Despite the mutual antipathy between the team’s outgoing and incoming managers, the Dodgers took care to focus mostly on the positive at the end of 1976. After the season most of the team’s players at the time continued praising Lasorda’s appointment. Bill Russell, the starting shortstop, said Lasorda had “all the qualifications for the job. He has worked hard, he knows the players and it was a good choice.” Pitcher Tommy John, who had just returned in 1976 from reconstructive surgery on his elbow, said, “I don’t think you could have picked a better man. He has worked in the organization for a long time and paid his dues. I think he will do a good job.” Third baseman Ron Cey agreed that Lasorda was the most qualified man for the job. “He is a tremendous motivator. He believes in hard work. He has meant a great deal in my career as a player. I will try to perform above my capabilities for him.” And star first baseman Steve Garvey pointed out that he had been on four championship teams with Lasorda, two in the Minors and two in the Winter Leagues. “I know as well as I know anything that he is the right man. He is a dedicated man and will do a fine job.”19
Lasorda, for his part, was immediately clear about one thing: he had finally obtained the position he long coveted. “This is the greatest day of my life,” Lasorda told the press. “To be selected as manager of an organization I love so deeply, to wake up and learn I had inherited a post being vacated by the greatest manager in baseball, it’s like being presented the Hope Diamond.” That Lasorda was still nervous despite his bluster is clear in how he deflected a few hard questions by reporters, protesting that he had nothing to prove as Alston’s follower. “I just don’t look at it like I’m following a legend,” he said. “If you start defying the pressures of following someone, you’re actually creating pressure within yourself. . . . I don’t want people to be looking back at what Walt Alston did but to look at what Tom Lasorda is doing.” When Vin Scully, the Dodgers’ veteran sportscaster, prodded further, Lasorda was even more defiant: “I’m worried about the guy who is going to replace me.”20
With Lasorda in charge of the Dodgers in late September, and Jim Gilliam now stepping into the third base coaching job, the Dodgers split their last four games of the 1976 season to finish with a respectable 90-68 win-loss record. Despite this success, however, for the fifth time in the past seven seasons the team ended up in second place behind the seemingly unstoppable Cincinnati Reds, who won their second straight World Series in 1976 by beating the New York Yankees. It was another disappointing season for the Dodgers, and Tom Lasorda was not pleased. Going into the off-season the Dodgers’ new manager was more than eager to begin making his mark on his team. “I have this ‘weight’ problem,” Lasorda said during the off-season. “I just can’t ‘weight’ to get started.”21
Lasorda would make several conspicuous moves during the off-season to distance himself from the past regime. Whereas Walt Alston’s office had long been, like the man himself, hard to find, Lasorda immediately moved it, taking over a larger, more centrally located training room. He hung his own personal photos on the cinderblock walls, laid down new carpeting, and brought in new couches that would be used to invite players to postgame buffets. Next, thinking of the hated Reds, Lasorda announced a ban on the color red in the clubhouse. Players could wear no red clothing or accessories anywhere within his sight. This was juvenile stuff, to be sure, but Lasorda brought some humor to the gesture by carrying it to ridiculous extremes. Although he would allow players to continue, should they choose, to chew Red Man Tobacco, he changed the nickname of his pitching coach, the highly regarded Charles Dwight Adams, from “Red” to “Blue.”
