Judging by Numbers, Both Get High Marks

As the wife of a major league ballplayer, Julianne McNamara Zeile can sympathize when her husband comes home after going 0 for 4, or striking out with the tying run on third with two out in the ninth.

But she has to think to herself: “At least you did it to yourself. You didn’t hit a perfectly clean single to center and have some non-English speaking judge wave you off and award you no points because you took off on the wrong foot in batting or bent your back too much for his liking or didn’t look good crossing first base.”

You see, Julianne was an Olympic gymnast, one of the best. She won a gold and two silver medals in the 1984 Olympics and was, next to Mary Lou Retton, the best-known beam and floor exerciser of the Games.

Julianne is married to Todd Zeile, a ballplayer so good the St. Louis Cardinals felt secure enough to let third baseman Terry Pendleton go to Atlanta.

But in Todd’s sport, when you hit the ball off the wall and run safely into second you get credit for a double. No panel of judges holds up numbers with decimal points on them, rating your performance. You are not judged on form, you are judged on substance. A home run is a home run.

What if judges had to decide what is and what is not a home run? What if some homers only counted a half? What if they were deemed not poetic enough and didn’t count at all?

That’s the way it works in Julianne’s sport. She won her gold medal in the uneven parallel bars in the ’84 Games, defeating even Mary Lou Retton in that event. She got a silver in the team combined and another in the floor exercise, finishing .025 behind Ecaterina Szabo.

Now, Szabo may have been worth those extra hundredths of a point. This is one sport where prowess, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. It is hardly as objective an event as a triple to the wall.

When husband Todd Zeile comes home at night, he is batting .265 with six home runs and has gone two for four or he has not. Only rarely does he have to rely on a scorers’ call. The umpire can call you out on strikes--or walk you--but if you hit the ball fairly, the decision is out of his hands. As they say, you control your own destiny.

That is not always true in Julianne’s sport, which is sometimes as subjective as the second act of “Aida.” In the ’84 Olympics, for example, Retton was power. Julianne was poetry. A judge had to decide which he preferred.

Todd Zeile doesn’t have to worry whether he looks good hitting a home run. He merely has to make sure he tags every base.

Pressure is pressure, but in Julianne’s sport, it is about what it would be 50 fathoms down, on the floor of the ocean. In baseball, you get 162 chances per year to make up for lapses of concentration. In gymnastics, you get your shot for a few minutes every four years. And, then, you have to hope your style appeals to a panel of jurists who are about as flexible as forged steel.

“It’s a subjective sport--like figure skating,” Julianne says.

Fortunately for her husband, baseball is as objective as poker.

Todd Zeile has been tapped for stardom by the Cardinals since they began to check on him in high school in Newhall, and later at UCLA.

They thought he was going to be the next Gabby Hartnett or Johnny Bench. Todd was a lifelong catcher. He had a throwing arm that was like a point-blank mortar. He hit 25 home runs and drove in 106 runs for Springfield his second year in the minors.

But catching is a defensive position. The demands, cerebral and physical--squatting three hours a night--are such that teams are happy if their catchers hit .250.

Zeile batted .244 his first full year as a catcher and even though he led the team in home runs with 15--in Busch Stadium, where the outfield fences are a toll call from the dugout, that’s a Ruthian number--the Cardinals’ feeling was, Zeile was more use to them with a bat in his hands than a mitt. He was better at hitting pitches than catching them.

They took a daring chance. They let Pendleton go and they talked their rookie catcher into playing third base.

Zeile stopped a lot of ground balls with his chest. But he knocked a lot of them through the infield, too. He drove in 81 runs, he hit .280 and he had 50 extra-base hits.

Todd Zeile is following in a grand tradition. Cardinal third basemen have included Pepper Martin, Ken Boyer, Whitey Kurowski, Mike Shannon and Joe Torre. Then they got Ozzie Smith and they didn’t need a third baseman anymore.

But the Cardinals’ Mr. Z can expect to be a picture on the clubhouse wall, along with the rest of them. He probably won’t be a statue in the rotunda, like Stan Musial. But if the Cardinals hope to overtake Pittsburgh in the National League East, they will need everything working from A to Z.

Still, if he comes home and says, “I got a triple, two doubles and a shot all the way to the wall!” Julianne may say, “That’s nice, Dear, did you get a 10?”

And if he says, “No, but I’m batting .350,” Julianne may frown and say, “Boy, that’s tough judging. In our sport you get an 8.5 even if you fall of the bar.”

On the other hand, if he has a bad day, he can say, “Well, I fanned three times today--but I looked good striking out.”