This Has Been World Series for Little Guy

OAKLAND —  Well, the canary ate the cat. The rabbit shot the hunter. The fish drowned the angler.

Goliath lost again. Bugs Bunny got away from the big bad wolf. The roadrunner kept out of Wile E. Coyote’s reach. Pauline hit a tree trunk halfway over the cliff.

The Dodgers get to keep saying, “Yah! Yah! Missed me!”

Listen! Has anybody around here seen Jose Canseco? Check the bus depot or the closets around town and see if the real one is locked up and bound and gagged in one of them. They got a guy out here wearing his uniform who looks like him and sounds like him, but when he gets a bat in his hand, it’s a lousy impersonation.

The real one better show up pretty soon.

Listen! You ever seen a botched-up execution? Where the guillotine sticks? The rope breaks? The pipe leaks in the gas chamber?

Ever see a bad bullfight? Where the bull is drooping and bleeding and blinded and the matador can’t finish him?

If so, you got some idea how the Dodgers came across in Game 4 of the 1988 World Series. The prevailing opinion was, these were a bunch of guys on their way to the electric chair. Everything but the shaved heads and pants slit up the side and a chaplain to read the 23rd Psalm.

Well, they walked out of the shadow of death. They showed up at the end chewing on a carrot, so to speak, and saying to the A’s, “W-w-what’s up, Doc?!”

Oakland kind of lost to Albuquerque Wednesday night. You looked at the Dodger lineup and you thought you had wandered into the Triple-A Little World Series by mistake.

The Dodgers, what was left of them, took the field with the ragtag order you might find in a prisoner-of-war camp pickup game. They went into what their manager likes to call “Da Fall Classic!” with a cleanup hitter who batted .196 for the season, a designated-hitter who hit .242 for this season and .163 last. A rookie was pitching. The manager got the lineup by sticking a pin in the roster. The batting order had a total of 34 home runs for the year. Oakland’s Canseco had 42 all by himself; Mark McGwire had 32, and the club had 156. Canseco had 124 runs batted in. That would be a career for some of the guys on the Dodgers’ card.

A network broadcaster said it was the weakest lineup that had ever taken the field in a World Series, and he could prove it. It outraged the Dodgers, but he had a point.

Oakland looked for all the world like a lion on the track of a bleeding antelope. They played as if they had all the time in the world. It looked like a battleship training its guns on a canoe.

But the Dodgers were harder to kill than a juicy rumor. They had more lives than Rasputin. Maybe you have to drive a blunt spike in them.

How did they do it? How did they take this bunch of irregulars and surround one of the proudest standing armies in baseball? Well, they kind of did it by guerrilla warfare, hiding behind trees, swooping at the right moment, dynamiting transmission towers and fading into the forest.

They scored a run on a passed ball. They scored another one on an error. They scored another one on an error, a stolen base and a double-play ball that went awry at the last minute in the pivot. They scored the last one on a walk, an infield hit and a ground-out that squirted off the pitcher to second to first. They nibbled the A’s to death. The got an extra-base hit that trickled off the second baseman’s glove.

It was liked winning a golf tournament with a 76, taking a poker pot with a pair of 5’s. Winning a war with spears.

Well, maybe, not the war. A battle. The war isn’t over yet. The Dodgers may yet have to check the Yellow Pages for a first team. They started this game without their own long-range railroad guns, Kirk Gibson and Mike Marshall. That’s 45 home runs and 158 runs batted in right there.

In the fourth inning, they lost their first-string catcher. Mike Scioscia, whom nobody ever mixed up with Ben Johnson--or even Van--took off for second base. If he had stolen it, they would have stopped the game and bronzed the bag. It would have been his first steal of the season. Instead it was his last anything, at least for the night. He twisted his knee and joined the rest of the MASH unit.

The Dodgers won with a pitcher who is not only a rookie but who is that most cryptic of baseball characters, the player-to-be-named-later. This is usually a throw-in in a baseball swap, a guy the trading team takes just to keep the stockholders happy and have a warm body to send out to the minor leagues. It’s usually a mop-up pitcher, not a World Series starter. And certainly not a World Series winner.

The Dodgers traded Rick Honeycutt to the Oakland A’s in August 1987 and, when they couldn’t seem to arrive at a one-for-one swap, they said, in effect, “Whatever you think is fair.” Oakland said, “How about Belcher?” The Dodgers said, “Fine. What’s his first name?”

His first name turned out to be Tim, but in postseason play it might as well be Sandy or Van Lingle.

The Big T has now won 15 games in his rookie season for the Dodgers, 12 in the regular season and 3 in the postseason. It’s safe to say no player-to-be-named-later ever had a season like this. Players-to-be-named-later are usually back on the truck or running gas stations by postseasons.

Tim Belcher may or may not be the rookie of the year, but he is the player-to-be-named-later of the century. With that makeshift lineup of who-dats behind him, he struck out 7 Oakland A’s Wednesday night, held them to 7 hits and 2 earned runs in 6 innings. Against him was the 21-game winner, the veteran “Smoke” Stewart who will never be anybody’s player-to-be-named-later. Smoke didn’t exactly flame out, but he couldn’t strike anybody out in his 6-plus innings.

Was Belcher awed by his eminence in this crucial game? Hardly.

Before a big game--or sometimes any game--a star pitcher often won’t talk to the press or anyone else on the day he pitches. Catfish Hunter was this way. So was Jim Lonborg. Sal Maglie.

Tim Belcher was chattily visible in the dugout throughout the afternoon. It was his birthday (27th) for one thing. Although he had been an Oakland chattel, he never pitched in this Oakland ballpark. “They didn’t think I was a major league pitcher,” he admitted cheerily.

They thought he was just another player-to-be-named later. He could end up being player-to-be-named-MVP in this thing. If he can win with that American Assn. batting order behind him in the biggest baseball games of all, he may even be a player-to-be-named-Cy-Young one day.