Dodger Blue Rejuvenates Madlock : Third Baseman Now Loves the Team That He Used to Hate

There is this element of mystique that runs strong in baseball. In the American League, there are the Yankees.

Bill Madlock has played virtually his entire career in the National League, where the mystique was the Dodgers’, and everybody hated them.

Madlock hated them, too. That’s what makes it so good for him to be wearing what the organization likes to be known as Dodger Blue, the way the Yankees are known for pinstripes.

Jealousy is a better word for what some opposing players have felt. The Dodgers had such a good organization and their history of success. They played in Los Angeles, where the weather was always nice. They had big crowds and you could always count on somebody like Liz Taylor to be shown smiling from the giant TV screen.

The Dodgers are pampered and spoiled here. The radio broadcast piped into the grandstand tells the fans what they’ve just seen, and seldom is heard a discouraging word. “You come here and you feel that,” Madlock said. “You know everybody wants to beat you because you’re the Dodgers.”

By the same thinking, they’d all like to play for the Dodgers.

The Dodgers had everything but a third baseman, which is what brought Madlock from the Pirates in time to qualify for the playoffs. He didn’t need to think twice about blocking the trade and he didn’t need to think twice when he was told to shave the beard he had nurtured for 14 years. The leap was too great to quibble.

He endured the pain of conditioning himself to Dodger standards and he enjoyed it. “When I came, I felt like I was 23 years old again,” he said. “And my body was still 34.” With the Dodgers, all the things that Madlock can do that are almost meaningless in last place are treasures at the top of the standings.

A lifetime .300 hitter for 12 seasons, he’s won four batting championships and was part of “The Family” with Willie Stargell and Dave Parker when the Pirates won the World Series. But times have been bad for the Pirates.

He was willing to give up the lucrative incentive bonus in his contract because the Dodgers don’t give incentive bonuses. “I could have sat in Pittsburgh and made a lot of money for the next two years, but I’d probably been too miserable to play,” Madlock said.

He gave up a lot of money for keeping his weight down and for being available to play. “You could live comfortably, real comfortably, even in L.A. on it,” he said. But he was thinking that his skill would atrophy if he stayed there, in last place, 40 games behind.

Madlock is one of the pure hitters in the National League. He has that short, swift chop to drive the ball sharply into the hole and on a difficult hop off Ozzie Smith to begin the conclusive three-run sixth inning in the opening game. He is also enough of a student of the game to have hustled into second base on the play, and to have seized the opportunity to steal second base in the fourth inning so he could score the first run of the game on a bloop hit.

“I have no speed,” Madlock said. “I pick the situation and the pitcher.” The nuance of the game is important enough for him to teach a postgame lesson to a television interviewer.

They were the kinds of things that were irrelevant on the Pirates, who were always playing in an empty stadium, always about to move to another city and always behind. And there was the cocaine trial in Pittsburgh. “Nobody asked you about baseball,” Madlock said. “At the airport, on the bus, in the hotel ... the only thing anybody asked about was about something we had nothing to do with.”

As Madlock found the gloom increasing, management decided it didn’t like his attitude. “They said I didn’t believe in the Pirates,” he said. “I didn’t believe in myself.”

He had put his roots down in Pittsburgh, collected antiques and classic cars and put himself into both white and black civic projects. But he felt his career was slipping away and these days a man who hits like Madlock can play a long time. “For two years there was nothing positive happening,” he said. “It’s so difficult playing on a last-place team.”

There was the youth movement that took the form of unloading so many veterans with good histories and high salaries. John Candelaria, George Hendrick and Al Holland went and it was made clear there were no plans for Madlock to stay.

He thought the Yankees and Dodgers might want him. The Dodgers decided it was worth two prospects to fill that gap at third base for a few years, which was what Madlock had in mind. Leaving the Pirates was considered an escape. “Stargell was gone; Parker was gone,” he said. “I looked around and I was the only one left.”

Coming to the Dodgers was the coming to the promised land. Once he had offered $3,000 so he could wear No. 5 in Pittsburgh. Mike Marshall has it on the Dodgers and Madlock never asked. He took No. 52, a rookie’s number. “The kind of number that if you don’t do good, they take it away from you,” he said.

He worked to adapt to the uncertainty of the Dodgers’ hard natural grass infield after the smooth artificial surface of Pittsburgh. Hitting behind the runner and breaking up the double play counted again. Knowing the hitter and where the outfielders would be playing enabled him to score from second on a bloop single in the opening game. The big things counted as always with a contender. In his month with the Dodgers he hit .360.

He noted that at any moment here he might see Sandy Koufax or Roy Campanella or Don Newcombe or Pee Wee Reese. Madlock intoned their names as if reading from bronze placques.

“Everybody wants to play hard against the Dodgers,” Madlock said. “It makes you want to stay here.” If they’d asked, he said, he would have shaved his head, too.