SLUGGER CORY SNYDER LOOKING TO PUT IT ALL TOGETHER FOR CLEVELAND IN 1988

Last April, everybody was talking up the Tribe. Cory Snyder and Joe Carter posed for a Sports Illustrated cover, picking the Cleveland Indians to win the American League East became the cool thing to do and Opening Day attendance in Cleveland doubled the previous year's.The only trouble was, they had to play the season.

The pitching fell apart, Snyder struggled with slumps and strikeouts, the manager was fired in July and the Indians finished last in their division. But as they wrapped up spring training in Tucson last week and prepared to the open the season tonight at Texas, the Indians were feeling good about themselves again. "My confidence is high," Snyder said.

Which was not always true last summer. For the first time, James Cory Snyder, the kid who, according to legend, hit three home runs against UNLV in his first game as a BYU freshman, went through slumps. Of course, many big leaguers would love to have 33 homers and 82 RBI in a "bad" season, but Snyder shattered a Cleveland record by striking out 166 times and his batting average fell to .236.

One pitcher, Baltimore's Mark Williamson, said of Snyder, "He looked bad swinging at pitches down all night, hacking at them." And that was after Williamson had given up a game-winning homer to him.

At home in Southern California, his father, Jim, watched Cleveland's games via satellite dish and was cringing with most every at bat. "I could see the wheels going around in his head while the pitcher was winding up," he said.

Frequent phone calls home and long talks with his road roommate, Brett Butler, helped Cory, but he still had a violently up-and-down season. From July 6 through Sept. 29, his average went from .232 to .256 and back to .229 before he closed the season with four hits on the last day.

Butler, now with San Francisco, well remembers Snyder's searching. "He's been a big fish his whole life," he said, "and he'd never been in an opportunity to fail. It was just the mental part that he'd never gone through."

The high expectations were not the trouble for Snyder, who's faced those all his ball-playing life. He may have done too much too soon in the big leagues by coming up from Triple-A in June 1986 and putting together a full season worth of numbers 24 homers, 69 RBI and a .272 average in 103 games but the toughest part for him last season was not living up to his own standards.

Says Jim Snyder, a former minor-league infielder, "He started to panic . . . He was so frustrated. Once you get going downhill like that, it's very hard to right that ship."