Dodgerland

by Michael Fallon

  In 1980 Fallon’s hardware store moved thirteen miles down old Route 66 to a shopping center in LaVerne, and something about the location, or the community’s drive-through quality, made it hard for the business to thrive as it had in Cucamonga. Though the partnership held on as long as it could, after several years the business became increasingly untenable. Seeing the writing on the wall—namely, that his father was struggling to hold on to his last major asset at an age when he should be thinking of retirement—son James Fallon walked away from the store, turning over all assets to his father, Tom, as a small nest egg.

  For the Dodgers the year 1979 was best forgotten. Thing got so bad that, after the season, an L.A. paper conducted a December poll of its readers asking, “Should Lasorda manage the Dodgers next season?” “Gee, that’s kind of tough,” Lasorda said of the poll. “Two Western Division titles and two National League Championships in three years and this newspaper was wondering if I should be fired. Fortunately, I had learned early in my career that it is impossible to win an argument with anyone who buys ink by the gallon. So I ignored the poll.” Besides, Lasorda added, “I won 5,822 votes to 2,123.”15

  Lasorda’s Dodgers would eventually recover from the down year, rebuilding their pitching staff and getting healthy enough to tie for the Western Division title with Houston in 1980 before losing in a one-game tiebreaker playoff, 7–1. After the 1980 season, at a welcome-home luncheon, Lasorda promised the assembled crowd, as always, that the Dodgers would win the world championship in 1981. Yet the World Series almost didn’t happen that year. A player strike in the middle of the season—primarily over the issue of compensation for teams that lose players to free agency—cut the season by more than a third. The Dodgers’ eventual victory in the World Series, poetically enough over the New York Yankees in six games, came only after two unusual five-game playoff series—against the Astros, who had the best divisional record in the second half of the season, and the Expos, who emerged victorious from the Eastern Division scrum. In both cases the Dodgers had to overcome losses in the first two games with dramatic, come-from-behind victories. Against the Expos, in fact, the final victory was secured by perhaps the most dramatic of all Dodger postseason home runs up to that point: a stunning ninth-inning shot by the team’s starting right-fielder, Rick Monday. Yes, the embattled, often injured Rick Monday finally paid off for the Dodgers, some five years after coming to the team.

  The championship that Tom Lasorda had long wanted to bring to Dodgerland would come just in time. In 1982 the team’s core players would begin to scatter. An aging Dave Lopes would be traded to Oakland before the start of the 1982 season, replaced by a rookie named Steve Sax.16 In 1983 Ron Cey would be traded to the Chicago Cubs for two prospects, making room for Pedro Guerrero to take over the position, and Steve Garvey would sign a free-agent contract with the Padres, making room for touted prospect Greg Brock.17 Among the other Dodger players from 1977–78 who came up through the Minors with Tom Lasorda, few remained past the first years of the new decade. The injured Doug Rau was released outright by the Dodgers before the 1981 season, and Charlie Hough had been bought by the Texas Rangers midway through the 1980 season. Joe Ferguson was released by the Dodgers in August 1981. Steve Yeager would continue playing with the Dodgers through 1985 before being traded to the Seattle Mariners. Only quiet, unassuming Bill Russell would remain with the team into 1986, eventually retiring as a Dodger at season’s end after an eighteen-year, 2,181-game career with the team.18 Russell would become a Dodger coach under Lasorda in 1987 and later became manager during a tough transitional moment for the team in 1996–98.

  Despite the crushing World Series losses in his first two seasons, Tom Lasorda would manage the Dodgers for twenty years, win two World Series titles (in 1981 and 1988),19 and gain a spot in Baseball’s Hall of Fame. The sport of baseball, meanwhile, from its point of crisis in the 1970s—with its labor struggles, changing character, attendant fan apathy (and antipathy)—would survive and thrive, regaining new fans even as the game continued to evolve. And while the strike in 1981 would cause a great deal of fan defection, and rampant drug use in the league would culminate in several sensational trials in the 1980s (and later performance-enhancing drug controversies in the 1990s and 2000s), baseball would survive its challenges as a pliable institution that could adapt and evolve with the times. As with America itself, baseball would repeat a cycle of decline, struggle, failure, redemption, and recovery over and over again, and the sport would prevail through it all.

