Bangor’s Stairs eagerly awaits new season

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He is, perhaps, the most famous Bangor resident you’ve never heard of – unless, of course, you’re a diehard baseball fan.

In Montreal and Boston and Oakland and Chicago, where he has toiled as a right fielder since breaking into the big leagues in 1992, he has built up quite a reputation. His name is often mentioned with a two-word prefix: Fan Favorite.

Milwaukee fans will find that out this year, when he takes his rough-and-tumble, fan-friendly style to the Brewers.

But around Bangor, where he settled with wife Lisa and daughters Nicole, Alicia, and Chandler a year ago, Matt Stairs is just the vaguely familiar guy you run into at the gas station, or see working out at the gym.

That’s fine with him.

“For us, [coming to Bangor] was always nice, because Bangor’s always been a quiet place, a safe place, a place where I can go and nobody knows me,” Stairs says. “I don’t get bothered. It might be a different story if I played with the Red Sox all the time.”

Alas, that’s not the case. The 5-foot-9, 215-pounder did make a brief stop in Boston and played in 39 games in 1995. Then he headed to Oakland, where he hit a career-best 38 homers and knocked in 102 runs in 1999.

But Stairs can’t forget his time in Beantown.

He joined the Sox in Baltimore, and remembers the trip back to Fenway Park after that series wrapped up.

“It was probably 2 o’clock in the morning. I just walked out and stood outside the dugout,” he says. “I’m a diehard Red Sox fan. I just stood there in awe, looking at the Green Monster.”

Mainers can relate to that. Maybe that’s a reason the Fredericton, New Brunswick, native feels so comfortable here.

He landed in Bangor instead of Kansas City only after checking the Internet real estate listings one final time during the offseason last year, when it became apparent that his time in Oakland had come to an end.

He found a house. He and his wife flew to Bangor, and discovered that they loved it. They bought it two days later.

The move was a “return,” of sorts, for the Stairs family.

“Living in Fredericton, the big thing is coming down to Bangor and going shopping,” Stairs says. “We’ve always enjoyed coming down here.”

Stairs is engaging, friendly, and full of stories he likes to tell. He says fans liked him in Oakland because of his charity work, and because he always signs autographs before games, and because he’s not averse to handing out “hundreds” of baseballs during batting practice, “even though the management gets mad at you.”

He says fans in Chicago liked him because he was the guy they could always have a postgame beer with at Slugger’s bar.

And he says his style of play doesn’t hurt, either.

“I play 100 percent,” he says. “I play hard, and whatever I have to do, I’ll do it. If that means I have to hit the second baseman and put him a mile into the stands, or charge the mound and fight the pitcher? Whatever gets the team going.”

That’s Stairs, the former hockey player talking, he tells you with a chuckle.

Stairs can tell you that he scored 100 points in 26 games in his final year as a hockey player at Fredericton High School and that he had some opportunities to continue playing. A knee injury and baseball got in the way.

But that doesn’t mean he’s forgotten about the game. No way.

“I’d retire today from baseball to get one game in the NHL. In a heartbeat. A heartbeat. I wouldn’t think twice,” he says.

“If they gave me one shot to play for the Canadiens, I’d go up there and play one game. I’d fight anyone. I’d get my ass kicked, but I could say I played in an NHL game and retire happy.”

That, too, is the old hockey player talking.

The stories keep coming. Like the one about his first major league at-bat. Every player’s got one, of course. But not one like this.

“It was ’92, against Rob Dibble, when he was with the Nasty Boys in Cincinnati,” Stairs says.

“Oh-and-two, he threw one 103 [mph], behind my back, and laughed on the mound. I dropped a turd right there,” he says, jokingly. “[Then I] took the next pitch, he struck me out, and I ran off the field.”

Stairs has high hopes for this year. The Brewers expect him to platoon in right field with the righthanded-hitting Alex Ochoa. Stairs plans on making it tough for his new team to take him out of the lineup.

But even if they do, he figures that since most pitchers are right-handed, he’ll play 85 percent of the games, get 500 or 600 at bats, and wash away the memories of a 340 at-bat 2001 season.

“I don’t want to stay around this game and just become a pinch hitter,” says the man who decided last season that he needed to reshape his body and reduce his body fat. He dedicated himself to daily weight-training with trainer Lance Reardon to do just that.

“I don’t love this game that much, to sit on the bench, watch games, and be a pinch hitter when I know I can still play.”

This game? No. But hockey? That’s another story.

“When I know I can’t play [baseball] any more, I’ll walk away from this game, never put cleats on again, and be happy,” he says.

“Then I can string up my hockey skates,” the former and future hockey player says with a grin.

“God knows, the day I retire, I’ll be out there skating the next day. I don’t know where it’s gonna be, but I’m gonna be skating, somewhere.”

John Holyoke is a NEWS sportswriter. His e-mail address is jholyoke@bangordailynews.net