Long Journey With Crew of Journeymen

CHICAGO — Tommy Lasorda must be right. God must be a baseball fan.

God put a stop Thursday to the sorriest exhibition of big league baseball that has been seen in a long time when he rolled a midsummer thunderstorm across the rotting old hunk of timber and cement that is Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, and spared a sellout crowd and TV audience what had become classic slapstick in cleats.

The game at the time was only in the middle of the sixth inning, but already 17 runs had been scored, 25 hits had been made, 5 home runs had been hit and 3 errors had been racked up. This was Three Stooges baseball at its finest. Connie Mack would have shipped the whole lot of them to the minor leagues. Casey Stengel would have wanted to know, “Can’t anyone here play this game?”

The game was just another in a series of misadventures that have overtaken the Dodgers on this swing through the leaky Midwest. This was a team that came into town here like a chorus of zombies after playing two doubleheaders in 28 hours (and losing both), to say nothing of a rain-delayed opener in St. Louis that was longer than some wars.

The Dodgers barely beat the dawn into Chicago Thursday morning. There haven’t been this many red eyes assembled in one place since the last Polish wedding in Kankakee. This is baseball’s version of the marathon dance.

This is not a road trip any more, it’s a death march. This is not a baseball team, it’s a sitcom. These guys have been huddled together in so many wet dugouts, you could grow mushrooms in their ears. Not many people could lose three games in one day. The Dodgers did.

Still, this is baseball as it used to be when the grass was real and so were the fans, and the sun was hot and the air was humid and games were called on account of darkness.

These are fans, not spectators. They are not here for free hats or bats, they’re here to hate. The bleacher bums in Chicago don’t keep opposition home runs. They throw them back on the field. They don’t plead for a hit. They dare you not to get one. No one leaves the game in the seventh inning here. They sit in the rain till 3 o’clock in the morning, which is what time the Dodgers’ second doubleheader in St. Louis ended Wednesday morning.

It’s hot in the Middle West, and tempers grow short as the games get long and skills trickle away. The Dodgers are playing atrocious baseball. They had three errors in a row in one game, easy fly balls bounced off the mitts of veteran outfielders, infielders threw wildly to the plate on easy double-play balls, and once-reliable pitchers couldn’t find the plate even on banjo hitters. The level of play appalls veteran Dodger-watchers like St. Louis’ Jack Herman and Chicago’s Ron Rapoport.

The players kick lockers, talk behind each other’s backs. The manager leaves a starting pitcher in through 6 runs with 4 hits, 4 walks and a wild pitch.

Nothing helps. An inexperienced general manager scans the trade lists but he comes up with journeymen players who are available for the very good reason that they haven’t been able to help anyone else and there is no reason they should be able to help the Dodgers. And, anyway, the Dodgers don’t need any more journeymen, they already have a surplus. The Dodgers need a cast, not a castoff.

It is a team that is trying to look over both shoulders at once, the look of a guy who is afraid he might find himself staring into his own casket.

In this negative atmosphere, not surprisingly, outsiders are sure that dissension in this dugout must be at the root of it. A National League umpire, one of the better ones, a crew chief, Bob Engel, let slip to the national magazine, Sports Illustrated, that he had overheard the star left fielder drop slurring remarks about his right-field teammate. Pedro Guerrero, never one to mask his feelings, was sure Mike Marshall was dogging it, taking himself out of games for imagined infirmities that don’t show up on any team diagnostic techniques.

The two have had words and icily ignore each other.

It’s a nice theory. Unfortunately, its chances of being the root cause of the Dodger downfall are minimal. Babe Ruth didn’t speak to Lou Gehrig for many of their pivotal championship years. Joe Tinker and Johnny Evers of the famous Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance didn’t speak. The early-1970s Oakland A’s had clubhouse fistfights and insulted each other in print while they won world championship after world championship.

Baseball is not a team game, it’s a soloist’s, a series of solo performances. Pedro Guerrero is not going to strike out because he doesn’t like Mike Marshall. Mike Marshall is going to hit a home run if he can, even if it’s Pete Guerrero who’s on base in front of him.

The Dodgers are lousy because their soloists are. You can’t cast an opera from the Yellow Pages. You can’t win an Academy Award with dress extras in the starring roles.

Eugene O’Neill once wrote a melancholy play about “The Long Voyage Home.” The Dodgers are living it. But with the crew they’ve got, there’s no reason to believe home is going to be any different.