Dodgerland

by Michael Fallon

  Whatever exactly occurred it’s certain that fans at the game, and many more who were not at the game—Americans who had had enough of flag burning in recent years, during the height of anti–Vietnam War sentiment and the continued fallout from the Watergate scandal and the ineffectual Ford presidency—were in favor of Monday’s spontaneous heroism. One fan for example, thirty-year-old Joe Shaver of Santa Monica, was stopped by police as he tried to reach the Cubs’ dugout to shake Monday’s hand. In the days following the incident, Monday was interviewed by the media and celebrated all over the country. The National League commended Monday on April 30. When he returned to Chicago in early May, after two weeks of traveling with his team, Monday discovered stacks of mail that had been sent to him by well-wishers and admirers from around the country. Included in the pile were congratulations from senators and congressmen, from former president Richard Nixon, and from Alabama governor George Wallace. The Illinois House of Representatives passed Resolution 747, proclaiming Tuesday, May 3, as Rick Monday Day in Illinois. Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley named Monday the grand marshal of the Chicago Salute to the American Flag Parade to be held on June 12. And recall, all of this fanfare came despite the fact that almost no one actually saw what happened, as this was well before cable game broadcasts, SportsCenter highlights, and instantaneous video postings to Facebook and Twitter.

  Interestingly, Monday said he never cared to find out the reason these two wanted to burn a flag—it was enough for him to know that they wanted to. But if he had been interested, he would have learned that the brain behind the protest was an unemployed thirty-seven-year-old man from Eldon, Missouri, named William Errol Thomas. His accomplice, meanwhile—the person with the matches—sadly was Thomas’s eleven-year-old son. After their arrest and booking, the son was sent to juvenile hall and the father taken to Parker Center, the headquarters at the time for the Los Angeles Police Department, where he was sentenced to pay a fine of sixty dollars or spend three days in jail in addition to twelve months of probation. Thomas pleaded guilty and chose to spend three days in jail in lieu of the fine. After he was released a small item ran in the paper explaining that his attempt to burn the flag was meant to draw attention to what he claims was his wife’s “imprisonment” in a Missouri mental institution. How or why he came to Los Angeles to make such a protest, and what he hoped to achieve from the act, or even if his story was true, is not clear. His attorney in the public defender’s office said that Thomas was American Indian, a transient living out of the back of his car. The Department of Motor Vehicles yielded no information, nor did the registrar of voters or Veterans Administration. The Bureau of Indian Affairs in Phoenix had no information, nor were there any military records. In the end Thomas simply faded away, and no one followed up with him. There’s no record of a story running in the paper once William was released from jail. The fact was, no one cared. They cared only about the flag rescuer.

  And, indeed, after the flag incident Rick Monday was forever a hero in Los Angeles, his image cemented in the minds of fans across the region. At a ceremony at Wrigley Field some weeks later, Dodger general manager Al Campanis presented Monday with his trophy—the flag, back from police impound. During the event Campanis admitted that he had for some time been trying to make a trade to the Cubs for Monday and now had “given up hope.” “There’s no way they’ll trade him now,” Campanis was quoted as saying. “He’s Mr. Red, White and Blue.”

  So how did the Dodgers finally manage to land Monday in 1977, at the height of his popularity? “Rick was simply asking for more than we were able to pay,” Cubs general manager Bob Kennedy told the L.A. Times. “We traded him strictly as a matter of dollars and cents.”8 Reportedly, after 1976 Monday had asked the Cubs for a multiyear contract deal, a rarity in those days, and the Cubs, wary of locking in a thirty-one-year-old center fielder, took a pass. To get the heroic player, however, the Dodgers broke their own long-standing policy and offered the center fielder a five-year contract—the longest the team had ever tendered to that point—reportedly for somewhere in the range of one million dollars, making him one of the highest-paid players on the team. It was a signing that would have deep ramifications, but in ways that the Dodgers could never have predicted in January 1977.

