Giants and Dodgers Tangle Again
In California an old rivalry gets a new lease on life
A laugher. A choker. A squeaker. A heart stopper. The four-game series in Los Angeles' Dodger Stadium had everything a baseball fan could hope for. It was high August, but the lead in the National League West had changed hands twice in four days. It was high August, but the teams sweating it out from game to game were not just the plump, lordly Dodgers and the once mighty Cincinnati Reds. For San Francisco has risen from the dead, and to Giant fans, at least, sweet are the uses of resurrection.
After six baleful, bitter years, a full 16 seasons after Willie Mays & Co. brought them their first West Coast pennant in 1962, the Giants for most of 1978 have been leading the league in a ding-dong race. Giant fans, regarded as an endangered species likely to be spotted only on beaches, at discos and in therapy groups, are flocking to Candlestick Park, breaking all attendance records (1.3 million, nearly doubled since last year). Now they dance in the stadium after victory, howl for Dodger blood and scream their affection for a new-found love, Pitcher Vida Blue. "Bloo! Bloo! Bloo!"
The original Dodger-Giant rivalry goes back a lifetime, to New York City, the shadow of Coogan's Bluff and the baseball shades that still haunt Flatbush Avenue. But the reborn Giants seem to be rekindling their old rivalry with the Dodgers. They are a hungry, young team with a scrambling, come-from-behind style that disarms fans and ages managers unmercifully. So far this year the Giants have gone into extra innings 16 times and have won 34 of their 70 victories by a single run.
Last week's Shootout showed them at their scrappy worst and best. In the first game the fat-bat Dodgers (with a team average of .261, second in the league) simply blew Blue out of the box and finished with 16 hits. In the second the Giants lost by only one run when Billie Jean King's kid brother, Randy Moffitt, relieving with the bases loaded, walked Los Angeles Centerfielder Bill North to give the Dodgers the league lead for the first time since May. Then the Giants fought back, winning a one-run game with a home run from Second Baseman Bill Madlock, a Dodger nemesis (he has a .342 career average against Los Angeles). The fourth game went into extra innings. The Giants stayed alive on a hit by aging Superstar Willie McCovey, indestructible and still explosive at 40, and carried to victory and a renewed fingernail grip on first place by a brand new hero, 22-year-old Born-Again Christian Rightfielder Jack Clark. Said Clark, after singling home the winning run in the eleventh inning: "This was to prove to the Dodgers and the rest of the league that we're for real."
The Giant players celebrated this victory as if it had brought them a pennant, and fans began freely invoking the memory of such miracle teams as the 1969 Mets and the 1950 Philadelphia Phillies. But the resurgent Giants are far from miraculous. The '69 Mets managed to win a pennant with a notably low team batting average of .242. The Giants are not great hitters either. McCovey, for example, though useful in the clutches, is currently batting at .226. But the Giant team average is rising and has now reached a respectable .253. Moreover, they have good to great pitching, fine fielding and super hustle, most of it assembled through a mix of purchases, trades and risky farmclub promotions by Owner Bob Lurie, who bought the club in 1976.
His essential coup was a seven-player swap that brought Star Lefthander Vida Blue and his blazing fastball across the Bay from Oakland, after three other teams had unsuccessfully tried to get him. Blue has a 16-and-6 record so far with an ERA of 2.65. Freed at last from the slough of despond into which Oakland Owner Charlie Finley's hostile machinations cast him, Blue has been playing and pitching with sheer joy--and a fastball still clocked at around 95 m.p.h. He stands beside the dugout leading the fans in cheering for other Giants. He has been known to wipe off wet bats for his teammates after a rain. He just may bring the pennant to San Francisco, win the Cy Young Award and be voted Most Valuable Player. "If you ask about our success," says Giant Manager Joe Altobelli, "I could point my finger at him and say, 'There it is.' "
When Blue is blazing, the Giants can afford not to worry too much about an average-run production per game or two. Nor is there much sweat when tall Righthander Ed Halicki (6 and 6, 2.72 ERA) and hard-throwing Lefty Bob Knepper (12 and 9, 2.87 ERA) are on the mound. Like the bulk of the pitching staff, the rest of the Giant team is made up of new and mostly young players, steadied and reassured by a brilliant veteran. The veteran is McCovey, the only Giant playing for the team when it won in 1962, a man who has now hit 504 home runs (twelfth place on the all-time home-run list). McCovey gives younger players confidence and generates game-winning hits, 13 so far, 60 RBls and eleven homers. Manager Altobelli describes McCovey among the young as an eagle offering example and protection to eaglets. Though somewhat, well, high flown, the comparison makes sense, especially as some of the eaglets are flying pretty high. The Giant outfield consists of a trio of speedsters 25 or under. In his third season, Clark, 22, a product of the Giant farm system, set a team record by hitting safely in 26 straight games. Larry Herndon, the most agile of the three, can rifle a runner out at the plate from centerfield. Terry Whitfield sprays hits to all fields, is batting .304, and zips around the bases with an effervescence that evokes memories of the young Willie Mays.
An all-eaglet outfield may not be the most reliable form of transportation to carry the Giants to the pennant. During a hot stretch drive, especially against relentless veterans, they have been known to flutter dangerously, not to say grow flustered, under stress. The Dodgers are such an enemy. Though they have thus far stumbled along, beset by injuries, they are still at or near the top, an established team of stars capable of leaving anybody in the dust.
Pitcher Don Sutton struggled with his control at the start of the season, yet he has won twelve games, against nine losses, mixing up curves and fastballs that leave batters fuming. First Baseman Steve Garvey, ramrod straight in the batter's box, the Jock Armstrong of baseball, has had that regular Garvey year: M.V.P. in the All-Star game, hitting .289, with 84 runs batted in. Rightfielder Reggie Smith, who has been alternately brooding or brilliant in the past for Boston and St. Louis, is now a happily artful Dodger. He has a tremendous arm, a pulverizing bat and looks like the best rightfielder in the league. Hot Reggie has been at least one reason why the Dodgers have drawn so well. This year they are almost assured of being the first team in baseball to top the 3 million mark for a season.
Regardless of big attendance, Manager Tommy Lasorda, whose office walls are hung with pictures of such pals as Frank Sinatra and Comedian Don Rickles, sees no humor in being in a virtual tie for first place. Without the early season injuries, which are now mostly behind them, he feels sure the Dodgers would be soaring. Mildly but logically, Lasorda points to the fact: "You can't have two out of eight starters out and not be hurt."
Not far off, too, lurks the big shadow of the creaky but still powerful Big Red Machine in Cincinnati. The Reds have hung tight all season despite a below par year from one of baseball's alltime great pitchers, Tom Seaver, and injuries to former M.V.P.s, such as Catcher Johnny Bench and Second Baseman Joe Morgan. Last year's M.V.P., George Foster, is leading the league in RBls. The hottest news around Cincinnati lately has been Pete Rose's 44-game hitting streak, one of the major reasons why the Reds have clung so close to the lead. If Seaver should get back to form and Morgan and Bench revive, the Reds could roll right past everyone again. After the Dodger-Giant free-for-all was over, Cincinnati was only 1 1/2 games off the pace.
Whether the young Giants are the team of destiny that their fans have so proudly and perhaps prematurely hailed remains to be seen. What they have surely done is to give a fierce rivalry a new lease on life in California. Since the Giants are young and fast, they are likely to be going at the Dodgers full tilt for years. However the wrenching, grueling pennant drive turns out, there are plenty of brush-'em-back pitches, spikes-high slides into second, empty-the-dugout confrontations and plain, hard baseball ahead.
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