Dodgerland

by Michael Fallon

  Allen wasn’t the only one who questioned the value of the Dodger Way. The great syndicated Los Angeles sports columnist Jim Murray, a longtime follower of the team, wrote about its Dodgertown spring-training facilities in the mid-1970s and found it curious that no picture of any recent Dodgers hung on the walls of the team’s clubhouses. “Will any of today’s players become streets in Dodgertown?” he wrote. “Or even pictures on a wall?” He noted that among the photos, only three depicted players from the team’s years in Los Angeles. And all three of these players—Koufax, Drysdale, and Wills—had retired. “Everything else is newer, shinier, and more efficient at Dodgertown. Gone are the barracks, the leaky roofs, the porous screens, the dripping showers, the 660-man chow lines, the raggedy old bedrooms. . . . But gone, too, are the Koufaxes, Hodgeses, Reeses, Drysdales, Robinsons, Campanellas, Newcombes, Labines, and Sniders. There is no movement afoot yet to take down their pictures for newer, more exciting ones. Dodgertown’s walls stay black-and-white. . . . On the walls, it will always be 1955.”13

  Considering the Dodgers’ glorious history over the past few decades, the reluctance to eschew traditions even in the new decade of the 1970s was understandable. But seven long seasons of mediocre play after the 1966 World Series had raised questions about the Dodger Way. In this the team had much in common with the country at large, since ordinary Americans were questioning the value of the American way. The conflict between the national desire to hold on to traditional values and a youthful embrace of rapid cultural change was a defining feature of the times. Caught in these muddy, uncertain waters, both in baseball and in the culture at large, the Dodgers were fortunate to have the phlegmatic presence of their tradition-minded manager, Walt Alston.

  “Now we could write two or three books on all the ifs, ands, and buts in baseball,” the patient Alston said of the seven-year stretch of futility for the team in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “But that wouldn’t change the standings in any of those years or any of the scores. . . . In those seven years without a pennant we seemed to have all the ingredients—even in 1967 and 1968—but frustrations pursued us every season.”14 Behind Alston, and with the blessing of the tradition-minded O’Malley family, the Dodgers remained determined to find a winning formula during a confusing new era of baseball. And the result of these efforts would affect the National League pennant races for years to come, even as it would move the Dodgers deep into the swirling maelstrom of change—to baseball, to the times, to sports in America.

  3

  Detours along the Dodger Way

  Over my years in baseball I’ve made a lot of friends among what we now call the media. It used to be the press but now radio and television are so big the name has changed. A lot of them have called me the Quiet Man—a reference I don’t totally agree with. Maybe I am to some. Others might not agree. Everyone who knows me well realizes that I’m slow to anger but, once I boil—watch out, it’s pretty hard to calm me down.

  —Walt Alston in 1976

  If I were starting my career again, I’d like to have Tom Lasorda as my manager.

  —Tommy Lasorda, Los Angeles Times, September 30, 1976

  The roots of the Dodger turnaround in the 1970s were actually planted during the team’s low point in 1967 and 1968. Chastened by their repeated failure at employing aging veterans to fill roster holes those years, and desperate for any sort of Band-Aid to stop the hemorrhaging, the Dodgers refocused on their own farm system and immediately found some talent there: a young pitcher named Don Sutton, an infielder named Ted Sizemore, and outfielders Bill Russell and Willie Crawford. Sutton became a solid regular starting pitcher for the team in 1966. Second baseman Sizemore won the Rookie of the Year Award in 1969, and, that same year, Russell and Crawford were brought up as quick corner outfielders. Russell eventually established himself as the team’s regular shortstop after Maury Wills retired at the end of the 1972 season, and Crawford became the team’s regular right fielder around the same time.