  With this last major off-season move completed, and with Lasorda in possession of a new tool for his championship quest, all that was left was to wait for the official date for players to report to camp. Spring training for the Los Angeles Dodgers officially opened in Vero Beach, Florida, on an unseasonably cold spring day on March 1, 1977. In mid-January an abnormally cold winter had brought snow, for the first time in recorded history, as far south as Miami. Because of a pressure front known as the Aleutian Low, temperatures remained low in Florida throughout February and into the first part of spring training. Things, of course, could have been much worse—Buffalo, New York, had received so much snow (a total of 181.1 inches between October 1 and March 1) that the city was forced to ship it out of town by rail—but arriving players recoiled from the unexpected cold. As backdrop to the players’ arrival, meanwhile, the number-one song on the U.S. Billboard charts at the time was by a California-based rock group, the Eagles. The sentiment of the song, “New Kid in Town,” was appropriate for the moment.

  In 1977 the Dodgers invited fifty-six players to the team’s spring-training site, the storied Dodgertown of Vero Beach, Florida, which was immaculately maintained and overrun with an unusual number of amenities and services for the era. Founded in 1948, Dodgertown was a full-service, self-contained training facility, as well as a residency-based resort, created for the purpose of studying baseball.9 Forty of the invitees were on the team’s expanded roster, and sixteen other players were not on the roster but given special invitation to participate in spring training—primarily because the team had special interest in their long-term potential. Although not every one of these players would make the Major League team, all were pretty much guaranteed a job for the season. If they didn’t make the team’s roster of twenty-five active players who were allowed to travel with the team and “dress” for games, or if they didn’t find their way onto the “extended roster” of forty players (which included the twenty-five players on the active roster and anyone just a step away from the big-league club on an “optional assignment” in the Minor Leagues), they knew they would still end up somewhere in the Dodgers’ farm system.

  At the start of his first full spring training as the Dodgers’ manager, Lasorda continued making unusual and unexpected moves. First, Lasorda surprised the team, and the baseball establishment, by announcing that he had already decided on the team’s starting lineup. “Never in anybody’s memory has the Dodger lineup been set so early,” wrote John Hall, sounding somewhat irritated, in the L.A. Times on March 18. “Every position secure even before the first day of spring training.”10 Not that any of Lasorda’s declared starters were a surprise, as it was essentially the lineup, with a few additions, that had taken the team to the 1974 World Series. The infield remained unchanged, with Steve Garvey, the 1974 MVP, at first base; Davey Lopes at second base; steady Bill Russell at shortstop; and the streaky slugger Ron Cey at third base. The catching spot, meanwhile, was owned by twenty-eight-year-old defensive specialist Steve Yeager, who was starting his sixth season with the Dodgers. Only the outfield lineup was relatively new. Reggie Smith, the team’s most consistent power hitter who had come to the team in a trade midway through the 1976 season, would return to his spot in right field; Rick Monday would take over center field from Dusty Baker, whose 1976 season had been shortened by a knee injury; and Baker would attempt a comeback in left field. Still, one couldn’t fault the sportswriter for his frustration. Spring training is usually a time of chaotic substitutions, a chance for coaches and managers to experiment with different lineups and team configurations, and an opportunity to observe future prospects (while making sure the regulars are fit and healthy for the season)—all of which provided grist for column inches.
r />   Adding to the writer’s troubles was the fact that not only had Lasorda decided who his starters were, but he had declared that these eight players would spend all of spring training playing together. They would be together during workouts and practice drills, at meals and team meetings, and in exhibition game after exhibition game, and they would even sit the bench together. They would remain one indivisible unit throughout spring training. Across the Grapefruit League, those in the know watched the new manager’s antics and declared that the Dodgers’ projected starters would get tired of playing together so much; they would end up bickering and hating each other by season’s end. When Sparky Anderson saw the Dodgers’ starters running on the field together before a spring game, he belittled Lasorda’s strategy, saying that not only would they be clashing with each other by September, but the team’s reserves would not be game ready. But Lasorda would not be deterred by any amount of criticism, and, in fact, there was a clear method to Lasorda’s madness. Lasorda did what he did in the spring of 1977 because, having known most of these players for years as their Minor League manager and third base coach, he was well aware this was a team of independent personalities not particularly prone to getting along with each other. He was certain that the key to getting them to pull together toward the greater goal—a World Series victory—was to have them become a single indivisible unit.

