One Doesn’t Do Its Part, Other Doesn’t Look It

What would the old Yankees have been without a Babe Ruth in the lineup? What would Dempsey have been without the left hook, Joe Louis without the right? What was Illinois without Red Grange, Notre Dame without its Four Horsemen? Are the Chicago Bears any good without Jim McMahon?

The German Army needed its railroad gun. Tilden had to have his serve.

No group can make much headway without its main weapon. When it doesn’t show up, the outfit is in big trouble.

And the Boston Red Sox have to have their designated hitter in the lineup to play their game.

Their 10th man is one of the certified giants of baseball. It’s big, all right, 37 feet tall, about 100 feet wide, and it’s as hard as cement. In fact, it is cement.

The Red Sox count on it for a half-dozen home runs a game, or at least that many doubles and triples. It’s the team’s leading RBI man. It is a standard of civic pride in Boston. People come to see it in the way they come to see Bunker Hill, Faneuil Hall, Old Ironsides or the place where they threw the tea in the harbor or turned away the British fleet.

You only have a few of its kind that achieve international reputation. There is the Berlin Wall, the Great Wall of China, the Wailing Wall of Jerusalem--and the Left-Field Wall of Fenway Park.

It has been unaccountably among the missing in the Red Sox arsenal in the World Series this week. It was supposed to have been the difference in the contest. It was supposed to have been the cleanup hitter.

It has been the Goat of the games as far as the Red Sox are concerned.

It is one thing for a team member not to show up or to be in unfit condition to help the team. It’s quite another to be traitorous.

The Wall is a fink. It is a double agent. It is Benedict Arnold with a net over the top.

It has given up two home runs in the contests this week--and both to the invaders. It has so mixed up its services that you half-expect the Red Sox to rush out there some night and cry out, “Whose side are you on, anyway?” Or, “No, no, not those guys in orange and blue, the ones with the red socks, you idiot, you treasonous bum!”

The World Series of 1986 is all tied up because of major malfeasance on the part of the Wall. One more incident of turning over the secrets--that is, home runs--to the enemy, and Reagan may put it on a plane back to Russia. It is either terribly confused--or it has a big bet on the other team.

It has one more chance to get in the good graces of its own armed forces. If it fails today, it is no longer Boston’s Wall, it is just another Fifth Column. A saboteur, a disgrace to the home uniform. One more loss and they may tear it down and make garden walls out of it in Sudbury.

A player who gets two home runs in two games and four hits in one game and three home runs in postseason play to date should be almost as big as a wall himself. He should have this blue-black beard, snaggle teeth, a lantern jaw and a bad temper. He should look like something off a pirate ship, cuss a lot and swagger when he walks.

It’s a cheat when he has this little baby face, big blue eyes and curly blond ringlets for hair. When he looks like something you might find on the flying teacups at Disneyland or wearing a mouse hat.

It’s just not fair when you look at Leonard Kyle Dykstra and have to tell yourself this is the guy who is dismantling the Boston Red Sox this week, brick by brick. This is the scourge of the batter’s box, the tower of strength from center field, this innocent-eyed rookie.

Len Dykstra does not look old enough to vote or big enough to wear long pants. And he certainly does not look mature enough to be topping in offensive damage a World Series that has Don Baylor, Jim Rice, Dwight Evans or Dave Henderson in it, to say nothing of Tony Armas and a few other bundles of brawn.

You all know Murray’s Theory if you’ve been paying attention. The reason they never caught Jack the Ripper is because he didn’t look like Jack the Ripper. He probably looked like somebody’s butler or a guy who dances in Swan Lake. He might have been short, mild, sad-looking. He might have lisped, for crying out loud. He probably did all those terrible things while keeping flowers in the window or reading poetry by the lake.

Napoleon surely didn’t look like the scourge of Europe. He looked like he fell out of somebody’s pocket.

So, in a way, does Len Dykstra. A pitcher must look in amazement when he sees this baby-faced assassin in the batter’s box. If you put a blue velvet suit on him, you have Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. Or Little Lord Fauntleroy.

But when he picks up a bat, you have a part for Lon Chaney. He’s like that creature that goes out in the moon or prowls the London fog in top hat and cape. He’s a deadly weapon.

He’s 5-10 or so (he says) and 160, but in baseball they usually turn guys this dimension into squib infielders.

They couldn’t do that with Len Dykstra. He’s left-handed. But Len admits, “I had to be twice as good as I would if I were four inches taller.”

If you see this apparition wearing uniform No. 4 on your TV and he looks like your paper boy--or your altar boy--there’s nothing wrong with your screen. This cub scout-appearing, curly-haired moppet is indeed the guy who is slamming those baseballs into the seats, leading off games with four-base wallops, making leaping catches in the outfield and doing the things Brobdignagian types do. You look at the stats, and you might expect this big pot-bellied, cigar-smoking, massive mixture of a man waving a 50-ounce bat and making strong men faint on the mound. He’s making this World Series look like a Leave It To Beaver rerun.

The Red Sox have a legitimate beef. Their Wall has been turned, as they say in the spy business, and now they get rocketed by a guy who looks as if he had come to sweep the chimney. They should appeal to the commissioner to make him look the part. “Listen, kid, if you’re going to be doing these things to our pitchers (and hitters), at least go home and grow a beard, put a pillow in your belt and a chaw of tobacco in your mouth.”

The way he does it now is like hiding a bomb in a baby carriage. The least he could do is wear a mask. Dracula’s would be fitting.