Dodgerland

by Michael Fallon

  The homespun, squeaky-clean Garvey image was further encouraged by the public relations office of the Dodgers, a team whose front office well knew the value of creating positive images in the minds of the public. Even the venal Lasorda, who, by 1977, had coached and managed Garvey for five years on the Dodgers and two years in the Minors, readily played along. “If he ever came to date my daughter,” Lasorda told reporters, “I’d lock the door and not let him out.”22 Long before 1977 Lasorda had adopted the former batboy as a kind of favored son. Garvey usually rode in the coaches’ bus, sitting with the manager and the other coaches and soaking up baseball banter. He always seemed destined for bigger and better things. In time his nickname on the Dodgers became “the Senator,” for the postplayer career goals he supposedly harbored.

  But if Steve Garvey of the Los Angeles Dodgers sometimes seemed too good to be true, the truth about Garvey was that, while he was not completely opposite what he appeared, he certainly was more complicated. For one, Garvey, despite all his outward charms, was not widely popular on his own team. This problem went back to his time in the Minor Leagues. Unlike many of his peers Garvey didn’t drink or smoke and often seemed judgmental about players who did. This stance caused plenty of friction. “You don’t have to get drunk,” Cyndy Garvey told him in those years. “But couldn’t you just drink a beer or two? They’ll like you better.”23 Garvey would hear nothing of it, refusing to waver from his personal goals. This was something that had been part of his character since childhood. Garvey, according to his father, never grew his hair long, never rebelled in any way, even in the rebellious 1960s. When his fellow college kids in the heady late 1960s were wearing tie-dye and cutoffs, Garvey wore slacks and monogrammed sweaters. Garvey said he even hated to dance, because to do so in the 1960s meant losing control.

  Over time Garvey gained real enemies on the team. When the Dodgers were winning, the resentment and antipathy remained mostly in check. In interviews teammates sometimes talked distastefully about the “Madison Avenue” image of an unnamed teammate. One time, after getting thrown out while attempting to bunt himself on base, Garvey was nonplussed when he caught two teammates high-fiving each other. But what was he going to do? Garvey simply wasn’t a drinker, and he wasn’t good at leering at women and cutting up with the boys. In some ways it was inevitable that, as Garvey’s star rose and he became more removed from his teammates, the gentle facade of tolerance would eventually implode. After his breakout season in 1974, players like Cey, Sutton, and Mike Marshall—all of whom had made significant contributions to the team’s success—couldn’t understand why Garvey received so much more recognition than they did. Then when the Dodgers collapsed in 1975, clubhouse ill will toward Garvey bubbled up to the surface. “You want to know something,” one Dodger starter anonymously told San Bernardino Sun reporter Betty Cuniberti in June of that year. “Steve Garvey doesn’t have a friend on this team.”24

  It was a simple statement, and one that rang fairly true, but almost immediately the Dodger brass moved to save face. A closed-door team meeting was called to clear the air and settle any outstanding issues. What exactly was said at the meeting remains a mystery, but afterward a number of Dodgers emerged to give Garvey some due. “Maybe we’re less mature,” said Dave Lopes, “but the other eight starters look at baseball as a game. Garvey thinks of it more as a business. That’s fine with me. It’s just not my bag.” Said Lee Lacy, “All I’ll say is Steve is a friend.” Jimmy Wynn, who also said he counted Garvey among his friends, sympathized because the same sort of jealousy had dogged him when he played in Houston. And Ron Cey suggested he was willing to offer a halfhearted détente: “I don’t mind what Steve does. If he wants to go out of his way to be the clean-cut kid, that’s fine—so long as he doesn’t interfere with my style. Sometimes he has interfered.” Garvey’s reaction, meanwhile, was revealing in what it did not reveal. “I’d rather not discuss it” was all he would say.25

  By the middle of 1977, Garvey and the rest of the team seemed to have put their personality conflicts mostly behind them. Likely helping ease the tension was the appointment of Garvey’s old endorser Tom Lasorda to the manager position. Garvey had also given his stature a small boost by agreeing, at Lasorda’s request, to change his approach at the plate and help provide the team with more power. And for a good spell through the first half of the season, Garvey, like the rest of the Dodgers, was quite successful. Although he had hit more than twenty homers just once in his career thus far (twenty-one HRs in 1974), by early August he was leading the team in home runs, with twenty-six. None of his teammates could argue that Garvey was not contributing to the team’s success, and team observers in the press and stands also took giddy note of Garvey’s surge. “Perhaps Garvey would get 200 RBIs,” said one commenter.26

  By the end of July 1977 Garvey, in his quiet, methodical way, had proved naysayers wrong. And as the season turned to August, with the Dodgers over their rough stretch and again leading the Western Division by a comfortable fourteen games, no one suspected that the high ground Garvey occupied was about to fall out from under him, plunging him into the deepest, darkest valley of his career.

