Grapefruit Loss Can Be Bitter

The Dodgers have won only one game all week as they come into the game with the Detroit Tigers, and they are in no mood to have it continue.

Enos Cabell, the first/third baseman and a world-class agitator, spots trouble immediately. “Lookit ‘im!” he fumes, pointing to the Detroit pitcher, a junk-throwing left-hander named Dave LaPoint. “He’s cheatin’ already! Looka that stuff on his left leg. Hey, Tommy,” he calls to the manager. “Look at it. Can you believe it? Cheatin’ in spring training?”

Manager Tom Lasorda squints out on the field. “It’s just dirt from sliding,” he says.

“Dirt!” Cabell shrieks. “It’s a load. Pine tar. He’s loadin’ ‘em up. In spring training!”

The manager looks on the bright side. “You see how scared they are of the Dodgers!” he shouts. “They gotta cheat already! I bet he didn’t sleep last night, pitching against the Dodgers! But it don’t matter. He’s throwing mush. It’s like hitting a scoop of Cream o’ Wheat.”

“Yeah,” Cabell shouts at the batter. “Rear back and hit it! It ain’t gonna get any faster. He can’t throw the fastball by you!” The “load” is forgotten.

The coach, Monty Basgall, comes into the dugout. “Hey, Tommy,” he calls to the manager. “Robert Wagner called. He’s trying to get ahold of you.”

“Robert Wagner!” exclaims the manager. “He wants to come down. You know, Charles Durning came up and says he wants to play me in the movie on my life. I said, ‘Hey! I want someone that looks like me. I want Robert Wagner.’ ”

Someone in the dugout looks over at the Detroit lineup. “Hey, Saxie!” he says to the second baseman, Steve Sax, “If we get in a fight with these guys, you got No. 13.”

No. 13 is the mass of muscles who used to be a bodyguard for rock singers, catcher Lance Parrish.

“Well, you got No. 23,” Sax counters, singling out the mercurial Detroit outfielder Kirk Gibson, who has been known to pull drinking fountains out of the wall with his bare hands.

“Let’s try to win one, eh?” Basgall pleads. “Hey, Dawg! Hit somethin’!” he yells. Dawg is Mad Dog Madlock, the third baseman, who singles to center.

The game is not going well. “Hey, Dennis,” Lasorda yells to his pitcher, Dennis Powell, a 22-year-old southpaw, as a right-handed hitter named Darnell Coles comes to the plate. “Throw him a high fastball. He can’t hit the high fastball!”

Powell throws a high fastball. Coles hits it into center for a base hit. Lasorda curses. “Who’s that guy?” he demands.

“Coles,” Basgall tells him. “A .237 hitter. He hit .237 for Seattle.”

“He murders a high fastball,” Lasorda says.

In the third inning, the Dodger slugger, Pedro Guerrero, drives a ball screaming down the third-base line. Darnell Coles pounces on it, throws Guerrero out.

Guerrero is insulted. He fires his helmet, points at Coles. “Only the third inning and he’s guarding the line!” he screams. “In spring training! Hey, rookie, play like a man! I’m gonna get you, rook!” He kicks a bat.

Coles has not played by the rules, the unwritten law that says you don’t guard the lines until the late innings. His unorthodoxy has cost Guerrero a double.

“That ball is a double,” Sax soothes the outraged Guerrero. “No way a man should be playing the line like that in the third inning.”

No one mentions that the line is the place to play Guerrero with a slow-throwing left-hander pitching.

Madlock is up again. He finds a hole and stings another hit.

“Hey, Dawg!” Lasorda pounces. “Your hits have eyes. They got more eyes than a needle factory. They got eyes like a potato. They could go through a car wash without getting wet!”

Cabell is up. His job is to move his teammate, the mastodonic Mike Marshall, from first base to second. He doesn’t. He lifts a tame fly to right field.

