Dodgerland

by Michael Fallon

  Two days later the Dodgers lost a tough battle at home—1–0 in extras—against the Padres. Don Sutton pitched superbly for nine innings, scattering five hits and giving up no runs, but the Dodger hitters eked out only two hits in eleven innings. On June 4 the Dodgers beat the Padres by exploding for nine runs thanks mostly to Ron Cey (who hit his league-leading fourteenth home run in the first inning), Reggie Smith (thirteenth home run), Steve Yeager (fifth home run), and new call-up Glenn Burke (three hits and two RBIs). And the Dodgers completed a sweep of the Padres on June 5, with Doug Rau recording the win, his sixth of the season against just one loss.

  But the team would lose its next series, against a suddenly bitter rival—the Chicago Cubs. Described before the series as a collection of “rejects, cast-offs, throw-ins and unwanteds from other teams,” the Cubs found themselves a surprising 32-19 in early June—good enough for first place in the National League East Division by two and a half games over the Pirates. Before the Dodger series the Cubs’ tough old-school manager, Herman Franks, downplayed any talk of his team’s underdog status. “I don’t remember sayin’ this spring that we don’t have a chance,” Franks told Times reporter Don Merry. “I don’t recall sayin’ nothin’ like that. All I remember sayin’ is that if our pitchin’ holds up and the guys play hard, we’ll be competitive.”21 His rough talk would turn even more combative as the series against the Dodgers played out, revealing that Franks harbored some bitter jealousy from his former life as a longtime coach with the Dodgers’ bitter rivals, the Giants.

  The trouble started in the first game, which the Cubs took 3–1, thanks to some clutch hitting by a couple of Dodger “castoffs”—Ivan DeJesus and, poignantly enough, Bill Buckner. When asked after the game about his two hits and key RBI, Buckner, who was making his first appearance in Dodger Stadium since being traded during the off-season, admitted that he was “very much psyched up for the Dodgers.” He also quickly added that he “wasn’t trying to prove anything to them,” but according to observers he was pleased with what he had done. Other people associated with the Cubs were not as conciliatory about Buckner or the Dodgers. “He had yet to cut the umbilical cord,” said a Cubs beat writer. Several players suggested Buckner still bled “Dodger Blue.” Franks went on to cast further disdain at the Dodgers general manager, Al Campanis, for unloading “damaged merchandise” when they dealt Buckner to the Cubs,22 and while Buckner went hitless in game 2, the riled-up Cubs scored ten runs before the fourth inning en route to an easy 10–4 victory over the Dodgers.

  The final game was a consolation victory, but the Dodgers took no real solace. Starting pitcher Don Sutton, hassled by the Cubs’ bench all afternoon, was accused in the eighth inning by Buckner and Frank of doctoring the ball. And while the umpire found no evidence when he searched Sutton, the irascible veteran pitcher was removed from the game and fined one hundred dollars for using profanity. The Dodgers were clearly losing the psychological war against the Cubs—the team that, if the season had ended after this game, would be the Dodgers’ opponent in the playoff for the National League Championship. And that wasn’t the worst of it. Also in the third game, for the second game in a row, Dodger outfielder Reggie Smith was rattled by the taunting of Cubs fans. The first incident had occurred after the Dodgers’ 10–4 loss and before the bus trip back to the team’s hotel, when Smith was signing autographs outside Wrigley Field. Someone in the crowd shouted racial slurs at Smith, upsetting the Dodger outfielder until his teammates could calm him and get him on the team’s bus. This second time, in the final game of the series, it was a fan sitting in the stands behind home plate while Smith was at bat in the third game. Smith started after the fan before he was grabbed by teammates Dusty Baker and Steve Yeager. “I’ve been hearing this crap for 15 years,” Smith said after the game. “You try to ignore racial remarks, but sometimes you can’t . . . sometimes they are too personal. I’m so heated up I’ve got to walk it off.”23