  12

  Dog Days in Dogtown

  They’re like sleeping in a soft bed. Easy to get into and hard to get out of.

  —Johnny Bench, on slumps

  Two hundred years of American technology has unwittingly created a massive cement playground of unlimited potential. But it was the minds of 11 year olds that could see that potential.

  —C. R. Stecyk III, on the California-based skateboarding phenomenon of the late 1970s

  Southern California has always been at the mercy of the elements. With its warm sun and relatively dry vegetation, broken only by periods of monsoon-like rain, the Los Angeles basin suffers from drought, reservoir depletion, and brush fires, alternated with raging flash floods and hillside mud slides. In 1977 the usual bounty of the region—in which the sunny landscape was inviting and locals were thriving—by August had turned to a long dry stretch. Going back to 1976 the entire state had experienced the most severe drought conditions of the past hundred years, a span of dryness that caused severe damage to the state’s agricultural system, depleted runoff water to an all-time low, and forced forty-seven of the state’s fifty-eight counties to declare a state of emergency. “If the drought continues for merely another 30 days,” wrote Time in March, quoting officials at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, “we’ve got a good chance of another Dust Bowl.”1 Because of the conditions, cities across Southern California banned lawn watering, families emptied out their swimming pools, and officials rushed to build an emergency desalination plant and an emergency water pipeline.

  In addition to the heat and the dry weather conditions, lingering economic woes and other uncertainties weighed on the local population. Jobs were hard to come by, and young men in the suburbs and along the coastal communities of Los Angeles lingered on street corners and at watering holes and video arcades, looking for something to fill their hot and empty summer days. Meanwhile, while the local baseball team had provided some distraction—thus far avoiding the “traditional June Swoone” that had upended fans’ hopes in recent seasons—in the August heat and dryness Angelenos began to hear, in hints and whispers, a single word in reference to their team. It was a somewhat leaden, unpoetic word, but with the unusual quality that it sounded pretty much exactly like what it meant: slump. In August 1977 the Dodgers were stuck in a slump so severe that it seemed, even after the team had built an insurmountable lead in the National League West, their season was still at risk.

  After a victory over Montreal on July 31 the Dodgers stood in first place by fourteen games over the Reds, but between August 1 and August 7 their divisional lead had fallen to eleven and a half games after they lost six of seven road games against the Expos, Mets, and Phillies. After splitting four games at home against the Reds between August 8 and August 11, for the next two weeks afterward, in game
s against the Braves, Giants, Cubs, Cardinals, and Pirates, the team played .500 ball and let their division lead slip to eight and a half games on August 26. And while a divisional lead was certainly welcome for the Dodgers at this point in the season, considering that a good stretch of games still remained in the season—and many of those games were against the team’s divisional rivals—there was legitimate cause for concern.

  The causes for the Dodgers August slump were several—cold bats, a struggling bullpen, a falloff in the effectiveness of Dodger starters Don Sutton and Doug Rau—but no reason was more jolting to Dodger followers than what had happened to Steve Garvey. In August “Mr. Consistency” found himself, for the first time in his career, mired in a major slump.

  It came about like this: On August 2, after losing the previous game in twelve innings to the last-place New York Mets, the Dodgers’ two leading hitters, Ron Cey and Steve Garvey, both unleashed home runs in a 7–2 victory. It was a high-water mark on the season for both players. Garvey, who had twenty-six home runs against Ron Cey’s twenty-two home runs, was leading in the power race on the Dodgers, though Cey was ahead in runs batted in, ninety to eighty-seven. After the game Cey hardly seemed pleased with his and his teammate’s accomplishments thus far this year. Instead, he seemed to feel slighted, particularly in comparison to his teammate. “I don’t think,” Cey said, “that anyone would think of me in MVP terms no matter what I did. I don’t want to belabor the point. It’s just the way I feel. I’m using what’s happened in the past as a frame of reference. What’s the highest I’ve finished before [in MVP balloting] . . . 15th?” Garvey, meanwhile, was bemused when reporters asked him to answer the same question, as if he were unaware that a rivalry existed between the Dodgers’ two hottest hitters. “I feel that to this point I’m having a better year than in ’74,” he said plainly, and brushed off any talk of postseason honors. “But it’s really too early to think about the MVP. You never know what will happen over the last two months.”2 A simple response; however, the talk about hit totals, slugging stats, MVP Awards, and other peripheral things must have gotten into Garvey’s head. Two days later, after going three for four and raising his average to .301 in a loss to Philadelphia on August 5, Garvey went hitless in four at bats, striking out once. On August 7 it was the same story: another hitless game, another loss. August 8, in a 4–0 victory over the Reds, Garvey again was blanked in four at bats. And on August 9, in a 4–0 loss to the Reds, Garvey was oh for three. Between August 6 and August 12 Garvey would be completely hitlesss—it was the first such seven-game stretch of his career.

