The Dodgers have brought in a ringer

When Doug Mientkiewicz hurt himself sliding headfirst into second base with his two-run double Thursday night, most Dodgers fans probably shrugged.

Mientkiewicz would have, too, except that his shoulder was dislocated.

It is not that Mientkiewicz is indifferent about his new career as a Dodger. Far from it. He is like any other player. He wants to play every day, bat third and hang around in the off-season with Scott Boras.

But Mientkiewicz is unlike most other players in that he has already been to the end of the rainbow and found his gold. Everything that has happened to him since the 2000 Olympics in Sydney has been figurative pocket change.

He is in his 10th full season in the majors, and the person most surprised by that is Mientkiewicz. “I can’t run, I can’t throw, I can’t hit, I can’t hit for power,” he says, “and I’m still here.”

Mientkiewicz, 34, could be out until September, so it probably will be a while before he’s pinch-hitting or filling in at first base again. It might take that long for fans to learn to pronounce his name (Min-Kay-Vich) or even spell it.

It is fitting that Mientkiewicz would work his way to the Dodgers, his seventh major league team. Dodger Blue Heaven is where Tom Lasorda lives. It was Lasorda who gathered up a ragtag bunch of minor leaguers, took them to Australia, cajoled and conned them as only Lasorda can, and managed them to an Olympic gold medal in a sport the U.S. had long since ceded to Japan, Korea and Cuba.

Mientkiewicz says of Lasorda, “He put me back on the map.”

Lasorda says, “I didn’t even know we’d gotten Doug this year. I’m walking around at spring training and there he is. I gave him a big hug.”

If they never play another Olympic baseball game -- entirely possible, since the OIympic nitwits who decide such things have voted out baseball -- Mientkiewicz will go down as the greatest U.S. Olympic baseball player.

Yet, if not for Lasorda, he and several Olympic teammates might not have arrived in Sydney.

The team played a series of exhibition games along Australia’s Gold Coast, which features a few casinos. Two nights before the team was to fly to Sydney, Mientkiewicz and his roommate, catcher Pat Borders, were playing blackjack. A man hassled Borders, an altercation began, and soon, as Mientkiewicz describes it, “Borders was tossing this guy all over the casino.”

Soon, a woman hit Mientkiewicz in the head with her purse. To the rescue came teammate Brent Abernathy, who tried to pull her off. The woman bit Abernathy in the chest.

This, of course, was not the sort of Olympic moment officials seek. The next day, things were tense. Shortly after Abernathy headed for the doctor to have his chest bandaged and get a tetanus shot, Borders and Mientkiewicz were summoned by Bob Watson, the major league official serving as the team’s general manager.

“We got called to the principal’s office,” Mientkiewicz says.

But it just so happened that Lasorda, no doubt mistaking the casino for a church, was there when it all happened and testified that his players had not started the fight. He even fought for their right to go back the next night.

The casino allowed that, but only in a quiet basement room with lots of elderly people playing cards. Abernathy, bored, sneaked upstairs, found teammate Sean Burroughs and asked to join the table. Burroughs moved over, and on the second hand, in a poker game with high stakes, Abernathy was dealt a royal flush.

Abernathy got his payoff, ran downstairs, saw his teammates at a table at the end of long wooden floor and dived toward them, injured chest first, yelling as he slid, “Jackpot! Jackpot!”

“He won something like 250,000 Australian dollars,” Mientkiewicz says.

The Olympics were no less eventful.

On Sept. 20, left-handed-hitting Mientkiewicz stood at the plate against South Korea in the bottom of the eighth, no score, bases loaded, count 3-2. Mientkiewicz sent the next pitch out of the park as if he had used a rocket launcher. Grand slam. The U.S. won, 4-0.

Six days later, the U.S. played South Korea again, this time for a chance to face Cuba in the final. The night had been miserable with rain delays. When Mientkiewicz stepped up in the bottom of the ninth, more than five hours into the game, the score was 2-2 with no outs, and with pinch-runner Travis Dawkins at first with orders not to do anything stupid and Mientkiewicz with orders from Lasorda to bunt.

“I would have done anything at that stage, even bunt,” Mientkiewicz says. “I was just cold and tired and wanted to get home.

He fouled off a pitch for a 2-1 count. Then Dawkins did something stupid. He got picked off. While Lasorda argued the call, Mientkiewicz felt relieved he didn’t have to bunt now. Before Lasorda got back to his dugout seat, the U.S. was in the final.

“I can still see the ball leaving the pitcher’s hand,” Mientkiewicz says. “I remember thinking, ‘Game over.’ ”

Mientkiewicz had homered again, this one landing in about the same spot as his grand slam six days earlier. And it put the U.S. in the gold-medal game.

Seventeen hours later, Lasorda was giving semi-flake Ben Sheets, the pitcher who would mow down Cuba, a pep talk about the importance of the gold medal.

“He looks at me,” Lasorda says, “and he says, ‘Who are we playing?’ ”

Mientkiewicz recalls looking at his family in the stands as the gold medal went around his neck and thinking it would never get better than this. And it hasn’t, although the Gold Glove he won with the Twins in 2001 and the World Series ring he won with the Red Sox in 2004 give him the distinction of being the only player with those two accomplishments, plus Olympic gold.

Things like that tend to ease the pain of a dislocated shoulder.

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bill.dwyre@latimes.com