Hawkins Weathers Heat, Stays Hot : Six-Hitter Gives Padres a 3-1 Victory Over Slumping Cardinals

Ninety-eight degrees. The sun goes down, the street lights come on, and it’s still 98 degrees.

Baseball players gasping for breath. Baseball players taking off their caps and looking as if they have just washed their hair.

The home team draws its fourth-smallest crowd of the season. The fans who do come sit in their seats and wave their scorecards like fans, and pretty soon you’d swear it’s a Sunday afternoon in a church.

“Ahhhh,” thought Padre pitcher Andy Hawkins while taking the Busch Stadium mound against the St. Louis Cardinals Thursday night. “Heaven.”

And so it was. Thrown into the middle of a humidity fair, the boy from the middle of Texas came out soggy but nonetheless with a six-hitter, taking the Padres to a 3-1 victory. The Cardinals have lost s even in a row.

Worn down physically, Hawkins resorted to other faculties in winning two late-inning confrontations with Tony Pena and Ozzie Smith en route to his fourth victory in his last five starts.

“Hawkins may be the smartest pitcher on the team.” Padre Manager Jack McKeon said admiringly.

No kidding. He figured out early that the coolest place in the entire park may be the runway behind the Padre dugout. It was there that he sat between innings, swabbing his face in an ammonia-soaked towel.

“Hey, it doesn’t take much common sense to figure out where the breeze was blowing,” said Hawkins, who grew up in Waco, Tex., a town a couple of hours south of Dallas. “ Besides, you have to understand, I was raised in this stuff.”

This stuff?

“Worse stuff,” Hawkins said. “Once it was over 100 degrees for 41 days straight. Where I’m from, it’s 85 degrees at 5 in the morning.”

In front of a paid crowd of 35,406, tiny by Busch Stadium standards, it never got that cool Thursday.

The Padre mustered enough oxygen to score a fifth-inning run on a walk, a single, a fly ball and Jose DeLeon’s wild pitch. They dragged themselves to the plate in the ninth to take a 3-0 lead, scoring two more runs on three ground ball singles and a bunt.

And the rest was left to Hawkins, who, in his last five starts, has gone 4-1 with a 1.16 ERA. He has improved his overall mark to 9-7 and his ERA to 2.97.

The three hottest nights of the Padre season, Hawkins has pitched. On May 31 in Philadelphia, on June 26 in Atlanta, and on Thursday. He has won all three, two of them complete games, with an 0.71 ERA.

“You’ve got to prepare yourself mentally,” Hawkins said. “You know St. Louis in July is going to be smoking. So you expect it. You deal with it.”

Just as you know something will happen like what happened in the Cardinal seventh and eighth innings Thursday. The only run Hawkins allowed was a ninth-inning homer by--big surprise here--Tom Brunansky, who has six homers in nine games against the Padres this year.

The important thing was not that Hawkins finished off the Cardinals after the homer.

The important thing was how he got to that point.

“When Hawk gets in trouble, he takes control. You can just feel it out there,” Tony Gwynn said.

Start with the seventh, which Hawkins began by walking Brunansky on four pitches and then, one out later, allowing a single to Jose Oquendo to move Brunansky to second.

Up came Pena, who in Hawkins’ last start here May 10, hit a home run to the second deck in right field en route to a 5-1 Cardinal win.

“I remembered that,” Hawkins said. “I don’t think anybody has ever taken me that deep before.”

After battling Pena to a 2-and-2 count, Hawkins missed inside on a fastball. But he threw it there because he figured Pena would be swinging anyway.

“Man hits the ball that far off you once, he’s going to try to do it again,” Hawkins said.

Sure enough, Pena was swinging, and connecting, and breaking his bat, and tapping the ball to shortstop Garry Templeton for a double play.

“If you can’t go to the whip in a game-losing situation--and that Pena thing was a game-losing situation--then you might as well fold up your tent,” Hawkins said. “If you can’t heat it up for the big ones, you aren’t going to last in this league.”

