HE’S IN THE . . . EYE OF A STORM : But Whether Dodger Catcher Mike Scioscia Can Calm the Cardinals Is Anyone’s Guess

Mike Scioscia gets famous a couple of times each year, usually for sacrificing his ample body in front of home plate.

You’ve seen the pictures: He’s on his back, unconscious, and somewhere up the third-base line, where he landed on the rebound, is the human wreckage of a base runner.

In the next frame, workmen are shown using tools to remove the ball from Scioscia’s grip so that he can be removed and the game can continue.

Well, yes, he is quite a plate blocker--big at 6 feet 2 inches and 220 pounds, and quite unmindful of personal safety. He’s the human equivalent of the Great Wall of China, enduring and resolute.

Certainly anybody who saw his collision with Jack Clark earlier this year must have been impressed. Scioscia was, in fact, knocked unconscious and did, in fact, hold onto the ball. And Clark was, in fact, out at home.

But that’s hardly all that the Dodger catcher does, either behind or at the plate, or away from it altogether.

He hits, for one thing. He hit .296 this season, the highest average by a Dodger catcher since Roy Campanella hit .318, 30 years ago. He leads, for another. Not only does he handle the league’s best pitching staff, he handles the club as well. He’s also the club representative to the ballplayers’ union, which was no fun in 1985, another strike year.

Also, the Dodgers fervently hope, he throws out base runners.

This last quality looms very large as the Dodgers prepare for the National League playoffs with the St. Louis Cardinals. The Cardinals, understand, are larcenous enough to make the James Gang seem like a pack of shoplifters in comparison.

Vince Coleman, for instance, has stolen 110 bases, a mere 40 more than the league’s No. 2 man, Montreal’s Tim Raines. The No. 3 man, Cardinal Willie McGee has stolen 56. Andy Van Slyke is the third Cardinal in the top 10 with 34.

It’s a fast club, is what those numbers indicate. And it’s Scioscia’s job, in large part, to make sure those numbers do not mount. It’s thought to be better, see, to cut those guys down at second than to have to meet them at home for more of those collisions. Those collisions, for one thing, can really slow a game down.

Scioscia, for his part, is not exactly hyper-ventilating at the thought of monitoring all that basepath speed. A catcher’s nightmare?

“Not at all,” he said. “Of course, they are a very aggressive team on the basepaths but, you know, it’s not just the catcher’s problem, either.”

As Scioscia pointed out, runners steal bases on a pitcher as much as, perhaps more than, on a catcher. And Dodger pitchers have been notoriously blase about holding runners on first. “It just wasn’t stressed,” Scioscia said. “I don’t think it was something the Dodgers ever really thought about.”

One reason, he admitted, is that the Dodgers have long had a catcher who gunned down runners with the nonchalance of Dirty Harry. Whenever Steve Yeager crouched behind the plate it was his way of saying, “Go ahead, make my day.” In a couple of seasons, Yeager threw out more than 40% of the runners who tried to steal against him.

“It might have been because of Yeager, who throws better than anyone,” Scioscia said of the Dodgers’ inattention to holding runners on first. “But over the last four or five years, they’ve come to realize how important it is for the pitchers to be involved, too.”

Yeager still comes off the bench, from time to time, to instill some discipline in unruly base runners. This year, he has thrown out 20 of 39 base stealers. Scioscia, not nearly so successful, has nailed 38 of 112. But Yeager’s bat--he’s hitting .207--has been no match for Scioscia’s, and it’s not likely that he will play in favor of Scioscia. So the pitchers will have to be involved more than ever.

Not that Scioscia won’t be involved. He said he has made an effort to improve as well. “I’ve made some adjustments. I think I’ve thrown much better the second half of the season, except for a bad rut of three or four weeks in June, which may have been a problem of mental fatigue.”

Certainly he will be more involved, and more effective, than he was several years ago.

Scioscia didn’t come to the Dodgers in the first place as any defensive marvel but, all the same, the Dodgers became so disenchanted with him in 1982 that they tried desperately to deal for another catcher. In fact, they almost got Jim Sundberg, then with the Texas Rangers, to replace him.

Who needs a .219 hitter who leads the league in passed balls and who green-lighted nearly every guy who got on base?

“No question,” vice president Al Campanis said at the time. “We were looking for someone to improve our catching.”

Unable to do that, the Dodgers decided to improve Scioscia and put him through a mini-instructional league during 1983 spring training. He practiced everything but plate blocking.

But 1983 was not the year of redemption it was meant to be. Scioscia played in just 12 games before he tore his rotator cuff, which in baseball frequently translates to: “Get a real job.”

If the Dodgers were down on his arm when it was healthy, well, they were not happy with that development, you can be sure. Scioscia was not happy, either. But he went along on a rehabilitation program, sitting out the rest of the season.

Remarkably, his arm was as good as ever, if not better, in 1984. And Scioscia, who says, “I just thanked God I was able to throw the ball again,” was firing on runners. He threw out 39% of them and hit .273 besides.

It was quite a comeback. Then he continued his comeback into 1985 for what has become his best year in the six seasons he has played with the Dodgers.

Still, Scioscia said it was never his aim to become virtually a .300 hitter, it just happened. “I’m not really goal-oriented,” he said. “A catcher on this club can contribute and hit .250 or .240.

“In fact, I may contribute more hitting .240 and do all the defensive things than if I hit .300 and don’t do them. As a catcher, my main contributions have to be defensively. So I take more satisfaction from that.”

Of course, even Scioscia has to admit that it’s better to hit at the plate than to be hit there, although he certainly gets more and better press for defending home plate than standing on it.

For the moment, though, his goals involve neither of those activities. Crouching behind the plate, monitoring the traffic from first to second, is how he’ll earn his money this week.

If he’s good at that, maybe nobody will even get to third and he’ll never have to appear in the newspaper unconscious again.