  And so June would go—up and down, back and forth, a long war of attrition among the great powers of the National League. After the demoralizing losses to the Cubs, the Dodgers faced another tough team in the St. Louis Cardinals. Adding to the confusion, Tom Lasorda had to take leave of the team in the middle of the series to visit his ailing mother back home in Pennsylvania. It was bad enough for Lasorda that the Dodgers lost the game, 8–7, but the manager also had to cancel an appearance on The Tonight Show, an appearance that the Dodgers’ PR Department had worked to get for much of the past two months. (Lasorda would not get another chance until nearly a year later, in April 1978, when his friend Don Rickles was filling in as guest host.) On June 12, with Lasorda back with the team, the Dodgers lost the final game against the Cardinals, 5–2, while the Reds swept a doubleheader against the Montreal Expos. As a result the Dodgers’ lead in the division had fallen to just seven and a half games. Tom Lasorda was a grim figure in the clubhouse. “Sure I’m concerned,” he testily responded when asked if he was aware that the Dodgers’ divisional lead had dropped by six games in only two and a half weeks. “Anytime you lose 10 of 15 you have to be concerned. But I’ve believed in these guys all year and I still do. It’s not that they’re not trying because they’re all hustling . . . all giving 100 per cent. I still feel fortunate we are where we are.”24

  Lasorda’s concern would not be assuaged—at least not in the short run. That is, just when it seemed the news couldn’t get worse for the Dodgers, when it seemed that the evil Red Machine of Cincinnati couldn’t get any more menacing, suddenly it did. On the morning of June 16 the headline of the sports page told the story: “Reds Obtain Seaver; Mets Acquire Zachry, Flynn and Two Minor Leaguers for Cy Young Winner.” Tom Seaver, a four-time twenty-game winner, the veritable ace of the Mets who had been the linchpin in one World Series victory in 1969 and another World Series run in 1973, was headed to the Reds. With a solid 3.00 ERA and 7-3 record for the last-place Mets in 1977, Seaver would bring to Cincinnati what it had lacked, even during its recent dominance of the National League since 1970—a legitimate top-of-the-rotation starter. “They got a helluva player” was all Tom Lasorda would say after hearing of the trade.25 And Sparky Anderson’s laughter could be heard all the way from Cincinnati, where the Reds had just beaten the Phillies 8–7 in ten innings to move to seven games behind the Dodgers.

  As the Dodgers’ season slowly, inexorably unraveled, George Lucas’s Star Wars was launching itself into the stratosphere. The all-engrossing, swashbuckling outer-space fantasy, with its clever gadgetry, colorful characters, and stunning visual effects, had instantly found its audience. According to Peter Biskind, Lucas’s particular genius was to take the avant-garde sensibilities that he learned in film school—the Marxist ideology of a master editor like Eisenstein, the critical irony of an avant-garde filmmaker like Bruce Conner, and so forth—and fuse these techniques to American pulp. Star Wars pioneered, according to Biskind, the “cinema of moments, of images, of sensory stimuli increasingly divorced from story.”26

  Lucas was surprised, he later reported, at how big a hit his film was, but he shouldn’t have been.27 The simple good-triumphing-over-evil morality tale that Lucas had crafted offered an uplifting message that was perfect for the country’s sullen historical moment, giving them at last something to cheer about. In the first weekend Star Wars earned $1.5 million, an impressive take in the film’s initial limited release. In week two the film expanded from thirty-two to forty-three theaters (in thirty-one cities) and took in $3 million. At each theater, according to studio executives, “it set house records” for ticket sales. The furor continued even when the movie went to widespread distribution after week three. On June 4 a veteran movie theater manager at the Avco Center Cinema in Westwood, Albert Szabo, told Lee Grant, a Times reporter, that he’d never seen anything like the reaction to this film. “They are filling the theater for every single performance. This isn’t a snowball, it’s an avalanche.” Grant described crowds that lined up every day at eight in the morning. “They
bring food from home in brown paper bags,” Grant wrote. “Some, returning for the second, third and even more times. . . . They go in there and have a ball, cheering and applauding. It’s a phenomenon.”28