  Notes

  1. The Days of Bad Baseball

  1.Born in 1928, Martin was part of the Silent Generation—those born between 1925 and 1945—who did not serve during World War II but came of age in the 1950s during the Korean crisis.

  2.AP, “It All Started Very Innocently Tuesday,” Lethbridge (Alberta) Herald, June 5, 1974.

  3.Pete Spudich, “Dime Beer the Culprit,” Las Cruces (NM) Sun-News, June 6, 1974.

  4.Spudich, “Dime Beer the Culprit”; Kent Pulliam, “Do the Cleveland Fans Deserve a Team?,” Hutchinson (KS) News, June 6, 1974; AP, “Fans Go Too Far,” Hutchinson (KS) News, June 6, 1974; Spudich, “Dime Beer the Culprit.”

  5.United Press International (UPI), “Indians Protest Riot Forfeiture,” Owosso (MI) Argus-Press, June 6, 1974.

  6.Tom Wolfe, “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” New York, August 23, 1976.

  7.Tom Wolfe, In Our Time (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1980), 4, 7.

  8.“To Set the Economy Right,” Time, August 27, 1979.

  9.Doug Brown, “Bottle Narrowly Misses Chylak after Close Call in Baltimore,” Sporting News, May 28, 1966.

  10.George Castle, When the Game Changed: An Oral History of Baseball’s True Golden Age, 1969–1979 (Guilford CT: Lyons Press, 2011), 313–14.

  11.Castle, When the Game Changed, 7–8.

  12.Whereas a strike had long been, by custom, any pitch located between a batter’s knees and his midchest, in the 1960s strikes were now called anywhere between the knees and the shoulders.

  13.“Charlie Finley: Baseball’s Barnum,” Time, August 18, 1975.

  2. Where It Will Always Be 1955

  1.Cucamonga had been made nationally famous as the strange-sounding punch line in a bit on the Jack Benny TV show. The strange sound of the town’s name, Cucamonga, in fact, comes from the Native Tongva language. Cuc means to “come from,” amo means “water,” and nanga means “village.” So the name is said to mean “the village where water comes from,” which was of course strange and ironic—since Cucamonga was bone-dry, even compared to the rest of Southern California.

  2.Jimmy Carter, “Address to the National Press Club by Jimmy Carter Announcing His Candidacy for the 1976 Democratic Presidential Nomination,” in Jimmy Carter Presidential Campaign Announcement Speech Flyer (December 12, 1974).

  3.Castle, When the Game Changed, 33–34, 28.

  4.Williams was eventually replaced, in time for the 10 Cent Beer Night riot, by another, lesser, 1950s-era luminary (and more successful manager)—Billy Martin.

  5.Author James Michener called The Boys of Summer “America’s finest book on sports.” In 2002 Sports Illustrated selected Kahn’s masterpiece as the best of all American books on baseball (and second-best sports book of all time). The Boys of Summer to date has been reprinted nearly ninety times and has sold more than three million copies.

  6.Durocher led Brooklyn to a 1941 World Series appearance, its first in more than twenty years, where the team lost, for the first time, to the New York Yankees.

  7.Branch Rickey, Branch Rickey’s Little Blue Book: Wit and Strategy from Baseball’s Last Wise Man (Toronto: Sport Classic Books, 1995), 17.

  8.The year 1947 was also when Jackie Robinson would debut on the Dodgers’ Major League squad.

  9.Among the people whom Rickey would influence were Hall of Famers Walt Alston, Leo Durocher, Tom Lasorda, and Dick Williams, as well as Gene Mauch, Herman Fran
ks, Don Zimmer, and Roger Craig—all of whom, after coming up through the Dodger system, went on to have successful careers as team leaders. So influential was Rickey that even rivals such as Sparky Anderson, manager of the Cincinnati Reds, were admirers. “Strictly for baseball fundamentals,” wrote Anderson in his autobiography, “I believe the game peaked in the 1950s. That was primarily because of the genius of Branch Rickey. He was a baseball scientist. What Abner Doubleday invented, Mr. Rickey perfected. He was the greatest innovator this game has ever known. He had the sharpest baseball mind I ever saw.” Sparky Anderson with Dan Ewald, Sparky! (New York: Prentice Hall, 1990), 91.