  Despite Lasorda’s focus on his starters in 1977, there were still, as in any year, a number of hopeful young prospects in camp. The top prospects—those included on the Dodgers’ forty-man roster—included a variety of types of players from different backgrounds. Lance Rautzhan, for example, was a twenty-four-year-old left-hander out of Pottsville, Pennsylvania. Drafted by the Dodgers out of high school at the age of seventeen in the third round of the 1970 amateur draft, Rautzhan had, in 1977, been in the Dodgers’ farm system for seven years without seeing the big lights. In 1976 he reached the Dodgers’ Class AAA team in Albuquerque as a relief pitcher. And since one of the Dodgers’ two biggest perceived needs going into 1977 was left-handed relief, Rautzhan hoped he was close to his dream. He just had to convince the Dodgers he could get batters out when it counted.

  Claude Westmoreland, meanwhile, was a tall and muscular twenty-four-year-old position player who had been drafted out of college by the Dodgers in the first round of the 1974 draft. Originally from Fresno, Westmoreland had played baseball and football at the University of California, averaging 9.2 yards per carry as a running back on the freshman squad and eventually rooming with Steve Bartkowski, the All-American quarterback (and All-American first baseman) at Cal who would be the first overall pick in the 1975 NFL draft. Westmoreland was a gifted athlete, and in 1976 he went on a hitting tear through the Dodgers’ farm system—excelling first at the Dodgers’ single-A team in Lodi and then in the summer Instructional League in Arizona. All through his Minor League stints Westmoreland showed he had the potential to hit for power, one of the Dodgers’ biggest concerns going into 1977.11 In fact, Westmoreland’s only major drawback appeared to be his play in the field. He was too big ultimately to be an effective outfielder, the position he played at the start of his career, and in 1977 he was struggling mightily to find his footing at the position he’d adopted, third base.12

  Another top young player in the Dodgers’ camp in the spring of 1977 was outfielder Glenn Burke. Although he was not completely new to the big-league level, having been called up to the Majors in 1976 as an injury replacement, he was still considered a rookie. Drafted in 1972 out of Berkeley High School, Burke was a rising prospect in the Dodgers’ system, said by team scouts to have “all the tools to become a major leaguer in the near future.”13 For four of his five years in the Minors, he batted over .300 and led several leagues in stolen bases. At the same time Burke acquired a reputation for being somewhat unconventional. “His attitude is a question mark,” another scouting report read.14 Among other things Burke had a tendency to be the clubhouse cutup—blasting music, cracking jokes, pulling elaborate pranks. Burke’s stated goal was to loosen up any team he played on. Unfortunately, as a big-league call-up Burke had yet to carry this looseness to the plate. He batted .239 over twenty-five games with the Dodgers in 1976 and was used mostly as a defensive and base-running specialist. Still, Burke had a legitimate hope, leading up to 1977, that he’d be given a shot at the Dodgers’ starting center-field job on opening day. That hope had, of course, been dimmed in January by the acquisition of Rick Monday. In fact, the Monday trade was doubly bad news for Burke—as during the 1976 season, while on the big-league team, he had befriended the outfielder they’d traded to get Monday. “On the road that first year,” Burke said, “Bill Buckner and I would hang out. He’s strange. He had those big heavy eyebrows. He was a great player. I really enjoyed his company a lot. Maybe because I was kind of strange too.” Burke would not get along with Buckner’s replacement. “Rick Monday and I never had a chance,” he later said. “He gave me a lot of grief. But I didn’t care, because I was after his ass. He would fuck with me. Try to keep me off balance. But that shit of his didn’t really bother me.”15