He comes back to the dugout, fuming. “A perfect hit-and-run pitch,” he complains. “I get a perfect hit-and-run pitch to hit and the man misses the sign. Misses it or don’t know it.”

Marshall comes back to the dugout a moment later. He senses that something is wrong. “I got my own hit-and-run sign,” he says defensively before anybody can say anything. “Mine is different from the others.”

“How different?” asks the coach, Joey Amalfitano.

“Well, you know where you go to your ear? You din’ go to your ear.”

“We’ll talk about it later,” Amalfitano says resignedly. “Go, play”

No one thinks to ask what difference a hit-and-run sign would make on a pop fly to short right.

Detroit goes ahead in the bottom of the sixth, 2-1, on a walk, a steal of second by Gibson and a hit by the catcher no one wants to choose in a fight, Parrish. Meanwhile, Parrish, for his part, has thrown out three successive Dodgers on attempted steals.

“Hey! Monty! How you think Parrish got to be a golden glove catcher?” demands Cabell, who used to play for Detroit. “You think he got all them gold gloves letting people run on him?”

Basgall shrugs. “Last year he couldn’t get nobody out,” he says.

“That was last year!” Cabell shrieks. “Last year, his back hurt! His back don’t hurt this year. He throws out Man o’ War this year!”

A backup infielder, Doug Baker, comes up and delivers a key hit for Detroit.

Up in the press box, the former pitcher, Don McMahon, manning the “Eye in the Sky” walkie-talkie, is incensed. “That guy just batted .185 last year,” he says. “And .185 the year before that. Why would you give him a fastball?”

Another Detroit batter steps in. “This guy is a dead low-ball hitter!” Lasorda sings out. “Don’t give him no low balls!”

The batter almost breaks his back swinging at three low balls. “Way to go, Dennis!” shouts the manager.

Marshall comes up. He larrups a ball to deepest left-center. The gale-force winds hold it up. The fielder catches it. The bench is beside itself with rage.

“That was a gapper!” they assure the disappointed Marshall and the world. “That ball’s in the gap if the wind’s not blowing.”

A gapper is a ball that finds the hole between fielders and rolls to the fence. Marshall has hit one. The gods have seen fit to blow it back.

“You hit a gapper, Moose,” Lasorda assures Marshall.

Moose has hit an out, but he is mollified. He has done his job. Weather conditions, like third basemen who play the line too early in the game, are circumstances beyond a batter’s control. “The guy must of run 40 yards to catch it,” soothes the manager.

Marshall gets hit in the back by a pitch. It’s like a bird hitting a tank. The bench is unsympathetic.

“Hey, Moose!” the players yell as he comes back to the dugout. “Was that a forkball?”

Marshall is insulted. “That was a full-steam, four-speed Rick Honeycutt fastball,” he says spitefully. He wants sympathy, not derision.

“They had to throw that ball out of the game,” they tell him. “The stuffing was coming out of it.”

The worst happens. The Dodgers lose again. The relief pitcher, Randy O’Neal, holds them safely in check.

“He ain’t got nothin’,” spits a batter after popping up.

“Hey, that guy holds runners on pretty (bleep)ing good!” Lasorda contradicts him.

“He’s had a lotta practice,” sniffs Marshall, the batter.

A pinch-hitter, Kenny Landreaux, a puckish fellow, is summoned.

“Get a bat,” Basgall tells him.

“It’s too cold!” Landreaux protests.

A moment later, he is called out on strikes. Another Dodger is simultaneously thrown out at second, caught stealing.

“How can he call that a strike?” Landreaux wants to know.

“Because it was right over the plate,” Lasorda says. “Umpires are paid to call them strikes.”

Detroit has beaten them, but it hasn’t impressed them. If it weren’t for a lot of lousy stinking coincidences, the wind blowing in, myopia in the umpires and a rookie who doesn’t know enough to play in the hole in the third inning, the Tigers would never have known what hit them.