Putting It Plainly: It’s Unexplainable

If you think I am going to sit here and trash a baseball team that, as of Sept. 25, had won 90 games and lost 68, then you better go find yourself another designated shredder. I have seen enough baseball in my life to know the difference between a terrible team and a terrible 10 days.

Saturday night, as I stand by Mike Piazza’s locker and hear him say, “Unfortunately, we just kind of fizzled out,” I sympathize completely with the Dodger catcher and his teammates, a number of whom will never play together again. Outside in a stadium runway, Ryan Klesko of the Atlanta Braves is waving to fans from his red Dodge Viper, on his way to a run at the pennant, while in here, the Dodgers are in a rush to go nowhere, except home.

“Ten days ago,” someone says to Manager Bill Russell, who listens intently, “your team was playing like it could beat anybody.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Russell agrees.

“So what went wrong?”

Questions such as these are harder to field than bad-hop grounders for an old shortstop, but Russell accepts his new responsibility in life, the one Tommy Lasorda abdicated after 20 years of wear and tear on his pump. Russell can’t explain why his Dodgers scored 10 runs in seven games any more than Piazza can, or batting coach Reggie Smith can, or know-nothings like me can. About all he can do is inhabit spin city.

“Well, again, the last three games against Atlanta, you saw some excellent pitching,” Russell says, patiently, accentuating the positive rather than bash the Dodger hitting. “Pitching was just the dominant thing from both sides. They just scored more runs than we did, that’s all.”

No one asks why.

“Why?” Russell answers before anyone can. “They’re big-game guys, that’s why. You make a mistake to one of them, a home run’s going to be hit.”

In this 5-2 defeat that put the sizzle-to-fizzle Dodgers out of their misery, the homer was hit by Chipper Jones, getting even 12 months later with Hideo Nomo for losing that rookie-of-the-year trophy to him. Jones became the last batter Nomo faced in 1996, and later, when the Tornado was asked what he thought of the Dodgers being blown out of the playoffs exactly as they were in his first season, Nomo said through a translator, “Nothing special. I just have to keep up my conditioning.”

It didn’t make much sense, but then again, neither did what happened to the Dodgers.

As for Jones, the second-year player who soon could have have more World Series championships than many of the guys in the Hall of Fame, he was feeling chipper enough to leave the Dodgers with some generous parting words, saying, “This was the team we were most afraid of.” True or false, and I tend to give the benefit of the doubt to a boy with a name like that, it was a sweet thing to say.

The Dodgers sure were blue. You could see it on their faces as early as the first inning, when Piazza got trapped and Todd Hollandsworth tagged out in a play that got scored 9-2-6-4-2, which is either a rundown or a Zip code in Beverly Hills. Any other time, the Dodgers could afford to have a run disappear, but not now, not with runs more rare than a Roberto Alomar for President rally in Cleveland.

I’m still not sure if the Dodgers were lousy or unlucky, and I’ll let you in on a little secret. Neither can they.

Bobby Cox wasn’t sure himself.

“You know, I saw some of those San Diego games,” the Atlanta manager said of the Dodgers, “and they were in every game. And with a break here or there, the Dodgers could have won the first two games of our series with them. Lady Luck’s got to shine on you sometime.”

Tell that to Piazza. From a high of being the All-Star Game’s most valuable player, he finds himself, in virtually a week’s time, seeing the National League’s MVP award, batting title and pennant slipping through his gnarled fingers. The guy won’t so much as look at a shinguard for at least a month, when he has a commitment to appear on an exhibition tour of Japan. By then, maybe Mike will know whether 1996 was his favorite year, or one he would like to forget.

“We seemed to hit a real difficult skid, where nothing was going right for us,” Piazza says, tired and disappointed and, OK, maybe a little irritable. “We’re not feeling sorry for ourselves. It’s easy to make excuses, but I don’t think anybody’s doing that. It’s painfully obvious that we went into a bad stretch, and under these conditions, it’s more exploited. If this was the middle of the year, it wouldn’t be that big a deal.”

He is patiently trying to sum things up and get the hell out of this place, but some guy from Atlanta keeps wanting to know this, then that, then this.

“Look,” Piazza finally snaps, “I don’t mean to be rude, but you’re really starting to bother me.”

I know exactly what he means. Explaining what just happened to the Dodgers is difficult enough, without explaining it again and again. I know. I’ve tried. These guys just lost seven games, so it would be nice if somebody other than Chipper Jones would say something nice about the 90 they won.