  10.The Dodgers won 3,135 games during this stretch and the Yankees 3,185—a difference of only 50 games over thirty-five years. The only other team that came close to this level of success was the St. Louis Cardinals, who had won more than 100 fewer games—3,001—than the Dodgers.

  11.Dan Epstein, Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride through Baseball and America in the Swinging ’70s (New York: St. Martin’s, 2010), 41.

  12.This transaction, at the time widely derided, would eventually prove crucial to the Dodgers’ fortunes, as it netted the Dodgers an important player in pitcher Tommy John.

  13.Jim Murray, “On Dodgertown,” Schenectady (NY) Gazette, April 4, 1977.

  14.Walt Alston with Jack Tobin, A Year at a Time (New York: World Books, 1976), 194.

  3. Detours along the Dodger Way

  1.Tom Singer, “The Greatest Draft in Baseball History: Forty Years Ago, Dodgers Strike Gold with Their Picks,” MLB.com, May 6, 2008.

  2.Singer, “Greatest Draft.”

  3.Singer, “Greatest Draft.”

  4.Alston with Tobin, Year at a Time, 195.

  5.“Game One, World Series Broadcast,” ABC TV, October 11, 1977.

  6.Halfway through 1976 the Dodgers, spurred by requests from several frustrated teammates, would trade Marshall to Atlanta.

  7.Alston with Tobin, Year at a Time, 180; Anderson with Ewald, Sparky!, 92; Hank Hollingsworth, “Alston: The ‘Quiet’ Agitator,” Long Beach (CA) Independent Press Telegraph, August 8, 1976.

  8.For instance, outfielder Jimmy Wynn, who had disappointed in 1975, was traded along with several other players to the Braves for outfielder Dusty Baker; outfielder Willie Crawford was traded to St. Louis for infielder Ted Sizemore; catcher Joe Ferguson was traded to St. Louis for Reggie Smith; and Mike Marshall was traded to the Braves for reliever Elias Sosa.

  9.Wire story, “Alston, Sportswriter Exchange Insults,” Hayward (CA) Daily Review, August 23, 1976.

  10.Ross Newhan, “If Fired, I Won’t Cry,” Los Angeles Times, September 19, 1976.

  11.Newhan, “If Fired.”

  12.Ross Newhan, “Alston Retiring after Managing 23 Years,” Los Angeles Times, September 28, 1978.

  13.Newhan, “Alston Retiring.”

  14.Newhan, “Alston Retiring.”

  15.Ross Newhan, “Dodgers Get Their Man; It’s Lasorda,” Los Angeles Times, September 30, 1976.

  16.Bill Plaschke with Tom Lasorda, I Live for This (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 117–18. Later, Lasorda also reportedly rebuffed a similar offer from the Atlanta Braves.

  17.As it happens Lasorda’s embrace of the “Dodger Blue” refrain was an example of his quintessential “company man” approach to the game. In 1977 Dodger administrators were looking at ways to build the team’s already solid popularity when they struck on a simple notion. “I had always been impressed by the way the major colleges in this country have been able to develop a great spirit among their fans,” wrote the team’s vice president of marketing at the time, Fred Claire. “From Notre Dame football to Indiana basketball, there was a special flavor to these programs. And a central component of that flavor were colors, from the gold of the Fighting Irish’s helmets to the bright red of the Hoosier’s uniforms. So why not add a color to the Dodger identification, Dodger Blue? . . . I knew Tommy would be the perfect person to spread the blue all over town. It ended up being spread all over the world.” Fred Claire with Steve Springer, My Thirty Years in Dodger Blue (New York: Sports, 2004), 39.

  18.Plaschke with Lasorda, I Live for This, 63, 168.

  19.UPI, “‘Bums’ Speak Up,” Pacific Stars and Stripes, October 2, 1976.

  20.Newhan, “Dodgers Get Their Man.”

  21.John Hall, “The New Man,” Los Angeles Times, January 13, 1977.

