Zeile Wonders if Dodgers Have Any Zest Left

By ROSS NEWHAN

June 27, 1999 12 AM PT

ARLINGTON, Texas — Garrett Zeile, who is 5, has a locker with his nameplate next to the locker of his dad, Todd, who is 33, in the clubhouse of the Texas Rangers. Tots in uniforms romp among the older kids who play the game professionally. The senior Zeile nodded toward his son’s locker and said that Texas Manager Johnny Oates recognizes the importance of family, as does the organization overall.

Maybe that was once true with the Dodgers, with whom Zeile yearned to play as a youngster growing up in the Los Angeles area and with whom Zeile did play in 1997, only to be traded as what he calls the “secondary” element in the Mike Piazza deal with the Florida Marlins in May 1998.

Florida was only a pit stop, of course, for both Piazza and Zeile, who were exchanged for Gary Sheffield, Charles Johnson, Bobby Bonilla, Jim Eisenreich and Manuel Barrios.

Zeile was subsequently traded to Texas at the July deadline last year, “landing on my feet” as the third baseman of a team that won the American League West and is now bidding to win the division title for the third time in four years.

Zeile left a house and piece of his heart in Los Angeles, but he knows the Dodger organization that traded him in May wasn’t the organization he joined as a free agent the year before, fulfilling his young dreams.

He may be part of a family in Texas, but he wonders, as do many, if that Dodger family hasn’t become a little dysfunctional.

“I’m like everyone else,” Zeile said. “They have the making of a good club on paper. I can’t figure out why they haven’t done better.”

This was Thursday in the Ranger clubhouse. Zeile said he didn’t want it to appear that he is analyzing from a distance, but that paper only goes so far, of course.

“The Dodgers had that solid foundation with the O’Malley family,” he said. “They understood baseball and understood that there’s more to it than putting good names on paper. There has to be cohesiveness, and I don’t see that there yet. Maybe a new organization needs time to learn that. I’d be surprised, knowing Davey Johnson and having played for him [in Baltimore], if he didn’t eventually bring it together. He’s been successful everywhere with clubs that people said weren’t good enough to win.”

The Dodgers, of course, were expected to win. They have an $80-million payroll, and General Manager Kevin Malone, after tying up $164 million in Kevin Brown, Todd Hundley, Carlos Perez and Devon White, proclaimed they were headed to the World Series. Now, swept recently by Pittsburgh, Oakland and San Diego, it’s a retreat. No Dodger team, since the move to Los Angeles, has rallied from a deficit larger than seven games to reach the playoffs.

The problems have been chronicled. If it’s an issue of chemistry and cohesiveness, that’s not new to Fox, although seldom have so many Dodgers talked so openly about the absence of spark.

“It’s the old question of what comes first, winning or chemistry?” Zeile said. “It’s possible that if you have a laid-back, outwardly dispassionate club that appears not to care, the opposite may be true. Guys may care too much and try too hard. I don’t know. I do know that Fred Claire [fired as general manager last June] may have been criticized for not making a big trade, but Fred knew people and he knew how they related.”

Claire’s authority, however, had been undermined when Fox executive Chase Carey made the Piazza-Zeile trade.

“Hindsight is 20-20, but we had everything we needed to be a contending club,” Zeile said. “There were a lot of people who said the trade made the Dodgers a better team. I wonder if those people would still say that.”

Claire was handcuffed by budget restraints. Malone has been handicapped by a lack of farm help and some of the multiyear contracts he inherited, but Fox provided hefty financial resources and might look closely at how it was used if the Dodgers don’t revive.

Zeile hit 31 homers and drove in 90 runs as the Dodger third baseman in ‘97, happy to be home. He hit six and drove in 28 runs in 52 games after his acquisition by the Rangers last year, arriving at the same time as Royce Clayton and Todd Stottlemyre, helping ensure another division title. He entered the weekend with 11 homers and 39 RBIs in 70 games, along with a .254 average and 11 errors--a disturbing total.

He is eligible for free agency when the season ends but knows he can’t go home again--since Adrian Beltre is at third in Los Angeles.

“I still have a childhood fondness for the Dodgers and still think life would be easier for all of us [wife Julianne and their two children] living at home, but I like it here a lot, there’s good management, a chance to win every year with this core of guys, and the organization is very family-oriented,” Zeile said in the rumpus room.

He and the Rangers then went out and defeated the pesky A’s, 5-2, for the second win in a three-game series that began a stretch of 15 consecutive games against division rivals, including three with the Angels starting Monday in Anaheim.

At their current pace, the Rangers will win about 92 or 93 games, and Oates said he would take that to the bank. Most weeks he frets about his rotation, but on Wednesday and Thursday he had meetings with temperamental slugger Juan Gonzalez, who has complained about the dimensions in the left-center power gap at the beautiful but quirky park here and went into a helmet-throwing snit when he rifled a bullet off the 390-foot mark in left-center Wednesday night and got only a double instead of a home run.

Gonzalez, of course, is one of those core guys and a key reason that Zeile says, “I’d be very disappointed if we didn’t win the division and didn’t have success in the playoffs. I don’t think this team realizes how good it can be. It seems like it’s only after we fall into a stretch of not playing as consistently as we should that we then rise to the occasion.”

That his hometown team in Los Angeles hasn’t shown similar zeal may be a family matter, suggests the former Dodger Zeile.