BASEBALL PLAYOFFS : Blue Jays Get Their Point Across

Suddenly, he is baseball’s most valuable and most vulnerable player. He is Dennis Eckersley, the hittable unhittable pitcher. You already know what Kirk Gibson did to him. You saw Sunday what Roberto Alomar did to him. A moment of silence, please, for a man on a mound with a lot on his mind. Dennis Eckersley, of all people, could use some relief.

Feel sorry for him? The Toronto Blue Jays damn sure don’t.

They loved giving Oakland a pain in the Eck.

To ambush the Athletics, 7-6, in Game 4 of the American League playoffs meant more to the Blue Jays than merely getting within striking distance of the World Series. They teed off on Eckersley after he teed them off.

Nobody on the bench, Devon White included, failed to notice when Eckersley made a big production out of punching out pinch-hitter Ed Sprague to end Toronto’s eighth-inning rally, pumping his fist the way . . . well, the way Kirk Gibson did in 1988, rounding second base.

“We’re used to him pointing after getting us out,” Toronto outfielder White said afterward, “but this time he started pointing right at our dugout.

“That made us hungry for the ninth. That made us hungry to get him.”

They got him, all right. Alomar’s two-run Ecker-decker tied the score. And then, in a daytime drama that took 11 innings and 4 1/2 hours to settle, overran the televised election debates and practically preempted a prime-time National League game, the Blue Jays not only took care of business, 7-6, but took great pride in taking down the much-praised best relief pitcher in baseball.

Jack Morris, Toronto’s starting pitcher, particularly enjoyed it, saying with no small amount of sarcasm: “Poor guy, he didn’t do any pointing in the ninth inning. Isn’t that funny? I wonder why.”

Derek Bell, who scored the winning run, said: “Eckersley making that gesture with his hand at the end of the eighth, it woke us up. We jumped off the bench and yelled back at him.”

Even the mild-mannered Alomar had a mild dig for Dennis the menace, mentioning how “flat” his pitches were, how they didn’t seem to have the same movement they usually do.

Movement coming in, not movement going out.

So, what do the Athletics do now--move to Florida? No, they must face their public again this very afternoon, attempting to recuperate from one of the most painful disappointments any of them could remember since Eckersley gave up that World Series gopher to Gibson.

Reggie Jackson was Mr. October? Pretty soon, people are going to start referring to Eckersley as Mr. April To September.

Eck’s take on all this?

“It seemed like I had them after the eighth. Man, I thought I had them stopped .

“Then they started up again. I’ve been hit hard two days in a row. Funny, I really thought I’d stopped them. I didn’t know what was ahead of me.”

Question for Mr. Tony La Russa: You manage the Athletics. Your team is leading, 6-2, on a sunny Sunday in your home park. It is the eighth inning, but the Blue Jays have put men on base. Do you bring in Eckersley immediately, or do you wait?

Normally, you save Eck for the ninth. However, this being Game 4 of the playoffs, you could classify this as an emergency. So, do you do what you usually do? Or do you bring in baseball’s best relief pitcher now, four runs in front?

La Russa: I use Eck now.

“I think it was definitely a stretch, using him that early, especially because he threw 16 pitches yesterday,” La Russa said. “But the Blue Jays getting those men on base the way they did, I think it takes the decision out of your hands. You have to go to Eck. Just because he had to get extra outs doesn’t take anything away from who he is or what he did.

“Eck has just had the damnedest season for a reliever you could ever have.”

He sure has. In more ways than one.

If ever a game was in the bag, it was this one. Here were the A’s, luxuriating in the knowledge that twice they had faced the dragon of postseason pitching, Jack Morris, and slain him. Their own Bob Welch had been beautiful, except for a big hole in his shoe, and new kid in the dugout Ruben Sierra had made most of the fans in the stands forget about old what’s-his-name, Jose Who.

In came Eck. As A’s infielder Walt Weiss said: “It’s about as secure as it gets. He’s the best there is.”

Weiss paused.

“But even the best aren’t perfect.”

Like a diamond with a flaw, Eckersley is not what he might appear to be. Turns out he is imperfect. But his fatal flaw was not that fat, flat fastball that Roberto Alomar pounded with the power of Roberto Clemente. It was that other thing he did with his arm, that gesture that the Blue Jays took personally.

What did a rival pitcher think of it?

“Little League stuff,” Morris called it.

“A guy who does something like that is just asking for it.”

Dennis Eckersley doesn’t get hit often, but he sure does get hit hard.