  The emergence of these players could not have been better timed, reminding Dodger management of their long history of “building from within” and leading them to seek a return to that model. Complicating matters, however, was the fact that, in 1965, Major League Baseball (MLB) had established a new method for teams to choose and sign first-year players. Whereas the effort to sign new players had long been a free-for-all that favored teams with more resources to scour the bushes and pay bonuses to new prospects, baseball’s new amateur draft, conducted for the first time in 1965, was meant to give every team an even shot at the prospect pool. As a result, after a few years the team’s management decided they had to deal with the new reality. “The Draft was in its infancy,” said Bill Schweppe, who was the Dodgers’ assistant farm director at the time, “and we didn’t have much experience.” So, sometime before the 1968 season, Al Campanis, the Dodgers’ director of scouting, and general manager (GM) Buzzie Bavasi decided to consult with a coterie of respected talent evaluators from the National Football League (NFL): Dan Reeves, then owner of the Los Angeles Rams; Sid Gillman, coach of the San Diego Chargers; and Al LoCasale, the draft coordinator for the Chargers. The key advice they received? Numbers. The NFL draft experts suggested the Dodgers bring in large numbers of prospective players. “The thought was that you didn’t know how well you would do signing these players,” Schweppe said, “so you better draft as many as you can.”1

  In the two phases of the 1968 draft, the Dodgers made 101 selections in fifty rounds. Campanis, reviewing recent statistics, had noted that the Dodgers were the National League’s worst hitting team in 1967—with a team average of .236—and had started out even more ineptly in 1968, held to one run or less in twenty of forty-nine games through May. “In our meeting before the Draft,” Campanis recalled, “I remember telling Peter [O’Malley, the owner’s son and an executive vice president for the team] that we were going for bats. We couldn’t buy a hit. So every time we had a tough choice to make, we went for the better hitter.”2 The team’s scouts dug deep, suggesting a number of players, led by standout Bobby Valentine, that the team would develop into future stars. Valentine won the Pioneer League MVP Award in his first year in the Minors, appeared in five games with the Dodgers in 1969, and was brought up to the Majors full-time in 1971. Rounding out the team’s picks, meanwhile, were a number of future Major Leaguers—Bill Buckner, Dave Lopes, Joe Ferguson, Steve Garvey, Ron Cey, Tom Paciorek, Doyle Alexander, and Geoff Zahn. They all entered the Dodgers’ farm system to gain seasoning.

  Dodger scouting notes and approach to developing these players reveal much about how a new team would eventually come together: Buckner was deemed a “hitting machine,” and quick, but difficult to place in the field. He rose through the system in much the same way as Valentine, eventually settling in at corner outfield and first base for the Major League team in 1971. Dave Lopes, an outfielder chosen in the second round of the January secondary draft, was called a “handy little guy,” who possessed a good attitude, great speed, and a good batting eye. He moved more slowly through the system, eventually making the team as a second baseman in 1973. Joe Ferguson, drafted in the sixth round of the June draft, was a strong-armed catcher with good plate skills and some power; he landed in the Majors in 1971. Steve Garvey, chosen in the first round of the June secondary draft, was a sharp-hitting third baseman who had questionable fielding range and a poor throwing arm, but his bat earned him significant playing time at the Major League level in 1970. Ron Cey, chosen two rounds after Garvey also as a third baseman, had solid power and was expected to rise through the system once he could shore up his fielding. He became the Dodgers’ everyday third baseman in 1973. Years later, Bill Schweppe rated the 1968 Dodger draft as outstanding, giving it a rare “nine-plus.” One of the players chosen in 1968, Tom Paciorek, concurred: “That might have been the best Draft in the history of baseball, because everyone played a long time in the big leagues.” Paciorek stayed with the Dodgers only a few seasons, never establishing himse
lf as a regular, but became an All-Star after being traded and stayed in the Majors for eighteen years. “Some had better careers than others,” Paciorek continued, “but they were all tremendous players with good baseball minds. And they were all great people.”3

  While Dodger fans remained disappointed and impatient over the next several seasons as their team got beat out by rival teams with established stars, the Dodgers’ brain trust never panicked—preferring to wait for the team’s young new players to develop. They did not have to wait terribly long. The team finished in second place in the 1971, 1972, and 1973 seasons, improving their overall record each year. Fans were still restless for a championship. “But,” said Alston, “everything came together in 1974.”4

