With Barely a Leg to Stand on, Giants Will Try Robinson

The man chosen to rescue the San Francisco Giants was wandering behind the batting cage Monday when he spied a former Giant star. He grinned, grabbed a bat, and poked at the man from behind.

Say hey. It’s not everybody who would tease Willie Mays.

“Don Robinson,” explained teammate Mike Krukow, “is our caveman.”

By taking the Candlestick Park mound this evening at 5:30 against the Oakland Athletics in Game 3 of the World Series, Robinson has come to the right place. His Giants are trailing, two games to none. They have been outscored, 10-1. They have been out-hit, 18-9. Neither of their two starting pitchers has lasted more than four innings.

And those aren’t even the most telling statistics. This one is: No team has trailed, 3-0, in games and come back to win a seven-game World Series.

Today, more than anything spectacular, the Giants just need to come up with a good reason to continue playing. It may take something fearless, something senseless, something that does not play by society’s established rules that the better team--in this case, Oakland--should win.

It may take somebody with a heavy stubble, most of whose 235 pounds are in his belly and who can barely run. A guy who was found in the Giants’ clubhouse after the loss in Game 1 exhorting his teammates to cheer during a televised college football game. A guy who, when he takes batting practice, gets in as many loud insults as swings.

It may take a caveman.

“I’m your guy,” Robinson drawled in an accent carved from the West Virginia hills. “Give me the ball, man.”

Giant Manager Roger Craig will do that, pitting Robinson against an Oakland pitcher--Bob Welch--who has a 6-0 lifetime record in Candlestick Park and has a lifetime record of 19-4 against the Giants.

“When the game begins, that stuff doesn’t matter,” said Welch, a former Dodger.

Robinson has never faced the A’s in a regular-season game. Because of his chronically sore right knee, he didn’t face many National League teams at the end of this season either. His four September starts numbered just one more than his September cortisone injections.

His knee is so bad that he wears a brace underneath his pants that Krukow says is not a brace. “It’s a Lawn Boy,” Krukow said.

His knee is so bad that he is not thinking about tonight in terms of a complete game or a shutout. He just wants to be in there long enough so the patrons of Robby’s, his restaurant-bar in Huntington, W. Va., can still be watching him when their chicken wings arrive.

“I just want to get through the first inning, and I’ll be fine,” said Robinson, who missed his only scheduled playoff start against the Chicago Cubs because of the knee. “I want to be able to stay out there long enough so those people can get in there and get their seats and still see me pitch.”

And yet he is being entrusted with this game, against this A’s team that thus far has turned this World Series into a Giant world of hurt and embarrassment.

What has gotten into Manager Roger Craig? Having no luck in improving his team’s statistics so far, he apparently is trying to give them some emotion.

During a season in which he went 12-11 with a 3.43 earned-run average despite the knee, five times Robinson was given the ball with the Giants clinging to a 2 1/2-game lead, or less. All five times, he won.

“I’ve got a lot of pitchers on this staff with a lot of heart, but if I have to take one for a big game, Robby is the one,” Craig said. “No offense to the other guys, but it’s like when you are going into battle. You want one general, one leader, and he’s our guy.”

Second baseman Robby Thompson agreed. “The guy is a warrior,” he said.

And an honest one. After Robinson’s encounter with Mays during Monday’s workout, the Hall of Fame center fielder asked him how he felt.

“My arm hurts, man,” said Robinson, 32, who has undergone six types of surgery. “My shoulder is also killing me. My back is killing me. And my knee.”

Then he laughed and thought back to his only World Series appearance, when he allowed three runs in five relief innings for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1979.

“I’ve been telling all the young guys on this club to cherish the moment,” Robinson said. “I remember when I got in the Series with Pittsburgh, I thought, ‘Heck, I’ll be back three of four more times.’ And now look how long it’s taken me.

“I tell them, ‘Have fun, because it ain’t that easy.’ ”

Doesn’t Craig know it. Applying to the lineup card the same sense of desperation evident in his team’s face, he announced three changes. He will replace right fielder Candy Maldonado with Pat Sheridan, move third baseman Matt Williams to shortstop in place of Jose Uribe, and bring in pinch-hitting star Ken Oberkfell to play third base.

He will be hurting himself defensively, particularly with Williams’ limited range. But since Maldonado and Uribe are a combined one for 11 this series, Craig figures he has no choice.

“I’ve got to do something,” he said. “So I’m sacrificing more defense to get some more offense in there.”

That offense should be further helped by Robinson, who, well, let him tell you.

“I don’t think there’s a better hitting pitcher in baseball,” said Robinson, who has hit three home runs, one more than third baseman Oberkfell. In his 13-year career, he is hitting .253 with 11 homers and 57 runs batted in.

“That’s really all I’ve been thinking about, finally getting a chance to hit in a World Series,” he said. “I want to be out there long enough to get an at-bat. I just want to get up once.”

If the Giants’ bad luck continues, Robinson could end up out-hitting this postseason’s most powerful hitter, Giant first baseman Will Clark. That is because Clark has been hit with what is normally a children’s illness, tonsillitis. He played with it in Game 2 Sunday and went hitless in four at-bats, and then did not work out Monday.

“Although he had general malaise . . . he felt a lot better today,” Giant trainer Mark Letendre said.

The A’s have become so confident that their only certain lineup switch today will mean that a player with a home run and a Series-leading three RBIs will be benched for a player making his first Series appearance.

No, Manager Tony La Russa would not explain why Ron Hassey will replace Terry Steinbach. A good guess might be that Hassey helped Welch make the switch to the American League last season, and caught 31 of his 33 starts this year.

La Russa would only say that talking to his team about being overconfident would not be necessary.

“We’ve watched the Giants all year, we know they can bounce back and play tough,” La Russa said. “We have never taken anything for granted. So, we are going to be very ready to win tomorrow, and if someone beats us, we’ll take our hat off to him.”

If the A’s just join Robinson’s weekly game of Caveman Quiz, that will make him happy. Every Sunday, Robinson reads Trivial Pursuit cards to teammates, who attempt to answer while howling at the way the drawling Robinson fractures the question.

“It is one of the things that brings this team together,” Krukow said. “How many times do you play that game where the question in funnier than the answer?”

According to Krukow, recently Robinson asked, “What country borders the Yu-Yu-Yukon peninsula.”

“Canada!” somebody shouted. Wrong, said Robinson.

“Russia!” Wrong.

“United States!” Wrong.

Robinson finally announced that the answer was Mexico. Teammates stormed the pitcher, only to discover that Robinson had really meant to say the Yucatan peninsula.

“What the heck,” Robinson said of today’s game. “No matter what happens, it will be interesting.”