Dodgerland
Page 1
“Dodgerland is a fascinating study of American culture in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Among the characters marching across the pages are Tom Wolfe, Hugh Hefner, Charles Manson, Jim Bouton, Mayor Tom Bradley, Frank Zappa, and, of course, the men who bled Dodger blue, including imperfect heroes such as Steve Garvey, Don Sutton, Reggie Smith, and Glenn Burke. All came for the American Dream. Not all of them made it.”
—Peter Golenbock, author of The Bronx Zoo
“An intriguing, often audacious tale that weaves in such iconic characters as John Wayne and Bob Marley, Tom Wolfe and Tommy Lasorda. In the eye of this cultural hurricane, for a moment or two, stood the 1977–78 Los Angeles Dodgers. Here is their story—deftly told.”
—Tim Wendel, author of Castro’s Curveball
“Michael Fallon has given us the California counterpart to The Bronx Is Burning, a sweeping yet intimate portrayal of the seventies’ denouement on the West Coast. Here’s the American Dream in Dodger blue, a black mayor, a pioneering journalist, and a hardworking hardware store owner.”
—John Rosengren, award-winning author of The Fight of Their Lives
Dodgerland
Dodgerland
Decadent Los Angeles and the 1977–78 Dodgers
Michael Fallon
University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln & London
© 2016 by Michael Fallon
Cover images: top image © iStockphoto.com/Tatiana Georgieve; bottom image © AP Images
Author photo courtesy of Carrie Thompson
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fallon, Michael, 1966–author.
Title: Dodgerland: decadent Los Angeles and the 1977–78 Dodgers / Michael Fallon.
Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016002293 (print)
LCCN 2016004109 (ebook)
ISBN 9780803249400 (hardback: alk. paper)
ISBN 9780803288317 (epub)
ISBN 9780803288324 (mobi)
ISBN 9780803288331 ( pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Los Angeles Dodgers (Baseball team)—History—20th century. | Los Angeles (Calif.)—Social conditions—20th century. | BISAC: SPORTS & RECREATION / Baseball / History. | HISTORY / United States / State & Local / West (AK, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT, NV, UT, WY).
Classification: LCC GV875.L6 F35 2016 (print) | LCC GV875.L6 (ebook) | DDC 796.357/64097949409047—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002293
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Contents
Prologue: Tuesday, October 17, 1978
Part 1. 1977
1. The Days of Bad Baseball
2. Where It Will Always Be 1955
3. Detours along the Dodger Way
4. Great Expectations, Everybody’s Watching You
5. The Land of Golden Dreams
6. We Were All Rookies Again
7. The Game Has Gotten Worse
8. But You Can Never Leave
9. Hollywood Stars and Blue Hard Hats
10. A John Wayne Kind of Adventure
11. Heroes and Villains
12. Dog Days in Dogtown
13. The Right Stuff
14. Gonna Fly Now
15. Klieg Lights, Smoke Bombs, and Three Massive Bombshells
Interlude: Postorbital Remorse; or, There’s Always Next Year
Part 2. 1978
16. Rediscovering Baseball
17. Paradise Defiled
18. The Redemption of Rick Monday
19. Every Day We Pay the Price
20. The Ballad of Glenn and Spunky
21. Ain’t Talkin’ ’bout Love
22. Untaxing the Golden Cow
23. Nothing Is Clicking Right Now
24. The Grapple in the Apple
25. Is the Force with Us?
26. Clinching
27. The Inevitable Yankee Miracle
28. Chronic Hysteresis; or, Another Yankees-Dodgers Rematch
Afterword: Leaving Babylon
Notes
Index
Prologue
Tuesday, October 17, 1978
The stout figure on the bench told the story. His face had the hangdog look of an Italian Boxer. His body, slumped backward, was as distressed as a Renaissance pietà. He was in obvious pain, his spirit deflated, his copious ego crushed. He could only watch as his boys—all his beloved “sons”—were being beaten by a remorseless enemy. As the manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1978, he had no choice but to suffer the indignities of yet another likely loss to the Yankees of New York and to suffer it in front of fifty-five thousand live spectators and an entire TV-watching nation.
