Alston did briefly consider ending his career before deciding to rededicate himself to the 1976 campaign. He held out hope that, with a few key personnel changes, the team would have enough gas in the tank this year to catch the Reds.8 But it was not to be. In 1976 the Dodgers lost out once more to the Reds, further distressing team followers and, this time, throwing the Dodger clubhouse into a state of turmoil. Most disappointing to fans and management during these two seasons was the fact that the Dodgers had sprinted out in front of their division early on, only to fall apart in the latter part of the summer.
The turmoil around the team was made clear by a few telling episodes. In August 1976, with the season’s hopes fading, Allan Malamud, the sports editor for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, was first to suggest in print what many were thinking—that the Dodgers should finally dismiss Alston. The story was not well received by the manager, and on August 22, before yet another loss—this time to the Pirates at home, 6–1—the Dodgers’ manager caught Malamud roaming the halls outside his office at Dodger Stadium and uncharacteristically read him the riot act. Said Malamud afterward: “He called me an overstuffed pig.” “Everyone is entitled to his opinion,” Alston told reporters about the incident. “He wrote his. I told him face to face, man to man. I have no complaint with the press. I’m not saying this guy isn’t a good writer. . . . But how often is he in the clubhouse? Two or three times a year? Does he know what goes on here? Does he know what I say in my meetings? This is my bread and butter, my job. I’ve got a right to my opinion and that’s the end of it.”9
It was a unique moment in Alston’s long career. Not only had he almost never been confrontational with the media, but he had rarely done anything to make media headlines. Unfortunately, the furor around Alston only increased as the disappointing season wore on. By mid-September the Dodgers had fallen ten-plus games behind the Reds when the L.A. Times reported that the team’s very fabric was fast unraveling. For a story called “If Fired, I Won’t Cry,” a Times reporter surveyed the team’s players and found “little clubhouse support for Alston.” As one anonymously quoted veteran player told the paper:
I flatly believe that Walt does not deserve to be rehired. He has made too many mistakes in strategy, and he has become too stereotyped. We’re not aggressive, we don’t intimidate anyone. We make fundamental mistakes and they’re allowed to go uncorrected. . . . There have been times I’ve sat next to Walt on the bench, and he had to ask me the names of players on the other teams. . . . He’s become more hardened and calloused to his own players. We’re all just numbers. The other day, before the first game of the series with the Reds, he had a clubhouse meeting and told us we were not as good as Cincinnati, that the Reds were simply the better team. Maybe it’s the truth but what point is there in saying it, how does it help our confidence?10
Alston was his usual blasé self in his response to the accusations. “There are always frustrations and disappointments,” he said, “but I continue to feel I have the best job in the country. . . . I still like my work and yet I don’t want to hang on longer than I feel I should.” In fairness to Alston in 1976, not everyone blamed the manager for the Dodgers’ troubles. “Anyone who criticizes the manager should first look in the mirror,” the Times quoted another anonymous Dodger veteran. “We have the ability to get the job done and we haven’t done it. There is a tendency toward selfishness on this team, a tendency toward thinking of the individual rather than the team.” The story also quoted Sparky Anderson, again praising the job that Alston had done, even though his team was about to beat out the Dodgers in the pennant race for the fourth time in five years. “Here’s a man who has managed for 23 years and won over 2,000 games. Those totals will never be matched. He doesn’t need defending.”11
The late-summer months of 1976 were an excruciating time all over Los Angeles, as the local baseball team’s fortunes were sinking as fast as the local economy. After being swept in a four-game series against the Reds at home on August 8, the Dodgers fell thirteen games off the division lead. Speculation about Walt Alston’s future with the Dodgers was so rampant that Dodger president Peter O’Malley felt compelled to put minds at ease, stating clearly, late in the season, that no decision had been made regarding removing Alston as the team’s field manager.
