LOS ANGELES -- He bolted from the dugout with the speed and grace of Ben Johnson pumped up with pasta instead of steroids.
The words spewed from Tommy Lasorda's mouth like helium from a ruptured blimp. His message lit up TV screens coast-to-coast: Get the bleepin' ball over the plate or you're a goner!
Poor Jesse Orosco. He looked death in the eyes, and it was short, rotund and wrapped in Dodger Blue. It was do or smoke the last cigarette.
Fear is a guided missile to the heart. There, in the 12th inning of Game 4 of the National League Championship Series, it seized Orosco by the sleeve and pointed him toward the strike zone. He got Darryl Strawberry to pop out, and Orel Hershiser came on to get the final out in the wee hours of Monday morning.
Orosco lived to see the dawn, and by the time the sun set again in New York, the Dodgers were winging home with a 3-2 lead in a series that saw them hanging by a prayer less than 24 hours earlier.
Back up and freeze the frame of Lasorda in full Italian fury on the mound in New York. That picture tells the story of why the Dodgers are in the World Series.
Mike Scioscia's home run off Dwight Gooden in the ninth inning of Game 4 snapped the Dodgers awake. Lasorda grabbed them by the scruff of the neck and flung them back into the fray.
Later, when asked what he had told Orosco, Lasorda said, "I just offered him some words of encouragement and let him know we were all behind him."
A female reporter said she was reading his lips and thought his opening line was something like, "What the heck are you doing?"
"What the heck?" Lasorda said. "Lady, you sure can't read lips."
THE BULL FLIES HIGHER
His players didn't heed everything they read about the Mets' being the best thing to come out of New York since Coney Island franks. The Dodgers were guileful and gullible enough to believe their manager's abundant hot air and ride it right over New York's lead balloon.
Now the Dodgers are tearing down David Cone clippings and wallpapering the clubhouse with inciteful phrases from Oakland.
"Don Baylor (of the Athletics) said he wanted to play the best team, the Mets, but now they'll be playing the team that beat the Mets," Lasorda said.
"This is the best team I've ever been on," L.A. right fielder Mike Marshall said. "That's because we want to win as badly as any team I've seen." An Oakland-Mets World Series would have provided a match of teams with 100 regular-season victories for the first time since 1970 (Baltimore and Cincinnati) and a rematch of the memorable seven-game showdown of '73. Instead, the flashback is '74.
The wise guys next door in Nevada will tell you the outcome should be about the same as then, when the A's of Reggie, Rollie and Catfish blitzed the Dodgers of Garvey, Sutton and Cey 4-1. It is a bet I would be inclined to take, but not without reservations -- for the full seven games.
The daft Dodgers are L.A.-loony enough to believe they can duck the odds again. Anything is possible in this land of make-believe.
I looked out my hotel window Wednesday morning and saw an elephant tethered in the parking lot. Honest, it was there. The Athletics come with elephants on their shoulders. An omen? We'll see.
Remember the no-chance '69 Mets? Amazing, like these Dodgers.
MUD IN EYE OF BEHOLDER
The freeway series on the Left Coast will be old-home week of sorts. If Lasorda can convince Hershiser to take a day off, Game 1 Saturday night will have rookie Tim Belcher, a former Athletic, pitching for Los Angeles against Dave Stewart, a former Dodger.
We will find out who got the best of the Bob Welch/Matt Young-for-Alfredo Griffin/Jay Howell trade. Former compatriots can meet behind the batting cage and Howell about the sticky subject of pine tar.
The series presents a stark contrast in managers. Linked only by heritage, Oakland's Tony La Russa is everything Lasorda is not: reserved, level-headed, trim, dark, handsome.
But give Lasorda credit. He may be a caricature, but beneath all the sauce and baloney is a sound baseball mind and a devout heart. Lasorda convinced Hershiser, admittedly a bit wimpy when he came up, that he is a bulldog on the mound. He had the Hatchers and Dempseys running through walls. He had all of the Dodgers believing they could beat the Mets.
Back in New York a Mets fan hung a sign that read, "Lasorda, you're fat and ugly."
"Hey," shouted the roly-poly manager, "I may be ugly, but I'm not fat."
From any perspective, a peculiar piece of work, just like his ballclub. There is a misshapen beauty to the beastly Dodgers.