Braves Losing Playoff Grip

Time was, we would look at toolbox types like Craig Counsell and think one thing.

There goes a Dodger.

This week, watching the baggy-shirted byte dominate the National League championship series in a way his giant teammates cannot, we are resigned to thinking a different thing.

There goes an ex-Dodger.

He was once a Kevin Malone afterthought.

He is now the Arizona Diamondbacks’ rattler.

He was once cut from the Dodgers to make room for the $15-million contract of Mark Grudzielanek.

He is now a $450,000 reason the Diamondbacks are on the verge of their first World Series.

“I look like I’m 10 years old, and I’m skinny,” he said late Saturday with a smile. “I guess I don’t mind if somebody calls me scrappy.”

Just as long as they also call him the giant of this series, as his four RBIs and perfect-again fielding Saturday led the Diamondbacks to an 11-4 win over the more-awful-than-cheese-grits Atlanta Braves in Game 4.

“You ask the players, the coaching staff, who’s the most valuable player on this team, Craig Counsell is going to get an awful lot of votes,” said Manager Bob Brenly.

In the spring of 2000, the Dodgers wouldn’t have registered one of those votes.

That’s when they cut him, even after watching him play decently for the second half of the 1999 season after acquiring him from the Florida Marlins.

The Dodgers thought he wasn’t an everyday player.

Yet he’s been on every lineup card in every NLCS game.

“He’s made it impossible for me to take him out of the lineup,” said Brenly.

The Dodgers thought he couldn’t hit enough to stay in the lineup. Yet after batting .275 in the regular season, he’s hitting a team-leading .444 in the NLCS, with a team-leading 11 total bases, three doubles and .611 slugging percentage.

“He’s a very unspectacular guy,” said teammate Mark Grace. “But every good team has to have a player like Craig Counsell.”

That’s Craig . Not Greg , as everyone from teammate Randy Johnson to National League officials have called him.

Because he attended Notre Dame, where his father had been the freshman baseball coach, his teammates call him, “Rudy.”

After spending time in the minor leagues in eight of his 11 professional seasons, he can’t argue with the idea that he’s a walk-on.

After walking into the clubhouse Saturday with both gray pinstriped pants legs covered completely in dirt, carrying a water bottle with the label torn off, he also can’t argue with the idea that he’s a mudder.

“Batting behind him, standing in the on-deck circle, I have the best seat in the house,” said teammate Luis Gonzalez. “I love walking up to the plate and seeing the catcher shaking his head and saying, ‘That guy, he really hits it hard.”’

He sort of does all of it hard.

On Saturday, he charged off third base on a grounder back to Brave pitcher Greg Maddux, both stunning and freezing Maddux, leading to no play that loaded the bases and led to a four-run inning. A dumb move, but an aggressively dumb move.

Later, the left-handed batter drove in two late-inning runs on two opposite-field hits with two strikes each.

Old-fashioned hitting. Championship hitting

In Friday’s Diamondback win, he scored the first run after beating out an infield grounder, then bunted to lead to the second run.

In the Diamondbacks’ series opening win, dominated by Randy Johnson, all Counsell did was score both runs.

Oh yeah, and he hit a three-run homer against the St. Louis Cardinals that helped send the Diamondbacks to the NLCS.

Not to mention, he was the guy who scored the winning run for the Marlins in the 1997 World Series.

But until this year, the new-era Dodgers weren’t about mudders. They didn’t want dirty, they wanted famous.

They were about big names and big bats and big contracts.

There was little emphasis on fundamentals. There was no room for the likes of Counsell, whose time there was so brief and uneventful, some Dodger fans probably forget he ever wore the uniform.

“It was just a bad situation,” said Counsell Saturday. “I was playing behind E.Y. [Eric Young], then they moved Grudzielanek over to second, and it just didn’t fit.

“I have no bitterness. It just wasn’t a good place for me.”

When the Dodgers are not a good place for a player like Counsell--they kept F.P Santangelo as a reserve infielder that year--then the Dodgers need to change their environment.

That’s something which perhaps began happening this summer under Jim Tracy. But it’s something that happened too late for Counsell.

In the spring of 2000, only five days after he was released, he was picked up by the Diamondbacks, who initially weren’t much smarter, sending him to Tucson for half the season.

But this year, finally given a chance to play because of injuries to others, he recorded a career-high in everything from games (141) to hits (126).

How can someone spend all that time in baseball and not excel until the year of his 31st birthday?

“Maybe I contribute more to winning teams,” he said. “Maybe if I’m on a team that’s not very good, they don’t notice my sort of contributions.”

Then, on second thought, he wouldn’t have been a good fit for the Dodgers.

At least that’s what they can keep telling themselves.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com.