As Dodger management deliberated, in August 1976 Tom Fallon found himself facing a set of nerve-racking personal decisions. Tom’s middle son—James—was struggling. Having married at a young age, James Fallon had been forced to settle on work after college. Now, ten years later, his job at Allstate Insurance barely brought in enough money to support his family of three growing boys. It didn’t help that he hated the job, hated being a corporate cog and having his boss take credit for several innovations he had made at the office. For some time James Fallon had been looking for other work. Earlier that summer, after thinking long and hard on the matter, Tom Fallon called James to present his son a business proposal. It was not an easy call to make, as their business history together had been checkered, at best. But Tom pushed all of that out of his mind. He wanted at least one, if not several, of his sons at his side as a partner in the hardware store. He wanted to share his own success with his family—it was the least he could do.
Things moved quickly once the decision was made. That August James Fallon quit his job at Allstate and quickly shifted to the life of an independent businessman. His young family struggled to adjust to his new schedule: six long days of work each week that lasted well into the evening. It didn’t help that the store, located in Cucamonga, was a good forty-five-minute drive, on a good traffic day, from James Fallon’s home in Pasadena. So rarely was James home, he had all but ceased listening to radio, or watching the occasional television broadcasts, of Dodger games with his fanatic eldest son. But, James Fallon said to himself, these are the sacrifices one makes to provide for the family.
All through the late summer and into fall, as Tom and James Fallon, and then James’s brother Kenneth, worked to bring new business to Cucamonga Hardware, baseball people around the country speculated about manager Alston’s future with his longtime family, the Dodgers. Alston himself finally put an end to the speculation on September 27, when he announced his retirement at a press conference at Dodger Stadium. The timing of the announcement, with still four games left to play in the season and coming so close to the L.A. Times article in which numerous players criticized him, was revealing. No doubt Alston was stung by the depth of the criticism of his recent leadership of the team. “A manager can’t escape it,” Alston said to the Times, speaking on the day of his retirement announcement. “I’m as disappointed as anyone that we didn’t beat the Reds this year. . . . But,” he was quick to add, “I’m not retiring because of criticism.” Alston also insisted there had been no “communication gap” on the team, though the story reported that the manager had confided to friends that he had become increasingly soured on the game in recent years—mostly because of the attitude of players who needed constant validation and encouragement in order to play to their potential. “I don’t blame the players as much as the times,” he said in his announcement. “We used to have 24 or 25 farm clubs. It would take six or seven years to reach the majors. A player had to beat out a dozen guys to do it. He was appreciative of what he had. Now they get a free ride through college and a bonus even before they’ve swung at a major league curve. They expect it to be that easy for them all the way.”12
After Alston’s announcement, players and fans alike expressed their support of the longtime leader. Don Sutton, who had played for Alston since coming up with the Dodgers in 1966, was most vocal in his support of Alston. “I felt it was coming all year and I was hoping against hope that he’d change his mind. I’m very disappointed. . . . Walt is the only guy I’ve ever known more stubborn than myself. We’ve disagreed strongly and in most cases he’s been right. He’s consistent, he’s honest, he’s upfront.” Steve Garvey also expressed disappointment. “It’s a sad day. To me, Walt has a
lways represented the standard of his position. He’s been a man’s manager. Not too many rules, not too many restrictions. All he expects is your honesty, your respect, a full effort. I feel blessed to have played for him.” Catcher Steve Yeager, meanwhile, said, “He’ll be missed by fans, by players, and by baseball. . . . It’s a shame he didn’t have 25 guys working their ass off for him all year long.” And outfielder Bill Buckner said, “The thing about Walt is that he’s always been fair, he’s never carried a grudge . . . . I always felt he was on my side. You could respect him as a man as well as a manager.”13
In the moments after the press conference at Dodger Stadium, Alston locked the doors of the players’ lounge and delivered a brief message to the team. Later, Alston told reporters that he didn’t say a lot to his players. “I just tried to impress on them that even though they finished second this year, that with a little help, with everyone contributing, they’ll have a good shot next year. I wished them well and told them . . . I’d do everything I could to help.”14
Reportedly, as Alston the old stoic returned to his office after his speech to his players, his eyes were filled with tears.
Anyone concerned about who would replace the Dodgers’ Hall of Fame–bound outgoing manager would not have to worry long. Just twenty-four hours after the press conference announcing Alston’s decision to retire, the Dodgers were back at Dodger Stadium’s press room, this time introducing their new manager: forty-nine-year-old former Dodger player and current third base coach, Tom Lasorda.
