Seeing That Inning Was Disbelieving It

Chavez, something horrible happened in your ravine.

Had I not seen it with my own eyes, I never would have believed what happened Tuesday night at Dodger Stadium--and I thought that I had seen just about everything.

The Dodgers lost a baseball game, 12-11, because in the ninth inning the other side got nine runs.

Tommy Lasorda, as subdued as ever I have seen him, sat zombie-eyed at his desk and incanted: “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it. Eleven to one. Eleven to one. I don’t believe it. Eleven to three going into the ninth inning. I don’t believe it.”

Down the hall, in the Philadelphia Phillies’ clubhouse, ninth-inning hero John Kruk, whose three-run pinch-homer tied the score, was as giddy as Lasorda was grieved. Lasorda looked thin and sad. Kruk looked hippy and happy.

“All I wanted to do was get back to the hotel by midnight, because that’s when room service closes,” Kruk said.

Winning pitcher Roger McDowell was a silly Phillie, too.

“Gee, I wish we’d gotten a couple more runs for a cushion,” McDowell said.

Meantime, every joke ever made about leaving Dodger games prematurely became seriously unfunny. This was a blow from which the 1990 Dodgers might never recover. This one made them bluer than blue.

Losing pitcher Tim Crews sat alone in front of his locker, gazing vacantly into it, long after the game, after every single teammate had left the premises. He looked like a man looking for a future.

Starting pitcher Mike Hartley had long since showered, dressed and half-listened to the last few innings on the clubhouse radio, where he found the whole thing “kind of unbelievable.”

Hartley had had the world’s most comfortable lead. You’d have figured the Dodgers would protect that lead if Lasorda spent the last couple of innings playing only seven men.

“I thought I had it sewn up,” Hartley said. “I’m sure it’s not the first time it’s happened, and it’s not going to be the last time. But man, it’s still kind of unbelievable.”

As midnight drew near, Dodger radio voice Ross Porter called the entire experience “a killer.” Then he had a few more minutes to kill, so he took calls from listeners.

Some guy from Tustin asked: “What’s Lasorda’s hometown?”

Presumably too tired or too dazed to wonder why anybody would care about such a thing, Porter replied obligingly: “Norristown, Pa.”

“And how close is that to Philadelphia?”

“Very close.”

And the caller said: “Can you add two and two?”

That’s the kind of night it was: Kind of unbelievable.

For 100 years, the Dodgers have been playing baseball, and everybody from Ebbets Field to Elysian Park has been observing the anniversary by re-dramatizing the great moments: Robinson’s ripping down of the white curtain. Gibson’s homer. Drysdale’s shutouts. Hershiser’s shutouts.

But also, the awful moments: Campanella’s accident. Roseboro’s being hit by the bat. Getting swept in the ’66 World Series. Pitching to Jack Clark. The Campanis thing.

This one was just a plain old August game against the plain old Phillies. More than 39,000 customers turned up, hundreds of them toddler tumblers who performed before the game. A lot of the kids had to be home early. A lot of the adults left because they’d seen enough.

Maybe 30,000 of them had split by the ninth when the Phillies hit.

The Dodgers were practically fooling around. Almost anybody would have been, under similar circumstances. They put an all-new lineup on the field. They let Fernando Valenzuela pinch-hit. They gave a kid named Dave Walsh the ball and told him to get three more outs.

His cushion was eight runs.

“We just couldn’t get anybody out,” Lasorda said later, still staring blankly.

“In shock. I’m in shock.”

Walsh, who needed only to throw strikes, couldn’t throw one. By the time Crews took over, when the Dodger pitcher needed to be careful, Crews grooved one. Saddest of all, the guiltiest party was Jose Offerman, the Shortstop of Tomorrow, who made two errors in the ninth. Two days before, he made the most spectacular debut, homering in his first turn at bat, catching everything that came his way. Two days later, he couldn’t handle the simplest grounders.

Ross Porter took one more call:

“I have a suggestion for the Dodgers,” the caller said. “Give this Offerman a one-way ticket to Albuquerque.”

In the best Dodger move of the night, Ross took no more calls.