethier remembered. “I think it paid seven bucks an hour. It was a nice little job.”

Ethier hit .227 that summer as a 19-year-old. The summer leagues are often kinder to pitchers. His teammate was Tim Stauffer, who went 7-0 with a 1.35 ERA, and later became a first-round pick of the Padres.

“It gets you ready,” Ethier said. “We played almost every day. There’s bus travel. You have pizza after the game. You have to wake up early in the morning to drive four or five hours and then play a game, drive home, and get ready to do the same thing again. It’s just the grind of playing that many games over the season with wood. Some of the environments and situations are similar to what you find when you get to the minor leagues.”

In Keene, the entire community knew more about the players than the players knew about themselves. As a West Coast kid, it was his first taste of New England’s favorite religion, baseball. Keene would draw 2,000 fans a night, bigger crowds than many college games.

“You become kind of a celebrity,” Ethier said. “Everyone knows who you are for those three months. They really follow the team and support it. It’s a little more special than a lot of minor league towns where you get forgotten about. Some people in those towns don’t even know there’s a team or a game going on. They enjoyed it there. They liked having the kids there.”

While Ethier enjoyed his summer experience, Randy Wolf recalled his two summers with Team USA as two of the toughest summers he encountered. Drilled by former Louisiana State baseball coach Skip Bertman, he ran into the Southern heat in an environment that was designed to weed out the weak.

“My memories of Team USA should have been better than they were,” Wolf said. “We had our training camp in Millington, Tennessee. It was a military town outside of Memphis. We stayed in this barracks. It was the first time I had been in the South. It was the first time I experienced heat and humidity together. The barracks were these old, bug-infested rooms. It was like a boot camp. It was at the end of a long college season and we went out there and they were running us into the ground. It was like two-a-days. I had always worked hard, but it was the first time I had sweated so much because it was so humid.”

The days were run with military-like precision. An 8 a.m. wake-up call was followed by a four-mile run on a day he would pitch. “I saw a lot of good players who couldn’t make that team,” Wolf said.

Wolf made the team twice, in the summers of 1995 and 1996 after the college seasons at Pepperdine. He went 4-0 with a 1.90 ERA in 1995. That team went 36-6 and won the National Baseball Congress World Series and had expectations of winning a Gold Medal in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Team USA spent $5 million over two years, but finished with a Bronze medal. On a staff with future major leaguers Jim Parque, Eric Milton, Jeff Weaver, Kris Benson and Billy Koch, Wolf held his own, going 2-0 with a 4.50 ERA. He pitched fewer innings than he did the summer before.

“It was the first time you realize that there’s a political aspect to it,” Wolf said. “You see that, basically, you’re a piece of meat. It was good to have that experience, but you’d think that playing for Team USA would be different. But it was interesting. I wouldn’t say as far as on-field baseball it was that developmental, but I think as far as off-field goes, the travel, the relationships with the other players is different. In high school and college, you’re with the same guys for two or three years. Team USA, you had 60 guys there and only 25 were going to make it. You’d become friends with them and they’re gone. You don’t see them again for two years. And that’s the way pro ball is. You can be buddies with a guy and if he gets released, you don’t talk to him again. And that’s weird, but that’s just the way it is.”

Nomar Garciaparra learned the way with Team USA that finished in fourth place in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. After hitting .363 with 25 stolen bases as a freshman at Georgia Tech on a team that included future major leaguers Jason Varitek and Jay Payton, Garciaparra made the team after arriving at a cattle call tryout camp. He was the emergency backup catcher, hit .200 in 20 at-bats, and used playing with Varitek, Jeffrey Hammonds, Jason Giambi and shortstop Chris Gomez to elevate his own skills.

“My memories of that are unbelievable and remarkable,” Garciaparra said. “The things I had to go through, I wasn’t invited to the camp. I had to walk on. It was an open tryout. Sure it helped. It wasn’t necessarily the International competition; it was the players I was playing with on the team itself. Watching how good the other guys were and trying to emulate them. That helped me tremendously. I watched how they practiced and what they did.”

After hitting .297 as a sophomore at Georgia Tech, Garciaparra got his first taste of New England baseball when he played for Orleans in the Cape Cod League. He had a successful summer, batting .327 with 50 hits and 15 stolen bases. He made the All-Star team in a year the league included future major leaguers Darin Erstad, Mark Bellhorn, Geoff Blum and Varitek. Matt Morris was the top pitcher.

“That was awesome,” Garciaparra said. “I had a great family that took care of me. It was a good experience facing top guys from across the country, playing with and against them, and to get used to the wood bat. You get the feel. You get used to hitting with it every day because you know the next step, where you want to go, that’s what you’ll do.”

What he wanted to do was play in the big leagues. The experience helped, and in 1997, he became a first-round draft pick. His two summers helped prepare him.

“It was the first time I got used to the environment of playing every day, instead of three or four times a week,” he said. “It was kind of a stepping stone for what professional baseball might be like, even though professional baseball is a whole different animal.”

The road has been worth it, even though Garciaparra remembered how he couldn’t wait to come home. He had been gone for eight months between college and summer ball.

“But at the same time,” he said. “I was there to get better, learn and work hard. Those summers, were, for sure, worthwhile.”

The big leagues are a long way from fetching tools, grueling runs, mosquitoes the size of a baseball, and pressure to win Gold Medals. But as Gonzalez said, when you look back on the road, it was all about caring enough about playing the game to mature another notch.

“It’s the commitment you make,” he said. “You look back now and laugh because everything turned out OK.”

John Klima is the national baseball writer for the Los Angeles Daily News.