No Darkness, Only Light in Vero Beach

In that most over-reported and over-romanticized of recreational activities, baseball, spring training is ostensibly a time of utmost optimism, a time when everybody is going to win the pennant, everybody is going to earn his pay and everybody is going to sing in the sunshine, laugh every day.

Skepticism in spring training is rarely tolerated. Anybody who dares suggest that 1990’s second-place team could become 1991’s third-place team is destined to be drawn and quartered come October, when the players and manager of this team, having placed first, begin crowing to the world: “Nobody believed in us! You guys called us losers!”

It is hardly easy to attempt an impartial, dispassionate examination of anyone’s favorite team, knowing full well that the slightest suggestion of this team’s imperfections is bound to be viewed as another example of the villainous media’s lack of expertise or support, or the cynical individual’s desire to create controversy or “sell newspapers.”

Believe me, trashing the Los Angeles Dodgers is no way to sell newspapers. If all we wanted to do was sell newspapers, we would illustrate our sports section with photographs of women in swimsuits.

I suppose that is why it becomes necessary nowadays to provide disclaimers up front, reassuring readers that any success enjoyed by the esteemed Dodgers in the forthcoming season will be perfectly all right with the man manning this keyboard. Why wouldn’t we want the Dodgers to win?

Then again, why must favoring another team--say, the San Francisco Giants--be construed as fraternizing with the enemy? If someone speculated that the Giants, San Diego Padres and Cincinnati Reds all might run in front of the Dodgers in the National League West standings this season, must this be interpreted as blasphemy or, worse, treason? Are we to say what we think or what people want to hear?

I suspect there are a number of baseball lovers in the general public who would have no objection to an account of an opening-day game commencing: “The Dodgers defeated the Atlanta Braves in the season opener Tuesday night, 4-3. Good!”

This is our roundabout way of taking a campfire look at the Dodgers as they reconnoiter on the shores of the Atlantic to prepare for their eventual return to the Pacific. It is what occasionally is referred to as a “preseason preview,” which sounds redundant but, upon reflection, isn’t.

We are going to be looking at how the Dodgers are going to look. It is but February and the only uniformed arrivals in quaint little Vero Beach, Fla., are the pitchers and catchers and quaint little Dodger manager, Slim Lasorda.

Where optimism is concerned, Tom Lasorda is an optometrist. He helps you see everything clearly. Where you see darkness, he sees light. Where you see weakness, he sees strength. Where you see potential only, he sees only potential.

So, when the effusive (some would say effluvial) camp counselor of Dodgertown gives his boys the once-over and assesses their chances for the season ahead, what he sees is an outfit that ran second to the runaway World Series champions, then went out and added Darryl Strawberry and Brett Butler and Gary Carter and Bob Ojeda while hanging onto Fernando Valenzuela and getting an encouraging health prognosis on Orel Hershiser.

Who wouldn’t be encouraged?

Yet, what another eye might behold is this: A nine-man team unsettled at second base, shortstop and third base, staffed with surgically repaired pitching, with a left fielder who isn’t a great fielder, a center fielder with a worrisome arm and a right fielder with a worrisome past.

I, for one, believe it to be pointless and unproductive to estimate a baseball team’s assets and liabilities six weeks before a season that will take six months to complete. Any view from such a distance can have but little bearing on whatever events transpire over the course of the season ahead.

But perhaps pessimism, like objections at a wedding, should be spoken now unless one wishes forever to hold one’s peace. Don’t you hate people who come up to you in June or July and say: “See? I told you they weren’t going to be very good.”

Personally, I feel the Dodgers have a chance to be a very strong, very dominating, very entertaining team. There are days when I simply can’t wait for the season to begin, just so I can watch some poor, perspiring, generously paid pitcher breathe a sigh of relief upon retiring Strawberry and Eddie Murray, only to catch sight of Kal Daniels stepping up next. If this isn’t a murderers’ row, it is at least an assault-battery row.

My suspicion is that the Dodgers will make a race of it and more. Of course with each new season come startling surprises, so don’t be shocked if 1991’s is Atlanta. On the whole, though, for you eternal optimists out there, I am willing to be a good sport and say that where your Dodgers are concerned, OK, OK, you win. They’ll be great.