He’s Really the Wizard of Pride

You check the guy coming through the door and you immediately feel like a slob. I mean, not a hair out of place. Beard carefully trimmed. Face so clean, it sparkles. Pants crease you could cut bread with. Hanky just peeking out of the breast pocket. Gray double-breasted suit, understated but expensive. Socks, of course, match. The tie is tasteful. This guy is either on his way to a duel--or a ballgame.

It’s either the secretary of state or Ozzie Smith.

Ozzie Smith is the kind of a guy who would change his suit to go down and get the mail. You’re sure he wears pressed pajamas to bed and wouldn’t think of going in to brush his teeth without first putting on a robe and slippers.

The shoes are bench-made, his shirts are the finest Egyptian cotton. He looks like a highly successful bond market broker.

When you meet with Ozzie Smith, you first want to hide your feet under the sofa. You have to resist the urge to say “My other shoes--my good ones--are at the cobblers.” Heh-heh. “This isn’t my best suit,” you hurry to explain. “The lapels weren’t right.” You wish you hadn’t worn your orange socks.

What Ozzie Smith is all about is pride. Ozzie wants to look his best, play his best, be his best. Ozzie always looks as if he has just showered. He would answer the door at 2 a.m. in a tuxedo. If the hotel caught fire, Ozzie wouldn’t jump till he had on the right shirt and tie.

He’s either in an infield--or a haberdashery. Ozzie always dresses as if he’s having dinner at the White House. Most ballplayers’ idea of high style is a semi-clean pair of Reeboks and a shirt with epaulets. Ozzie looks as if he just came off the cover of Gentlemen’s Quarterly. Which he did, by the way.

It carries over into his career. Ozzie not only wants to be the best, he wants his team to be the best. Everything around him. The whole wardrobe.

Ozzie is the best ballplayer in the game today. He is the best shortstop in the game ever. He is the only guy in the history of the game to be worth $2 million with a .222 batting average.

You see, Ozzie gets his hits with a glove. There is no telling how many base hits got trapped in the webbing of his glove the year he racked up the assist record of 621. The 3-base hit disappeared into the glove of Willie Mays. The infield hit disappeared into the glove of Ozzie Smith. If the ball stayed in the park, Willie got it. If it stayed on the ground, Ozzie got it.

Ozzie’s got a new book out, “Wizard,” which surprised a lot of people. Because, in it, Ozzie attacks various elements of the grand old game.

In order, he finds fault with:

--Umpiring.

--The media.

--A former teammate.

--His manager.

--The New York Mets.

--The San Diego Padres.

--The San Francisco Giants.

--The Metrodome in Minneapolis.

--Those parts of the baseball world that fail to give the St. Louis Cardinals their due.

The bias against the Padres, and the Mets is easily understandable. The Padres traded Ozzie after the owner had publicly offered him a job as her gardener if baseball wasn’t enough of a career to him.

And the Mets beat Ozzie’s team. Ozzie seethes over defeats. Some ballplayers do not care what happens to the team if they get their 2 for 4. Ozzie takes it personally if the Cardinals are not held in universal awe. It is a theme that runs through his book. When the media jibes at the Cardinals as a team of pie thieves and road runners who heist a pennant every two years with foot speed and not much else, Ozzie sees this as somehow racist.

“Ever since I’ve been in St. Louis, this club has had to apologize for winning,” Ozzie writes. “Other clubs don’t apologize for winning. It finally occurred to me that it had to be much deeper than just winning or losing. Every article said it was a ‘Cardinal-like hit’ or a ‘typical Cardinal victory.’ Finally it hit me what made us different--it was because we had so many black players and still won. Black guys using their legs. That’s why people call it ‘typical Cardinal baseball.’ ”

Well, Ozzie is, of course, caught leaning on this one. Black players use their bats, too. Three of the four top home run hitters of all-time are black. Ozzie would like the ‘80s Cardinals to be rated with the ’27 Yankees. After all, they are his team. When they talk of the great Cardinal teams of this decade they will be thought of as the “Smith Cardinals” just as the New York teams of the ‘20s were the “Ruth Yankees.”

Ozzie will brook no trifling with the Smith Cardinals. When Jack Clark decided not to try to play in the World Series with his bad ankle, Smith was unconvinced.

“I think Jack should have taken a shot to kill the pain of his ankle so he could play. It would have been a big morale booster for the club to have him in there, even if he wasn’t 100%, and it also would have thrown off the opposing club to know he was playing. It might have made the difference between one of us getting a good pitch to hit with Jack waiting on deck or not getting a good pitch to hit.”

Like I say, Ozzie does not suffer defeat gladly. He wishes the manager had not gone around saying, “I don’t know what we’re doing here,” on the eve of the Minnesota World Series. Writes Ozzie: “I know what we were doing there--we deserved to be there.”

You speak ill of the Cardinals at your peril around Ozzie. His case against the umpiring is not the oopses they came up with on the bases in the last two Cardinal World Series, but Ozzie thinks they shrank the strike zone on him when he became a $2-million ballplayer.

Maybe so, but the statistics don’t bear him out. Ozzie Smith strikes out less than any great ballplayer in history, about once a month when he’s on his stick. That’s hard to do with hostile umpiring.

But the point of Ozzie is not this minor paranoia. Ozzie would like respect for his way to play baseball. Ozzie is now a bona fide .300 hitter and he batted in 75 runs last year with no home runs. But if he got credited with an RBI for every run he prevented from being batted in, he would break Hack Wilson’s 1-year record.

“I hope I will be remembered as a guy who changed the game of baseball a little bit,” Ozzie says. “I’d like to be remembered as a player who helped show people the importance of defense and helped defensive players earn some of the recognition and money usually reserved for offensive players.”

And while he’s at it, he’d like a little more respect for that funny little team of his that just goes about getting into the World Series every other year.