Hey Buddy, Got Any Spare Hits?

The first game at Dodger Stadium this season was played on April 8. The Dodgers got five hits. Atlanta got three. The Dodgers won, 1-0. Hideo Nomo was the winning pitcher; Tom Glavine took the loss.

The last game at Dodger Stadium this season was played Thursday night. The Dodgers got three hits. Atlanta got five. The Dodgers lost, 3-2. Nomo will face Glavine this Saturday, when the Dodger season could end.

Did six months really go by in between?

Did we hallucinate 90 Dodger wins?

Did that “juiced baseball” everybody else was hitting never get to L.A.?

I honestly don’t know what to say. I don’t want to kick the Dodgers while they’re down. Someone wondered if I thought Bill Russell was being outmanaged this week. My reply was that, on the contrary, Russell must have been a miracle worker to get this team this far.

It can’t hit.

Eight runs in six games. That’s absurd.

One run in Game No. 159. (And seven hits.) Two runs in Game 160. (Eight hits, in 10 innings.) Two runs in Game 161. (Five hits.) No runs in Game 162. (Four hits, in 11 innings.) One run in Game 163. (Five hits, in 10 innings.) Two runs in Game 164. (Three hits.)

And don’t give me that “John Smoltz” business, either.

They lost the last Giant game to somebody named Mark Gardner. They lost the last Padre game to Bob Tewksbury and Dario Veras. You say they lost this last National League playoff game to the great Greg Maddux? Yes, they sure did. Greg Maddux, whose record this season was 15-11.

The Cardinals won both playoff games at home. The Orioles won both playoff games at home. The Yankees pulled out their last playoff game at home. Everybody held service, except the Dodgers.

It’s 1995, all over again.

It’s embarrassing. Or, if it isn’t, it should be.

How embarrassing? So embarrassing that the Dodger organization resorted to every trick in the book, trying to excite their fans. They played a three-minute film of Kirk Gibson’s 1988 homer, narrated by Gibson himself. They played “YMCA” not once but twice, pumping up the volume. They put “MAKE SOME NOISE!” on the message board, a pathetic, Pavlovian stunt that Dodger fans have ridiculed in other towns.

Make some noise, and maybe a Dodger will hit the ball?

Oh, well. Whatever works.

A hit here, a hit there, and who knows? The Dodgers could be sitting pretty. I mean, it isn’t as if they’re losing by 10 runs, night after night. But they haven’t had 10 hits in a game since Sept. 21. A hit, a hit, their kingdom for a hit.

Eight runs in six games.

If that ball was ever juiced, somebody must have sucked the juice right out of it.

“We are in a little rut,” Todd Hollandsworth said.

And the Grand Canyon is a little hole.

“Anyone who doesn’t think we can win should not get on the plane,” Eric Karros said.

OK, but doesn’t a team need to field nine players?

And to think Game 2 began so well. Ismael Valdes took the mound and looked calm. “Estoy Nervioso” read a Thursday headline in a Spanish-language paper--(“I’m Nervous”)--quoting Valdes, but he sure didn’t look nervous against Los Bravos at first. He struck out Marquis Grissom, got Mark Lemke to fly out, got Chipper Jones to ground out, one-two-three.

Then came the Dodgers’ turn to, uh, hit.

Hollandsworth dinked a single to left, which looks like a line drive in the box score, as we baseball lovers say. Then came a lucky break. The left fielder, Ryan Klesko, put a paw on the ball like a kitten with a ball of yarn. By the time Klesko picked it up, Hollandsworth was on second base.

A few minutes later, he even scored.

Grounder to the second baseman, grounder to the pitcher. . . . For the Dodgers these days, a real explosion.

Unfortunately, those next three booms you heard came from Klesko, Fred McGriff and Jermaine Dye, homer, homer, homer. (You remember home runs. They’re those things the other team hits.) Suddenly the series was Atlanta’s, two games to zip, going home. . . . In Manager Bobby Cox’s words, the “best-case scenario there could ever be.”

And for the Dodgers?

I don’t know. Maybe they need a change of scenario. Maybe Russell will find some runs, somehow. Maybe on the launching pad of Atlanta, the science of hitting will return to the Dodger order. Maybe they will vault back into contention in Atlanta like nobody there since Kerri Strug.

I hope they do. But I have to be honest. Estoy nervioso.