Orel Does a Numeral on Cardinals

Baseball is not your basic, everyday Roman numeral sport. I mean, it’s not polo in Palm Beach, backgammon in the Hamptons, point-to-point sailing on the Sound. It’s more for guys named Chuck or Moose or even Stash than guys who get counted in Latin like Popes and kings. Guys with their own yacht get enumerated, not guys who are professionals and work for a living.

Orel Hershiser IV not only doesn’t sound like a ballplayer, he doesn’t look like one. Orel doesn’t look like a guy found in a sandlot; he looks like one who came walking right off the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. He wasn’t born, he was drawn. By Norman Rockwell. He looks like Saturday night America at the ice cream parlor. One part Ichabod Crane, one part boy with a dog and fishing pole. He’s so pale and skinny, he looks like his own X-ray. He’s almost all Adam’s apple. Jimmy Stewart gets the part in the picture.

It’s a heart-warming story. Mr. Deeds Goes to the Playoff. It’s not the story of a boy and his dog, though, it’s more like Tom Swift and His Electric Sinkerball.

Orel Hershiser the Fourth turned back the St. Louis Cardinals, the team that would steal Christmas, Thursday night in the game his team had to win to be sure not to get blown out of this tournament when it reaches that rubber rug in St. Louis this weekend.

Orel, as you might suspect, is a very heady pitcher. Even the guy he was pitching against, Joaquin Andujar, who is not a clone of anybody and gets no Roman numeral after his name, had said before the contest that Orel the Fourth was, to his mind, a better pitcher than Dwight Gooden. “He’s smart and he has a better slider,” Joaquin sniffed. Case closed.

Before Thursday’s game, though, Orel, studying the parts of the St. Louis lineup that seemed a blur to the rest of the league this season, opined thoughtfully that it wouldn’t do to pay too much attention to the blinding speed on the basepaths. “The batter can hurt you worse than the runner,” he philosophized. “You have to pay attention to the batter.”

When the game started and the St. Louis sprint team opened up typically with a hit and a dance off first base, Orel seemed to forget his own advice.

Orel the Fourth threw about 100 sliders, sinkers and slow curves before the night was over, but the most important pitches he made all evening were not to home plate--they were to first base. He threw over there nine or more times when Vincent (Van Go) Coleman opened the game with the well-known single to center. “All of a sudden,” Orel said, “I thought, ‘Oh-oh!’ I remembered all the hype about how these guys would run you right out of here.”

Incredibly, he forced Coleman into a poor jump attempt at a steal of second, and for almost the first time the Dodgers played him, Van Go was Van Gone, thrown out at second. Leg two of the St. Louis relay team, Willie McGee, then reached base on an error. He set sail for second on a pitchout and didn’t even get 80 of the 90 feet before he saw that the ball had preceded him. He was semi-picked off.

In the fourth inning, St. Louis put Orel the Fourth under pressure again when Ozzie Smith, the anchor leg on the relay, reached base on a hit. The Cardinal pitcher, Joaquin Andujar, tried to bunt Smith along. He lofted a tiny pop bunt. Orel demonstrated the powers of cerebration when he artfully let the ball drop, trapped it, then threw swiftly to second. The object was to remove the super-swift wizard, Oz, from the equation, but when Andujar neglected to run a sincere route to first, Orel got a double play. The Cardinals went quietly after that.

A lot of people besides Joaquin Andujar consider Orel the Fourth the premier pitcher in this league these days. Not everybody, of course, considers him the superior of Dwight Gooden, but being in the same breath with Dwight Gooden is a nice neighborhood.

After the game, in which he sinkerballed the Cardinals to death, Orel showed that, in his case, pitching means more than an arm, and he also showed that, in his case, he probably should ice down his head as well as his arm after a game.

“I had too much energy when I first went out there,” Orel explained, bringing a bit of Newtonian logic to what has usually been an instinctive game. “When you have too much energy, your sinker doesn’t sink. It tends to rise. I had to figure some way to harness that excess energy, to bring the sinker down to manageable levels.”

He did this in a way not even his own facile imagination could have conjured.

In the third inning, when the game was still on the line, Steve Sax was on third base, and there was one out. The Dodger brain trust ordained a squeeze play, a maneuver right out of John McGraw, mustache-cup baseball, in which the batter bunts as the runner comes streaking for home.

It didn’t work twice. Orel bunted foul on the first one and fouled off the second. On the next pitch, he noticed the infield charging in with the delivery. He swung through--and dropped a hit like a guy emptying a pitcher of water just over the head of the third baseman. Sax scored. That run opened the gates. Before the inning was over, the Dodgers were on their way to winning the game and who knows what else. And Orel Hershiser got himself sufficiently tired running around the bases and scoring to make his sinker sink the rest of the night.

Orel is giving Roman numerals a good name. the final score was VIII-II, an VIII-hit victory for Orel IV.

In the dugout before the game, Orel the Third, the pitcher’s father, explained the family routing that led to the Hershisers being counted like Caligulas. “The family was founded by two Hessian brothers who came to this country as mercenary soldiers in the Revolutionary War,” he explained.

Apparently these Orels the First had a little trouble with their sinkerballs, too. George Washington won that playoff. “One went to Iowa, and the one we are descended from ended up in Buffalo,” explained the father Hershiser.

It’s a good thing for the Dodgers that these forefathers didn’t go back to Germany but kept the Roman numerals in this country. They worked so well that we may expect the Dodgers to come out with them on their backs the rest of this series. At least Orel should wear LV on his back instead of that icky 55, and Mike Marshall should go to V and Greg Brock IX. That way, the Dodgers may hope to see their way to finishing Numero I.