This Understudy Is Stealing Most of the Dramatic Scenes

In a game that had all the thrills of a dance with your sister, a card game in the firehouse, the Cardinals took what little suspense there was out of the 1985 World Series Wednesday night.

“The fat lady is singing!” waved signs hung up by jubilant St. Louis fans before the final out. The opera is over. Like Camille, the Royals get to die in the end. They’re already coughing through the third act. The death scene is set up for 7:30 (CDT) tonight.

But it’s not the way the opera was supposed to be scored. The libretto got all screwed up.

The St. Louis Cardinals are not supposed to power you to death. They’re not the 1927 Yankees, they’re the track team, the baseball version of a Tom and Jerry cartoon. These are not sluggers, they’re fugitives. They win ball games the way the Bowery Boys used to steal hubcaps.

Only, they put the World Series out of reach Wednesday night the way Ruth and Gehrig used to. They didn’t slide to victory, they didn’t slicker the catcher, they didn’t hit ‘em where they ain’t. They hit ‘em where they’ll never be--the seats.

And the game was won by a guy who wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for the ground crew. He owes it all to a threat of rain.

Some guys get in World Series games because left-handers are pitching or the defense needs shoring up or the bench is used up. Tito Landrum is probably the only guy in the history of World Series to be put in a World Series by a tarpaulin.

He’s the beneficiary of the horror movie that took place at Busch Stadium in the championship playoff when a runaway tarp tried to eat the regular left fielder, Vincent Coleman. If that creature that swallows left fielders, legs and all, doesn’t attack Coleman, Tito Landrum probably gets the same view of this World Series as you do--from a cushion.

As it is, now, he is in a fair way to win that car they give to the outstanding player in these things. Which is a very long shot for a guy where a lot of people don’t even know who he is, let alone what language he speaks.

Terry Lee Landrum comes from a long line of Americans. The Landrums were probably here before the Lincolns. Terry Lee was born in Joplin, Mo., and you can’t get any more American than that, not even if you’re Daniel Boone. But a school chum fastened the nickname “Tito” on him, and baseball coaches ever since have been laying pigeon English on him when he shows up at spring training. “I get ‘Como esta usted, amigo?’ all the time,” admits Terry Lee. “Once a guy asked me what part of South America I was from. I said ‘Joplin.’ ”

Well, it’s America. And it’s sure South. But that’s been the story of Terry Lee Landrum’s life. No one ever had any trouble with the hemisphere Henry Aaron or Willie Mays hailed from, but Tito Landrum is not exactly your $500 bubblegum-card star.

Tito Landrum is actually an inspiration to every guy who ever had to go down to a dock shape-up or wait on a corner for the construction truck pickup every morning to see if he was going to get paid that day or have to eat peanut butter. Terry Lee should be a hero for every temporary sub clerk in the post office or every super on the cops or substitute teacher who had to wait to see who called in sick that day.

Tito has been a part-time employee his whole career. He’s sort of baseball’s piece worker.

A part-time player in baseball spends a lot of time in places like Louisville and St. Pete and Tampa and Springfield, and Tito sure did. Nine years in all. He also spends a lot of time on the bench. A part-time player is like an understudy on Broadway. He gets in the spotlight only when he’s least ready for it, usually. No one ever gives a part-time player the part--or the ball--and says, “Here, kid, it’s yours to make or break.”

Tito’s always in the wings, which is where he was a week and a half ago when the hit-and-run tarp ripped into the star.

It wasn’t like the old Busby Berkeley musicals. No one said, “You’re going out there a nobody, kid, and coming back a Star!” But that’s the way it happened.

In Game 4 of the 1985 World Series Wednesday night, Terry Lee of the Joplin Landrums came to bat in the second inning of a scoreless ball game and hit a two-strike pitch into the right-field seats, and that was the old ball game. The Cardinals added two other runs, a home run by Willie McGee and a squeeze play by Terry Pendleton, but who needed them? Tito gave pitcher John Tudor all he needed to beat the Kansas Citys.

It was the second time in this Series this non-Latin Tito had figured in the victory. In that electrifying four-run ninth-inning rally Sunday, it was Tito’s two-out double down the right-field line that had set the table for the three-run victory burst.

It so happened that that homer Wednesday was the sixth hit Tito Landrum has had in this World Series, good for 11 total bases. A homer and two doubles is not sub stuff, it’s Roberto Clemente time.

Tito Landrum is the only player in the tournament to be traded for himself. Two years ago, the Cardinals dispatched him to the Baltimore Orioles for a portly third baseman named Floyd Rayford. While there, Tito Landrum took the opportunity to hit a home run that defeated the Chicago White Sox in the American League playoff in ’83. In his own way, Tito is kind of the substitute Mr. October.

The Cardinals traded Rayford back to Baltimore for him last year.

A handsome young man much in demand for modeling jobs, Tito does not expect to become a statue outside the ball park alongside Stan Musial. But he does have hopes people will stop yelling, “Ole, hombre!” or “Bueno, amigo!” at him or stop asking him when he learned English or whether he started out life wanting to be a bullfighter.

He may not only get his nationality known, there may be some people in this town who want to start a fund to bronze that tarp roller, too.