COLUMN: Glanville getting hits and runs, but little attention

The Penn grad is having a great year, but few people seem to notice. The Penn grad is having a great year, but few people seem to notice.Kent Malmros, Commentary When you're Doug Glanville, maybe you have to wonder that a little more. Doug who? Around this campus, for sports fans at least, it's a common name. He is the one Penn baseball player currently playing at the highest level, the major leagues. Around Philly, his name is becoming equally as common. But for a man who is putting up unparalleled numbers --unparalleled anywhere in the Majors -- it seems to be justified to ask the same question to the rest of the baseball viewing country, but certainly not a fitting tribute to the player Glanville has become. Doug who? Tony Gwynn leads the National League outfielders in all-star voting, with 1,181,776 votes. Brian Jordan is at the bottom of the 16-man list with 175,476 votes. Glanville is nowhere to be found in the tallying. Gwynn and Jordan are having unquestionably stellar years, batting .350 and .344 ,respectively. Glanville is at .332, but he crushes the other two in hits and runs. The former Quaker's hit total of 98 puts him in a tie for the Major League lead with Dante Bichette. The 77 hits for both Gwynn and Jordan pale in comparison. His 56 runs are well above the other two. It seems like the Phillies leadoff man should fall somewhere in the middle of those 16 outfielders. He has arguably become one of the best leadoff hitters in the Major Leagues. But around the country, the question persists, for now at least. Doug who? The knock on Glanville is the notion that he isn't a pure leadoff hitter. For a man in the first spot, Glanville has only 14 walks and 12 stolen bases. His on-base percentage is .360, only 30 points higher than his batting average. The numbers are uncharacteristic of the prototypical leadoff man. For instance, Chuck Knoblauch, the spark of the Yankees, has a .392 on-base percentage with only a .269 average, due to 41 walks. If Glanville were to improve in the walk department, his stolen base opportunities would allow him to use his speed, and his argument as one of the top leadoff hitters in the game would likely disappear. But Glanville tried his hand at becoming the typical leadoff man early in the season, and hovered under .250 for the first 17 games. If you ask the Penn baseball coaches, they'll tell you he approaches the game the same way he did in his college days? when he was the three hitter for Bob Seddon. And guess what, he is getting the job done. The 1991 first-round draft pick has left the shadows and entered the limelight for fleeting moments in his life before. As a superstar baseball player, at a basketball school, Glanville's due respect came for the final year of his career at Penn. The Teaneck, N.J., native was rated as one of the top collegiate players in the country by Baseball America and drafted as the 12th overall selection in the 1991 amateur draft by the Chicago Cubs. And so was his time of relative inobscurity at Penn. That gave way to the 20-year-old outfielder's five-year journey to the pros. Five years spent out of any sort of public eye once again. Some things never change. Until last season -- sort of. The 26-year-old outfielder made his name known as a rookie for the Cubs. After some time dabbling around in the ivy confines for the Cubs in 1996, Glanville assumed a starting center fielder role last season, surprising everyone by hitting .300 and playing gold-glove defense; so they traded him. Now here he is, at Veterans Stadium -- on a pace to have upwards of 240 hits, and having hit safely in 53 of his last 57 games -- terrorizing National League pitchers. The 6-2, 175-pound Glanville may be one of the few Major Leaguers who can come to Penn, his alma mater and his adopted hometown,as he did Tuesday in jeans and a white polo shirt, and have people walk by without mobbing him. Even as a Comcast Sportsnet TV crew sets up next to him. And he needs to maybe steal a couple more bases -- even if he is on pace to steal around 30 now -- and walk some more. But, Glanville's hit and run totals have earned him respect among his peers, and he is the Phillies spark plug. And with Mark McGwire chasing the ghost of Roger Maris and his record 62 home runs and Juan Gonzalez chasing 191 RBIs, Glanville may continue to move towards 240 hits and 130 runs in relative obscurity. Well, he's been there before.