Leary Treats Fans With Some Nifty Tricks : He Keeps Heavy-Hitting Reds Off-Balance While Pitching Dodgers to a 3-1 Win

Cincinnati outfielder Eric Davis toyed with the crowd before Sunday’s 3-1 Dodger victory over the Reds, staging an impromptu souvenir contest and offering baseballs to whichever section of fans cheered the loudest.

Soon after, Dodger pitcher Tim Leary did a dandy imitation of Davis, with a few minor alterations:

1) Using home plate as his target, Leary did his crowd-pleasing rendition during the game.

2) Like Davis, Leary also put the ball wherever he pleased, but he was toying with the Reds, not the crowd.

3) Leary made no contest out of it, and, rather than noise, his reward was silence--as in, very quiet Cincinnati bats.

Using a dipping, dying split-fingered fastball, Leary (5-4, 2.97 earned-run average) baffled the Reds. He allowed one run in the first inning on a home run by Todd Benzinger, but sprinkled four harmless singles over the next seven innings. Jay Howell pitched the ninth for his 12th save.

What makes Leary’s outing all the more impressive is that he did it against Cincinnati, which leads the National League in hitting (.256 team batting average) and was averaging more than 10 hits in its last 11 games.

“I knew I had to make some adjustments after the first inning, so I threw a lot of split-fingered fastballs, probably more than I’ve ever thrown in one game,” Leary said.

Leary ran into his only trouble in the seventh, when with none out, he allowed back-to-back singles to Benzinger and Barry Larkin. Up stepped Davis with the hope of giving the fans behind the left-field fence yet another baseball. Instead, however, Leary smothered the rally by inducing Davis to bounce into a double play and getting Ken Griffey to fly out.

“All forkballs,” Davis said, shaking his head. “You could tell he didn’t have his good fastball, so from the first inning on he became a pitcher. He stayed ahead of us and did a real good job of disguising his pitches.”

Leary has beaten the Reds twice this season, the other victory being a complete-game five-hitter on April 6. He is 5-2 lifetime against Cincinnati with a .300 career batting average (six for 20) to boot.

But, having caught the illness that has been spreading throughout the Dodger dugout, Leary was hitless in two at-bats Sunday. After hitting .269 last year, he is hitless in 24 at-bats this season.

The rest of the coughing, wheezing Dodger offense did, however, muster four hits Sunday, providing Leary with three early runs--exactly three more runs than it scored in the previous 23 innings combined .

The offense has become such a concern that Tommy Lasorda had a closed-door meeting with his pitchers before Sunday’s game, presumably to tell them how well they were doing and perhaps to also caution them against criticizing the offense publicly.

What exactly did Lasorda say?

“Oh, he just asked us how our families were,” Fernando Valenzuela said, throwing a verbal curve. “I think he closed the door because it was personal.”