60 YEARS AGO/143: THE DODGER DOWNTURN BEGINS...

It won't start to affect their position in the standings for a little while longer, but the Dodger downturn definitely begins on 9/16/62 (a Sunday, and my mother's 39th birthday).

We won't give it away in the final comparison chart (at right), but LA simply stops hitting during the last two weeks of the season. They'll score just 3.15 runs/game from this point on, but it's worse than that: in two games during the last week of the regular season they'll score 19 runs (and still manage to achieve a split in those games). 

That's right: in 11 of their final games, they averaged two runs a game. That's what's known as an ill-timed team-wide batting slump.

IN what is still (very occasionally) called "God's own sunlight" with reference to Wrigley Field (long since electrifried for night baseball...), the Dodgers ran into an "aging veteran" named Bob Buhl, with whom they'd had a long history. A few members of the team probably remember how the Dodgers' 1956 pennant was nearly snatched away by Buhl's incredible 8-1 record against them that year. Buhl would wind up making 70 starts against the Dodgers in his fourteen-year career, posting a 30-21 won-loss record and an ERA of exactly 3.00 (feel free to add as many zeros as you like).

Nine zeros is what the Dodgers came up with that day, as Buhl blanked them on four hits. Stan Williams woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across his head and came up with a rag arm when he took the mound, giving up five hits and four runs in just a third of an inning. The big damage: rookie outfielder Nelson Mathews' grand-slam homer. 

Everyone pretty much stopped scoring then...of course, the Dodgers--now in their dangerous new mode--never started. Final score: Cubs 5, Dodgers 0.

OVER at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, Juan Marichal still wasn't ready to return, so "young Gaylord," back from the minors, got an emergency start. (That's Gaylord Perry, in "incongruous youth" mode.)

He didn't pitch too badly, but the Bucs got an unearned run off him in the third and cuffed him around in the fourth (rookie Bob Bailey, who'd stop hitting as soon as the Giants left town, had another RBI single) to take a 3-1 lead--which became 4-1 when Donn Clendenon knocked home Bill Virdon in the fifth.

Willie Mays, back in the lineup despite still being more than a bit shaky, was 0-for-2 with a walk when he faced Elroy Face in the top of the eighth with two out and two on. Three pitches later, Willie hit his 44th homer of the year to tie the game, 4-4. (We'll defer to Jayson Stark and his network of battle-tested trivia-meisters to tell us how many times a 44th homer resulted in tying a game at 4-4; absent the baseball bloodhounds, we'll venture to say: "not many.")

But Willie's bomb was the only gasp left for SF: his teammates went six up, six down in the ninth and tenth innings, and Stu Miller, pitching into his third inning in the bottom of the tenth, was so intent in not allowing the winning run to score from third(particularly after having wild-pitched Bill Mazeroski there a batter previously) that he left one of his famous change-ups "up" in the zone, where Smoky Burgess could...well, yes: smoke it over the right-field wall. Final score: Pirates 6, Giants 4 (ten innings).

SEASON RECORDS: LAD 98-52, SFG 94-56