  Young rookies weren’t the only players included on the Dodgers’ forty-man roster in 1977. A burly right-handed reliever named Mike Garman had also come to the team in the Rick Monday–Bill Buckner trade. Garman was a veteran of six seasons who had been sporadically effective in recent seasons with the Cardinals and Cubs. Dodgers pitching coach Red Adams thought he saw something in the hard-throwing Garman and intended to make a reclamation project of him. On December 6, 1976, meanwhile, the Dodgers had picked up a twenty-nine-year-old utility infielder named Teddy Martinez in the Rule 5 draft. Martinez had been left unprotected in the Cincinnati Reds’ farm system, where in 1976 he had batted .255 as a utility player for their AAA team. His last appearance as a Major Leaguer before showing up at the Dodger camp was in 1975, when he hit .172 for the Oakland A’s. Wiry and quick, Martinez was originally from the Dominican Republic and lived during the off-season in Santo Domingo, the home of an established Dodger veteran and pinch-hitting specialist, Manny Mota.

  Of the players who were nonroster invitees in 1977, a few were highly prized young prospects, but most were a ragtag collection of lesser names, B-level journeymen, and flagging prospects looking for a last chance to fill an emergency need on the team’s roster. On February 7, 1977, just a few weeks before spring training, the Dodgers had sent infielder Rick Auerbach to the New York Mets in exchange for a twenty-six-year-old right-hander named Hank Webb. Webb was a tall, rangy pitcher who hid a boyish face behind a scraggly Doobie Brothers–style mustache and a reputation for a blasé attitude. Originally drafted by the New York Mets in 1968, Webb’s career highlight had come in 1974, when he’d tossed a no-hitter on the Mets’ AAA team in Tidewater and started the International League’s All-Star Game. But 1975 didn’t work out as Webb hoped: in twenty-nine games—fifteen as a starter—Webb struck out only thirty-eight while walking sixty-two, and he recorded an ERA of 4.07 (compared to the league-wide ERA of 3.36). By 1976 Webb’s window of opportunity was closing fast, and he spent most of the year in Tidewater, looking less and less impressive to a frustrated Mets management. The trade to the Dodgers was the New York team’s final proverbial washing of the hands.

  As a Dodgers nonroster invitee, Webb got lumped in with a batch of mostly forgettable players like Marty Kunkler, Mitch Bobinger, Mike Seberger, and Mark Hance. Of the sixteen total nonroster invitees in Dodgertown in 1977, only five would ever see any playing time in the Majors, and only two would have any sort of sustained career. Ted Power was a twenty-two-year-old right-handed pitching prospect who would play thirteen years in the Major Leagues as a journeyman reliever for the Dodgers, Reds, and a few other teams. The other future Major Leaguer—in fact, a future All-Star—was a young eighteen-year-old Italian kid from Morton, Pennsylvania, who played catcher and had just finished his first season in professional baseball with the lower-A-level team in Bellingham, Mike Scioscia. All of the hopefuls—no
matter their background, their prospects, and their burning desire to play—landed at the Vero Beach airstrip in late February, found their way to the Dodger compound, unpacked their suitcases, and readied themselves for the team meeting Tom Lasorda had called for the afternoon of March 1, 1977.

  5

  The Land of Golden Dreams

  I love your old gray Missions—love your vineyards stretching far.

  I love you, California, with your Golden Gate ajar.

  I love your purple sun-sets, love your skies of azure blue.

  I love you, California; I just can’t help loving you.

  —F. B. Silverwood and A. F. Frankenstein, “I Love You, California,” California’s official state song (1913)

  On the opposite side of the country from Vero Beach, far from the rising expectations and excitement of the first day of spring training, the bright metropolis of Los Angeles glittered in the sun. From afar, L.A. looked to many ballplayers—who came from all parts of the nation and from several other countries—like a New World Marrakech, a proverbial land of milk and honey that had magically been dropped on the coast of a vast and wealthy nation. That the young men who played baseball for the Dodgers were fond of or, in the case of various rookies and other hopefuls, intensely curious about the “Land of the Lotus” is understandable. Every ballplayer who had spent a life practicing the game and honing his skills at it naturally hoped to reach a final destination like Los Angeles.