Knockdown Time In The Wild, Wild West

Ted Sizemore, the ferocious rookie second baseman of the Los Angeles Dodgers, says the first thing he learned about pennant races was that they never begin until Sept. 15. Last month Sizemore, who stands a sizeless 5'10" at the very most, walked into a restaurant to meet Tom Haller and Ken Boyer, two Dodger teammates, for dinner. Boyer noticed that Sizemore seemed to be eating a cigarette and dancing the Funky Broadway while they waited for the ma�tre d'hotel to seat them.

"Runt," Boyer said, "just what's bugging you anyway?" Sizemore grimaced. "This pennant race," he answered. "It gets to you." Boyer laughed. "Runt," he said, "don't climb any walls yet. Relax. Wait until the middle of September. Then, if things are still tight, we'll all be there climbing them with you."

Last week Sizemore, Boyer and almost everybody else in the National League West started serious wall climbing as the tightest race in baseball's 100 years headed into the final days of the schedule with five teams viciously chasing one simple title. The fun of it all was that the five teams were playing almost exclusively among themselves. Nobody was off beating up the Phillies or the Expos. This was baseball roulette—Western style.

The situation in the wild, wild West flirted with chaos last Wednesday when three different clubs held sole possession of first place on the same day. The San Francisco Giants woke up in first. By late afternoon, having lost to the Houston Astros, they were out and the Los Angeles Dodgers were in, one one-hundredth of a percentage point ahead of San Francisco and the Atlanta Braves. But that night the Braves beat the Dodgers in 12 innings and they were in first place.

That is, they were and, in a sense, they were not. Although the Braves had the West's best winning percentage, they still had lost 67 games—the same number as the Giants, the Dodgers and the Cincinnati Reds. They had merely played more games, so the other three teams were, potentially, sharers of the lead.

But that is the way it has been all season long. Five teams—the Braves for 108 days, the Dodgers for 33, the Giants 31, the Reds 25 and even the expansion San Diego Padres for a day—have had or shared the lead, none of them for too long. The lead, in fact, has changed teams 30 times, 17 times since the All-Star break. Then came mid-September and Ted Sizemore's real pennant race and with it, apparently, the division's second casualty, if San Diego's rapid descent into the cellar can be considered its first. The Astros, who played the West's best baseball from May 1 to Labor Day, lost three straight to the Braves in Atlanta. Then last week they went to San Diego and lost there. They had about had it.

Cincinnati, suddenly, looked like the next dropout, which is one of the more curious developments of last week, since the Reds, only one game behind the Braves, were quite jovial when they arrived at Dodger Stadium for Tuesday's twinight doubleheader against Los Angeles. Second Baseman Tommy Helms was around sticking bubble gum on people's pants, and one player tacked a newspaper story on the wall of the dressing room in Dodger Stadium that said a computer picked the Dodgers to win the pennant. Someone else wrote over the story, "Do not fold, staple or mutilate."

The words were prophetic on this crucial night. But it was the Reds who were folded, stapled and mutilated, and the saddest victim was Gary Nolan, the 21-year-old righthander who is recovering from arm miseries. Before the game Pete Rose discussed the Reds. "We've got great harmony, just like the Dodgers always have had," he said. "We're all having good years. No one's mad at himself for not hitting or anything. When there's a runner on third base with less than two outs, somehow we always get him in. We can do those little things you must do to win a pennant."

Before the game, too, Dave Bristol, the Reds' manager, called a team meeting in the clubhouse. Bristol conducts more meetings than any other manager in the majors, a good example, his critics say, of overmanaging. "You got to communicate," Bristol says. "Some people don't like it, but I don't care. I got to tell it like it is." Like what is? "I tell them I want them to put more crooked numbers on the board than the other team."

So what happened? In the first game the Reds put one straight number—a 1—on the scoreboard in the top of the eighth inning. They had a chance to put up another straight number in the ninth, but Rose, of all people, grounded to shortstop when he should have been, by his own account, bringing a runner home safely from third. Rose ended up at second on the play and, furious with himself, kicked the base as though it were the culprit.