With his clubhouse situated to his satisfaction, Lasorda began considering the keys to his hopes for a championship in 1977—his players. In early December Lasorda sat down and wrote each member of the Dodgers’ presumptive roster a Christmas card, informing them it was a privilege to be their manager. “We have the nucleus of a very fine club,” he wrote. “Each of you is gifted with talent and will play a major role in the success of the Dodgers, but there is only one way to win a pennant and that is for 25 players, the coaches and manager to pull and work together. We have to be totally involved and determined to come out of spring training totally prepared.”22
Throughout his career Lasorda had employed various techniques to motivate his players. He had long treated many of his players like they were his own sons, making sure to know the names of their mothers and the most intimate details of their lives—in order to use them as a spur later. And like any benevolent family patriarch, he demanded, above all else, obedience. In the Minor Leagues Lasorda even trained young players to drop to their knees at his command and shout out their love for the Dodgers. “It was all about getting these guys to visualize the major leagues,” Lasorda said later. “What better way to visualize it than to shout about it?”23 Once the letters were received Lasorda then called each of the players and told them what he expected them to do during the upcoming season. Knowing the team needed to generate more offense, Lasorda called shortstop Bill Russell and told him he wanted him to use his speed to steal more bases. He told first baseman Steve Garvey that he would rely on him to supply the team some extra power. He asked Davey Lopes to become a team leader. He told Dusty Baker he was counting on him to finally establish himself in the outfield. And he told Reggie Smith, a slugging outfielder who had a reputation for being somewhat mercenary, that his leadership was critical. “I really need your superstar talent this year. I need you to help me survive my first year of managing.” Smith, who had been an All-Star with the Boston Red Sox and St. Louis Cardinals before coming to the Dodgers in a trade in 1976, said no manager had ever told him he was needed. After the calls were completed some players who had come up in the ranks with him understood what he was trying to do, yet many worried about how distracting it might be to spend an entire big-league season with Lasorda as manager. And at least one player actively opposed Lasorda’s antics. Pitcher Don Sutton made a few pointed comments about the incoming manager’s style. “I’ve been able to respond better to a person like him (Alston) than to a guy who licks your boots, who gives you pats on the back,” Sutton said. “Walt never second-guessed us, has never competed against us. . . . I just don’t believe I can play for a manager who’s a headline grabber, who isn’t honest.”24
As Lasorda worked to launch a new team era, Walt Alston quickly faded into the background. On December 7 the Dodgers held a farewell dinner for Alston in Los Angeles, celebrating his accomplishments and career. And even though Alston was slated to continue working with the team as an adviser, the event had a distinct air of finality it. “Walt’s new title hasn’t really been decided upon yet,” explained Dodgers president Peter O’Malley at the function, which was sponsored by the Los Angeles Junior Chamber of Commerce, “but he’s certainly going to be doing a great number of things for us.”25
Gathered at the dinner were many current and former Dodger players, as well as VIP friends of Alston such as Sparky Anderson, Buzzie Bavasi, Al Campanis, Mayor Tom Bradley, and Vin Scully. All stood up to praise the great manager. Don Sutton called him an “honest man” and said he was grateful “for eleven wonderful years.” Steve Garvey said Alston was the kind of man all other managers should pattern themselves after, “not necessarily from a baseball stance, but from the standpoint of being a human being.” Finally, Vin Scully gave a moving tribute that ended with: “We’re so much richer to have known you, and we’re so much poorer for letting you get away.”26
There’s no record of Lasorda having attended the event, but the new manager did pause his transition project for the holidays before renewing efforts again after the start of the new year. In early January the headline on the front page of the L.A. Times sports section told the story: “Now the Dodgers Know Where They Stand.” “I want everyone tugging on the same end of the rope,” Lasorda boldly announced to the reporter. “What happened in the past doesn’t matter. We’re looking ahead. Baseball has to be played with a relaxed and conf
ident attitude. Putting the uniform on should be fun. I want a team that’s aggressive, that wants to win. . . . I simply feel that the best team doesn’t always win. The team that wants it the most does.”
Considering these sentiments, the announcement of a team transaction in mid-January would surprise, and perhaps dismay, a number of Dodger followers. The transaction would somewhat belie the manager’s bluster about his loyalty to “his sons” and raise questions about what it mean to be dedicated to “Dodger Blue.” At the same time it would show the depth and intensity of Lasorda’s, and the Dodger management’s, desire to win. And critics couldn’t argue with that.
4
Great Expectations, Everybody’s Watching You
This job doesn’t start and end with the first and last pitch. You have to be a father, teacher, philosopher and disciplinarian. I want the player who’s down to know I’m with him. I want them all to go home and say, “I hope our children get a chance to have Tom Lasorda as their manager.”
