Now It Seems Winning Is Also a Mania

There were four young guys in the stands in St. Louis last week, strolling around and around. One of them wore an N on his shirt, and the next one wore an O, and the next one wore an M and the last one wore an O.

I kept looking around for these characters Saturday night at Dodger Stadium, when I sat in the stands myself to soak up a little Nomomania. In this, the year of “I’ll never come to a baseball game again,” there were 53,551 of us who came to see Hideo Nomo throw. And the man from Japan struck out 13 San Francisco Giants, same way he had just struck out 16 Pittsburgh Pirates.

He even laid down a sacrifice bunt.

“Hiri kiri squeeze!” I yelled. “Hiri kiri squeeze!”

To which an Asian gentleman seated to my right turned, nodded and said, “Very good, very good.”

Even without a runner on third to squeeze.

Oh, well. We were having fun. Yes, baseball had actually become fun again, here in the Land Without Pro Football. We were clapping our hands and stomping our feet and a few hundred fans in the left-field seats began a chant of “Heh-day-oh! Heh-day-oh!” in honor of their new hero Hideo, who mesmerized the Giants with his slo-mo wind-up and made Barry Bonds look bad, which is always fun.

“Did you see what he did to Bonds?” Dodger Manager and United Nations Secretary Tom Lasorda said after the game. “Not many people do that to Bonds.”

Yeah, unfortunately.

And what is making Nomomania particularly enjoyable for some of us is that, if we weren’t already enjoying that, we would be enjoying Ismaelmania instead. See, we’ve got this other young Dodger pitcher from down Mexico way name of Ismael Valdes, or “Rocket” to his friends, who is out there making Giants and Cardinals look every bit as bad as Mr. Nomo is. In fact, the two of them are a combined 10-0 in the month of June.

I was thinking about these two boy-wonders Sunday when I went out to see how the Dodgers did without them. I was wondering what they chatted about when they sat beside one another in the dugout. I was wondering if Dodger rookies still got hazed by veterans, still got practical jokes pulled on them the way so many previous rookies had.

I even asked Tom Candiotti about that.

But before I did, Candiotti went there with his aging right arm and his 53-m.p.h. knuckleball and you know what he did? He struck out 11 Giants. He extended a Dodger winning streak to five. He got help from Raul Mondesi in right field and from Todd Worrell from the bullpen and he made it stand up for a 3-2 victory. Candiottimania!

OK, maybe not.

“Just don’t forget about us old guys,” Candiotti said.

He was laughing about the rookie sensations and how the pitching coach has “practically gotta be psychic” to communicate with Nomo and Valdes now and then, and how they must be communicating beautifully because, as Candiotti put it, “These guys aren’t just rookie phenoms who are pitching well. They’re Cy Young candidates right now.”

Tom, too, is having fun.

“Not only are they winning, they’re fun to watch,” Candiotti continued. “Hey, if I was a fan, I’d be up there watching Nomo pitch myself.”

“Do Japanese pitchers throw knuckleballs?” I asked.

“Good question,” Candiotti said. “Obviously, some of them don’t have to.”

The Dodgers are happy blue this week, not sad blue. A few weeks ago, they had lost Mike Piazza. Then they got one run against Philadelphia over an entire weekend. They looked lost. Then the “mania” kids kicked it into gear, and Candiotti and Ramon Martinez finally got some runs, and Mondesi began hitting as soon as Piazza got back, and Billy Ashley’s average began to rise, and suddenly the Dodgers were sweeping four from the Giants for the first time in 15 years.

And five guys in the stands wore shirts with an S, a W, an E, another E and a P.

Tim Wallach, enjoying the scenery, observed, “We finally stopped standing around and started playing baseball.”

Worrell, untouched and unscored-on, commented, “I don’t think there’s a team in baseball that can play with this team, and I’m talking the American League too.”

Dodger players and their fans feel better than they have since before that damned strike. They each have a case of Nomomania. They each have a touch of Ismaelmania. They even caught a little Worrellmania, from a guy who at the home opener got booed by his own fans. Pro football is gone, yeah. But in Los Angeles, baseball is making a comeback.