The Answers Are Blowing in the Wind

By the time you read this, the Dodgers could be doomed.

Depends what time you woke up this morning. Depends whether you got any sleep after what happened to the Dodgers last night. Depends what is happening this very minute in Atlanta, where it is three hours later and three times louder. Depends what happens at noon today here in San Francisco, where the Dodgers are living on death row.

It is late.

It is bleak.

It is so quiet, you can hear a pennant drop.

You look around the Dodger dugout and see understandably unhappy faces. You look back at games that got away, at hits that hooked foul, at pitches that could have been hit, at balls and calls that could have gone some other way. None of it matters now. There is no yesterday. There is only today.

Mike Scioscia: “This is really the first time this season we’ve needed help. Now we need some help.”

Lenny Harris: “It’ll take a miracle for those guys to lose right now at home, the way the Braves are playing now.”

Chris Gwynn: “So strange. So strange how everything has turned out.”

Things could be worse. Things have been worse. Seventy-five years ago this month, the Dodgers were defeated in the World Series by (get this) the Boston Red Sox. That’s worse. Four years later, they lost one to the Cleveland Indians. That’s worse. Forty years ago Thursday, they lost the pennant to Bobby Thomson and the Giants. For the Dodgers, it doesn’t get much worse than that.

But this is close.

They lost, 4-1, Friday night to the Giants, who were so eager to beat L.A., center fielder Mike Felder (or is it center felder Mike Fielder?) instructed his barber to sculpt into his scalp: “BEAT L.A.” And outside Candlestick Park, the entire front page of a San Francisco newspaper being hawked by vendors bore those same words: “BEAT L.A.”

Which the Giants then did.

They went right for the Dodger jugular. Will Clark golfed a two-run homer in the very first inning. Matt Williams bashed one two batters later and 20 feet farther. These guys weren’t out to merely beat L.A.; they were out to bludgeon L.A.

Furthermore, there was something in the wind, something blowing from across the bay that told you, told them, told everybody that this night would belong to someone other than the Dodgers.

When an easy breeze could have blown a Dodger baseball safely over the fence, fair or foul, it blew it instead into Willie McGee’s mitt, in Candlestick’s coffin corner. When a favorable breath of fresh air could have carried Gwynn’s game-tying swat to the fair side of the right-field foul pole, it puffed it instead to the wrong side, converting it from savior to souvenir.

What a hero Gwynn could have been. Afterward he said: “I gave it all the body English I had in my body. I tried everything to make that ball go fair. It was like a golf shot that just twisted and took off into the wind.

“This is such a strange, strange place to play.”

Yet when Kevin Bass of the Giants popped one high in the sky toward center field, and little Brett Butler practically scaled the wall like an escaping convict at San Quentin in pursuit of it, the fickle breeze transported it a couple of meters farther, barely beyond Butler’s desperate reach, barely over the barrier, until the baseball came to epitomize the Dodger situation--so close and yet so far.

How and why do such things happen? How and why did Darryl Strawberry’s wicked liner in the seventh inning, with two men on base, go hooking foul? When and why did baseball’s Fates decide to frown upon the Dodgers, leave them twisting in the Candlestick wind, bless the Atlanta Braves with seven successes in a row, when they needed them most?

Well, back in 1988, similar questions were being asked about the Dodgers: Why was everything going so well for them?

Stuff happens.

So, unhappy days are here again. For the Dodgers, a storybook season is turning into a grim fairy tale. Atlanta’s chances of winning another game are good. All the Braves must do is defeat the Houston Astros, who at any moment might be calling up players from high school to play.

The baseball season isn’t over, but the fat lady has her throat spray.

It is getting late for the Dodgers.

Getting late for questions. Getting late for answers.

How do the Lakers look?