Everyone Hit Except Stan Musial’s Statue

Call off the Card Aid concert. Save your pity. The St. Louis Cardinals are back among the living. They still inhabit the earth. Even a killer tarp cannot stop them.

What happened to the L.A. Dodgers here Sunday night was so scary, it should have been hosted by Elvira. You could just hear all those peacocks squawking, all those TV channels changing from NBC to CBS. This game was murder, he wrote.

It was a horror story. A double feature. “The Thing That Ate Vince Coleman” and “The Inning That Wouldn’t End.”

Only Stephen King could have written a story about a baseball player who gets his foot stuck in an electric tarpaulin and gets swallowed alive. “This is Spinal Tarp.” “Death of a Stealsman.” “Eat Me in St. Louis.”

It sure was a weird way to start a game. Weirder still was the home half of the second inning, in which practically everybody in a St. Louis uniform got on base with the exception of Willie McGee and Stan Musial’s statue. The Dodgers might not be aware of this, but as a general rule, 14 guys are not supposed to come to bat in one inning.

Dodger Manager Tom Lasorda was asked what he was thinking during the nine-run attack that carried the Cardinals to a 12-2 win in Sunday’s National League playoff game.

“I was thinking it’s not too nice,” Lasorda said.

Uh huh.

“It’s unbelievable.”

You could say that.

“It’s unbearable.”

Anything else?

“It’s downright . . . “ Lasorda was interrupted in the clubhouse for a moment and lost his train of thought. “Downright what?” someone asked.

“Downright disturbing,” he said.

The Dodgers had a right to feel that way. Their fans certainly must have felt that way, watching the game on television 2,000 miles away. A few shot glasses must have been tossed through a few saloon picture tubes Sunday night.

As professionals, though, the Dodgers knew enough to keep cool. They were still in good hands. Fernando Valenzuela would be pitching Game 5. There could not be any other Dodger the players would prefer to have on the mound.

“Koufax, maybe,” Bill Madlock joked.

Lasorda said: “If I think about this game I just saw, I don’t feel good. But if I think about Fernando going out there for the next game, I feel great. So, I’ll just think of Fernando and forget this (bleeping) thing I just saw.”

When the Dodgers took the first two games of the series, they left the Cardinals in the position of having to beat them four out of five. In other words, they left them for dead. With the sort of pitching the Dodgers have, whipping them four out of five is about as unlikely as . . . well, as unlikely as losing an outfielder to a piece of groundskeeping equipment.

However, Bob Welch, who is best remembered in postseason baseball for a strikeout of Reggie Jackson, was best remembered Sunday for Saturday’s walks. And Jerry Reuss, whose fine career has been frustrated by the worst record of any pitcher in history (0-7) in league championship series games, was able to get only five guys out Sunday night.

Poor Jerry was pinged to death. Murdered by little singles. “I thought I pitched reasonably well,” Reuss said afterward, not unreasonably at all. “I put the ball pretty much where I wanted it. It’s not that I was wild. On the contrary, I threw a lot of pitches they hit, so I couldn’t have been wild.

“My plan was to get them to hit the ball on the ground, and that’s exactly what they did. After they hit the ball on the ground, I have no control over it. No control over it at all, unless it’s hit back to me.”

One of them was. After an assortment of pond-skipper singles that went just beyond the outstretched reaches of the infielders, John Tudor, the enemy pitcher, tapped a squeeze bunt right back at Reuss. He fumbled it. No excuses on that one, Reuss said.

“Otherwise, I wouldn’t do anything differently. What do I do--adjust my pitching style? What are you going to do if every grounder is hit right at somebody? I can’t make the ball go somewhere. All this was was a game just like the one we had in L.A., where everything we did was right and everything they did was wrong. I accept what happened. I won’t replay it tonight when I put my head on the pillow.”

The other Dodgers said much the same. Mike Scioscia stressed he was embarrassed by the score, but not by losing. Steve Yeager said “we were sort of destroyed,” which must have been pretty much the way Tokyo reacted to Godzilla, but promised that the Dodgers would make a full recovery.

Just in case the Dodgers lose Game 5, though, somebody had better call Chris Duca, the Dodger Stadium groundskeeper, and tell him to order a couple of those man-eating tarps. The Cardinals won’t be laughing when Willie McGee gets sucked right out of the playoffs.