  Even professional film reviewers were effusive. Associated Press called Star Wars a “dazzling galactic swashbuckler . . . a comic strip come to life . . . eye-popping special effects.” Variety: “Wow . . . boffo . . . meteoric . . . super-socko.” Time: “A grand and glorious film . . . a combination of Flash Gordon, The Wizard of Oz, the Errol Flynn swashbucklers of the 30s and 40s . . . a remarkable confection . . . a riveting tale.” And on and on. By the end of the third week of the film’s release, Star Wars was bringing in so much money that Fox’s stock price had doubled. At the end of its first theatrical run Lucas’s fantasy had become the most successful Hollywood movie up to that time, earning a domestic gross of more than $307 million and hundreds of millions more from the European market. And it made a fortune for Lucas, Alec Guinness (who had negotiated for 2.5 percent of the film’s profits), and almost anyone associated with the film.

  Still, despite the frenzy of accolades and ticket sales, the film’s otherworldly success also had stark ramifications for the American film industry. Prior to Star Wars the special effects in Hollywood movies had not changed in any significant way since the 1950s. To create his vision for Star Wars—of dazzling views of strange imaginary planets, menacingly realistic spacecraft, strange alien monsters and robots, laser blasts, light flashes, laser sword fights, and endless explosions—George Lucas had, through a side company called Industrial Light & Magic, done something wholly new. “Like The Birth of a Nation and Citizen Kane,” wrote noted film critic Roger Ebert some years later, “Star Wars was a technical watershed that influenced many of the movies that came after. . . . It linked space opera and soap opera, fairy tales and legend, and packaged them as a wild visual ride.” Star Wars, according to Ebert, “focused the industry on big-budget special effects blockbusters, blasting off a trend we are still living through. . . . In one way or another, all the big studios have been trying to make another Star Wars ever since.”29

  Star Wars was also revolutionary because it created a franchise mentality in Hollywood in the form of spin-off toys, figurines, games, and other merchandise.30 The “action” figures and associated toys earned millions and millions of dollars and changed not only movie merchandising but the American toy industry. They also put Hollywood on a distinct path for the foreseeable future. Or as Paul Schrader, who wrote the screenplays for such heavy 1970s dramas as Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, explained in more dire terms, “Star Wars was the film that ate the heart and the soul of Hollywood,” Schrader said. “It created the big-budget comic book mentality.”31

  Through the rest of June, with the newly adolescent-minded country’s head aswim with images of distant planets, intergalactic space airliners, and funky alien creatures, baseball’s annual pennant race seemed to take a back seat just as it was beginning to heat up. In the American League, on June 14, five teams—the California Angels, Minnesota Twins, Texas Rangers, Chicago White Sox, and Kansas City Royals—were within spitting distance of first place in the Western Division. In the Eastern Division, meanwhile, three teams—the Boston Red Sox, Baltimore Orioles, and New York Yankees—were separated by just two games. And in the National League East, three teams—the Philadelphia Phillies, St. Louis Cardinals, and Pittsburgh Pirates—were neck and neck as they chased the Cubs, whose early surge had put them four and a half games ahead of the second-place Pirates.

  After another loss to the Cubs on June 17 and a Reds win against the Expos, the Dodgers’ division lead fell to just six and a half games. It was the team’s smallest lead since April 28. Since their seasonal high-water mark after their win over the Reds on May 27, when the team’s winning percentage was .750, the Dodgers had won eight games and lost eleven. Again, team observers wondered if the Dodgers were destined to run out of gas. It wasn’t until June 18, at home again against Chicago, that the team finally showed signs of returning to life. Veteran left-hander Tommy John and shortstop Bill Russell combined to give the Dodgers a come-from-behind 2–1 win over the Cubs. John went the distance in the game, and Russell had three hits, scored a run, and helped turn four double plays to keep Cubs base runners at bay. John improved his record on the season to 7-4, and Russell, who had been another of the few Dodgers who had not performed up to expectations thus far at the plate, raised his seasonal average, thanks to a recent eight-game tear in which he was batting .457, to a respectable .272.