  The 1974 Dodgers were an intriguing team. Orderly, efficient, no-nonsense, youthful, and relatively “starless,” they surprised the league from the start and won 102 regular-season games. The lineup in 1974 was a mishmash of homegrown talent that had blossomed seemingly despite the odds. Steve Garvey, for instance, had almost failed as a Major Leaguer before switching positions in 1973 and emerging as a regular starter at first base halfway through the season. Clean-cut and well spoken, Garvey was a write-in starter of the 1974 All-Star Game, one of only two times that such a thing has ever happened. He would provide a consistent, middle-of-the-lineup bat for many seasons for the Dodgers. On the corner opposite Garvey, at third base, was Ron Cey. Prior to Cey’s call-up in 1973, third base had easily been the least stable position for the Dodgers—the team had fielded forty-five different third basemen since their move to Los Angeles just fifteen years earlier. Cey’s physique—all torso, with too short legs that gave him a wobbly, awkward running style—had often been questioned by the team as he came up through its farm system. (The Dodgers once tried to trade Cey to Milwaukee, but the Brewers’ GM nixed the trade, saying, “I ain’t going to trade for no duck.”)5 Yet with his solid fielding and fair amount of slugging power, Cey brought stability to the position for a decade—the longest stint ever for a Dodger third baseman. Converted shortstop Bill Russell, on the other hand, was a quiet, unflashy, lead-by-example sort of player who covered shortstop territory adequately, had a solid arm (one of his nicknames was “Ropes”), and hit slightly better than average for his position. And Dave Lopes, the second baseman, blossomed from a shy speedster to a more vocal leader and capable catalyst of the team’s offensive attack. Another adequate fielder, Lopes set the table for the Dodgers in 1974 by stealing fifty-nine bases and scoring ninety-five runs.

  In keeping with the Dodger Way, perhaps the biggest key to the team’s success in 1974 was its surging pitching staff, led by twenty-eight-year-old Andy Messersmith, who had been picked up in a trade with the California Angels a few years earlier. The hard-throwing Messersmith blossomed on the Dodgers, winning twenty games while losing only six and finishing second in the Cy Young balloting. Reliever Mike Marshall, meanwhile, was the Cy Young Award winner that year, the first time a reliever had ever been so named. Picked up in a trade from the Montreal Expos, Marshall was an eccentric pitcher who espoused the idea that, with the right conditioning and mechanics, a pitcher could throw every day. In 1974 he broke the league record for appearances in a season (the record still stands today) and paved the way for new thinking about the evolving role that a “closer” played in a pitching staff. Marshall’s gruff personality and blunt manner of speaking also made him widely reviled among opposing players, opposing fans, even among his own teammates.6

  Pitcher Don Sutton was the team’s longest-tenured player. An occasionally acerbic man who was the son of a sharecropper from Alabama, Sutton saw himself as the face of the team in the years after its post-Koufax decline. Unfortunately, his teammates in the 1970s didn’t think quite as highly of him, and Sutton would run into trouble with several of the team’s new young players. And finally, there was Tommy John. A good-natured, aging, left-handed sinker baller, John was arguably the team’s most effective pitcher in 1974. He posted a team-leading 13-3 record with a 2.59 ERA in July before a severe elbow injury shut him down for the year and likely doomed the Dodgers’ hopes in the World Series.

  Rounding out the 1974 lineup was an array of young and promising everyday players—the speedy line-drive machine Bill Buckner, cannon-armed defense-specialist catcher Steve Yeager, rangy veteran outfielder Willie Crawford who, though still only twenty-seven, was playing his seventh season as a Dodger regular in 1974—as well as a slew of other Dodger farm products like Von Joshua; Lee Lacy; Joe Ferguson; Tom Paciorek; pitchers Doug Rau, Charlie Hough, and Geoff Zahn; and a few key veterans such as Jimmy Wynn, Manny Mota, Al Downing, and Jim Brewer.

  After the team’s surprising success in 1974, Dodger manager Walt Alston was awarded his sixth Manager of the Year Award by the Associated Press (AP). In his twenty-first season as the Dodgers’ manager, Alston put to rest any doubts, at least for now, about his insight and acuity in the face of the rapidly changing sport of baseball. It was difficult to argue with the sum of Alston’s amazing record. Going back to 1954, his first season as the Dodgers’ skipper, “Smokey” Alston, as he had been known since his childhood—or the “Quiet Man” as he had been dubbed later by the press—had managed the team through all of its glory years, including all four of its World Series victories and three more National League pennants. He had won more baseball games than all but five (at the time) other managers. Nineteen of his twenty-three seasons had been winning ones, and he had led the National League All-Star team to a record seven victories.

