Dodgers’ Hershiser One Baseball Star Who Continues to Shine

Baseball reached its first checkpoint of the season this Memorial Day weekend with many of its best hitters apparently on a holiday.

Home runs and scoring are down, along with the entire American League East Division and some of the game’s top stars.

Three of last year’s major award winners--MVPs Jose Canseco and Kirk Gibson and Cy Young winner Frank Viola--have found encores difficult.

Canseco has been out all season with a bad wrist. A damaged hamstring cost Gibson 22 games on the disabled list. Viola, locked in an ugly contract battle at the start of the season, is struggling along at 3-6 with a 4.12 earned run average compared to 7-1, 2.69 at this time last year.

Only Orel Hershiser, the playoff and World Series MVP, was on track with a 6-3 record and 1.76 ERA.

Cincinnati Manager Pete Rose has been playing defense for more than two months now during an investigation by the commissioner’s office. His situation and its possible ramifications are more serious, however, than that of the laughable AL East where three teams--Cleveland, Boston, Baltimore--shared first place for one day last week, despite the fact that each of them was under .500.

It was the latest ever that a team--in this case three teams--that had lost more games than it had won, held the top spot in the standings.

Two years ago, hitters were having a heyday with home runs flying out of ballparks at a record pace. Some people suspected that baseballs were being altered to aid the previously dormant offenses. At the 1987 All-Star Game, Bart Giamatti, then president of the National League, was asked if, in fact, the balls were juiced.

The ex-president of Yale drew himself up indignantly, looked the questioner squarely in the eye and said: “No more than I am, sir.”

Now Giamatti is commissioner and the hitters who were tearing it up then, seem to have gone south. Over 100 fewer homers have been hit and more than 200 fewer runs scored this season than there were at this time a year ago.

In the absence of offense, the pitchers are flourishing with their collective ERAs down from 3.78 at Memorial Day in 1988 to 3.67 just before the checkpoint this season.

As the holiday approached, Wade Boggs of Boston was batting .301, not bad for most hitters but terrible for a guy who was at .347 at this time a year ago and is a career .356 hitter. Fred Lynn was hitting .203 with one homer and nine runs batted in for Detroit. Montreal’s Andres Galarraga, hailed as one of the National League’s top young first basemen, was at .224. Jack Clark, acquired by San Diego last fall, was at an embarrassing .193.

The New York Yankees’ Don Mattingly was batting .269 and celebrated the approach of the holiday with his first home run of the season. In fact, the Yankees, once a haven for left-handed hitters with Yankee Stadium’s short right field porch, had just two other homers by lefty hitters all season, a figure that astounded their ex-slugger, Reggie Jackson.

“The whole team’s got two?” he said before Mattingly connected. “I could do that by myself.”

And he’s been retired for two years.

Numbers like those, plus the sub-.200 averages of Gary Carter, Mookie Wilson, Gregg Jefferies and John Shelby, and the not much over-.200 figures of Lloyd Moseby, Juan Samuel, Terry Pendleton, Willie McGee, Benito Santiago, Willie Randolph, Shawon Dunston and Chris Sabo would suggest that the pitchers are benefitting. But that’s not the case for all of them.

Minnesota’s Viola wasn’t the only one with problems. Detroit’s Jack Morris, the winningest pitcher of the decade, drifted through the first two months at 2-7 with a 4.94 ERA. Pascual Perez of Montreal, who missed spring training because he was in a rehabilitation progam, was 0-7 with a 5.04 ERA.

Danny Jackson of Cincinnati, runnerup in the Cy Young race when he won 23 games with 15 complete games a year ago, was 3-7 with no complete games this season. Atlanta’s pitching Smiths, Zane and Pete, were 1-7 and 1-5 respectively. Chicago’s Greg Maddux, a 15-game winner at the All-Star break last year, was 3-5. Charley Hough of Texas was 3-5 with a 5.83.

If they’re all doing so badly, then who’s doing well?

Oakland, despite the season-long absence of Canseco, has stayed at the top of the AL West, largely because of the fast starts of Dave Stewart, who was 8-1, and bullpen ace Dennis Eckersley, who had 14 saves.

Carney Lansford of the A’s was leading the league in hitting and teammate Terry Steinbach, the All-Star Game MVP when he was a .220 hitter a year ago, was batting over 100 points higher than that.

Will Clark of San Francisco was 50 points ahead of everybody in the NL batting race and teammate Kevin Mitchell was comfortably in front in home runs and RBIs. That kept the Giants hot on the heels of Cincinnati, which ignored Rose’s woes to lead the NL West race through the early going.

Jeff Ballard, with 10 lifetime victories before this season, won seven games for Baltimore, and Lee Guetterman, with a career 5.11 ERA, had a string of 30 2-3 scoreless innings out of the Yankees’ bullpen before that ended the night Mattingly hit his homer.

Perhaps nobody’s doing better, however, than Toronto’s Nelson Liriano. Burdened with a good-field, no-hit reputation, Liriano was batting .318 and leading the league in breaking pitcher’s hearts.

Twice within five days in April, pitchers took no-hitters into the ninth inning against Toronto and both times Liriano broke up the bids, first against Nolan Ryan of Texas and then against Kirk McCaskill of California.