It’s Hard Not to Get Excited About Trade

The Dodgers win the pennant!

The Dodgers win the pennant!

Excuse me. Geez, I guess I lost my head there for a minute.

The rule is, “No cheering in the press box.” As an objective reporter, I must maintain my detached perspective. But I’m excited for my city’s ballclub about the big trade.

I just got the news that the Dodgers have traded Pedro Guerrero to the St. Louis Cardinals for a pitcher. Or maybe it was a batboy, or a veteran Clydesdale. Early reports are sketchy. It doesn’t matter. Whomever or whatever the Dodgers get, they have significantly improved a team that is already leading its division.

If I’m a Giant or an Astro, right about now I’ve got to be cursing and slamming my morning newspaper to the floor.

What a week in baseball, as Mel Allen might say. Within a nine-day span, lights go on at Wrigley Field and in the Dodgers’ front-office cerebrums.

Not that Guerrero was a cancer on the team. That’s pretty harsh terminology. But at this stage of his career, let’s just say Pedro was at least an inflamed appendix.

On defense, Guerrero was OK unless someone hit or threw the ball to him. I was going to say Pedro played first base with all the verve and enthusiasm of a rubbish-truck can-slinger, but that would be a cheap shot. My neighborhood happens to be blessed with the services of two refuse collection men who are the Pete Rose and Ernie Banks of their profession.

Guerrero will be missed, of course. He could hit, and he had a certain style, an athletic grace and power, and a pride and cockiness that could set a tone for a team. Faint heart ne’er won fair pennant.

I love the Guerrero home run trot, for instance. But not on ground balls to short.

The Dodgers’ front office and Tommy Lasorda were tolerant of Guerrero’s shortcomings. When he threw away an entire season with a half-hearted slide in spring training two years ago, Pedro received only praise for his comeback efforts.

When he actually reported to training camp on time last spring, Lasorda did everything but present Pete with a dozen blue roses. When Guerrero, paid $1.72 million a year to play a team game, finally volunteered to play third base, where the team desperately needed him, Dodger leaders all but nominated Pete for the Nobel Prize.

Guerrero missed almost two months of action this season with a chronic pinched nerve in his neck. He was supposed to undergo daily traction treatments, but eventually he stopped.

“He didn’t do it very religiously,” Dodger trainer Bill Buhler said at the time. “He just stopped coming in, and we stopped nagging him about it.”

Nagging. Whew.

When Mike Marshall was missing chunks of action last season with a variety of injuries that some Dodger players felt were less than life-threatening, Guerrero was one of the chief finger-pointers.

Monday night, apparently because of the impending trade, Guerrero sat out the Dodgers’ game against the San Francisco Giants. The Dodgers won, 1-0. That has been the pattern this season, the Dodgers winning with Pedro sitting.

It’s not all Guerrero’s fault that the Dodgers play better without him. Maybe it’s pure coincidence, although I doubt it. But baseball is a superstitious sport. In a winning streak, guys won’t even change their underwear, so obviously you don’t want to break up a winning lineup. Pedro’s too good a hitter to sit, so a trade made perfect sense.

This is the type of dynamic, do-it-now move that has characterized the Dodgers under Fast Freddie Claire. If the general manager waits until the end of the season to shop Guerrero, the Dodgers lose him to free agency and gain nothing. The kid executive who was laughed at during the baseball winter meetings for his seeming hesitancy to make any kind of deal, is gaining a reputation for decisive action.

When the Dodgers need a pitcher last week, instead of playing it safe by keeping Don Sutton or finding a semi-serviceable retread starter somewhere, Claire calls up a 20-year-old beanpole from the minor leagues and throws the kid into the jaws of the pennant race.

Then Fast Freddie deals Slow Petey to St. Louie, and gets a real starting pitcher in return.

Maybe Claire has just been lucky, but I wouldn’t want to bring my rent money into a poker game if he’s dealing.

This week in history, then, will leave us with two enduring--though surely not of equal magnitude--news images. In New Orleans, Ronald Reagan bids farewell to Americans, walking away carrying a gigantic, symbolic gavel. In Los Angeles, Pedro Guerrero will be packing up his oversized bats and bidding farewell to Los Angeles.

Two heavy hitters, both somewhat battered and tattered, moving on.

The Gipper and the Ripper. Close the door on your way out, fellas.