  Alston had so long been a fixture in the Dodgers’ dugout, sitting somewhat aloof from his players as he took in the game, that it seemed to many that the Quiet Man had always been manager of the Dodgers and always would be. Alston was not particularly old—just sixty-two years of age at the end of the 1974 season. Connie Mack, by comparison, had managed the Philadelphia A’s for fifty years, until he was eighty-seven years old. More recently, Leo Durocher managed until he was seventy-one and Casey Stengel until he was seventy-five. Still, as fans knew, there was a world of difference between the era when Alston had started managing—in the 1950s—and the 1970s. The players had changed in significant ways, not least of which was their growing expectation that the game owed them more—more money, more security, and much more personal attention. What’s more, unfortunately, there were signs that player expectations in the 1970s had begun to rankle the famously stoic manager.

  Prior to the 1970s baseball had long been a small-town sport. Mickey Mantle had come from Spavinaw, Oklahoma, the population of which hovered around 500. Ralph Kiner had come from Santa Rita, New Mexico, a place so small it eventually became a ghost town. Ken and Cletus Boyer had come from Alba, Missouri (pop. 588); Rod Carew from Gatun in the Panama Canal Zone (another ghost town); Catfish Hunter from Hertford, North Carolina (pop. 2,185); and so on. These were places that Walt Alston understood. Born in rural Ohio in 1911 to a town ball–playing farmer and his wife, Alston always remained a small-town ballplayer at heart. For twelve seasons as a Minor League manager in the 1940s and early 1950s, Alston had returned home to Ohio in the off-season to teach at the local high school. (He quit teaching only when his higher-level Minor League managerial jobs became too time-consuming.) Even in 1974, in the off-season away from the lights of Dodger Stadium and L.A., Alston lived in a large brick ranch home in Ohio that he and his father had built to house four generations of the family.

  Because of his particular ways, by the 1970s Alston had become something of a cipher to many of his players. Alston proudly called himself a midwesterner, and he was not by habit showy or demonstrative. As a manager his overall approach to the game was studious and analytical. He preferred not to play “hunches.” In many ways Alston’s managerial style was to strip things down to their barest essence. “I believe in keeping everything simple,” he wrote in his autobiography, which he wrote a year after the Dodgers’ World Series run in 1974, “allowing a great deal of room for the individual to think on his own and respond wi
thin general confines we have set down for the whole Dodger organization.” Rival managers like Sparky Anderson admired Alston for his character and his convictions. Alston, said Anderson, managed “by the book all the time” and worked to “force the other team to make plays.” Despite his seeming aloofness, however, Alston still cared greatly about winning and had done more of it than all but a handful of men in the game. “On the outside,” Sparky Anderson said of his rival, “Alston . . . was the wise old grandfather. You couldn’t trick him. He knew everything that was going on. As soon as he stepped onto the field he had so much presence. . . . He was cooler than a professional poker player. I always wondered how he could stay so peaceful. Alston was an excellent strategist. He played chess on the field, but was never fancy.” “Walt is an agitator, make no mistake about that,” said Red Adams, a longtime Dodgers pitching coach. “But one thing about him is that he never lets little things bother him. He’s so damned consistent that you could set your watch by him, and he doesn’t miss a thing. He does everything so easy, he gives the impression that he’s not doing a lot. But he has a way of getting through to a player, even though he’s quiet.”7

  After the team’s surprise appearance in the World Series, hopes ran high among the Dodger faithful going into 1975. The youth movement begun by the team six years earlier had finally paid full dividends, and the team’s prospects looked good for years to come. But in 1975 these hopes were crushed hard when the Dodgers fell to second place, twenty games behind Sparky Anderson’s vaunted world champion Cincinnati Reds. As in the corporate world, and in politics, and in many other fields of endeavor in America, baseball fans are a “What have you done for me lately?” lot, and so, in the off-season after the Dodgers’ setback in 1975, rumors swirled that Alston would retire or be fired.