At the press conference Alston put on a gracious face, telling Lasorda he should take over the team immediately and manage for the final four games of the season. “But you better win,” Alston smiled, “because the results go on my record.”15 The gesture was perhaps meant to look like a generous baton passing, but in retrospect something about it and its timing was suspect. No one’s ever gone on record saying that Alston was pushed out by Dodger management, and everyone involved made every effort to imply that retirement was Alston’s idea alone, but then why retire with four games left in the season? Was Alston registering a quiet complaint by not waiting until the off-season’s relative calm to step down? Or were the Dodgers forcing him out early so they could start the rebuilding process before the off-season? People around the Dodgers organization remained silent on the subject.
Although the media and fans had speculated furiously in the immediate aftermath of Alston’s announcement—suggesting that Maury Wills and Jim Gilliam were, along with Lasorda, leading candidates—the planned succession of Lasorda had been an open secret within the organization for a number of years. Not that Lasorda wasn’t deserving of this chance. As of the end of the 1976 season, Lasorda had spent twenty-eight years in the Dodgers organization, starting first as a journeyman pitcher who lost his shot at a place on the team in the mid-1950s because the team had signed a young prospect named Sandy Koufax. After his playing days Lasorda returned to the Dodgers to work as a scout. By 1965 Lasorda had landed a managerial position in the Dodgers’ Minor League system. Like Alston twenty years before, Lasorda moved up through the system for the next eight years. He won the Minor League Manager of the Year Award in 1970 after his Spokane team won the Pacific Coast League flag. In 1972 the Dodgers’ front office asked him to coach third base for the Major League team. He was reluctant to take the job at first, but he eventually realized that the third base coaching job would be right up his alley. Third base coaches are field generals. They relay signs to hitters and runners, make split-second decisions, take the heat when things work out badly, and take the credit when they work out well. This fitted the impulsive and effusive Lasorda’s personality to a tee.
Beyond his years of service to the Dodgers, Lasorda was the natural choice to manage the Dodgers for another reason. He had been a key component in developing many of the players who were now on the big-league team. Eighteen of the Dodgers’ roster players at the start of the 1977 season had played for Lasorda while they were in the Minor Leagues. Further, when he had arrived in Los Angeles to begin his new coaching gig under Alston in 1973, Lasorda, seeing the distance between Alston and his players, decided to start a “111 Percent Club” at spring training. Lasorda’s club encouraged nonroster players to show their stuff by taking extra fielding instruction and batting practice. Even as Alston became more and more rigid and remote toward players over the next three years, Lasorda was more and more loose and encouraging. By the 1976 season Lasorda had even taken to giving pregame pep talks that predicted the team’s inevitable success. Eventually, players rewarded his long-standing confidence in them by letting it be known—to management and press—how much they liked playing for Lasorda.
