Heidi Hamels: Changeup on the player's-wife image

Game nights mean Heidi Hamels doesn't get to bed until 2 a.m., and on this Tuesday - after the Phillies' joyous blowout of the Cincinnati Reds - she has to be up extra early.

Before the wife of the World Series MVP can buy $1,200 in baseball equipment for orphans in Turkmenistan and spend several hours cleaning up the grimy, long-shuttered library at John B. Stetson Middle School, she must withstand six morning radio interviews promoting an E! baseball wives' special.

When you're cute and blond - and married to Cole "Hollywood" Hamels - and you've survived Survivor, and oh, yeah, you've appeared topless on the cover of Playboy, people get a certain impression about you.

And it's pretty superficial.

But Heidi's daily reality - as a businesswoman and hands-on philanthropist - tells a bigger story.

"I don't know what people think I do," says Heidi, 30, who holds a master's degree in secondary education from West Chester University and is cofounder of a T-shirt company. "People want to think your life is glamorous and all that. It's not. We're everyday people. I'm the wife driving the U-Haul back from spring training."

Even as King Cole and the Phillies chase another World Series bid, Heidi and Cole are building a new charity venture. And in this instance, she has emerged as the most valuable player.

Heidi works 12-hour-plus days to establish herself separate and apart from Wife of Cole, or worse, eye candy on an athlete's arm.

The marathoner runs her weeks like The Amazing Race, traveling from a Center City Modell's to a West Kensington school to a Northern Liberties publicist, then a couple of days later to a West Chester photo shoot, and a few days after that, to St. Louis for an All-Star poker fund-raiser - all good practice for the wannabe contestant who notes, "Cole has a compass in his head."

Managing www.colehamels.com and SistasShirts.com (she and younger sister Dawn Strobel design T-shirts for female athletes with amusing one-liners such as "My Mascara Runs Faster Than You") isn't enough. She already gets by on a college kid's sleep schedule of midnight dinners (by the time Cole wraps up at the ballpark) and wee-hour bedtimes, even now, six months pregnant with the couple's first child - a boy.

Now, she's added to this heaping plate the Hamels Foundation. The fledgling nonprofit helps struggling schools in the United States and orphans abroad. In April, Heidi visited several Philadelphia schools under consideration for grants, and before that traveled to Malawi and Thailand, where projects support education and sports teams.

"I'm not OK just being," she says. "Most people are completely content just being. I'm always looking for a challenge."

Matt Davis, superintendent of the Eldon School District in central Missouri, has known Heidi since 2002, when she taught phys ed. She "never stops," said the foundation board member. "She's a doer. She's not the stereotypical baseball wife."

Still, curious minds want to know what it's like to live with that gorgeous husband.

"We are very best friends," she says, obligingly. "Cole and I are actually homebodies." He often calls a dozen times to ask about her day - though not from the dugout.

And she swears she really doesn't get worked up about those who lust after her man, who's five years her junior. "I don't have a jealous bone in my body," she says. "He's a cute guy. I don't blame them."

It's 11 a.m., and Heidi's starving. She and her mother, Kathy Dugas, head to eat before the visit to Stetson. Dugas, the foundation's operations manager, is visiting from Missouri on one of her frequent charity business trips.

Cole comes along - a rare bit of together time - because he doesn't have to be at the ballpark till 2 p.m. He brings the couple's hyperkinetic, 3-year-old miniature Maltese, Royce Hamels.

The Devon Seafood Grill on Rittenhouse Square is a stroll from the couple's new digs at Two Liberty Place. They lease (with an option to buy) a $2.2 million, 2,700-square-foot condo with three bedrooms, three-and-half baths, and a spectacular view up and down the Delaware River.

The unit's decor is corporate-suite neutral except for the pool table in the dining area and the red, No. 35 cleats that rest atop. Oh, and there is the gigantic bottle of Moet nearby that declares "Welcome Home MVP."

Once lunch is ordered - he chooses the blackened chicken and pasta, she, the Caesar salad with french fries (to satisfy a craving) - the pair talk about their current passion, the Hamels Foundation.

Africa, in particular, became a joint cause after they honeymooned in South Africa (Heidi's choice; she sold Cole on the safari), where they saw the Big Five animals - and shantytowns.

"It opened me to a different side of the world that I probably would never have had if it weren't for her," says Cole, a San Diego transplant known as a laid-back surfer dude.

