Club Refuses to Resort to Making Limp Excuses

Jim Tracy wanted to tell all the doom predictors to stuff it. Five losses in a row for the Dodgers and all the heads around town were bobbing. A city of bobblehead dolls all nodding in agreement--yes, it was over for the Dodgers. The season was done, the losing wouldn’t stop.

Yet here it is, Sunday, Aug. 5, and the Dodgers are in first place again. The Dodgers beat the Cubs, 3-1; the Diamondbacks lost to the Mets, 4-2; and for good measure the Giants got crunched by the Phillies, 12-2.

The Cubs know about grim predictions and dire expectations. Every season, all of Chicago waits for that time when the Cubs will fall apart.

Usually that’s in May. This year time is running out. A certain Chicago-area family (mine) has held tickets for months to a game in Chicago in mid-August. Since May they’ve been hoping, hoping, hoping that maybe the Cubs will still be in the wild-card race when it comes time for the trip to Wrigley.

Winning the division? Ha! Don’t get greedy.

But this year the Dodgers and the Cubs are part of a special club. They are “no-excuses” teams in a “no-excuses” season.

The Dodgers lead the NL West, the Cubs lead the NL Central, and Dodger catcher Paul Lo Duca calls the Cubs “the best team in the National League.” Nobody has called the Dodgers the best team in the NL West, even. But they lead.

What excuses could the Cubs have? They are the Cubs. That’s an excuse. They haven’t played in a World Series since 1945. Here’s another--the Cubs lost their third baseman, Bill Mueller, early in the year.

The Boston Red Sox have challenged the Yankees all season, and are still pursuing a wild-card spot, even though Nomar Garciaparra, maybe baseball’s best player, just returned after wrist surgery. And the Red Sox are still missing the American League’s best pitcher, Pedro Martinez. Seattle rarely loses these days after trading Randy Johnson and Ken Griffey, Jr. and losing Alex Rodriguez to free agency. Only Johnson (Diamondbacks) has a chance to play in the postseason. Griffey (Cincinnati) and Rodriguez (Texas) are on teams making excuses.

The Phillies lost their starting catcher, Mike Lieberthal, for the year and they’re staying close to Atlanta in the NL East and in the wild-card chase.

And, of course, the Dodgers have seen most of their starting rotation either get hurt badly enough to now be out for the season (Andy Ashby, Darren Dreifort) or to at least miss a big chunk of it (Kevin Brown).

All together now: “No excuses.”

“When you have some bad things happen,” Cub second baseman Eric Young said, “it can make a club tougher and give you the feeling that no matter what happens you’re going to find a way to win.”

In lieu of excuses, Dodger executives acquired pitcher James Baldwin from the White Sox.

Baldwin wears his cap pulled so low on his forehead you can’t see his eyes, and he moves ever so slowly from the dugout to the mound, dragging his glove as if it weighed a ton.

But Baldwin throws strikes, lots of them.

“How does he win?” Lo Duca said. “He has four pitches he throws for strikes. Doesn’t matter how fast he throws them. He throws them for strikes.” Doesn’t matter how slowly he walks or talks either. Baldwin is a calm, stoic man and Tracy hopes some of his young pitchers watch and learn. Throwing strikes is so important.

Tracy had spoken before the game, defiantly almost, about the heart of the Dodgers, about their will to win and about the way they have, so far, refused to doubt themselves.

This game was played by teams that refuse to doubt themselves. It was played fast--2 hours 22 minutes--as if both teams are sprinting to the end of the season, eager to arrive at the playoffs where they belong. All the runs were scored in the first inning. “Good pitching beats good hitting,” Sammy Sosa said with a shrug.

Sure enough. And great pitching beats good pitching. Baldwin pitched a great game.

Afterward Tracy talked about how his team has something intangible, unable to be measured by statistics or picked out of a box score. “If you figure it out, we’ve lost 400 and something man games to injury,” Tracy said. “And we’ve never used that as an excuse. If you start to look for excuses you quit looking for ways to win. Instead of looking for excuses, look for ways to step it up. That’s what we’ve done.”

The Cubs had won a big “no-excuses” game Friday by beating the Dodgers, 2-1. They had come from San Diego and two consecutive one-run losses. The second was particularly disturbing since they blew a 3-0 lead in the eighth, and the Padres had traded scheduled starting pitcher Woody Williams to St. Louis only a couple of hours before Thursday’s game.

Saturday’s win was equally important to the Dodgers. If a five-game losing streak turned to seven or 10, then it would have been time to make those excuses.

“When you’ve survived some bad things happening,” Lo Duca said, “then you reach a point where no matter what bad things happen, you believe in yourselves and you think you’ll figure out how to fix whatever is wrong.”

That’s what the Dodgers have become. Fixer-uppers instead of excuse makers.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com.