To the manager’s left, the team’s first baseman unconsciously mirrored his manager’s posture. To his right, assistant coach Monty Basgall sat more upright, arms locked in a tight fold over his chest. All three men had the look of a kid whose favorite toy had just been taken by the biggest bully on the block. And why wouldn’t they look this way? It was the eighth inning of the sixth game of the 1978 World Series, and the Los Angeles Dodgers were losing in the worst possible way, to their hated rivals. Here at home, in Dodgerland. In front of their own fans. For the second year in a row.
Down at the other end of the bench, other players were less openly dismayed. After all, they had come about as close as you could get to a happy ending without actually reaching that peak. Sure, it was frustrating, but most players, most people, never even got a shot at baseball’s championship. So they wouldn’t win this time. They had no reason to hang their heads. Hell, they were a damn good team of ballplayers, and they were still young. There would be other opportunities.
If anything, the players felt bad for the man at the end of the bench, their manager: old Tom. Tommy Lasorda. They regretted they hadn’t lived up to old Tom’s confidence. Cocksure, blustery Tommy, ever convinced his boys would prevail. “When you guys get to Dodger Stadium and do something special,” they remembered him saying years ago when it seemed they’d never get out of Ogden, or Spokane, or Albuquerque, “look up in the stands for the spirit of a guy who helped you get there, a guy with a tear in his eye. Look up at old Tom.”
Now, with just six outs to go in Game Six, and the Dodgers about to lose it all, Lasorda had inwardly collapsed. His normally gregarious and enthusiastic self was gone. Tom Lasorda, who had survived the tough love of his Old World father, who had scrapped with bigger kids on Pennsylvania playgrounds, who had outplayed his physical ability to become a Major League pitcher, was now reduced to a taciturn and insecure shell of himself. He had nothing left to spur his players to win on this horrible Los Angeles night. He was defeated.
As Tom Lasorda languished on the bench at Dodger Stadium, about forty-one miles due east in the small town of Alta Loma another Tom had just settled down to watch the World Series on his patio TV. Just a year into his sixties, Tom had spent a long day on his feet at his hardware store, moving stock here and there, helping befuddled customers, and tousling the hair of their kids. Even though he had missed most of the game, catching the last few innings was still a nice way to spend the lovely evening’s remains. At least it wasn’t work.
When he saw the score, however, Tom let out a small, pained breath. It was audible enough that his wife of nearly forty years, Catherine, sneaked a look at him from her usual perch in the kitchen. Yes, Tom was still a strong man, having helped to raise six strapping Irish American kids (five of them sons) and having built businesses and kept houses in order, but she was still protective of him. When she saw that he was fine, she went back to the dishes.
Tom Fallon had been following the Dodgers for many years, going all the way back to the uncertain days after leaving the Philadelphia orphanage where he had spent eight years after his mother’s death. The orphanage was not a pleasant place in his memory. The nuns were cruel, beating him for his left-handedness and other imagined crimes. He left Philadelphia in 1934 and headed straight for New York, where he would later reunite with his three younger (surviving) siblings, whom he had not much seen since they were all sent to different orphanages. It was while in New York that Tom discovered the Brooklyn team.
The Brooklyn Dodgers of the era were a sloppy squad, but Tom liked their pluck. He especially liked a lippy shortstop who would go on to bigger renown, even infamy. “He was a small guy,” Tom remembered, “but quick. And he had great hands. Strong hands, but soft as well. He could pick up anything that came close to him. I never saw a shortstop like him before, or since.” Leo Durocher was an All-Star player for the Dodgers twice in the late 1930s. In 1938 he finished in the top ten in league Most Valuable Player (MVP) voting, and the next year he took over as the hapless team’s player-manager. The 1939 Dodgers surprised everyone by finishing third with an 84-69 record. It was the team’s first winning season in a decade and the first of many to come. No wonder Tom Fallon became such a fan of the Dodgers. In the orphanage he long dreamed of better days. Among devoted Dodger fans whose rallying cry was “Wait till next year,” he found his tribe.
In time Tom Fallon’s love of baseball grew to encompass the history of the game and the great players of the past, whose life stories often sounded like his own. Across the patio from his easy chair, a bookshelf held one of Tom’s favorite books: The Glory of Their Times, by Lawrence Ritter. “This is a great book,” he would tell a curious grandson who was about the same age as Tom had been when he lost his mother. “It says something about what America used to be. Let me know what you think of it after you finish it.”
