Dodgerland
Page 22
After Sutton’s victory on July 4 someone had pointed out to him that he had recorded 186 lifetime victories as a Los Angeles Dodger, just one shy of the number of wins Don Drysdale had recorded as a Dodger in L.A. Sutton’s next win would thus tie him as the all-time wins leader of the Los Angeles Dodgers. On July 9, in a close game against the San Diego Padres in front of a crowd of nearly forty thousand at Dodger Stadium, Sutton pitched magnificently for nine innings, scattering five Padre hits while matching his career high for strikeouts with twelve and holding his opponents to just one run, only to see the team lose 2–1 when Charlie Hough gave up a run in the tenth inning. In the fifth inning of the game, an incident took place that may, or may not, have rankled Sutton. While people around the league had long suspected that Sutton occasionally employed an altered ball—either by marking it with some sort of tool, which was the source of his nickname, “Black & Decker,” or by using a petroleum product to create a sort of “spitball”—by 1977 the idea had become a kind of ongoing psychological battle. That is, Sutton often used the appearance of cheating to get in the head of opposing hitters, while opposing teams accused Sutton of cheating as a way of getting him off his rhythm. Al Dark, the Padres’ manager, did just that, hoping to disrupt the pitcher in the midst of a tight game. Whether Sutton was rankled this time, or perhaps had pushed himself too hard to win this game, the eventual loss was the first of a long, tough string for the pitcher.
Over the next month Sutton grew increasingly ineffective. On July 14 Sutton lost a close game, 4–3, against the Astros. In his first start after the All-Star Game, on July 23 against the Expos, he lost 6–4. After a no-decision against the Phillies on July 27, Sutton had the worst outing of the season on August 1, giving up nine hits and six runs in five and two-thirds innings against the lowly New York Mets. And on August 12 Sutton blew a sure win by giving up four runs in the top of the ninth and losing to the Braves at home, 5–2. By mid-August Sutton’s amazing season had all but collapsed, his record falling to 10-7 and his ERA gaining an entire run in just six weeks.
Not that there weren’t bright spots for the Dodgers in August, hidden behind the scrim of slump and injury that had defined the past month. Plenty of his Dodger players, Lasorda had to acknowledge, were playing their hearts out. Tommy John, for instance, has quietly won sixteen games, against just five losses, while lowering his ERA to 2.57. The starting pitching in general, in fact, was solid—effectively keeping the team in the playoff hunt despite the rest of the team’s struggles. Rick Rhoden won his sixteenth game on August 31. Doug Rau had thus far won thirteen games (against just five losses). And Burt Hooton, though he’d hit some rough spots,13 had recorded a strong ERA of 2.71.
Taken on the whole the team’s lineup had had a solid season at the plate despite the recent struggles. Cey had cooled some after his fast start, but he had twenty-four home runs and was fast closing in on one hundred RBIs. Reggie Smith was batting a solid .313 and had twenty-five home runs. Dusty Baker had managed twenty home runs. And both Russell and Lopes had been solid, contributing batting averages over .280 and solid play in the middle infield. And because it was the Dodger Way to think down the road to the future, Lasorda could take solace in the fact that the wider organization was thriving. Three of the team’s five Minor League affiliates were in first place in their leagues. On the team’s AAA franchise, the Albuquerque Dukes, several obvious prospects—Pedro Guerrero, Rafael Landestoy, Ron Washington, Rick Sutcliffe, and Dave Stewart—were waiting in the wings. Hank Webb, while not spectacular, had pitched well enough that the Dodgers were considering calling him up to Los Angeles in September. And Claude Westmoreland, who had not made the team in spring training, attracted some attention in Albuquerque by setting a new Minor League record by homering in seven straight games. With the team shorthanded after losing Teddy Martinez, the Dodgers’ front office might have briefly pondered bringing Westmoreland up, but since he would have been a major liability in the field, it never happened.