The seventh inning was not his last big one. With two out in the eighth, Vince Coleman singled to left. Coleman has led the National League in stolen bases all three seasons he has been in the big leagues. The same guy is second in the major leagues this year with 45 stolen bases.

With the Cardinals down by one run and Smith at the plate, you know he’s stealing. But Hawkins knew he could handle it.

“With Benny (catcher Benito Santiago) behind the plate, a guy who has thrown him out three times, I knew it would be OK,” Hawkins said. “I knew I just had to get Smith, who could really hurt me.”

Except it wouldn’t be so easy or precise.

Hawkins threw over to Coleman on first base once, then again. Then he threw twice to home plate to Smith (one ball, one strike). Then twice more over to Coleman. Then to Smith again (ball two).

Then Coleman took off . . . and Smith fouled the ball down the third-base line. Then Hawkins threw over again.

“It was OK, I was OK. I knew what we had to do,” Hawkins said. “When you have a plan, it makes it easier.”

A plan, indeed. Hawkins threw Smith an inside pitch that froze him. And froze Coleman. But it didn’t freeze home plate umpire Gary Darling, who called it strike three.

“It was a borderline pitch. It wasn’t down the middle or anything,” Hawkins said. “But I wasn’t throwing it down the middle.”

Said Gwynn: “When we saw Darling make the call, it was like, whew . That picked us up and got us going to that monumental ninth-inning rally.”

Just kidding, folks. Roberto Alomar started the game-cinching rally with a grounder just to the left of Oquendo at third base. Single. Gwynn then attempted to bunt Alomar to second, but bunted so perfectly to the left of pitcher Larry McWilliams, who had just entered the game, that it went for a single.

Added to Gwynn’s first-inning infield single, it gave Gwynn six consecutive two-hit games and a .500 average in his last 36 at-bats (18 for 36). He has a nine-game hitting streak.

After Keith Moreland’s strikeout, up stepped Carmelo Martinez. He was pinch-hitting for John Kruk against right-hander Dan Quisenberry, the former Kansas City star making his first St. Louis appearance.

On a 2-and-1 pitch, Martinez grounded the ball past Smith for an RBI single. Next up, Chris Brown grounded a ball to the other side for another RBI single.

“Quisenberry got me,” Brown said, “but I just managed to get it through a hole, and in the morning it will show up in the box score as a base hit, and that’s all that matters.”

Padre Notes

Pitching coach Pat Dobson missed Thursday’s game to be with his mother in the Midwest after his father’s death late last week. Padre officials say he may miss a couple of games in this series.

So how did the Padres spend their All-Star break? Roberto Alomar is negotiating to buy a house in Puerto Rico--sort of. “I couldn’t sign the papers. I’m not old enough,” said the 20-year-old rookie. The house is next door to his parents’ home in Salinas. . . . Benito Santiago took his family to Disneyland. “Oh man, you should have seen it--my mother, my aunt. I had to rent a van to fit everybody in,” Santiago said, shaking his head. “It was some day.” . . . . Tim Flannery went--where else?--to Lobster Village south of Rosarito Beach. “Awesome,” said Flannery, in a surprise statement. . . . Pitcher Greg Booker went to dinner with a former Padre and current triple-A Las Vegas coach, Bruce Bochy. Pressed into duty as a player earlier this year, catcher Bochy is hitting .273 in 27 games in Las Vegas, with two homers and eight RBIs. “Tell everybody he’s still alive,” Booker said. . . . And in the biggest upset of all, pitcher Ed Whitson did not go fishing during the first All-Star break for the first time in his 10-year big-league career. “Just decided to give my two days to my family,” said Whitson. “We’ve been traveling a lot lately, and I wanted to be with them.” Although Whitson won’t be near any lakes on this current trip, the Padres’ next trip will take him to two of his favorite fishing holes in Houston and Atlanta. “A couple of good lakes in each place to choose from,” said Whitson, who fishes on days he doesn’t pitch.