RMJ 63 April 18

FRIDAY, APRIL 18 ● Los Angeles, vs Dodgers

It was a pleasant day in the Valley. Had a nice visit with Mom and Dad, talking about old and new times. They showed me all of the articles that their friends around the country had sent.

One that they saved was not about me at all; it was a cover story from the fashion section of the LA Times, titled Untucked and it featured the Hawaiian shirt. I guess Hawaiian shirts are coming back in style.

This is definitely the first time I’ve been on the cutting edge of fashion. Maybe it’s my year.

           

Maybe not. When I got to Dodger Stadium, things weren’t so groovy.

I noticed that our computer-generated stats on batter/pitcher matchups were wrong. These stats had Luis González hitting 14 times against Scott Radinsky, even though the two players have been in different leagues throughout their careers.

It had Craig Biggio and González never batting against Pedro Astacio, even though I knew that they have both faced him a lot.

When I saw that, I didn’t trust the other numbers. I used another source to get the real numbers, and that put me behind by half an hour.

We had our meeting regarding the Dodgers before batting practice, because there is not enough time after BP.

When the pitchers broke off to discuss the hitters, one point I made was that Mike Piazza had killed us (.547) last year, and that we should not give him a pitch to hit. “Don’t let him beat you,” is the way I phrased it.

A couple hours later after Piazza had singled and scored, then hit a three-run homer, Vern and I discussed this phrasing. We are sensitive to how things are said these days, and I do think we could have said it better.

When you say “don’t do (something)” it seems to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It would have been better to say, “jam him off the plate, and make him chase breaking balls outside.” This is simply another way of saying don’t let him beat you, but it sounds positive instead of negative. Still, don’t let him beat you is a stock phrase in baseball. It doesn’t always have to work the way it did tonight.

 

The writers met me in the dugout during batting practice, and I was able to get the interviews done in one sitting. Sometimes they come in waves, and I have to answer the same question over and over again.

One of the things I mentioned – and Bob Nightengale ended up using in his game story for the Times — was that I never had much luck in Dodger Stadium. I beat Sandy Koufax 3-0 in 1966, then never won another game here. My parents even stopped coming to the games, it got so bad.

And the worst of it was the luck. A lot of the games were 3-2 and 2-1, where a bad bounce or a bad call made the difference. I feel snakebit here.

 

I took the lineup card out to meet the umpires: Gary Darling, Charles Reliford, Dana DeMuth, and Jerry Meals. I will continue this process until I have met them all.

Gary Darling is an umpire who rubs me wrong. He even got to me when I was in the broadcast booth. Gary was behind the plate tonight, and he really pissed me off in the eighth inning.

We had already lost one run on a call by Meals on a Bagwell double down the leftfield line. Abreu was running on the play, and probably would have scored if a fan had not interfered by reaching over the railing and deflecting the ball. This is a judgment call; Meals made Abreu come back to third, and he did not end up scoring.

In the eighth, we were down 5-2 with Ausmus on second and a 3-2 count on pinch-hitter James Mouton. Ausmus broke on the pitch, which was so high and wide that Piazza had to stretch up and out to get it. His throw went into the leftfield corner. Ausmus got up and scored.

In the excitement of the play, few people realized that Darling had called the pitch strike three. According to my Dad, Dodgers announcer Vin Scully called the pitch ball four on the radio. I heard the call from the beginning, and I was really mad.

I didn’t say anything, because I am a rookie. But when the rest of the team saw Mouton coming back to the dugout instead of going to first, they didn’t know what was up. When they heard, they stared screaming at Darling, and he looked over.

I just gave him the palms-up shrug. What more can you do?

It turned out that Biggio walked, and Abreu tapped weakly to the mound. We would have had Bagwell up with two men on; as it was, Bagwell led off the ninth, and we were still down two runs.

Darling rang him up on a pitch that looked outside. A review of the videotape showed it to be about six inches wide.

I guess Gary can make mistakes, just like the rest of us. But he sure made a couple of them at crunch time.

 

When I got back to the Valley, my folks were in bed. I am sitting out in the yard now, in a lounge chair by the pool, smoking a cigar and drinking a glass of red wine under a canopy blue-black sky.

It’s not so much fun to write about the losses. But then again, it’s not all bad.