Despite the continuing concerns the future was still bright for the Dodgers, as was its present. Lasorda had no way of knowing it, but as August wound down the seeds of a final team turnaround were being sown by an unusual managerial move. On August 27 the Dodgers announced the signing of a wiry forty-one-year-old former Major League outfielder who had been playing in the Mexican League for the past three years. Originally from Venezuela, Vic Davalillo was a left-handed contact hitter with decent speed, who had rarely struck out in thirteen seasons spent with the Indians, Angels, Cardinals, Pirates, and A’s. The signing gave the Dodgers an intriguing one-two punch off their bench, the ageless Davalillo batting from the left side of the plate and Manny Mota, who in August 1977 was batting nearly .400 (and had an on-base percentage over .500), batting from the right side. Over the last month of the season, Davalillo would bat a solid .313 (fifteen for forty-eight) while pinch-hitting and filling in ably at the team’s trouble spot, center field.
And there was more encouraging news to come. On August 28 Steve Garvey finally let loose at the plate. It was a stunning turnaround. In a convincing 11–0 win over the Cardinals, Garvey went five for five, collected fourteen total bases, scored five of the team’s eleven runs, and knocked in five runs. “It’s great to be back,” Garvey told reporters after the game. “A day like today has a tendency to make you forget any hard time the last couple of months.”14 Incidentally, thanks to Garvey, on August 28 Don Sutton finally got his 12th win on the season and his 188th as a Dodger. He had at last moved past Drysdale into first place on the all-time Los Angeles Dodgers wins list.
The next day, as if confirming Garvey’s, and the team’s, reemergence, while the Dodgers first baseman batted in the first inning of a game against the Cubs, the notorious Kissing Bandit, Morganna, rushed home plate. Garvey at first hid behind the umpire, but then allowed her to kiss him on the check before she was ushered away by stadium police. The Dodgers got the win in the game, their fourth straight, and just like that the Dodgers were back in business. Suddenly, they seemed as loosey-goosey, and deadly effective, as they had been in April. On August 30 during the team’s regular “Kangaroo Court” session—a regular team gathering designed to allow players to blow off some steam by pointing out each other’s foibles and mistakes—word came that Don Sutton had been fined five hundred dollars for leaving the team recently for two days to do color commentary at the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. When Lasorda asked Sutton to step to the center of the clubhouse, the pitcher presented his manager with a meringue pie in the face—all to the merriment of his teammates. “Lasorda was my defense counsel,” Sutton explained later, “and I wanted to show him what I thought of the job he had done.”15 Lasorda reportedly took the pie incident well, indicating that perhaps the event had been prearranged beforehand as a way of releasing some of the team’s recent tension.
The good vibes continued growing. Before the game on August 31 the team rejoiced when Tommy John announced to his teammates the birth of his second child, a son named Thomas Edward Jr. Also that day news would come down that Mayor Bradley, in a move meant to honor the now retired former owner-president of the Dodgers, had proposed to the city council to rename Stadium Way O’Malley Way.16 Then, perhaps most important, on August 31 Steve Yeager started the Dodgers game against the Cubs after sitting out for a week. That he would go two for four and score a run in the 5–0 win over Chicago was a bonus, indicating that Lasorda had survived his gamble. Steve Garvey, meanwhile, had one hit and an RBI, continuing his recovery from his slump. Vic Davalillo, filling in for the still struggling Rick Monday, had three hits and scored two runs, and Manny Mota got a crucial pinch hit in the eighth inning of the game. The multiarmed octopus of Sutton’s imagination had returned.
After the game the Dodgers took their final step toward the playoffs by ending their Boog Powell experiment. The beefy Powell, who had not contributed the power that the Dodgers hoped for in 1977, would end his season, and his Major League career,
in Los Angeles without collecting a single extra-base hit. On September 1, while the expanded roster opened the door to a host of hopeful young players—including Webb, Landestoy, Ron Washington, Jeffrey Leonard, Bobby Castillo, and Lance Rautzhan—to join the team, Powell was released. On September 9, after Tommy John got his fourth win against the Reds on the season, and his eighteenth overall, the Dodgers stood thirteen and a half games atop the Western Division. Their magic number was now just eight with twenty-one games left to play. Even Johnny Bench could read the writing on the wall. “To be realistic,” said the Reds’ star catcher, “we don’t have much of a chance. We’re due for a comeback, but it’s probably too late.”17 On September 20 the team clinched the pennant on another stellar pitching performance by Tommy John—this time his nineteenth win on the season—and a rare home run by Rick Monday, his fourteenth of the season. After the game, in a jubilant clubhouse, Tom Lasorda hugged and thanked everyone for their effort, lavishing particular praise on his thirty-four-year-old left-hander, whom he had decided to name as his opening starting in the playoffs. At a lull in the celebration Lasorda moved to the center of the clubhouse and said, “I want to congratulate all of you. It’s been an honor to be your manager.”18
A few days later, on September 22, Lasorda turned fifty. At the team party that night, the second in three days, the Dodger manager stood up and spoke, saying that the pennant had been a great birthday present, but the lavish party funded by the team’s Kangaroo Court money was not so bad either.