—Tommy Lasorda, January 1977
In many ways Bill Buckner epitomized the Dodger teams of the early to mid-1970s. Drafted at age eighteen by the organization in the second round of the 1968 amateur draft, Buckner was a natural and gifted hitter with good hands and foot speed. In 1968 Buckner hit .344 for the Dodgers’ rookie league team in Ogden and swiped twenty-four bases. His manager that year was Tommy Lasorda, who was leading the team to a third straight Pioneer League championship. In 1969 Buckner split time between the Dodgers’ AA team in Albuquerque and its AAA team in Spokane. On the Spokane Indians, he was reunited with Lasorda and hit .315, good enough to earn a brief September call-up to the Major Leagues at the age of nineteen. By 1971 Buckner had become a semiregular on the Dodgers. In 1972, as Lasorda was wrapping up his Minor League career by leading the Albuquerque Dukes (now the Dodgers’ top AAA team) to a 92-58 record and a Pacific Coast League championship, Buckner batted .319 for the Dodgers, which would have qualified him for a top-five finish in the batting title had he reached the threshold for plate appearances (PAs).1 On the 1974 World Series team, Buckner was a fixture, batting .314, the fourth-best average in the National League, and stealing thirty-one bases. He also knocked four hits in the Series, including one home run.
Described as a “free spirit” with an “enthusiastic style,” Buckner wore a characteristically mid-’70s style of mustache, à la Burt Reynolds in his Cosmopolitan centerfold, and he had otherworldly bushy eyebrows. Like many of the 1976 Dodgers, Buckner’s star was hitched to Lasorda’s. Lasorda loved mentoring players, but Lasorda grew particularly close to the offbeat Buckner. Lasorda had scouted Buckner as a high schooler in Northern California and, while managing him in Ogden and Spokane, had put Buckner up in his home for a time. On the 1976 Dodgers Buckner, now twenty-six, had played fairly well, again batting over .300. But the previous year, in 1975, he had developed ankle problems that required two surgeries. As a result he lost much of his natural speed. With Steve Garvey’s emergence at first base in 1974, Buckner was now barred from playing from that position, even as he had lost much of his range in the outfield. Further, he had also shown his limitations as a run producer, hitting just seven home runs and batting in just sixty runs in 1976. It’s likely Buckner was the player Alston had in mind when he said the team needed more “sock” in the outfield if they were ever going to catch the Reds.
On January 12 the L.A. Times reported the Dodgers had traded Bill Buckner to the Chicago Cubs for the power-hitting left-handed thirty-one-year-old center fielder Rick Monday. As Lasorda told the Times on the day after the trade, Monday would make the Dodgers’ outfield sounder defensively, and he would provide the power the team desperately needed. “Rick Monday,” said Lasorda cheerfully, “is one of the outstanding centerfielders in the game. He won’t hit as many homers in Dodger Stadium,” a notorious pitcher’s park, “as he did in Wrigley Field, but he has good extra base power, the type of power that’s needed for doubles and triples in our park.”2
Buckner was bitterly disappointed, like a son cast aside in favor of an upstart stepchild. “I’m going from a contender to a non-contender, from a city that I love to a city I dislike,” Buckner told an L.A. sportswriter. “It’s a real drag. I’m very upset about it. . . . I feel like a piece of meat. They use you for what they can and get rid of you in the same way.” And Buckner’s feelings of frustration and betrayal had been intensified by the fact that his longtime mentor and friend had signed on to the deal. “He’s been like a father to me,” Buckner said of Lasorda. “Now he becomes the manager and I’m traded. It’s hard to understand and it’s a real disappointment, especially since he hasn’t called me.”3
There is no record of how Lasorda handled telling Buckner of the trade in the end, but the Dodgers’ new manager did express some public regret about losing the offbeat outfielder. “The hard part,” Lasorda said, “is giving up Buckner. We came up through the system together and he’s been like a son to me. . . . He’s a tremendous competitor who should give the Cubs a lot of good years. He’s a bona fide .300 hitter.”4 Still, despite Lasorda’s regret at losing Buckner, the manager knew where his ultimate loyalty lay. And he knew the move would show he was serious enough about getting the Dodgers to the Series to let one of his “sons” go.