The grandson borrowed the book from Grandpa Tom and, even though it was thick as an adobe brick, read it in three or four sittings. He too became hooked on baseball’s history.
Farther afield, the reactions of other critical figures were less certain. From his Manhattan apartment, a third Tom—this one a distinguished writer and a social critic—might have caught wind of a shifting mood on the radio broadcast on the old RCA tube radio outside his office. He had been working away at his typewriter most of the day, trying to reach his daily quota of three pages, but the sound might have reminded him it was time to quit for the day. If so, Tom Wolfe would have pushed back his leather chair from his circular writing desk of polished teak and gilt trim and walked into the alcove just off his office. Then the crowd on the radio would have roared again.
The World Series. He had lost track of the World Series. What inning is it? What’s the score? He sat down on a nearby settee and listened for a moment. 7–2 after seven innings. The Yankees were leading, but Joe Ferguson of the Dodgers had led off the eighth with a sharp double to right-center. Wolfe would have pondered this. He had no great love for the Yankees. How could anyone love the Yankees? They were like Big Government. No one liked Big Government. Tom Wolfe was an old Giants (and small-government) man. He still worshipped the great Giants of his youth: Bill Terry, a boyish-faced assassin at the plate; Carl Hubbell, efficient as a clock maker on the mound; and Mel Ott, compact and unassuming, but as natural a hitter as ever played the game and with that crazy, eccentric high leg kick. When Wolfe was in college, editing the sports section of his school newspaper and playing semipro ball on the side, the Giants were the most storied team in the league. After school Tom arranged a tryout with the Giants. He was a pitcher, and an adequate one, but his stuff was nowhere near Major League level. He hung on at camp for three days before getting cut. Now, he liked to say, “If somebody had offered me a Class D professional contract, I would have gladly put off writing for a couple of decades.”
But that was years ago, and baseball had changed. The Yankees had long overtaken the Giants as the league’s dominant team and now represented all the worst impulses in American society: the burning desire to win, even at the expense of fair play; the poisonous love of wealth and success above all else; the imperial urge to dominate. And though the franchise’s fortunes had dimmed for the past ten years or so, now, in the middle of this decadent decade, the team had returned to its old ways. Like most Americans of honest conscience, Tom Wolfe hoped for the toppling of the New York Yankees.
On the other hand, he thought, the Dodgers were the ancient, bitter rival to his Giants. And now they were out in the sun-addled, libertine New Age lotusland of Southern California. How could he root for the Dodgers, with their pleasure dome of a stadium overlooking palm-treed vistas and smog-choked sunsets and glamorous Hollywood stars filling the field-level seats among the earnest women in their snap-around denim skirts and honest calves and their poor wimp husbands with their round eyeglasses and droopy beards and their babies spitting up natural-food mush onto their work shirts? Wolfe had seen his fill of the California social experiment, which he was certain would someday implode in a giant frenzy of self-satisfaction and waves of feathered, conditioned perfect hair. He did love that catcher Yeager, though—pugnacious and fearless, just like his cousin Chuck. Wolfe would have loved to throw to a guy like Steve Yeager back in his day . . .
A roar from the radio jarred Tom Wolfe from this imagined reverie. He leaned in to listen. Vic Davalillo from Venezuela, a forty-one-year-old retread with an odd, twitchy slap swing, had beaten out a slow Baltimore chop to second baseman Doyle. There were now men at first and second and no outs, and the top of the Dodgers’ order was due up. This could still be a game, Wolfe thought, and he waited to find out what would happen.
A bit more speculation about the last key character: In an office in L.A.’s city hall, just down the hall from the mayor’s office, two assistants might have leaned in close to the television as the Dodgers threatened in the eighth. The two, working late on details related to an upcoming ceremony at the White House, likely had been unable to stay away from the game. They wouldn’t have resented working late. No one who worked for Mayor Tom Bradley could survive for long if they hated long hours. And this was important work. He was poised to sign, at long last and in the presence of President Carter, an important agreement regarding the 1984 Summer Olympic Games. Mayor Bradley wanted everything to be planned out just right. They understood that.
On TV, though the volume was turned down, a burst of noise erupted. The Dodger Stadium crowd showed life for the first time since the third inning, and the Dodger bench was stirring. Score a few runs here, and a comeback was not impossible. As the next batter, Davey Lopes, stepped to the plate, one assistant would have nodded to the other and quickly left the room.
