Pity the Pitcher When He Puts His Team Into the Off-Season

It’s just a faded, yellowing square of newspaper dated July 27, 1983, the cartoon clipped atop Tom Niedenfuer’s dressing stall. It shows a relief pitcher on the mound, his exhausted right arm stretched halfway across the infield like a spent water hose.

“I know it’s your 150th relief appearance,” his manager is telling him, “but we really need this one.”

The cartoon headline? “It’s Just A Game.”

Try telling that to Tom Niedenfuer. Try telling that to him Wednesday as he walked alone up the tunnel to the Dodgers locker room, a solitary man with a solitary ache. Try telling Niedenfuer, glove clenched like a fist, eyes staring straight ahead as he marched up that tunnel, that it was just a game.

If it were just a game, it wouldn’t have taken the Dodgers 25 minutes to open their clubhouse afterward. And if it were just a game, Tom Niedenfuer wouldn’t have hid out in the sanctuary of the trainer’s room for another 25 minutes after that.

Nobody’s livelihood is just a game.

“I wouldn’t talk to him right now,” Enos Cabell advised a group of reporters who were standing around Niedenfuer’s empty locker interviewing his blue jeans. “He doesn’t feel like talking right now. He’s a little bit off.”

Especially Wednesday. Especially after Niedenfuer, the Dodgers’ best reliever all season, had come on for the second day in a row with the job of silencing the Cardinals and instead drove them to new heights of rapture.

This stakeout would take awhile. And rightly so. Niedenfuer was in the trainer’s rooms composing himself. For the sake of his image. And for the sake of the first reporter without Blue Cross who asked a tactless question.

The events of the last 48 hours, half a continent apart, would live on in the record books and in the windmills of his mind forever.

Two consecutive relief appearances in the National League championship series. Two consecutive game-winning home runs. Ozzie Smith Monday. Jack Clark Wednesday. A long walk off a short pier Thursday? Who among us wouldn’t consider it? Instead, Tom Niedenfuer must live with this: More than anyone, he pitched the Dodgers into the off-season. And the Cardinals into the World Series.

There are worse burdens to bear. But when Niedenfuer finally emerged to meet the press, the customary ice pack taped to his right shoulder by an Ace bandages, nobody mentioned any. Niedenfuer’s pain and that of his teammates, most of whom had by now said their goodbyes and slipped off into the wild world of wheels that is Los Angeles, was as real, as tangible, as a broken jaw.

The questioning started slowly, as questioning always does in these cases. Niedenfuer, recalling how he’d thrown nearly all sliders to Clark when he struck him out to end the seventh inning with two on and the game tied, said the idea in the ninth was “just to sneak” a fastball by him to get ahead on the count with runners at second and third and two out.

To anyone who bleeds Dodger Blue, it will go down as the worst idea of 1985. The ball was so obviously a home run that Dodger left fielder Pedro Guerrero took a single perfunctory step back, as if to prove that, yes, he was still awake out there. Then he stopped.

Clark knew, too.

“I knew it was gone as soon as I hit it, so I didn’t have to look at it,” he said. “I took my time running around the bases so I could think of all my years in San Francisco.”

So as Clark was recalling purgatory on his 360-foot stroll, Niedenfuer, standing disbelieving on his little mound of sand, was entering his own.

“Before the series,” he recalled later, “people were saying, ‘As Tom Niedenfuer goes, the Dodgers go.’ Well, I didn’t do very well this series and the Dodgers lost.”

He said it like a child reciting the multiplication tables. By now, there was no pain or emotion in his voice, only the trace of anger or irritation at the occasional probing question. Bad pitch. Bad day. Bad end. It was over. Yes, he would talk about the past. But he wouldn’t relive it.

“It (the home run) must have been 500 feet,” Niedenfuer said. “I was just hoping it wouldn’t hit the roof and make him the third guy to hit it out of Dodger Stadium.”

Asked how he felt at that particular minute, Niedenfuer snapped, “How would you feel? Same question as the other day. It’s not the highlight of my career. But I’ve seen Goose Gossage give up a lot of postseason home runs and it didn’t affect his career at all.”

Just as Niedenfuer is determined not to let it affect his.

“I feel very lucky that I’m a good enough pitcher to be out there in that situation,” he said. “I’m glad I was out there.”

And he said he was glad to pitch to Clark, even though first base was open. He said it wasn’t his decision. And besides, he said, “I’m confident on any batter I’m facing. I’m confident if I faced Jack Clark 10 minutes from now.”

“Aw,” Hershiser said, looking over at Niedenfuer’s then-empty locker, “Buff (Niedenfuer’s nickname) will get him (Clark) out next year.”

Next year.