The newest Dodger as of January 13, 1977, Rick Monday had never been part of Lasorda’s Minor League “family”—Monday arrived in the Majors too early for that—but he had known the Dodger manager for quite some time. When Monday was a young high school star in nearby Santa Monica in 1963, Lasorda had scouted him for the Dodgers. Lasorda in fact tried to convince Monday to sign with the team (for a bonus of twenty thousand dollars) instead of going to college, but he failed and Monday instead became an All-American outfielder for Arizona State University before the Kansas City A’s made him famous for being the first player drafted in baseball’s very first amateur draft in 1965.
In contrast to Buckner, Monday was a notably straightlaced “all-American” kind of guy. Softly handsome with feathered hair and a granite jaw that made him look a bit like Adam West of the 1960s TV series Batman, he seemed a throwback to the age of heroes. With the A’s, who moved to Oakland in 1968, Monday became an All-Star, and by the mid-1970s he’d established himself as a solid Major Leaguer who could run, field, hit for power, and drive in runs. In 1976 in particular, the center fielder hit thirty-two home runs for the Cubs and drove in seventy-seven runs from the leadoff position for a mediocre team. He also had the second-highest fielding percentage among all outfielders in the league.5
Beyond Monday’s local-boy and all-American qualities, and his solid playing record, the Dodgers were also likely interested in Monday because of his role in an incident that had occurred at Dodger Stadium in 1976. On April 25 Rick Monday and the Cubs had rolled into Dodger Stadium for a Sunday-afternoon game, little aware of the monumental event that would take place that day. As Monday later recounted, it was “between the top and bottom of the fourth inning, [and] I was just getting loose in the outfield, throwing the ball back and forth.” Without warning two fans dropped out of the stands beyond the third base line and onto the playing field. “Wait a minute, there’s an animal loose,” Dodgers announcer Vin Scully said from the radio booth. “Or two of them.” Monday, who was the closest player to the two fans, wasn’t sure at first if they were drunk or playing a gag. However, after noticing what the first figure had cradled under his arm, the Cubs outfielder quickly realized something was wrong.
The game was not televised, but in a super-8 film clip that would surface in 1984, the fans, both male, are small figures on a wide expanse of grass in left-center field. At first there is only one man in view. Unfurling his bundle on the ground like a picnic blanket, he kneels on one knee and begins to douse it with lighter fluid. Then, from the direction of left field, another figure appears, kneels down, and begins attempting to light a match. “I’m not sure what he’s doing out there,” Scully continues, in an annoyed voice. “It looks like
they’re going to burn a flag.” On the field Rick Monday had come to the same conclusion. “He got down on his knees and I could tell he wasn’t throwing holy water on it,” Monday told the Los Angeles Times when interviewed after the game. In that moment the outfielder, who was a marine reserve during the off-season, grew incensed. “If he’s going to burn a flag, he better do it in front of somebody who doesn’t appreciate it. I’ve visited enough veterans hospitals and seen enough guys with their legs blown off defending that flag.”6
In the film clip, as the men kneel and struggle with their task, the Cubs’ center fielder suddenly comes in view from the direction of right field. Running at full sprint, he dashes past the kneeling man’s left shoulder and without slowing scoops up the flag from the ground before the flag burners even know what has happened. As Monday jogs away in the direction of third base, one of the stunned would-be flag burners hauls back and throws his can of lighter fluid at the outfielder’s back. But he misses wide to the right, and as several players, the Dodgers’ third base coach, and an umpire rush to confront the two would-be flag burners, Monday jogs to the third base foul line and hands the flag to Dodger pitcher Doug Rau. A few moments later the two protesters are escorted from the field by two security guards and the head groundskeeper. The report after the game suggested that fans gave Monday a standing ovation for his heroic gesture, but Monday was modest about his actions, saying he did not feel the cheers were for him. “The way people reacted was fantastic,” he said, “but I felt they were cheering for what the flag meant.”7 A photo from the game shows a sign on the Dodgers’ scoreboard reading: “RICK MONDAY . . . YOU MADE A GREAT PLAY.” Monday himself on more than one occasion has recollected that he recalls a spontaneous version of “God Bless America” breaking out across the stands, though no paper reported at the time that such a thing happened.
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