14
Gonna Fly Now
Ah come on, Adrian, it’s true. I was nobody. But that don’t matter either, you know? ’Cause I was thinkin’, it really don’t matter if I lose this fight. It really don’t matter if this guy opens my head, either. ’Cause all I wanna do is go the distance.
—Rocky Balboa
The divisional playoff system in Major League Baseball was, in 1977, still a relatively recent invention and a somewhat odd event. On the one hand, these playoffs—established in 1969 and officially called the League Championships Series (LCS)—felt somewhat trivial, an unwanted annoyance. After all, they weren’t the World Series, which had a history stretching back, in some form or another, more than one hundred years.1 By the 1970s the World Series was a spectacle and a life-changing event—for those who played in it, of course, but also for even casual fans of the game who often demarcated the moments of their lives based on when their home team last won a Series. But the League Championship Series was much more difficult to grasp and get behind.
The World Series was where heroes were created and where images of athletic prowess became part of the national imagination. The LCS, on the other hand, seemed like a formality, something you had to swallow in order to get to the main course. “If there really was such a thing as Tom Lasorda’s big Dodger in the sky, he would never have created a playoff,” wrote one L.A. sports columnist who fretted about the team’s chances in the LCS in 1977. The writer thought it was a “little sad for Los Angeles” since its dream of a season was likely about to end at the hands of the powerful Philadelphia Phillies, who had clinched the Eastern Division title on September 27. “The Dodgers didn’t quite do their 3 million at the gate, but they did just about everything else—first out of the gate, first all the way in the National West, first to clinch, first in attendance, first in pitching, first in double plays, first in Chinese dinners to go, first in victory parties, first in center fielders hanging upside down and first in blue this, blue that and big blue adjectives from the immortal Bill Russell to the incomparable Davey Lopes. . . . But so short, so bitterly sweet, and whatta way to go.”2
Despite the seeming pro forma quality of the League Championship Series, however, players did not approach the games as an afterthought. “There’s more pressure on you in the playoffs than in the World Series,” said pitcher Tommy John some years after his playing career. Toward the end of September, when Tom Lasorda announced that John would receive the honor of starting the Dodgers’ first playoff game in 1977 in Philadelphia, the veteran left-hander took a deep breath and tried to prepare himself. “If you lose in the playoffs, that’s all they remember about your season, no matter how good it was. The World Series is the gravy you enjoy after getting by the playoffs. There’s more press, more attention, and every pitch gets magnified. No matter how much you try to prepare yourself for it, you can’t fully appreciate what it’s like pitching for the first time in your first playoffs.”3
By 1977 the unique quality of the League Championship Series meant that the psychological battle to gain an edge, inspire your own players, fluster your opponents, and get public sentiment behind you often began weeks in advance. On September 24, just four days after the Dodgers clinched a spot in the playoffs as sure winners of the National League’s Western Division, the Dodgers’ Don Sutton assessed the team’s chances against the Phillies. While conceding that Steve Carlton, Philadelphia’s ace, was the best pitcher on either team, he all but dismissed the rest. “Overall their [pitching staff] doesn’t match up to ours,” he said. “And you can also legitimately say that on the basis of this year alone [Tommy] John has been Carlton’s equal.”4 Sutton went on: “[Our] team has more pitching depth, better defense, more guys capable of delivering offensively and a more consistent offense. I don’t mean to take anything away from the Philadelphia offense, but as for big guns you’re really only talking about Greg Luzinski and Mike Schmidt. They’ll have to hit a lot of solo home runs to beat us. By contrast, we have a handful of guys who can break it open with one swing. I think we have an advantage in offense as well as in pitching. It’s just awfully tough to stop us completely.”5
The Phillies were listening to Sutton, intently as it happened. While Lasorda’s hungry young players thought of themselves as a team of destiny, the Phillies, who hailed from a struggling, older, and more overburdened eastern city desperate for a winner—Philadelphia—were just hungry. Like Rocky Balboa, the fictional boxer from the gritty streets of Philadelphia who won the hearts of movie audiences in the summer of 1976, this Phillies squad had the aura of a people’s team. Loaded with the unhittable ace Steve Carlton, a nearly unhittable bullpen, dangerous sluggers like Greg Luzinski and Mike Schmidt, and speedy base stealers like Greg Maddux, Larry Bowa, and Bake McBride, the Phillies had won 101 games (compared to the Dodgers’ 98) in the tough National League East. After Sutton’s comments had been fully digested by the team, the Phillies began deploying their own artillery to fight the battle of words.
