They Traded a Special Bit of History

It was one of the great moments in baseball history, the kind the game lives on.

At the bat was the most exciting player in the game, Mr. October himself, Reginald Martinez Jackson, in person, not a recording, black bat poised behind his back, waiting confidently for the fastball he knew was coming, ready to hit his seventh home run in five consecutive World Series games.

It was the ninth inning, two were out and the New York Yankees, trailing by one run, had two runners on base.

On the mound for the Dodgers was a kid no one had ever heard of east of Figueroa Street. Bob Welch was a beardless youngster just up from Albuquerque with a major league fastball and not much else. And Reggie Jackson was getting to the Hall of Fame on fastballs.

The count went to 3 and 2, the runners were going. It was the classic confrontation, the Boy of Summer versus Mr. October, it was Casey-at-the-Bat, Take-Me-Out-to-the-Ballgame stuff. As the cliche had it, what it was all about.

Everybody in the world knew what was coming. The high hard one. The flame. Heat. The Number One.

Reggie muscled up. Welch wound up. The runners took off. The ball streaked plateward. Reggie’s eyes got big. He strode, swung. Swish! Mighty Reggie had struck out!

But, this time, there was joy in Mudville. Mudville, a.k.a. Los Angeles, went crazy. There was dancing in the aisles, streamers on the field. Reggie glowered, flung his bat, scowled his way to the dugout.

Baseball became our national pastime on scenes like that. It was grand opera, American style. Top theater.

But that was then. We’re all almost 10 years older now. Reggie Jackson is in a three-piece suit cutting deals.

And Bob Welch has gone to Oakland. The melancholy headlines confirm a trade: Welch has left the Dodgers in a deal involving three teams. The Boy of Summer is winter’s tale. He takes a bit of Dodger history with him, a recollection of glories past. Another era gone, a chapter done.

And what do the Dodgers get for cutting loose this part of their hallowed past? Well, let’s see. From the New York Mets, those wonderful people who gave us Carlos Diaz and Bob Bailor for Sid Fernandez, we get another left-handed relief pitcher with an Old West name, Jesse Orosco.

Orosco is a sad-faced southpaw with a deceptive delivery who saved a couple of World Series games for the Mets two years ago, but it’s hard to figure a relief pitcher’s statistics.

Their sales pitch tends to rely on esoteric designations like “saves.” It’s a little like those old college blind dates where they would tell you, “She’s got a nice personality,” when you really wanted to know important things like how much she weighed.

Jesse Orosco has doubtless got a nice personality, too, but the question is, what really is a “save”?

Now, “saves” are a bastardization of baseball statistics which have something less than a precise meaning. They didn’t even standardize the criteria for a “save” for the first few years of its existence, when each club had its own definition and the Sporting News tended to have another.

A “save” now is credited to the finishing pitcher of a game if he has either: (1) entered the game with a lead of no more than three runs and pitched at least one inning; (2) entered the game with the potential tying run either on base or at bat or on deck; (3) pitched effectively for at least three innings.

You can see where you don’t have to be Lefty Grove to get a save.

The records show Jesse finished 41 games, appeared in 58 and “saved” 16. He pitched 174 fewer innings than Bob Welch, struck out 118 fewer batters and allowed 126 fewer hits.

The Dodgers’ problem now would seem to be finding games capable of being saved.

“Saves” may be a little hard to come by if the starting lineup doesn’t present you with a three-run lead by the seventh inning. But the Dodgers’ trouble since the departure of Steve Howe has been that they had no one who seemed to be able to steer the game into the hangar even with a five-run lead. Without Bob Welch, there may be even fewer of these.

Would the Dodgers give up part of their history for a cunny-thumbed three-inning pitcher of uncertain performance?

Now why would you think that? Just because this is the team that dealt Jackie Robinson, no less, at the end of his career, and to the hated Giants, at that? Just because it cut loose Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, Steve Garvey, Ron Cey and even shipped Leo Durocher across the river to the Giants in his managing heyday?

Do you think they’re still operating on one of the beatitudes of Branch Rickey, “It’s better to trade a player a year too soon than a year too late”?

Bite your tongue! The Dodgers wouldn’t trade their history for a junk reliever. They got another reliever--Jay Howell--and a shortstop from the Oakland A’s, too.

Now, I can’t tell you much about Alfredo Griffin except that he seems to be able to stop a rolling ball between second and third with some degree of consistency and to be able to throw it over to first on less than one hop. On the Dodgers, a cast of characters who, in the words of one scout, seemed well on the way to making the routine ground ball obsolete, this could make him an object of awe.

But whatever he does, it’ll be a long way from Welch against Jackson with the World Series in the balance. The Dodgers have plenty of 9-to-5 guys, a dugout of .260 hitters already.

Bob Welch may not make Cooperstown, but he left the Dodgers with a baseball memory and maybe a mural on the wall in spring training camp. What they got for him was a snapshot--of guys of whom the fans will say, “Which one’s Orosco?” Maybe, even after he’s retired.