SARASOTA - You look at 6-foot-6 and 240 pounds and you think about fastballs flying to the moon. Six-six and 240 equals 40 home runs. Rockets red glare. "There's a long flyball to right-left center ..."

Ballplayers get typecast, same as actors. Vin Diesel will not appear in a romantic comedy anytime soon. Adam Dunn is a big man, so people began tinkering with his swing and his approach to hitting. Stop walking so much, son. Start wearing out the heels of your cleats. Because Dunn bats left-handed, coaches pointed a helpful finger toward the bleachers in right field. "There," they said.

Dunn is still young (24) and eager to please, so he listens. Instead of waiting on pitches he likes and stinging them as Tiger Woods might a 5-iron, he loads up and rips like John Daly. When he hits it, it goes. Twenty-seven homers last summer, in 381 at-bats. Problem is, he misses it way too much: 296 strikeouts in two years, a .215 batting average in '03.

"Who told me to change my approach? Everyone," Dunn said. "I was too patient," they said. "I needed to be more aggressive. That's not my game."

Like more than a few other players on the 2004 Reds - Brandon Larson, Cory Lidle, Junior Griffey - Dunn's career is at a crossroads. Is he the player who hit .300 in the first half of 2002 and looked like a Reds Hall of Famer to be? Or is he a one-dimensional long ball-ist? Line drives? Or Dave Kingman?

"What kind of hitter do you think you are?" I asked Wednesday.

"I don't know anymore," Dunn said.

In 1990, Lou Piniella looked at Paul O'Neill and saw 35 homers. Piniella was an outstanding hitting coach. He tried to change O'Neill and almost ruined him. Piniella referred to O'Neill as "Big." It wasn't a compliment. Big O'Neill was never the hitter Piniella envisioned. He was, however, a very good line-drive hitter on the Yankees teams that won four world titles in the '90s.

Last year, the Reds wanted Adam Dunn to be more aggressive. OK. Then they hit him leadoff 12 times. A guy could get confused.

As Chris Chambliss, the new hitting coach, said: "Large and home runs don't always mix."

Said Dunn: "I want to go gap to gap, like I have in the past. Not just a dead pull, hit it to right, if I get lucky hit one to center. That ain't me."

Chambliss just might be Dunn's savior. Chambliss was the Yankees' hitting coach between 1996-2000, when they won all those championships. Chambliss is working with the hitter Dunn is, not the stereotype. "I'm finding his natural swing and going from there," Chambliss said.

"He's got me back to using the whole field, hitting line drives," Dunn said. "The main assumption is I can't hit for average. I've hit for average all my life, until I got up here. It's not because I can't. It's because people have tried to get me to hit more home runs. I will hit more home runs when I'm hitting the way I can.

"This year, I'm saying I know what I need to do. I'm not trying to be uncoachable. But I know what to do. It's time for me to fix it."

Last year, too many people filled Dunn's head with too much stuff. "That's what has been going on," he said. "We'll fix that."

By the way, Dunn wondered, "Who's Dave Kingman?"

Never mind.

E-mail pdaugherty@enquirer.com