Commentary : Reds Game Becomes a Walk in the Park for Andre Dawson

CHICAGO —  Andre Dawson likes respect at least as much as the next guy. But he admitted having second thoughts after the Cincinnati Reds fitted him for a straitjacket and walked him, still kicking and screaming, into the history books.

Eight times on Tuesday, the National League’s grim reaper of late walked to the plate. And five of those times, by design, he kept on walking. The first intentional pass came in the first inning against the first Cincinnati pitcher, the last in the 16th against the seventh.

If that was difficult to follow, imagine how befuddled Reds Manager Lou Piniella must have felt after dropping a 2-1 decision.

The revolving door that led to the mound at Wrigley Field spun so often that it made his head swim, and about the only constant he could remember afterward was instructing several of the pitchers who walked through it to walk the guy in blue pinstripes wearing No. 8.

“How many did he have?” Piniella asked reporters. “Five? My God.”

It was a measure of respect never accorded the Babe or Henry Aaron--not to mention Willie, Mickey and the Duke--and only Roger Maris and Garry Templeton, with four intentional passes each, had ever sniffed such rarified air before Dawson. It became so predictable and moved so near comedy by the end that it seemed Rodney Dangerfield was batting behind him.

Dawson, though, was closer to a grimace than a grin by the time it was over.

“What did I do,” he said to no one in particular, “to deserve that?”

Depends on where you want to start.

Coming into this season at age 35 and coming off his sixth knee operation, Andre Dawson was supposed to be getting older, not better. He was supposed to be disabled, not dominant. Sure, he beat the odds once, but who figured he would do it again?

In 1987, Dawson turned his back on the Expos organization and a $1-million salary after 10 stellar seasons in Montreal and found few invitations awaiting. Though those were the days of collusion, there was a consensus among baseball people at the time as well that he was over-the-hill and as such, overpriced.

When he showed up at the Cubs’ training camp in Mesa, Ariz., the following spring and just about begged (on chronically bad knees) for a job, his new employer was not overly generous (Dawson signed for a $500,000 base salary, plus incentives) nor optimistic.

But with a work ethic almost unmatched in baseball, he posted numbers as fine as any in the last decade--.287 average, 49 home runs, 137 RBIs--and became the first National Leaguer to win the Most Valuable Player award while toiling for a sixth-place team.

Last season, he underwent knee surgery in May and managed to put up the kind of numbers in 118 games--.252, 21 HRs and 77 RBIs--that most of his counterparts could not match in 162. Yet, playing in obvious pain, he struggled mightily through the NL championship series at .105, and his very public failure to produce in the clutch several times began anew the whispers that he was finished.

And when Dawson had major reconstructive surgery on the right knee (the fourth operation) a few days afterward, the doubts were aired in black and white.

“One thing I never do is put pressure on myself. But it’s funny how the same guys who will build you up will write your obit,” he paused, checking himself, “will announce your retirement.

“They don’t know the anguish of rehabbing a knee, they don’t know how hard it is. How frustrating it gets to be pitched around all the time. They don’t know,” he said, finally, “what makes you tick.”

By the same token, when Dawson is the subject, few people do. Even Cubs Manager Don Zimmer, who often sounds as though he is in awe of Dawson, didn’t expect to have him around at the start of the season.

“When he came to camp and we had a look at him, we knew how hard he’d worked, but the knee looked so bad we planned to (put him on the disabled list) at the start of the season. We figured, ‘He’s a cripple.’

“But the last 10 days of camp, he suddenly started moving,” Zimmer said, “like all that work suddenly paid off--just like that.”

And just like that, Dawson started tearing up opposing pitchers. Coming into Tuesday’s game, he was hitting .346, with league-leading totals in homers (13) and RBIs (41). Indeed, Dawson is on a pace to outstrip his 1987 numbers, and he has yet to get hot--by his definition, anyway.

“I don’t feel like it--yet,” he said. “When you’re hot, you hit everything on the nose. The ball looks like a balloon. Those things haven’t happened yet.”

Opposing managers might beg to differ. Just one day earlier, Dawson was named Player of the Week after batting .428 (12-for-28), with nine runs scored, three doubles, five homers and 15 RBIs in the last seven games.

Little wonder, then, that Piniella felt Dawson should rest his bat on the eighth.

Three times he ordered Dawson walked (by Tom Browning in the first and eighth innings and Scott Scudder in the 14th) when there was only one man on and two out; twice more (by Tim Birtsas in the 12th and Scudder again in the 16th) to load the bases with two out.

“Hey,” he said, “I don’t need to tell you that he’s been hot . . . and it’s not like this is the first time the guy’s been on fire.

“So I figured, if somebody else is going to beat us, fine,” Piniella added. “But not him.”

Even so, it’s not like Piniella didn’t feel a little silly by the finish.

When Dawson looked into the Reds’ dugout and smiled on a slow trot toward first base after the fifth and final walk, Piniella smiled sheepishly back, shrugged and called out, “It’s not my fault the guys in front of you keep getting on.”