After L.A., Pendleton Turns Corner

Terry Pendleton woke up Wednesday morning in Los Angeles and found a cyst alongside his right knee. A doctor got rid of it, and an “X” of bandages marked the spot. He went to Dodger Stadium, wondering whether it would put him out of that night’s National League playoff game. It was a cyst that nearly turned into a putout.

Pendleton wanted to play. As far back as he could remember, when he was a 9-year-old in Oxnard playing Little League ball in Colonia Park, he wanted to set foot in the Dodger Stadium infield. In 1985, his first full year as third baseman of the St. Louis Cardinals, he finally did. And suddenly, he was there for the biggest game of his life.

He played. A Bill Madlock grounder ate him alive and led to the first Dodger run. A Candy Maldonado bunt caused him to rush a throw to home plate, where he proceeded to conk his own pitcher. The Dodgers won.

The next night, he played again. Dodger pitcher Orel Hershiser could not find the plate in the third inning, walking two guys and throwing a wild pitch. But Pendleton swung on a 2-and-0 pitch, flied out and killed the rally. In the bottom of the same inning, Hershiser hit a ball that hopped over Pendleton’s head. It scored a run, and the Dodgers were on their way to another big win.

The Cardinals flew home. “For those guys who could sleep, it was a relaxing trip,” Pendleton said. “I wasn’t one of them.”

He fidgeted. He anguished. He re-created every inning, every situation, in his head: Constant Replay. He wondered if things would get better in St. Louis. Only then did he recall what his father, Alfred Pendleton, the Oxnard truck driver with the distinguished-sounding name, had told him to lift his spirits when Terry Lee was 9 and striking out a lot and determined to give up the game.

“He used to tell me that life was going to be a series of temporary setbacks,” Pendleton said. “That’s the phrase my father used to use, ‘temporary setbacks.’ He said, ‘Don’t let them get you down, because sooner or later, you’ll be right back up.’ ”

Terry Pendleton felt better Saturday the minute he laid eyes on his home turf. Quickly, with his dad watching from the stands, he set about dealing the Dodgers a 4-2 defeat.

His ground ball in the first inning bumped home a run. His Willie Mays-ish, over-the-shoulder catch of a foul fly in the eighth inning dispensed with a Dodger threat. And his diving stab of a hot smash in the ninth gave the Cardinals the game, 4-2, and earned Pendleton an infielder’s ultimate praise: a curtain call demanded by the audience, inspired by a defensive tour de force.

In the clubhouse, he felt all but giddy. All the Cards did. The surroundings were familiar to them, and cheerful. The bubble-gum card above Ken Dayley’s cubicle had a mustache drawn onto the pitcher’s face. Bill Campbell’s had an arrow through his head. “Good to be home, where everything’s normal again,” Dayley said.

Pendleton felt right at home in his Hollywood-style director’s chair, with “Tee Pee” inscribed on the back, and in his slippers, with “Tee” scribbled on the left shoe and “Pee” on the right. Above his locker was a homemade Home Sweet Home sort of embroidery, one that said: You Never Fail, Until You Stop Trying .

“The thing about those losses in Los Angeles,” Pendleton said, reflecting on the events that had saddened him so, “was that I really didn’t feel bad about how I played. I wasn’t satisfied, but I felt like I’d played my tail off. I was out there trying. I was giving it my best. Those bad things could have happened to anybody. A third baseman could play for 20 years and not catch that ball Hershiser hit. I was only unhappy because I didn’t help us win.”

Pendleton knows he is no Brooks Robinson, no Ozzie Smith. Although he has been an infielder ever since he showed up for tryouts at Channel Islands High School and saw how many good outfielders they had, his bread has been buttered with his bat. “I’ve always been a hitter,” Pendleton said. “I’m not a $2-million third baseman.”

But Smith, his sidekick, the man who makes two mil per year just for the way he plays shortstop, could not have handled balls any better than Pendleton did Saturday. The real eye-popper was the Greg Brock pop-up, which dropped into a mob of enemy relief pitchers, along a rising slope, and near a new porch of VIP box seats that were installed strictly for the playoffs.

Pendleton did not know where he was, but the Dodgers offered him assistance. “Yeah, their bullpen was a lot of help,” he said. “You bet. They were out there cussing at me.”

Cussing? Actual cussing? What were they saying?

“Believe me, you don’t want to put it in your paper,” Pendleton said.

He caught the ball on the run, comparing himself to a wide receiver who goes long and does not look up for the quarterback’s pass until it is practically on top of him. It also was the sort of play that Maury Wills, his hero, made for the Dodgers when Pendleton was an adolescent in Los Angeles, “living right off the Harbor Freeway,” or later on, when his family moved to Oxnard.

“I always called myself a Dodger fan,” he said, “until 1982.” That was when the Cardinals drafted him out of Fresno State.

Now, at 25, Tee Pee is very much at home in St. Louis, a popular player from the moment he joined the team midway through 1984 and started tattooing the ball at a .324 clip for the rest of the season. His fielding, Ozzie Smith said, is 50% better than it was a year ago, to the point that the Busch Stadium scoreboard billed him Saturday as “Houdini of the Hot Corner.”

“I don’t know where they got that,” an embarrassed Pendleton said. “I really don’t.” As nicknames go, it is one that he would rather live without. But he is prepared to come to terms with it if necessary. It is only a temporary setback.