Lasorda’s unique personality also played a key role in cementing his rise to Dodger manager. During the 1974 World Series, from his third base coaching post, Lasorda’s loud encouragement of the young Dodgers, his on-field instructions, his enthusiastic gestures, backslaps, and hugs had provided a constant background soundtrack to the game. After Steve Yeager hit an RBI (run batted in) single in the second game of the Series, for example, Lasorda yelled to the catcher from across the field—“Thatta boy, Stevie!”—then gave him thirty seconds of instructions about the game situation. When Joe Ferguson hit a two-run home run (HR) in the sixth inning of the same game, Lasorda exploded, gesturing wildly: “Oh get on it! Go on, ball! Oh yeah. It’s a home run. I told you. Oh yeah! I knew he was due. . . . I called it! Oh yeah. What a shot, what a blast!” So relentless was Lasorda’s patter that in Game Three, as the Dodgers threatened the A’s one-run lead, third base umpire Ron Luciano looked over at Lasorda, who was in the middle of his ongoing game narrative, and said half-jokingly: “Will you stop talking to yourself?” Lasorda looked over at Luciano, took a nervous step forward and then another step back, and said: “That’s not too bad, Ron. It’s when I start answering myself that you’re really in trouble in this game.” While Lasorda’s antics didn’t make a difference in the Series, which the Dodgers lost in five games, it did raise his national profile. Some even suspected Lasorda was the soul of the surprise champions, and after the 1974 season he received at least two managerial inquiries. The Montreal Expos wanted him to manage their team in 1975. At the time, as third base coach for the Dodgers, Lasorda was earning just $17,000 a year and living in a relatively modest tract home in suburban Fullerton. The offer by the Expos was a multiyear contract worth $250,000. Lasorda very nearly took the bait before he declined, telling the Expos, “I’m sorry, I love the Dodgers, and I want to stay here.”16
Though Lasorda and Alston could hardly be more different in temperament, in some ways Lasorda was actually quite similar to his predecessor. Like Alston, Lasorda was a failed Major Leaguer. Alston had famously had just one at bat (an out) in the Majors and spent most of his years in the Minors, while Lasorda had been a part-time pitcher for just three seasons in the Majors, recording no wins against four losses. Both Alston’s and Lasorda’s postplaying careers had been orchestrated by a Dodger general manager—Branch Rickey in Alston’s case, Al Campanis in Lasorda’s—who seemingly had seen enough character or intelligence in the failed players to put them in charge of a lower Minor League team. And both Alston and Lasorda were so fiercely loyal to the organization that they had become dedicated to the hard work of developing young players and teaching them the proper way to play the game. Perhaps as a consequence, both were very successful in the Minor Leagues.
Despite these similarities between Alston and Lasorda, the Dodgers’ change in management at the end of 1976 was a definitive change of direction. Whereas Alston was a quiet schemer, happy to sit in the recesses of the dugout or clubhouse and plot subtle ways to defeat his opponents, Lasorda was a less introspective, more in-your-face type of manager whose larger-than-life personality kept him at the center of the games he managed. It’s no stretch to say that while Alston shrank from the spotlight, Lasorda craved it (and he made no apologies for this). He loved to hold court at Dodger Stadium while surrounded by
the media and Hollywood celebrities. Whereas Alston never seemed affected by either victory or loss, Lasorda’s emotions rose and fell with the team’s fortunes. Lasorda was fond of saying he “bled Dodger Blue,” almost to the point of annoyance, and that he prayed to the “Great Dodger in the sky.”17 He seemed bemused at the suggestion that anyone might not root for the Dodgers. The local media, quickly picking up on the new manager’s own mythologizing, called Lasorda “a fighter,” a “man of many words,” and a “motivator.” One sports columnist who followed the Dodgers suggested that Lasorda made, in his first nineteen minutes as Dodger manager, more appearances around town than Walt Alston had made in nineteen years.
The fact that Lasorda and Alston were so markedly different in personality may have had much to do with why Alston did not stick around for the last four games in the 1976 season. “He never liked me,” Lasorda said in his autobiography. “I have no idea why. But it is one of the great disappointments of my life that Walter Alston never liked me.” The antipathy between the two went all the way back to the beginning, in 1950, when Lasorda was a junk-balling pitcher moving up through the Dodgers’ Minor League system and Alston was manager of the Dodgers’ top farm team in Montreal. The gregarious Lasorda first raised Alston’s ire by conspiring with several players to pull a few pranks on Alston. It was, Lasorda later said, part of an effort to draw out the reserved manager. “Hey,” Lasorda said, “he wanted to be one of the guys, so I made him one of the guys.” But Alston was not amused, and afterward, for four seasons in the Minors, Alston had nothing but stern, disapproving looks for Lasorda. Once both made the Majors in 1954—Alston as the Dodgers’ manager, Lasorda as a rookie pitcher—Alston got revenge by making it difficult for the pitcher to settle in. He barely used Lasorda. In 1955, during Alston’s tense second year as a manager, he stuck with the players he favored. “I won ten games in a row at Montreal [in 1955],” said Lasorda, “and I get called up to the Brooklyn Dodgers, and I only played in one game the entire time I was there. That guy Alston never gave me a chance, and I never forgot it.”18
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