SALISBURY, Md. -- Scott Rice's baseball cleats clattered with each step as he walked up the concrete ramp from the clubhouse and onto the grassy baseball diamond for the Delmarva Shorebirds.

Diehard fan Les Moore raised a beefy hand from the pair of cheeseburgers he was cradling and smacked Rice's hand as Rice passed the bleachers.

"We have to 'high-five' every night. It's a pre-game ritual," said Moore, 44, of Salisbury. "He's my hero. He's my best friend."

Schmoozing with the fans has been a part of Rice's life since he was drafted into the Baltimore Orioles baseball club right after his 1999 graduation from Royal High School in Simi Valley.

Birds sang between the hollow thocks of the bat on a June evening in Salisbury as Rice, 21, prepared to play another game with the Shorebirds, the minor league team where he's played for the last two seasons.

Before that, he spent two seasons in Sarasota, Fla., then began to move up incrementally within the ranks of the minor league's Single A teams -- they are ranked high Single A to low Single A. But after Florida, he seemed unable to move up past the low Single A level of the Delmarva Shorebirds.

"All four years I've played pro ball, I've felt like I've failed," Rice said. "I haven't lived up to my expectations."

Rice worried about falling off the Orioles' radar screen and about the media reports.

One article from the April 2002 edition of USA Today listed Rice among the Orioles' disappointing prospects.

"A 1999 draft in which Baltimore had seven first-round selections (including supplemental picks) has yielded very little ..." wrote reporter Matt Santillo in USA Today's Sports Ticker. "Southpaw Scott Rice spent a third straight summer in rookie ball."

It stung.

When he was first drafted at age 17, the 6-foot, 6-inch left-handed pitcher in the size 17 shoes was confident he'd one day stand on the major league mound at Camden Yards. It wasn't going to be easy.

"I want to break out of the shell," Rice said.

But no matter how hard he worked with the Orioles' professional pitching coaches, he couldn't seem to move up to the high Single A team in Frederick, Md.

In the end, it was a mentor from high school, Lou Birdt, who taught Rice perhaps the most important lesson of the last four years: To get where you're going, sometimes you need to return to your roots.

It seemed to work. A week ago -- on June 29 -- Rice played in his first game with the high Single A team called the Frederick Keys in Frederick, Md.

High hopes

The future was brighter than a 4,000-watt stadium light when Rice first learned he'd been drafted by the Orioles. After Rice got the call, Birdt was moved to tears. He had always believed in Rice's potential and level-headed nature.

"He's always been an easygoing guy," Birdt said.

Pro ball did turn out to be heady stuff. After Rice traveled to Sarasota to start training in the rookie league, Rice and the other players visited Camden Yards in Baltimore for one practice session with the major leaguers. He was assigned a locker next to future Hall of Famer Cal Ripken Jr. and met first baseman Will Clark.

"I was so nervous, I can't even tell you," Rice said in early 2000. "It was kind of something I've dreamed of since I was a little kid."

The other perks were nice, too, but he was careful to keep his perspective, especially as he watched players around him give way to excess. He saw players spend their bonuses on cars, boats and electronic equipment. One player would buy an expensive car, get tired of it and give it away.

"Then he bought a Lexus and put three TVs in it and a DVD player," Rice said.

Rice's sign-on bonus of $750,000 went into the bank. (His salary after the bonus comes to about $30,000 a year).

"If baseball doesn't work out, I can start my own business," he reasoned at the time.

His Sarasota pitching coach, Moe Drabowsky, was impressed.

"He's not like the type of kid who gets a pile of dough and thinks he's a notch or two above everybody else," Drabowsky said in 2000.

That's not to say Rice didn't indulge in some luxuries. In 2001, he bought a Cadillac Escalade, which he still drives.

Pitching to win

It took about a year for Rice to realize that moving up was going to be tougher than he thought.

"Before, when I first started out, it was like, 'I'm going to be awesome! I'm going to move right up!" Rice said during an interview at the end of 2000. "But I really have to work hard."

After spending his first two years in the rookie leagues in Sarasota, Rice moved up to a low Single A team in Bluefield, W. Va., for one season in 2001. Then, he joined the Delmarva Shorebirds, where he has been playing ever since, with the exception of a short season in 2002, when Rice pitched in the new 6,000-seat minor league stadium Cal Ripken Jr. built in his hometown of Aberdeen, Md. Ripken would sometimes watch his Aberdeen Ironbirds play from a glassed-in box that Rice could see if he looked to the right from the pitcher's mound.

