A Wild Night for Nomo

The ultimate home stand of the season for the Dodgers began with Hideo Nomo atop the mound, waiting for Deion Sanders to step into the batter’s box in the most hideous shoes Hideo must ever have seen, a pair with black-and-white stripes that made Deion look like a man dressed in zebra-skin slippers.

But even wilder was Nomo himself, and before Tuesday night’s game was barely an inning old, the Dodger pitcher was down two runs and one catcher, Mike Piazza having been sent off to a hospital with a throbbing pain in one of the National League’s most valuable wrists. And L.A. let another big one get away, this time to those dirty rotten Giants, 7-2.

What had the makings of a nice night--Colorado and Houston each losing--turned out negatively for Nomo and the Dodgers, as did, blessedly, the X-rays of Piazza, who already sat out near the beginning of this season and has no intention of sitting out the end. Had Piazza’s hand been broken, so would have every Dodger heart.

“I thought he got hit in the face,” outfielder Brett Butler said. “To find out nothing’s broken, that’s a relief. But if Mike’s out for a while, we have to keep pressing forward. That’s why they call it a team.”

From this day forward, the Dodgers have to pull out all the stops. Nobody is more acutely aware of this than their pitching coach, Dave Wallace, who is moving pieces like Bobby Fischer, re-arranging the staff so that Nomo and Ramon Martinez could conceivably pitch half of the team’s remaining 12 games. That’s one plan, anyway.

Just in case, Wallace said, “I’ve already written Plans B, C and D.”

Should Nomo not pitch any better than he did against the Giants, it might not matter if the Dodgers juggle plans until they get to Z. He was wild from the moment he reached the rubber, walking Sanders at the top of the order and Giant pitcher Mark Leiter at the bottom. Nomo didn’t have it.

And, when Nomo doesn’t have it and the Dodgers don’t have Piazza, forget it. Good night. Drive safely.

After a 7:05 start, it took the team nearly an hour simply to get a hit. The clock read 8:03 when Leiter waved at Roberto Kelly’s bouncer through the box. For this home stand of home stands, the Dodgers didn’t exactly come out swinging.

Then again, Leiter didn’t exactly let them. He sent a jolt of electricity through the Dodger dugout with a single pitch, coming in high and tight to Piazza and catching the Dodger catcher a few inches from his Fu Manchu. The slugger’s season, the batting crown, the team’s season could have collapsed in a 215-pound heap, right then and there.

Maybe once in a blue moon Kirk Gibson can hit homers one-handed, but don’t go expecting those kind of miracles again.

The thought alone of playing without Piazza is enough to rattle a team. After seeing him hit by a pitch and removed from the game, the Dodgers came to bat in the second inning and Leiter struck out the side. Eric Karros, who normally has a good idea, missed one pitch by what must have been three feet.

Baseball is a game that toys with the mind. And this is no time for the Dodgers to be losing their edge.

The players of late have begun talking themselves into accepting the role of wild-card team, perfectly willing to make the playoffs any way they can. While they nestle in the standings with the eighth-best record in baseball, the Dodgers continue to tell themselves that staying active is all that counts, same way the middle-of-the-pack L.A. Kings and Montreal Canadiens did when they met for hockey’s Stanley Cup.

With this thing going to the wire, the Dodgers do not look sharp. They haven’t for weeks, maybe months.

At 8:28 p.m., looking up from their dugout, the Dodgers were greeted with the scoreboard news that the Rockies were losing and that the Astros had just lost. More mind games. Delino DeShields drove a double to the left-field corner and, quickly as that, the Dodgers’ attention spans had sprung back to life.

But by night’s end, they were no better off than when the day began. Second-best to Colorado--is that the best the Los Angeles Dodgers can do?