If Dodgers Don’t Win Pennant, Blame Him

In Monday’s paper, Scott Ostler wrote a column telling the Dodgers to get rid of Pedro Guerrero.

On Tuesday, the Dodgers traded Guerrero to the St. Louis Cardinals for John Tudor.

How it works out is anybody’s guess, but one problem has been solved. If the Dodgers don’t win the pennant, we know who to blame, don’t we?

During the 1973 World Series, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn became something of a hero when he ordered Oakland A’s owner Charlie Finley to re-instate Mike Andrews after the second baseman was placed on the disabled list and sent home after making a couple of costly errors in a game against the New York Mets.

Asked about it this week, Finley told Tom Verducci of Newsday: “The team doctor said, ‘Don’t play him. He’s hurt. He could suffer a debilitating injury.’ If I played him, I would leave myself wide open to a lawsuit. Then that 24-karat kook, Bowie Kuhn, stepped in. He didn’t call me to get the facts. He called up my manager, Dick Williams, and said, ‘Put him back on the roster.’ That’s the kook talking.

“Ordinarily, I’m full of fighting spirit. But when you’ve just had a heart attack three weeks ago and your cardiologist is sitting next to you in your suite--I went ahead and decided not to fight the commissioner. Ordinarily, I would have told the commissioner, ‘Go fly a kite, you stupid jerk.’ I often think and wish that I would have been OK to tell that guy to go to hell.”

Add Finley: Of George Steinbrenner, he said: “Where would George be without two of the kids I signed, Rickey Henderson and Claudell Washington? I signed Claudell for $500 and I think I signed Rickey for $5,000. George owes me so damn much he’d never be able to pay me back. George does so much popping off, why doesn’t he find his own talent? I beat the bushes to find talent. If he had to do it the hard way, he’d be lost without his checkbook.”

Trivia Time: Who holds the world record in the 440-yard dash? (Answer below.)

Are the drivers in Los Angeles really that bad? Richard Petty doesn’t think so. In fact, he thinks they’re tame.

“That’s because everybody is driving their own stuff,” he told the New York Times. “In New York, you get a lot of company cars and rentals, and they don’t care.

“We go to some races, you have 400 cars squeezing into one lane, and you just roll your windows down and say, ‘Hey, man, this is a rental.’ You see them cats just back off because they’re still making payments on their own car.”

Steve Hershey of USA Today, on the anonymity of the PGA Championship winner: “Someone said an empty cab pulled up to Oak Tree Golf Club last week and Jeff Sluman got out.”

Trivia Answer: The record for the 440, an event abandoned when the United States went to the metric system, is 44.5 seconds, set by John Smith of UCLA in 1971. He is now an assistant coach at UCLA. Two of his pupils, Danny Everett and Steve Lewis, finished 1-2 in the NCAA 400-meter final and were 2-3 behind Butch Reynolds in his world record 400-meter race Wednesday.

Quotebook

Iowa football Coach Hayden Fry, revealing that he will personally handle the kickers in practice: “I guarantee you that at least 50% of the kickers I’ve ever had, and I’m going into my 37th year of coaching, have been what I would classify right on the verge of being psycho. They live in a different world.”