Ozzie Contributed a Little Pregame Jazz, Left-Handed Homer

To Whitey Herzog, manager, St. Louis Cardinals: “What are you hoping Ozzie Smith will do when he comes to bat in that situation?”

Herzog: “I’m hoping he hits one out.”

“But Ozzie had never hit one out left-handed in his life!”

Herzog: “I know. I been hoping for five years.”

To Tom Niedenfuer, pitcher, L.A. Dodgers: “What were you feeling when Ozzie’s ball went out?”

Niedenfuer: “Oh, it’s the happiest feeling in the world! What kind of stupid question is that?”

“Sorry. Just wondering if you could describe how it made you feel.”

Niedenfuer: “How would YOU feel?”

To Joaquin Andujar, pitcher, St. Louis Cardinals: “What were you thinking when you saw Ozzie’s home run?”

Andujar: “I was thinking: ‘That little midget has power!’ ”

“So what did you say to him?”

Andujar: “I said: ‘Da plane! Da plane!’ ”

On the 4,277th at-bat of his major league life, including those in the 1982 playoffs and World Series and in this year’s crazy playoffs, 5-9, 155-pound Ozzie Smith tattooed one. It was the 14th time he had thumped a ball out of any park, and he probably has not hit many more than that in batting practice.

“Somebody told me he’d never had a homer left-handed in his life,” Dodger coach Monty Basgall said.

True.

“Well, he’s got one now,” Basgall said. “He sure picked a time for it.”

Osborne Smith chose the ninth inning of the fifth game of a deadlocked National League championship series to do an impersonation of Babe Ruth. It was the last thing anybody expected, seeing as how Smith is approximately the size of Babe Ruth’s bat.

His homer off Niedenfuer won Monday’s game, 3-2, and sent the blue boys from Los Angeles home to Dodger Stadium and its “lumpy” infield, which is how Smith described it. That is where the mighty Oz, the world’s greatest infielder, misplayed a grounder and got the Dodgers off to a good start.

“It’s so lumpy,” Smith said. “It’s a beautiful ballpark, but it’s not the world’s greatest infield.”

Upon returning home after Game 2, Smith decided to jazz things up for the St. Louis fans by doing something he has been doing periodically since 1978, when Gene Tenace, his teammate then at San Diego, double-dared him. On his way out to shortstop to start the game, he did an elaborate handspring and backflip that was so acrobatic, it made Mary Lou Retton look like a klutzy little uncoordinated kid.

He did it before Game 3 and again before Game 5. Then he went to work, playing his usual unparalleled shortstop and doing a nice job batting second for the Cardinals while Vince Coleman was recovering from the leg injury suffered when he was caught up Sunday by the killer tarp.

And when the deed was done, when Smith had dashed around the bases with the game-winning run, Coleman tossed aside his crutches to run from the dugout and embrace the hero.

Cesar Cedeno went him one better. “I wanted to be sure he touched that plate so I grabbed his leg and put his foot on it myself,” Cedeno said.

The midget had done what the big guys could not, and suddenly the Cardinals found themselves on Fantasy Island. Their chances of coming back in this series were as slim as the shortstop himself. The odds of outlasting Fernando Valenzuela and hanging in the game long enough to win on a homer by Ozzie Smith were about as preposterous as asking Andujar to put the Cardinals into the World Series--something else that unexpectedly has happened.

“It’s not over yet, not by a long shot,” Smith cautioned.

He knows the Dodgers will feel better--and safer--back in Los Angeles, where fans hardly ever splash puddles from the dugout roof toward the players. Perhaps this is because there very rarely are puddles in Los Angeles, but nevertheless, nobody expects to put up with what Steve Sax did Monday at Busch Stadium, where a customer ran down the aisle and sprayed water at him after a strikeout.

Sax tried to go after the guy, but the Dodgers restrained him while the jerk got away. According to Mike Bertani, director of stadium operations, the man had glasses and a receding hairline and was about 37 years old, but the description did not lead to his capture. Too bad, because if someone would have held him for the Dodger second baseman, the Cardinal fans would have been exposed to Sax and violence.

There was enough sadness for the Dodgers without needing more trouble. Just the forlorn look on Valenzuela’s face when he left the game and leaned his head against the dugout wall was enough to show that. Ozzie Smith could have taken him to downtown St. Louis right-handed, conceivably, but since no one has belted a homer off Valenzuela in two playoff games, there was small chance Smith would.

Smith said: “Size has nothing to do with it. You gotta have heart. If you don’t have heart, you don’t have much of anything.”

He said he considered himself a very underrated hitter over the years, ignored because his name is seldom found among the league leaders. “I work hard at what I do, at everything I do,” he said. “It may not always look like it, but I work hard at my hitting.

“I’m a line-drive hitter. That’s what I do. If I was 6-3 and 220 pounds, I’d try to be a power hitter. Who the hell wouldn’t? But I’m 5-9 and 155 and I have to work for what I get. So, I try to hit line drives.

“In fact, I tried to hit a line drive in the ninth inning,” Smith said. “But nobody’s perfect.”