When a Team Is This Pathetic, Optimism Counts for Nothing

The secret of Thomas Charles Lasorda’s success has always been runaway optimism. Tommy was always sure there was a pony under there some place, the next card would be an ace, the check really was in the mail and tomorrow would be better. Tommy would have told Custer to hang in there. He still thinks they’ll find Amelia Earhart and Judge Crater and that the Lindbergh baby is alive.

Tommy couldn’t stand bad news. The team lost a few games? Tommy would be ready. “Hey!” he would say, “the 1927 Yankees, the greatest team in baseball history, had a nine-game losing streak!” They didn’t. But the players didn’t know that. Tommy dealt in positives. True or untrue.

Tommy wouldn’t let a player get down on himself. “Hey! Gabby Hartnett had slumps!” he would yell. “Lou Gehrig was going to quit this game once!” These bulletins would probably have been news to Hartnett and Gehrig, but Tommy was more interested in consequences than truth.

It worked. The Dodgers seemed to believe in themselves. The secret of any great athlete is to be able to keep his self-esteem. To blame catastrophes on outside agencies. The grass was too high. Or too green. His foot slipped. The other guys cheated. The umps blew it. How can you win when there is conspiracy, a flouting of the rules, a flagrant example of incompetency in authority? God was a Dodger in Tommy Lasorda’s theology.

But all that was before this year. There is something missing from the Dodger melodrama on this trip, and that is the noise and bombast coming from the corner office where the manager holds forth, breathing fire and defiance.

Some nights--to show you how low things have sunk--even the mostociolli sits there untouched.

The manager has not wasted away. If he had stitches, he would still look like a 200-pound baseball with legs, but there is a new light behind the eyes that seems to say the party’s over, the dance is through. You can put away the paper hats and stop the music for this year. The next card is not going to be an ace, it’s going to be a trey.

Tommy was still full of fight earlier this year. The team was going bad? “Hey!” he would shout between forkfuls of linguine del golfo , “they gave up on the Miracle Braves in 1914! They were in last place on July 4th and everybody said ‘Back up the truck!’ And they came back to win the pennant and the World Series in four straight! Don’t you think they gave up on the 1951 Giants? Thirteen games out of it in August! In 1983, we gained 10 games on the Atlanta Braves in 11 days! We gotta believe in ourselves!”

But, that was before the present trip. The 1987 Dodgers seem finally to have done the impossible--turned their very own Pollyanna into a practicing pessimist.

This is a very bad baseball team. It is full of role-players, not stars. It no longer seems to believe in itself. It has players playing out of position, it has pitchers fearful to throw a ground-ball out, it plays with all the elan of a guy going to the electric chair.

There is an axiom in baseball that you never make the third out on third base. This team does. This team breaks a whole lot of baseball shibboleths. The one that says you don’t end up with two players on the same base, for example. This team ends up with two players on first base. Not even Babe Herman thought that one up. This team doesn’t let other teams do that. Only the other day, with a man on first, the Dodger first baseman took a double-play ball, kicked the bag to make an out at first, then threw to second where the infielder stood on the bag with the ball while the runner returned safely to the by-now-unoccupied first base.

This is the kind of thing that has been spoiling the manager’s appetite. Worse than that, they may be turning him into one of those guys who thinks the glass is half-empty and somebody up there has it in for him.

The team finally won a game which ended on the same day it started Sunday as they blew Cub pitching--if you can call it that--all over the premises of Wrigley Field and came up with an easy win as Bob Welch pitched a four-hit shutout.

But it’s going to take more than one laugher to start up the calliope in the corner office again, to start the comparisons with the 1914 Miracle Braves and the similarities to the 1927 Yankees.

Tommy Lasorda silent is an offense against nature, like a Fred Astaire on crutches, a beached whale, a flightless bird.

He finally seems to comprehend he’s asked to play a busted straight with all the aces out, he’s going to need a two on the 18th hole just to make the cut.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said in a whisper the other night as his heroes cobbled up another game. “I’ve managed 10 years. We finished first five times, tied for first another time and finished one game out of third when Joe Morgan got a home run he shouldn’t have. But I’ve never seen anything like this trip. You can’t even figure out what day it is, round-the-clock baseball.”

Then, he makes a mini-recovery, pasta-fuelled. “Hey! We get a rest for the All-Star break and then we got 81 games!”

They don’t. They’ve got 74. This team has a lot to answer for. But its ultimate disservice to mankind--to say nothing of the grand old game--may be that it took a guy with the nice sunny outlook of a guy who sells balloons for a living, a guy who would go through life saying “Hit me!” if he already had 18 at blackjack, and turned him into the kind of guy who would say “I fold” if he had two pair or who would sit there in a dugout and expect the worst. And get it. The world needs more optimists, not fewer. The Dodgers, particularly.