It’s the Summer for Dodgers’ Rose to Finally Bloom

In 1982 and ‘83, when the Dodgers broke up one of the winningest infield combinations in the history of baseball, Steve Garvey, Davey Lopes and Ron Cey, the one place they didn’t worry about was second base.

They had Pete Rose II to play there. Steve Sax, they just knew, was going to bat .300, get 200 hits, run out bases on balls. He also was going to do something the other Pete Rose couldn’t do--steal 50 bases a season.

Pete Rose had a lot of little kid in him, but Steve Sax was all kid. He always seemed to be in perpetual motion. Life had a big pink ribbon around it. He gave you the impression he was a little boy furiously pedaling a tricycle through life. Cooperstown, here comes Stevie!

Then, a funny thing happened: Stevie got the requisite 180 hits--not 200, but respectable. He hit the requisite .280--not .300, but a start. He stole the bases--56 and 34 the first two years. He didn’t strike out much--53, one season. He wasn’t Napoleon Lajoie yet, but give him time.

No one missed Lopes. Then, they found this one teensy weensy flaw in their future Hall of Famer. He could do all the hard things. What he couldn’t do was make the 85-foot throw.

It was like Einstein computing the complex mathematics of an expanding universe but not being able to balance his check book. Or Caruso hitting all the high C’s in a Verdi opera but lousing up the key for a barber shop quartet.

The Dodgers were beside themselves. “A little girl could make that throw all day long!” the manager screamed. Only 500 people could hit major league baseball pitching, moaned Tommy Lasorda, but 10 million people, including two monks from Siberia, could make the simple toss from second to first.

Lasorda had his coaches hit a hundred practice grounders a day. When Sax fielded them cleanly, and threw them accurately, they knew the problem was in his head. Which, of course, is the worst place to have it. If it was in the arm, they could ice it.

When Sax corrected that problem--largely, finally, by ignoring it--a new one arose.

When Steve Sax arrived in the league, he hit everything to right field. His inside-out swing soon had the fielders over-shifting on him, and he gave some attention to pulling the ball.

Pretty soon, that’s all he could do. Lasorda rode in on a white horse again. “Look!” he screamed. Lasorda always screams. “Suppose they changed the game to where you could only get a safe hit on one side of the infield? And you hit the ball on the other side? Well, that’s the way you’re playing. You’re only playing half the field. What’s the matter with the middle of the infield? That’s a fair ball, too, you know.”

According to Lasorda, Steve Sax thereupon became “the best up-the-middle hitter I’ve ever seen in baseball.” He spotted his coach, Monty Basgall. “Hey, Monty!” he challenged. “You ever see a better up-the-middle hitter than Saxie? Gil MacDougald, maybe? Paul Waner? He’s the best up-the-middle hitter in the game, maybe in history.”

Steve Sax will buy that--with reservations.

“The reason I’m an up-the-middle hitter is that when I was a kid growing up in Sacramento, my brother and I used to play this game where we would have to hit a ball onto this pump house for it to be a fair ball,” he says. “That’s because if it went to either side of the pump house, you had to go chase it. So, I became good at hitting that pump house which was, maybe, 20 feet wide.”

Wherever the credit belongs, Sacramento pump house or Dodger Stadium dugout, Steve Sax in 1986 has finally approached the second coming of Pete Rose.

The Dodgers have not had much to throw their hats into the air about this year. Owner Peter O’Malley has suggested that the highlight film be a series of rainouts. Dodger blue should refer to a mood, not a uniform color.

But Stevie Hustle seems to have come of age. With 182 hits, he seems certain to get his first 200--Pete Rose I had 10 200-hit seasons. At .328, he is flirting with his first league batting championship--the original Rose won three. He has stolen 37 bases, struck out only 51 times. The errors have been negligible, only 14.

He may be a Rose by any other name. The one Rose that’s left in the Dodgers’ heart. And though Sax never promised them a Rose garden, Sax, the center-field hitter, may yet deliver the team one.

For the Dodgers, everything’s coming up Saxes. And, who knows? If he leads them to a pennant or two, they may yet come to be known as the Pump House Gang.