"It's kind of neat looking up in the stands and seeing a living legend," Rice said in 2002.

Seasons in Salisbury

After his stint in Aberdeen, Rice returned to the three-bedroom apartment he still shares with two other pitchers.

"Watch out for the goose poop," Rice said last month as he walked past a duck pond to the front door of the apartment.

Inside, four guitars leaned against the wall of a dining room that was otherwise empty, save for a noise violation notice the roommates had tacked on the wall like a prize.

A baseball sat in the middle of Rice's unmade bed, which was accented with a SpongeBob SquarePants pillowcase.

In the kitchen freezer, corn dogs were stacked like firewood next to a crate of Marie Callender's chicken pot pies.

Picking up a skillet, Rice said "we have these but we've never really used them."

Asked where the roommates eat, Rice pointed to a plaid, mustard-yellow couch.

"We eat right here," he said. "Can't you tell by all of the stains we have on the carpet?"

Rice and his roommates, Ryan Keefer, 21, and John Maine, 22, also use a pair of plastic quacking duck lips to call their favorite duck from the nearby pond, Whitey.

"We're trying to lure Whitey in, but he won't live in the tub," Rice said.

When asked what it was like to have three pitchers all taller than six feet living in close quarters, Keefer managed a straight face and joked:

"We spoon a lot."

Maine nodded and added a solemn:

"Love is a beautiful thing."

But seriously --

"He'll do anything for you," Keefer said of Rice. "He just takes care of the other guys. In Bluefield, there was a Dominican guy and he really didn't have a nice glove and Scott gave him one of his new ones."

The inner pitcher

When he went home to Simi Valley over the winter for the 2002-2003 off season, Rice shared his frustration with his baseball-savvy friend and mentor, Lou Birdt. The two got back out on the baseball diamond to see what Rice had learned from the Orioles pitching coaches.

"He hadn't seen me pitch for three years," Rice said. "He said, 'Wait a second. Why are you doing that? That's not you! That's not how you pitch!' "

The critiquing from the pros was drowning Rice's personal style. With Birdt's help, Rice learned to trust what was inside, rather than relying too much on what he heard from the outside. In a sense, he was helping Rice reconnect with his "inner pitcher."

"It helped me find the pitcher that I am instead of having me do all these different things that were here, there and everywhere," Rice said. "My whole pitching style was corrupt or tarnished. You could still see it, but it was rough around the edges."

Birdt gave Rice just what he needed.

When he returned to Salisbury this spring, he was determined to give the Orioles a wakeup call.

The regional media noticed the difference. A sports writer with the Baltimore Sun noted that going into the spring season, Rice had just seven wins and 26 losses while his earned run average, or ERA, was 5.15 a game. That was bad. But by June 16, when the article came out, the writer noted Rice had 3 wins and 0 losses, meaning he won three games and lost none. And his ERA was a much-improved 0.89. That was good.

"Few pitchers in minor league baseball can match such a dramatic turnaround in their careers," the article said.

"I just finally figured it out," Rice said. "I finally got it to work."

It wasn't the only good publicity for him. Earlier in the month, Jim Hunter, the radio personality who calls all of the Orioles' major league games, picked Rice to interview as part of the Orioles' pre-game show.

Each week, Hunter chooses a promising minor leaguer to interview, and "this kid can pitch," Hunter said. Hunter added that his conversations with the scouts suggested that Rice was a definite prospect for the majors, even after having spent four years in the minor leagues.

"When you draft a kid out of high school, you better be patient... Especially a kid like him who has to come all the way out to the East Coast from California," Hunter said. "They have to learn to do things, like their laundry.

"You learn not to get too down on a kid if he takes too long to develop."

The same day as the interview, Rice found out he made this year's All-Star team -- a team composed of the best players from all 16 teams in the South Atlantic League.

A comeback

"Hey, Ricecake!" a player called, tossing Rice a bat during pre-game practice June 5.

Rice caught the bat and ambled over to home plate for some batting practice before that night's game.

Shorebirds pitching coach Larry McCall broke from practice a moment to praise Rice's progress.

"He wants to learn. He wants to get better. He's not afraid to take criticism.

"I think he's definitely ready to go to the next level," McCall said, just about a month before Rice advanced.

That's what Rice had planned.

He may have lost and regained his pitching identity over the past four years, but his answer to one question that he's been asked time and again since 1999 remains as steady as his left arm:

Is he headed for Camden Yards?

"Without a doubt," he said.