A couple of years ago, she persuaded him to join her effort to start a charity, before he was a household name in Philly, let alone the country. "I wanted to wait until I was more established," he says, worrying a foundation with his name might leave some wondering, "Who's that?"

Heidi, however, felt that urgency that seems to rule her days: "Never wait, when you can do the right thing now."

On Rittenhouse Square, Cole in dark glasses hears "Good job!" a few times after the previous night's Reds game. One woman interrupts to inquire about directions to a cheesesteak joint, clueless as to who's sitting right there.

Heidi grumbles; the couple usually have no privacy. They can rarely go out without someone chasing Cole to sign something. People have followed them into public bathrooms. When they lived in West Chester, fans would come to the front door.

"We get so few minutes together," says Heidi, who figures the time she and Cole see each other amounts to only five months a year, between his baseball and her businesses. "Even though we're not on a reality show, you do get used to living your marriage in public."

One consolation is the Hamels Foundation, which, she says, has raised $300,000 this year. Out of that amount, Philadelphia schools, including Stetson, have received $75,000 in grants. Funds also will be used to build an all-girls boarding school in Malawi, chosen after her research showed it was one of the world's most impoverished countries, with 500,000 orphans because of AIDS. Education, she says studies show, is one of the best ways to break the AIDS cycle. The charity also supports sports teams for children in Thailand who were affected by the 2004 tsunami, and in Turkmenistan, where Heidi has friends in the Peace Corps.

"Right now, it's a mound of dirt," her mother says of the school in Malawi. Construction is expected to begin next year.

"I cannot wait," Heidi says.

As a child, the eldest of three daughters was always high-energy, says Dugas, 53, an accountant who divorced when Heidi was 12. "I was that way, too," she says. But after having kids, she slowed down "by about half. I'm hoping her life will slow down, too."

Not likely. Before Heidi's pregnancy (she says she wasn't sure she could conceive after she got deathly ill post-Survivor), they had begun paperwork to adopt an Ethiopian child. They hope to bring home an infant girl a few months after baby Hamels' arrival. "They'll be like twins," says Heidi, who has long wanted to adopt.

She expects she'll make the best of the added responsibilities. She's overcome most of her hurdles that way.

Take the whole Survivor: The Amazon melodrama in 2003. It left a bad taste - and not just from the ants and worms she ate.

Heidi, teaching in Eldon, sent a tape of herself running a half-marathon to The Amazing Race, but was tapped for Survivor. She and eventual winner Jenna Morasca were bashed as mean pretty girls. The fact that the two took off their clothes for peanut butter and chocolate didn't help.

"They made me out to be the big, blond cheerleader, not somebody with a brain," she still fumes. She placed fifth and barely survived afterward, when she dwindled to 78 pounds. She also was paralyzed from the waist down for nearly a month from a spider bite. She says she posed for Playboy with Morasca in part to pay off medical bills.

Still, if not for Survivor, she wouldn't have met Morasca - who's her best friend - or her future husband.

In 2004, when Cole was a minor leaguer, the tables were turned. Heidi Strobel was throwing out the first pitch at ball games as part of "Survivor Night," then signing her name for three hours. "He was the one who was in my autograph line," she says of a stop in Clearwater, Fla.

Cole, on the disabled list that day, confessed he wasn't a Survivor fan but said he would like to go out. "I thought he was amazing," she says. Even her mother, a constant by her side, was "quite smitten." They wed on New Year's Eve 2006.

"They're an extraordinary couple," said Realtor Brian Nelson, who sold the couple their townhouse and befriended them. "People who don't know them see the flash thing. Once you get to know them, they're really deep."

In Heidi, friends see a determined, unpretentious entrepreneur, who has an independent streak and a sense of loyalty.

"What you see is what you get," said Morasca, a professional wrestler and Pittsburgh transplant to New York City. "She seems really untainted by the world. . . . She has big plans, and she's going to execute them."

Heidi seldom slows down, except when she plays an occasional SimCity computer game - "You can actually control the people," she says. "I control so little in my life. Honestly, baseball controls everything" - or reads for fun (she's set to start the Twilight series, which Cole, a fantasy-lit junkie, already has consumed).

"When I'm lying there, dead as a doornail," she says, "I hope people say, 'She was the hardest worker I ever knew.' "