It's just a faded, yellowing square of newspaper dated July 27, 1983, the cartoon clipped atop Tom Niedenfuer's dressing stall. It shows a relief pitcher on the mound, his exhausted right arm stretched halfway across the infield like a spent water hose.
"I know it's your 150th relief appearance," his manager is telling him, "but we really need this one."
The cartoon headline? "It's Just A Game."
Try telling that to Tom Niedenfuer. Try telling that to him Wednesday as he walked alone up the tunnel to the Dodgers locker room, a solitary man with a solitary ache. Try telling Niedenfuer, glove clenched like a fist, eyes staring straight ahead as he marched up that tunnel, that it was just a game.
If it were just a game, it wouldn't have taken the Dodgers 25 minutes to open their clubhouse afterward. And if it were just a game, Tom Niedenfuer wouldn't have hid out in the sanctuary of the trainer's room for another 25 minutes after that.
Nobody's livelihood is just a game.
"I wouldn't talk to him right now," Enos Cabell advised a group of reporters who were standing around Niedenfuer's empty locker interviewing his blue jeans. "He doesn't feel like talking right now. He's a little bit off."
Especially Wednesday. Especially after Niedenfuer, the Dodgers' best reliever all season, had come on for the second day in a row with the job of silencing the Cardinals and instead drove them to new heights of rapture.
This stakeout would take awhile. And rightly so. Niedenfuer was in the trainer's rooms composing himself. For the sake of his image. And for the sake of the first reporter without Blue Cross who asked a tactless question.
The events of the last 48 hours, half a continent apart, would live on in the record books and in the windmills of his mind forever.
Two consecutive relief appearances in the National League championship series. Two consecutive game-winning home runs. Ozzie Smith Monday. Jack Clark Wednesday. A long walk off a short pier Thursday? Who among us wouldn't consider it? Instead, Tom Niedenfuer must live with this: More than anyone, he pitched the Dodgers into the off-season. And the Cardinals into the World Series.
There are worse burdens to bear. But when Niedenfuer finally emerged to meet the press, the customary ice pack taped to his right shoulder by an Ace bandages, nobody mentioned any. Niedenfuer's pain and that of his teammates, most of whom had by now said their goodbyes and slipped off into the wild world of wheels that is Los Angeles, was as real, as tangible, as a broken jaw.
