Dodgers Could Win, but Reds Also Have a Schott : Baseball: On eve of division series, Cincinnati owner has a few, uh, peculiar answers to help make sense of confusing season.

By BOB NIGHTENGALE

Oct. 3, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

One of the most confusing, tumultuous and chaotic seasons in baseball history continues into the playoffs.

It opened with the players on strike, proceeded with the fans on strike, ended its regular season in utter confusion trying to figure out the playoff format, and begins postseason play today with teams still arguing about the home-field advantage.

The Dodgers and Cincinnati Reds still can’t quite understand just how they got here, and how they wound up playing one another in Los Angeles, but beginning at 5 tonight at Dodger Stadium (the Dodgers’ Ramon Martinez pitching against Pete Schourek), they’ll be playing in a best-of-five round called the division series. The winner will play the Atlanta Braves or Colorado Rockies for the National League pennant in the second round.

And if this extra round of playoffs was designed to stimulate fan interest, someone apparently forgot to tell them here and in Cincinnati. The Dodgers still have nearly 15,000 seats available for tonight’s game and the Reds say they have plenty left.

Leave it to Marge Schott, the eccentric owner of the Reds, to make sense of this whole mess.

Well, perhaps not perfect sense. This is, after all, the woman who has brought hair from her dead dog with her and plans to sprinkle it on her players tonight for good luck.

And it’s not every owner who has told the general manager to fire the manager, Davey Johnson in this case, at the end of the season because he lived with his wife before they were married.

It’s not every owner who has cut the front office down to 10 employees--there’s a one-man marketing department--and ordered the media relations department to issue only one page of notes during the regular season.

It’s not every owner who makes the players buy most of their own equipment, buy their own team picture and has yet to retire a single uniform number.

So let’s see now, how do we assure that baseball has full houses in every city during the playoffs?

“We should all move over to Japan and put our baseball teams over there,” Schott said. “God, they really love baseball there.”

Any other solutions?

“You see those playoff tickets?” she said. “They looked to me like rap [concert] tickets. It’s got everybody confused. They should be red, white and blue. What does brown have to do with baseball? They all look rappy.”

Do you understand this playoff format, complete with wild cards?

“This is so complicated,” she said. “This wild-card stuff is nuts. It has people confused. This is ridiculous. I’m a traditionalist. I wish they kept it the way it was. I don’t know who’s figuring this stuff out.

“I don’t even know how they pick the wild card. . . .

“I don’t even know if we’ve got anybody singing the national anthem or anything. There’s so much confusion.”

Yes, it’s all complicated, but hey, what’s that huge stuffed dog doing in Davey Johnson’s office?

“I wanted to bring the real Schottzie [a St. Bernard],” she said. “But we thought it would be too hard for her to make the trip. She gets nervous when she drives to the airport.”

Schott paused, looked at the stadium scoreboard where the game between the Angels and Seattle Mariners was being shown, and almost became speechless when pitcher Randy Johnson appeared.

“Who’s that guy pitching?” she asked. “Will you look at that hair. He could never pitch for us.”

Schott looked around, saw the American flag and the state flag, then asked, “What’s the lion flying up there?”

“It’s actually a bear,” she was told.

“It’s a bear? Oh, that’s cute. Do you know what his name is? I’m surprised they don’t have a bear mascot here.”

Schott had spent part of the afternoon in Dodger President Peter O’Malley’s office and reported some interesting findings. She said that O’Malley really would like to own an NFL team and had shown her the blueprints of his proposed new stadium. She said O’Malley expressed frustration that tonight’s game was not sold out.

Yes, it’s the Dodgers and Reds, two franchises rich in tradition reviving a rivalry that became one of the finest in baseball in the ‘70s.

Dodger Manager Tom Lasorda, who actually had some of Schottzie’s hair rubbed on him, started the bitter rivalry when he became manager in 1977. The Reds had won two consecutive World Series championships as the Big Red Machine, but Lasorda immediately announced that the Dodgers would overtake them.

“He put a lot of pressure on us,” said Dodger hitting coach Reggie Smith, who played on the 1977 team. “It’s easy for the manager to say that, but we were the ones who had to go out and play.

“You know what? We responded.”

Said Lasorda: “I was tired of seeing them succumb to the Reds. I said, ‘Those days are over. I don’t even want anybody to even wear any more red.’ We became the team of the 1970s and ‘80s.”

Said bench coach Bill Russell, the shortstop on those teams, “I think we also got Sparky [Anderson] fired.”

Now, here they are again. The Reds are the team everyone predicted would win the title in the National League Central, and clinched 10 days ago. The Dodgers were called underachievers until they won 17 of their final 23 games, winning the West title Saturday.

“What’s the difference?” asked Lasorda, only the fifth manager in baseball history to manage the same team into the playoffs in three decades. “We won, didn’t we? If we won by 15 games, would that make us any better? We can’t do anything about yesterday, but we certainly can do something about today and tomorrow.

“What are you going to say, those guys are bad because they didn’t win by 15 games? They won. They are champions of the National League West. Nobody else is. And it don’t make any difference how many games they won it by.”

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Dodgers at a Glance

* Site: Dodger Stadium

* Time: 5 p.m.

* TV: Channel 4.

* Radio: KABC (790)

* Tickets: 15,000 available