Dodgers Defeat the Gasless Gang Again, 8-2 : Cardinals Return to St. Louis With Fallen Arches, 2-0 Deficit

The Dodgers gathered Thursday night not to blame Joaquin Andujar, but to bury him.

In his own mind, Andujar might be one tough Dominican, but he was one soft touch for the Dodgers, who didn’t do anything to ease Andujar’s fear of finger-pointing in an 8-2 win over the St. Louis Cardinals before a sellout crowd of 55,222 at Dodger Stadium.

The win, which went to one tough babyface, Orel Hershiser, gave the Dodgers a 2-0 lead in the National League playoffs. Before this season, that would have put the Cardinals on the brink of elimination, but in the interests of greater financial reward for these postseason exercises, the playoff series have been expanded to best-of-seven affairs.

“That,” Cardinal outfielder Andy Van Slyke said, “may be our salvation.”

At this point, St. Louis needs something to atone for a catalog of Cardinal sins that would draw a blush from all who follow baseball religiously. And they weren’t all committed by Andujar, although his wild pickoff throw in the third inning led to a swift execution, Greg Brock finally dropping the ax with a two-run home run in the fourth that gave the Dodgers a 5-1 lead.

Cardinal sprinters Vince Coleman and Willie McGee got St. Louis off and stumbling in the first inning, when Dodger catcher Mike Scioscia pulled off an unprecedented double, catching first Coleman, then McGee, in the act of larceny.

If that didn’t take the heart out of the Cardinals, it certainly cut out the sole .

“I’ll bet we haven’t played three games like this all year,” reliever Bill Campbell said after the Cardinals committed the most blunders he had seen since . . . well, the night before.

For the Cardinals, the hope is that when the series switches from the surf to the (artificial) turf on Saturday, they will once again resemble the team that won 101 games this season, more than any other team in the league.

At the moment, however, they resemble the San Francisco Giants, a team that lost 100 games in 1985.

“Yeah, I had a few flashbacks there,” said first baseman Jack Clark, a Candlestick Park exile until being traded to the Cardinals last winter.

Even on their home rug, however, not everybody is so sure they’ll regain their footing against the Dodgers, who trampled on a lot of Cardinal toes with 13 hits, three each by Ken Landreaux and Bill Madlock.

When someone asked Whitey Herzog if he planned to come back with Andujar in Game 5, the Cardinal manager said:

“Game 5? There may not be a Game 5.”

The Cardinals probably lost Game 2 when they put eight runners on base in the first three innings and scored just once, and that in the third when Hershiser threw a curve into the dirt past Scioscia, allowing McGee to score from second base.

“No question about it,” said Dodger outfielder Mike Marshall, whose single in the fifth upped the Dodger ante to 6-1 and caused Andujar to finally cash in his chips to the boos of a crowd angered by two knockdown pitches--one to Mariano Duncan, the other to Steve Sax.

“When we looked up at the scoreboard in the third inning, and it was still 1-0, it gave us a big lift,” Marshall said. “It reminded me a lot of games in the middle of the year when we got hot, games where it could very easily have been 3 or 4 to nothing, and instead we were down by only one.

“Orel pitched out of a couple of jams, and we got them out of their running game.”

The knockdown pitch was only part of a perilous night for Duncan, who was spiked on his left knee in the top of the first by Coleman, then fouled a pitch off his right ankle in the third inning and left the game in the sixth when he pulled up lame after a double. Manager Tom Lasorda said that Duncan’s knee was bothering him but that he should play Saturday in Game 3.

As for Hershiser, in the first inning, it appeared that he had decided to pitch as often to first baseman Brock as he did to catcher Scioscia. After Coleman’s leadoff single, Hershiser threw five times to first before he went to the plate to McGee. In all, he threw 60 pitches in the first three innings, and threw to first base 10 times.

“In the first three innings, you could see I paid too much attention to them (Coleman and McGee),” Hershiser said. “Because of all the hype attached to their base-running, I had been thinking a lot about them and trying in my mind to keep them close. I don’t care how many times I throw over there. I just wanted to keep them close.”

Scioscia, who had thrown out just one of 13 St. Louis runners during the regular season, caught both Coleman and McGee on pitchouts.

“We got a couple of guys on who were a little anxious to run,” Herzog said. “You have to wait for certain counts, and we didn’t wait. Why they got anxious, I don’t know.”

If that puzzled Herzog, he was left flabbergasted by Andujar, his 21-game winner who had said the day before that he was already being blamed for a loss that had yet to happen.

Andujar looked anything but a loser in the first two innings, striking out four Dodgers in a row, and didn’t allow a hit until Sax bounced a ball up the middle with one out in the third.

That brought up Hershiser and an obvious sacrifice situation. But for reasons known only to Andujar, he tried to pick Sax off base and instead threw the ball to the right-field railing, with Sax’s headfirst slide into third just beating Van Slyke’s throw.

“There was no reason to throw to first,” Herzog said.

Hershiser fouled off two straight bunt attempts, but with an 0-and-2 count, Andujar threw him a fastball that Hershiser chopped over the head of third baseman Terry Pendleton, tying the score.

Landreaux, who hadn’t played in Game 1 because a left-hander was pitching, then doubled home Hershiser, and Madlock followed with an RBI single to score Landreaux and make it 3-1, Dodgers. Outfielders Coleman and McGee threw as poorly as they ran.

In the fourth, Scioscia dropped a surprise bunt single, then Brock--who had gone hitless in the ’83 playoffs--put the drop on Andujar with a home run halfway up the right-field pavilion.

“I have no comment,” Andujar said afterward, also leaving unanswered his delay in running to first base on his bunt that Hershiser converted into a double play in the fourth.

That left it for McGee to put it in perspective, with the same answer to three different questions.

“We lost,” he said. “We lost. We lost.”