  22.Ross Newhan, “Now the Dodgers Know Where They Stand,” Los Angeles Times, January 18, 1977.

  23.Plaschke with Lasorda, I Live for This, 104.

  24.Newhan, “Now the Dodgers Know.”

  25.UPI, “Dodgers Say Good-bye to Walt, but He Isn’t Going Anywhere,” DeKalb (IL) Daily Chronicle, December 9, 1976.

  26.UPI, “Dodgers Say Good-bye.”

  4. Great Expectations, Everybody’s Watching You

  1.Buckner had 405 PAs in 1972, short of the 502 required to qualify for the batting title.

  2.Ross Newhan, “Monday: The 4-Year Pitch,” Los Angeles Times, January 12, 1977.

  3.Ross Newhan, “Buckner on Trade: ‘I Feel Like a Piece of Meat,’” Los Angeles Times, January 13, 1977.

  4.Newhan, “Monday: The 4-Year Pitch.”

  5.Modern sabermetric thinking notwithstanding, fielding percentage was considered a vital stat in 1977. And while Dodger management was likely aware that other outfielders in the system were more talented in the field, the Dodgers hoped to find in Monday a balance between run production and power and decent-enough fielding.

  6.Dave Distel, “It’s ‘Flag Day’ as Cey Singles to Beat Cubs,” Los Angeles Times, April 26, 1976.

  7.Distel, “It’s ‘Flag Day.’”

  8.Newhan, “Monday: The 4-Year Pitch.”

  9.In 1977 players and their families would stay in brand-new Spanish-style villas, which were situated around winding streets named after the Hall of Fame Dodger players of the past: Duke Snider Street, Jackie Robinson Avenue, Roy Campanella Boulevard, Sandy Koufax Lane. The wide array of features in the camp included the five-thousand-seat Holman Stadium, where the Dodgers played spring-training games; three additional full-size baseball fields, one of which had a battery of “Iron Mikes,” or automatic pitching machines for players needing extra batting practice; a movie theater that showed a different film every night; an Olympic-size pool for players and their families; tennis and basketball courts; Ping-Pong and pool tables; a nine-hole golf course; and an eighteen-hole championship golf course called Dodger Pines. Despite the plentiful facilities at the Dodgers’ camp, the location was still known for its intimacy. Orange groves, royal palm trees, and exotic species of flowering plants were a common feature of the landscaping. One Sports Illustrated writer called the place “a baseball training facility disguised as an arboretum.” According to another sportswriter from Pittsburgh who visited Vero Beach for the first time in 1977, the grounds were kept up as “meticulously as any condominium site in Florida.” The writer was so taken by the Dodgers’ camp that, despite his plans to tour all other training camps in Florida, he stayed in Vero Beach several additional days.

  10.John Hall, “Spring Games,” Los Angeles Times, March 18, 1977.

  11.In 1976 the Dodgers had hit just 91 home runs, compared to the pennant-winning Cincinnati Reds’ 141.

  12.In 1976, for example, while playing with Class A Lodi, Westmoreland had committed nineteen errors in thirty-one games at third base.

  13.Steve Brener, Fred Claire, and Bill Shumard, eds., Dodgers ’76 Media Guide (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Dodgers, 1976).

  14.George Vass, “These Rookies Are Tabbed ‘Best Bets’ of ’77,” Baseball Digest, March 1977.

  15.Glenn Burke with Erik Sherman, Out at Home: The Glenn Burke Story (New York: Excel, 1995), 15.

  5. The Land of Golden Dreams

  1.“California: A State of Excitement,” Time, November 7, 1969.

  2.Tom Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolor
ed Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1965), 88–89. Wolfe described how the challenge was thrown down in the California fashion, quoting one of the hot-rodders: “A guy goes up to another guy’s car and looks it up and down like it has gangrene or something, and he says: ‘You wanna go?’ . . . Well, as soon as a few guys had challenged each other, everybody would ride out onto this stretch of Sepulveda Boulevard or the old divided highway, in Compton, and the guys would start dragging, one car on one side of the center line, the other car on the other. Go a quarter of a mile. It was wild. Some nights there’d be a thousand kids lining the road to watch, boys and girls, all sitting on the sides of their cars with the lights shining across the highway.”