Suddenly It's The Wild West

In his salon, apart from the players' clubhouse, Dodger Manager Tommy Lasorda was entertaining Danny Kaye, the actor-comedian-conductor, who is both a part owner of the Seattle Mariners and an unregenerate Dodger fan. Kaye was expressing amazement that Lasorda's team, an also-ran for most of the season, should suddenly be leading the pack in the National League West. "Danny," said Tommy, "I've always said that a baseball season is just like a horse race. It doesn't matter how you start; it's who's under the wire first."

The Dodgers are a long way from the wire, but there they were out front coming into the backstretch, if only by a head. They got there so swiftly that Kaye, not an easy man to surprise, may be forgiven his disbelief. On July 30 the Dodgers were in third place, 10½ games behind the Atlanta Braves. Some 24 hours later, after a doubleheader sweep and a single-game victory, they were 7½ back. Ten days later, they were in first place by a half game. They got there, in no small part, by beating Atlanta eight times in that stretch, not that that, in retrospect, seems like much of an achievement, because the Braves contrived to lose 11 in a row before sneaking out a one-run win over the third-place Padres last Saturday night. But what is even more amazing about this abrupt turn of events is that while the Dodgers were making their run, winning eight in a row at one point, the San Francisco Giants, of all people, were matching them stride for stride and then some, winning 10 in succession, including five over the suddenly hapless Braves.

The Dodgers and Giants had come from nowhere to transform a runaway division race into a four-way scramble. And to make matters better, they ran right into each other last week in a four-game series in Los Angeles that was reminiscent of a time in the '50s and '60s when the two were noble adversaries battling each year, it seemed, for the old gonfalon. Lately, of course, the Giants have been the Dodgers' patsies. Until they finally won on Saturday night, they had lost 24 of their last 30 games in Dodger Stadium, including four straight this season.

But this San Francisco team, led by their implacable manager, Frank Robinson, is made of sterner stuff than the pitiful Giants of recent years. And the series last week represented a return to the good old days of bad blood, beanballs, suspected foul play, brilliant defensive efforts and homers galore. In the fourth inning of the Friday night game, the Dodgers' Pedro Guerrero was hit on the back by a pitch thrown by the Giants' Rich Gale, who was irritatingly wild inside for most of his five-inning stay. Guerrero, suspecting that this and other Gale dusters were thrown with malice aforethought, railed at the pitcher on his way to first base. When Guerrero finally reached the bag, he was advised by Giant First Baseman Reggie Smith that if Gale had indeed grown careless, it was only because he suspected that the Dodgers' Ken Landreaux, leading off second base, had been stealing Giant Catcher Milt May's signs and tipping off the hitters. Gale was merely seeking to restore a semblance of honesty to Dodger batsmen with some morality lessons inside.

Guerrero was even more outraged by this intelligence. "I don't need to know anybody's signs to hit," he shouted at Smith in macho pique. To demonstrate his self-reliance, his next time up he hit a three-run homer off Gale's successor, Alan Fowlkes, icing a 6-1 Dodger win. And for good measure, the Dodger starter and winner, Bob Welch, flattened Jack Clark in the eighth with a pitch fully as sinister as the one that plinked Guerrero. Plate Umpire Ed Montague immediately issued a warning to Welch that the strike zone, not Clark, was his proper target.

The Dodgers won the opening game Thursday with a four-run eighth inning that severed a 2-2 tie. The Giants came within a literal foot of breaking that tie two innings earlier when Joe Morgan, attempting to score from third on Jeff Leonard's fly to right, was blocked at the plate by Dodger Catcher Mike Scioscia. Morgan rebounded off Scioscia and, from a short distance away, reached out for the plate with his left foot, in the manner of someone attempting to scrape gum off his shoe. Three times Morgan's foot groped for the plate, and, according to Plate Umpire Eric Gregg, he actually reached it on his third try. The trouble was, Scioscia tagged him on his second. Morgan was still fuming over this call two days later. "It changed the whole game around," he groused.

The Giants also lost a home run in the fifth inning of that game when Landreaux leaped high and reached over the fence in left center to rob Bob Brenly. Home-run larceny was committed in each of the first three games. Clark took one away from Landreaux on Friday, and Dusty Baker, timing his leap perfectly, came down with an over-the-fence sky-buster by Leonard on Saturday. No one reached homers hit Saturday by Chili Davis (on the first pitch of the game, off Dave Stewart) and by Morgan in a 4-2 Giants' win. Nor could any Dodger get back home runs by Darrell Evans and the retaliative Leonard in the Giants' 8-6 win on Sunday—certainly not Fernando Valenzuela, who was shelled for five runs and eight hits in three innings and made the earliest exit of his career.

It was vintage hardball by two of the more interesting teams in the National League. The Dodgers, we must remember, are the world champions, although they hadn't played that way until this month. Their inability to bury the opposition in a division not considered particularly strong had baffled their legion of supporters (they average more than 44,000 spectators a game at home) and their own front office, which got noticeably edgy early in the season.

"We suffered from an inability to put together a sustained effort," opines Rick Monday, the demon substitute and ace philosopher. "People were saying, 'What's wrong with the Dodgers?' when they might have asked themselves, 'What's right with the Braves?' It's always easier to analyze the negative. Fortunately, we had some positive data left in our memory banks."

Criticism from management was particularly annoying to the players. "I didn't understand how everyone could give up on us so quickly with such a long season ahead," said Baker, who's one of the few Dodgers who have played consistently well all season. "It makes you aware of what the future may hold."