Wizard of Oz Hopes Road Leads to Series

ATLANTA —  In a sense, it’s already over for Ozzie Smith.

On the eve of the NL playoff opener with the Atlanta Braves, the 41-year-old St. Louis Cardinals shortstop said it would be difficult to top the jersey retiring ceremony at Busch Stadium before the next-to-last regular-season game.

“It can’t get any better from that,” Smith said Tuesday. “From an emotional standpoint, that’s probably as high as I’m going to get from this point forward. From here forward, it’s just business as usual.”

Not even getting a start in Game 1 against the Braves on Wednesday night seemed to move him much.

Smith’s tear ducts are dry after the last couple of months, starting with the June 19 retirement announcement. Then came the triumphant final tour of the league.

And on Sept. 28, with a sellout crowd watching, testimonials from Hall of Famers like Bob Gibson, Lou Brock and Stan Musial, broadcaster Bob Costas and Olympic champion Jackie Joyner-Kersee went on so long the game had to be delayed about a half-hour.

“The love, the joy, the admiration expressed has been much more than I could ever dream for,” Smith said then.

The next day, the season finale, Smith took a victory lap around the park in a tour reminiscent to Cal Ripken’s after he broke Lou Gehrig’s iron man record.

Now he’s playing baseball again, and the memories are hard to shake.

“Think about what’s happened in my life,” Smith said. “What’s going to get any better than that?

“You have a day for me and have 52,000 people cheering for me, and you sit back and say, ‘The Hall of Fame may get better.’ Well, it won’t get any better than that.”

That doesn’t mean he won’t be trying. As a backup, he probably outplayed Royce Clayton--15 years his junior--with a .282 average, the usual acrobatics in the field and a knack for the clutch hit, and he wants to go out on the top of his game.

Last season Smith was at his worst, undergoing shoulder surgery in May to repair a rotator cuff torn a decade earlier. He batted .199 and experienced a sore arm after the operation, convincing the Cardinals to shop for a replacement.

This year, Smith started 50 games and played so well that for a time he thought about reconsidering his decision to retire. In early September he said he “reserved the right to change my mind,” and before the season finale, Reds shortstop Barry Larkin said he wouldn’t be surprised to see Smith in uniform again.

Now, he says there are no regrets.

“I realized a long time ago that this time was going to come, so I’ve kind of prepared myself for it,” Smith said. “I’ll play as hard as I can for as long as I can, and hopefully that’s right into the World Series.”