  In the games that followed the team slowly and surely returned to its earlier winning ways, increasing its distance from the Reds and the rest of the division and rewarding Lasorda for his confidence in them. On June 19, during a 3–1 win over the Cubs, a brawl broke out on the field after Cubs starter Rick Reuschel hit Reggie Smith with a pitch, and Smith charged the portly pitcher, punching him in the side of the head. Once the dust had settled Smith and the Cubs’ Reuschel, catcher George Mitterwald, and manager Herman Franks had been ejected by home plate umpire Ed Sudol. In the Dodgers’ next series against the Cardinals at home, they took two of three. Then, after splitting a series in Cincinnati against the Reds, the Dodgers won three of four in Atlanta against the Braves and four straight in San Francisco against the Giants. After the final win in San Francisco—a three-hit, 4–0 shutout tossed by Don Sutton that was the team’s fifth straight win, twelfth win in a row at Candlestick Park, and sixteenth win in the previous twenty-one games—the Dodgers found themselves back in front in their division by ten and a half games.

  Lasorda was effusive over the team’s return to its winning ways. “Every day, it’s something new,” he said after the sweep of the Giants. “One day it’s Cey, the next day it’s Smith and then it’s Garvey. It’s like Don Sutton so eloquently said a few months ago—playing the Dodgers is like fighting an octopus. You may keep seven of his tentacles occupied but the eighth one will get you.”32

  11

  Heroes and Villains

  I always try to act as though there is a little boy or a little girl around, and I try never to do anything that would give them a bad example.

  —Steve Garvey, to television reporters during the 1974 World Series

  As an athlete, I am no one to be idolized. I will not perpetuate that hoax. They say I don’t like kids. I think that by refusing to sign autographs, I am giving the strongest demonstration that I really do like them. I am looking beyond mere expediency to what is truly valuable in life.

  —Mike Marshall, to Sport Illustrated’s Ron Fimrite, August 22, 1974

  Numerous observers have pointed out through the years that baseball mimics the feel of daily life. For one thing the baseball season is long. Spanning from the preseason in late February to the postseason in later October, the season has strong tidal ebbs and flows, high peaks and low valleys, fast-moving stretches and painful slowed-down passages. To some the length of the baseball season is criminal. “The season starts too early and finishes too late,” said Indians, Browns, and White Sox owner Bill Veeck, “and there are too many games in between.”1 To others, though, the duration is part of the sport’s particular appeal. “Baseball is a game of the long season,” wrote John Updike, “of relentless and gradual averaging-out. . . . Of all the team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is essentially a lonely game.”2 Baseball players themselves have reacted to the season’s length with similarly mixed emotions. Giants third baseman Al Gallagher, in 1971, sweepingly described the effect of baseball in his life. “There are three things in my life which I really love,” he said. “God, my family, and baseball. The only problem—once baseball season starts, I change the order around a bit.”3 Pitcher Jim Bouton, who became widely known for his 1970 tell-all baseball book, Ball Four, put it even more poig
nantly: “You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”4

  Having been, by 1977, a baseball man for more than thirty years, Tommy Lasorda well understood how long the baseball season was and how this fact tended to level things out over the long haul. This must have been on his mind, in fact, when a sportswriter asked him whether he thought the team’s tailspin at the end of May was just the law of averages catching up with the team. “I don’t know about that,” he quipped. “I never studied that branch of the law.”5 Despite the team’s recent woes, as the midway point of the 1977 season approached Lasorda knew he had plenty to crow about. His boys had played well, and, despite the highs and lows, they held, at the end of June, the best record in the Major Leagues. The team’s pitching had been predictably solid, its fielding adequate, and a number of everyday position players were having career seasons. Each day, it seemed, someone new was stepping up, making a crucial play in the field, or getting a timely hit that helped the team win.