Down the hall, in his well-lit and comfortable office, Mayor Bradley sat working at his desk. The assistant knocked softly and then quietly stepped inside the office and waited. Behind the mayor, atop a large bookcase each ensconced in protective vitrines, sat the mayor’s collection of trophies, relics of track and field accomplishments in high school and college. Mayor Bradley paused and looked up, and the assistant told him what was happening in the game. Bradley looked at the assistant thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded before returning his attention to the papers on his desk.
Back in the TV room Davey Lopes flailed against Rich Gossage, striking out on four pitches, the last a breaking ball well out of the strike zone. Bill Russell followed Lopes, looking cooler, though it was hard to tell with Russell. He always looked this way, like he had ice in his veins. Russell waved his choked-up bat, waiting for something he could slash at. Gossage delivered a fastball, and Russell swung furiously, drilling a screamer down the third base line. Both of Bradley’s assistants leaped out of their seats—this could be extra bases!—and they could hardly believe what happened next.
Part 1
1977
1
The Days of Bad Baseball
; [I would] change policy, bring back natural grass and nickel beer. Baseball is the bellybutton of our society. Straighten out baseball, and you straighten out the rest of the world.
—Bill Lee, Los Angeles Times, February 3, 1977
If people in the early 1970s were unaware that America was becoming something different from what it had been a generation earlier, then June 4, 1974, opened a lot of eyes. That evening in Cleveland, the hometown Indians baseball team held a special promotional event at Cleveland Municipal Stadium for its game against the Texas Rangers. Called 10 Cent Beer Night, the idea was this: sell beer so cheaply that young fans would return in droves to support the team. While many baseball fans have a general sense of the events of that notorious night, a deeper look at the Beer Night riot reveals the forces behind the drastic changes occurring in baseball and American society at the time.
There was no big mystery why the Cleveland team had failed to draw fans over the previous decade. In six of the previous seven years, the Indians had been a miserable franchise, finishing at or near the bottom of its division each year. Its lineups were a rogues’ gallery of middling talent (Duke Sims, John Lowenstein, Steve Mingori, Frank Duffy, Tom Timmerman, Jack Brohamer, Bill Gogolewski). And its managers were either uninspiring organization men (Johnny Lipon, Ken Aspromonte) or bitter former stars who had fallen from grace (like Al Dark, late of the San Francisco Giants). For the desperate Indians, the Beer Night promotion worked like a charm, at least at first. At game time the stands of Municipal Stadium held more than twenty-five thousand fans, twice the season average. The fans were young and mostly male. They were in high spirits, and the beer flowed freely on a warm night. By one estimate the stadium moved more than sixty-five thousand units of beer. The trouble started almost immediately.
In the middle of the first inning several young male fans ran onto the field, drawing cheers from the crowd. As the Rangers ran up a 5–1 lead in the early innings, fireworks cracked and popped in the stands. More young men, including a streaker (or several, including possibly a woman, according to varying accounts), dashed onto the field. When the Indians narrowed the Rangers’ lead in the sixth inning, fans began throwing bottles and other missiles into the visitors’ bullpen in right field. The Rangers’ manager, Billy Martin, who was both a throwback to these kids’ fathers’ era of baseball and a famously pugnacious player prone to arguing with umpires, fighting on and off field, and drinking large amounts of alcohol, removed his players from the pen.1 In response fans threw firecrackers into the Rangers’ dugout. In the ninth inning, after the Indians fought back to tie the game, the levee finally broke. After one fan ran on the field and was rebuffed while trying to grab the cap of Rangers right fielder Jeff Burroughs, hundreds of young men flowed out of the stands. They surrounded Burroughs. “I tried to call time,” Burroughs said the next day, “but nobody heard me. I was getting scared because I felt the riot psychology.” When fiery Martin saw what was happening, he led his players into right field to save Burroughs. Many of them grabbed bats at Martin’s urging. “Jeff was out there all by himself,” Martin said. “I saw knives and chairs and other things. We just couldn’t let our teammate get beat up.”2 The Indians players also got into the act, and skirmishes between ballplayers and fans broke out all over the field. “It’s the closest I’ve ever seen anybody come to getting killed in my more than twenty-five years in baseball,” Martin added.3