Shot Heard ‘Round the Bay Thrills Western Crop of Giant Fans

SAN FRANCISCO —  The name’s Robby, not Bobby. The surname’s the same, only spelled with an extra p, as in power. But should the Giants win the pennant--win the pennant! win the pennant!--this could become a Thompson for the new generation of Giant fans, for the ones too young to remember Coogan’s Bluff and Ralph Branca and Leo Durocher and all that Fifties jazz, for those who wonder why anybody ever played baseball on grounds built for polo.

Robby Thompson. Just a runt of a Giant is he. The chance of him being anywhere near the 5 feet 11 inches and 170 pounds at which he is listed can only mean he must have been measured in cowboy boots after eating two Fisherman’s Wharf crabs dripping with butter.

Yet the stronger-than-he-looks second baseman is suddenly the slugger who occupies a place in every heart that presently beats or was ever left in San Francisco. Forget about Will what’s-his-face, the beast who ate Wrigley Field, and that other master blaster, Kevin something, the guy with the blacksmith’s arms. Meet Robby Thompson, the little wick of Candlestick.

The home run he clothes-lined off of an unlucky lug by name of Lester Lancaster in the seventh inning of Saturday night’s Game 3 of the National League playoffs was the second that Thompson had launched off of that particular Cub relief pitcher in two series at-bats against him. Thompson also took Lancaster to downtown Chicago in Game 2, in a losing cause. This homer, though, this one had meaning.

What it did was give the San Franciscans a 5-4 score on a silver platter in a game that had belonged to the Cubs. What it did was protect the home-field advantage that the Giants currently enjoy, keeping active their chances of avoiding a return trip to Wrigley and pointing them straight toward that bridge to Oakland. This was Robby Thompson’s personal gift to Bay’s Ball.

“I was floating going around the bases,” Thompson said.

And why not? On a night when the much-discussed wicked winds of Candlestick Park never made an appearance, leaving outfield flags limp, Thompson had the cheers of 62,065 fans, a record number for a baseball game in this city, to carry him along. He did not take the Dave Parker Three-Hour Tour. Thompson dashed from bag to bag as though trying to catch the man in front of him, Brett Butler, who already was clapping his hands in glee as he rounded third.

Thompson called it the most thrilling moment of his time in the game--any time, any game. Certainly it topped the first-inning hopper that ushered the way to three Giant runs, the only ones they would scrape together off the Cubs until his heroic feat a few innings later. Definitely it felt better than that rally-ruining foul out in the fourth inning with Butler on second base.

It even meant more to him than some of his contributions to San Francisco’s pennant bid of 1987, when the second baseman cracked open a shipment of bats shortly before the playoff series opened at St. Louis, only to discover that all of his signature-models bore the inscription: “Bobby Thompson.”

The kid kept swinging, kept hustling, kept scrapping. That is his trademark. That is the legacy he intends to leave, when he is old and gray and Candlestick Park is as weeded-over and deserted as the Polo Grounds of New York. For the adjective “scrappy” is not insulting to Robby Thompson, as it is to some who play his sport. He thinks it is the ultimate compliment, in fact.

“Everybody says ‘scrappy,’ and I think that pretty much says it all,” Thompson said, when asked how he would describe himself as a player. “I’ve always been that way. I love to play the game. Deep down, I have a big heart.”

Heart is what it took for San Francisco to stay alive Saturday. Every break seemed to be going Chicago’s way, from a phantom forceout at second base during which shortstop Shawon Dunston was almost as close to third base as second, to a wild pitch that chased home a game-tying run no more than a minute after the Giants seemingly had choked off a Cub threat with a snappy 3-2-3 double play.

In a slugfest of a series that actually would amount to a pitching duel if everybody agreed to skip right past the first inning and move directly to the second, Mike LaCoss surrendered two runs to the Cubs after five batters, and still did better than Rick Sutcliffe, who put the Giants ahead by 3-2 by walking Candy Maldonado with the bases full. A bird that decided to nest in left-center field during the first inning had to do a lot of ducking to avoid all the line drives coming its way.

The Giants escaped danger in the second and third innings, when the Cubs had runners in scoring position, but not in the fourth, when LaCoss Aux Folles continued. The pitcher dropped a sacrifice bunt, loading the bases and hurting himself in the process, whereupon he suffered the indignity of being pulled by his manager with the opposing pitcher coming to bat. LaCoss was so delighted by this turn of events, he kicked the rosin bag about five feet, earning a look next week from the 49ers.

Sutcliffe obliged with a double-play ball, but reliever Jeff Brantley gave the Cubs a break anyway, bouncing one in that scored Dunston from third.

Soon thereafter, Chicago took the lead, and held it until San Francisco’s little devil stuck a pin in his Lester Lancaster voodoo doll. Whatever situation the Cub manager was prepared for in the seventh inning hardly mattered, because there is no defense for a two-run homer when a hit-and-run has been called. Roger Craig knew that Don Zimmer was unlikely to be asking for pitchouts on a 2-and-0 count, so he sent Butler flying, which is exactly what Thompson did to the ball.

“Are you a Robby Thompson fan?” a wise guy asked Zimmer later, when “admirer” was the more appropriate word.

“I used to love him,” Zimmer said.

The Giants do now, and so do those who love them. They adore Robby Thompson, more today than yesterday, and perhaps sometime later will give his home run a proper nickname for its proper place in history, depending on what happens to San Francisco in the days to come. Or perhaps this is a home run that will be better remembered in Chicago than it will be here.