Dodger Relay Team Wins Opening Heat, 4-1 : Guerrero and Madlock, of All People, Outrun the Cardinals

The St. Louis Cardinals went from baton passers to baton twirlers Wednesday night, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a track meet in Dodger Stadium. It just wasn’t the one advertised.

The Dodgers, with Bill Madlock and Pedro Guerrero playing the parts of two unlikely sprinters, shot like a blue streak past the Cardinals, 4-1, in the first game of the National League playoff series before a sellout crowd of 55,270.

Just as all the wise guys predicted, speed and defense were the deciding factors, but somehow the roles got reversed. The Dodgers were the ones who lapped the field, while the Cardinals--so help them, Ozzie Smith--were the ones booting balls all over it.

For good measure, the Dodgers showed that their minds were racing as fast as their feet when they dropped a surprise two-out bunt on the Cardinals in a three-run sixth inning. Candy Maldonado, who was an uncertain starter Wednesday and an even more uncertain bunter throughout his career, laid one down the third-base line with Guerrero on third and heading for home.

Cardinal third baseman Terry Pendleton charged the ball and elected to go to the plate with his throw, but somehow, Cardinal pitcher John Tudor--who has been Johnny on the Spot all season for St. Louis--suddenly became Johnny in the Way, crossing directly in Pendleton’s line of fire.

The throw struck Tudor in the right elbow, Guerrero crossed the plate, and one pitch later--a pitch that Steve Sax hit into left-center for an RBI double--21-game winner Tudor left as a star-crossed loser for only the second time since May 29.

“The last time I saw a play like that? I’ve never seen a play like that,” said Pendleton, whose more routine muff of Madlock’s bouncer in the fourth led to an unearned run and 1-0 Dodger lead.

The fall of the House of Tudor wasn’t the only stunning sight of the night. The play that started it all in the sixth involved baseball’s most sure-handed shortstop, Ozzie Smith, who glided into the hole to backhand Madlock’s one-out grounder and had the ball skip off his wrist into left field. Then, when he finally tracked the ball down in the outfield, he swiped to pick it up--and missed.

By that time, Madlock was on second with what official scorer Wayne Monroe called a double but what Cardinal Manager Whitey Herzog called mind-boggling. For the Wizard of Oz, that was like sending Dorothy to Katmandu instead of Kansas.

“I’ve watched him play for five years,” Herzog said, “and he probably makes that play 99% of the time.”

Said Smith: “It’s not the first time and not the last. . . . I’m saying this for the 15th time.”

The last time Tudor lost was also to the Dodgers and to Fernando Valenzuela, who Wednesday night kept the Cardinal road-runners, Vince Coleman and Willie McGee, from even stepping off the curb until tiring in the seventh. That’s when Tom Niedenfuer stepped in with two runners on and with one pitch shot the tires out from under the Cardinal speedwagon one last time, Coleman bouncing to Dodger shortstop Mariano Duncan for an inning-ending double play. McGee, the league’s leading hitter, struck out three times.

The Dodgers, meanwhile, turned Madlock and Guerrero loose on Tudor, who had to be wondering what the roundest man on the field (Madlock) and a chiropractor’s dream (Guerrero) were doing, running their fool heads off.

Madlock, 34, who stole only three bases in Pittsburgh before being traded here, apparently has subscribed to the L.A. notion that the only way to beat old age is to outrun it. Next thing you know, he’ll be conducting Jane Fonda Workout sessions.

Madlock, who reached on Pendleton’s error in the fourth, stole second base without drawing a throw from Cardinal catcher Darrell Porter and scored when Guerrero was jammed by Tudor but still managed to bloop an opposite-field single to right.

And Guerrero, who has been under orders from Dodger Manager Tom Lasorda not to run since spraining his back in July, went one up on Madlock, stealing second base twice. He also went from first to third on Mike Scioscia’s RBI single in the sixth after drawing an intentional walk, and was alert enough to break for the plate on Maldonado’s bunt.

“Right now it’s different,” said Guerrero, trying to compensate for the things he used to be able to do before he sprained his left wrist and wound up wearing a bowling glove. He took the glove off before the game but put it back on in the fourth, when his single put the Dodgers ahead.

“I have to go out there and do the best I can,” Guerrero added.

Lasorda had said on Tuesday that he was wrestling with whether to play Maldonado--as he has been doing all season against left-handers--or Ken Landreaux.

The decision to go with Maldonado was Lasorda’s, as was the decision for Maldonado to bunt.

“I yelled at him in Spanish because I knew Tudor and Porter only spoke English,” Lasorda said.

Someone asked Lasorda how to spell toque , the Spanish word for bunt.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Lasorda said. “I’m not a professor in Spanish. I can’t even spell the word in English.”

As it turned out, Lasorda could have hollered out in the language of his choice and it wouldn’t have mattered. Maldonado said he never heard him.

Maldonado said he got a signal from first-base coach Manny Mota, who noticed Pendleton playing back.

“You’ve got to take a chance,” Mota said. “Tudor was kind of tough.”

Maldonado said that Mota’s sign was conditional. “He told me he’d tell me when the third baseman was playing back in case I wanted to bunt,” Maldonado said.

Maldonado, who had flied out weakly to right and struck out in his first two times at bat, figured he had nothing to lose. He also remembered the time that Pete Rose had dropped a two-out bunt to beat the Dodgers in extra innings earlier this season.

“If I bunt, we have a chance to score, so I took my chances,” said Maldonado, who had bunted twice for base hits in the last two weeks of the season after hardly bunting at all.

“Pete saw me square around and took off.”

And with that, so did the Dodgers, who come back today with Orel Hershiser, a pitcher who has not lost at home in 1985.

“You keep asking us if we’re worried about their running--why don’t they (the Cardinals) have to worry about us?” Hershiser said before Game 1.

“We’re the ones with the league-leading ERA and the best starters in baseball. Why don’t you ask them how they’re going to get on against us?”

The Cardinals, who scored their only run in the seventh on three straight hits off Valenzuela, the last by pinch-hitter Tito Landrum, will try to show tonight that they have the answer.