On October 2 Los Angeles papers led with the news that the Phillies were telling one and all how happy they were to be facing the Dodgers in the playoffs, as opposed to the Cincinnati Reds. The Reds, after all, had dispatched the Phillies from the playoffs the previous season in three straight games. Adding to the shock of this pronouncement was a biblical tinge of betrayal. Phillies manager Danny Ozark, who for thirty-one years before his move to Philadelphia had been a player and coach in the Dodger system, gave his former team only token respect.6 “They have their strengths and we have ours,” he said. “They’re not the toughest, because Cincinnati knocked the beans out of us. We haven’t won a game in Cincinnati in, I think, nine games. We played .500 against the Dodgers this year. So if you ask me which I’d rather play again, I’ll take the .500 club.”7
The psychological war was under way. The comments by Ozark, which were echoed by several of the team’s players, were deemed unacceptably dismissive by Lasorda and quickly found their way to the Dodgers’ clubhouse bulletin board. With a week still left in the regular season, various Dodgers, tired of hearing nothing but Reds, Reds, Reds despite all that they had accomplished this season, had murder on their breath. They were ready for the battle of their lives.
Frank Sinatra, who sang the national anthem at the Dodgers’ home opener back in April, threw out the first pitch of the first game of the National League Championship at Dodger Stadium on October 4. It was nearly the prettiest pitch thrown from the home side all night. Thirty-
four-year-old starter Tommy John, who was making the first postseason appearance of his long career, struggled with nerves from the start, giving up four runs off four hits and three walks before getting pulled in favor of Mike Garman in the fifth inning. That inning was particularly painful, as the normally composed John began by hitting the opposing pitcher, Steve Carlton, with a pitch before surrendering two Phillies runs that gave the team a 4–0 lead. Adding to John’s woes was a lack of support in the field—thanks to two errors by Bill Russell, all four of the runs he gave up were unearned. And while the Dodger battery would rally, tying the game 5–5 in the seventh on a Ron Cey grand slam, the team ultimately let the victory slip away when reliever Elias Sosa gave up two runs in the top of the ninth.
So much for murder on their breath. “That wasn’t us out there tonight,” said an angry Steve Yeager after the game. “I don’t know who the hell it was, but it wasn’t us.” Other players agreed that the occasion had done them in. “I think you are a little more nervous about a game like this,” said Steve Garvey, “because it’s something you’re not in all the time. We hadn’t been in it since ’74.”8 The Phillies, however, were brimming over with confidence after the game. “The Dodgers have to beat us tomorrow,” said Greg Luzinski, Philadelphia’s burly outfielder who looked more like a meatpacker than a Major Leaguer, “or as far as I’m concerned, it’s all over. They’ll have to win three in our ballpark, where we’ve played .750 ball. . . .9 We have a different attitude [than last year]. . . . [W]e’re hungrier.” Phillies third baseman Mike Schmidt, meanwhile, agreed: “Last year we had a bunch of young guys trying to achieve a goal. We just didn’t have enough drive left at the end to beat the Reds. Now we feel we’re going to win the championship . . . that someone is going to have to take it away from us.”10