  And the slump continued. Between August 6 and August 23 his average fell steeply—from .301 to just .275. The newspapers, fascinated by this unprecedented tailspin by the former MVP, spun the numbers. “He now has only seven hits in his last 65 at bats, an average of .113,” a sportswriter mused on August 24. “He is only 36 for 176 since July 4, an average of .205. He has only 12 RBI and four home runs in those 45 games, of which the Dodgers have lost 25, and he has gone 17 straight games without driving in a run.”3

  Leading up to August, predictably, Dodger watchers had talked about how Lasorda’s preseason directive to Garvey “to hit for more power” had led the first baseman to make some risky adjustments in his swing. But Garvey had dismissed the concerns. “I haven’t changed very much at all,” Garvey told a local columnist in mid-August, before describing exactly how he had changed his swing. “Just at certain times, I might be a little more conscious of going for the fence. . . . And then I’m dipping my right shoulder just a little lower to get more leverage on my swing.” By late August, however, Garvey, was at a loss to explain what was wrong. “I feel I hit a few balls well enough in that period to have some hits,” Garvey said on August 24, “but . . . I’ve tried to be philosophical. I tell myself that maybe it’s just the last three years catching up with me, that better hitters than I am have gone through worse slumps. It’s some consolation . . . but not much.”4

  As Garvey’s, and the team’s, slump dragged on through August, Lasorda pondered his options. In every scenario, however, Lasorda realized that if his first baseman didn’t come around, there was no hope. Who was he going to play, Ed Goodson? (On August 23, at the height of Garvey’s slump, Goodson was batting .190 and slugging .286; he was not an option.) But then Lasorda knew the ways of baseball players, how their spirit and drive rose and fell from one week to next. And he knew how fundamentally sound Garvey was as a ballplayer. There were no weaknesses in Garvey’s swing, he told himself. It wasn’t like pitchers were fooling him left and right—the hits just weren’t falling, which sometimes happened even with the best players. Lasorda wasn’t going to panic; he was going to stick with his first baseman until he started hitting again. When asked about Garvey Lasorda said:

  At one point or another, everyone gets into a slump. Steve never had one and I suspect that he felt he never would. Now what you have is one of the proudest and most intense competitors in baseball fighting himself. There’s really nothing mechanically wrong. It’s all mental. The problem is in trying to stop a snowball. We’ve given him rest. We’ve had him take extra batting practice. The only thing I can try to tell him is the same thing that I have tried to tell Cey . . . “Relax, hold your head up, you’re still the same hitter who helped put us 9½ games ahead of the Reds.”5

  Lasorda’s decision not to worry about Garvey was a practical one. After all, in late August Lasorda had plenty of other concerns to worry about. As of August 25 the Dodgers collectively had batted only .229 over their previous forty-seven games. Over the same period the team’s record had been just 21-26, making August the Dodgers’ first losing month of the season. If September continued in much the same way, Lasorda knew, and if the Reds got hot as was their habit late in previous seasons, then . . . Lasorda didn’t want to even ponder what would happen.

  No, Lasorda knew in his heart, the team would hit again. Garvey would hit again. This was a team of destiny, he told himself. The Dodgers would not keep losing. The Great Dodger in the Sky, such as he was, wouldn’t play such a nasty trick on him. Not when he had brought the team so close to the ultimate goal. Not when the World Series was within the team’s grasp.

  Slumps have a long history and special kind of lore in baseball. The very idea of a “slump” in baseball goes back at least to 1893, when a newspaper writer in Philadelphia scratched his head in print over the terrible recent performance of several East Coast teams by writing, “Their temporary ‘slump’ is hard to understand.”6 By the latter part of the twentieth century, slumps were not only a “soft bed,” as Johnny Bench suggested, but accepted as part of the toll of playing the game. They were also a natural preoccupation for men trying to survive at the highest levels of physical performance and athletic achievement. Over time a great amount of folklore and pseudoscience about the potential causes, and likely cures, for slumps had developed. As Billy Williams, the Cubs star of the 1960s and ’70s put it, “A slump starts in your head and winds up in your stomach. You know that eventually it will happen, and you begin to worry about it. Then you know you’re in one. And it makes you sick.”7 As was suggested with Garvey, many players blamed slumps on efforts to overreach, the tendency to force things with a bat that should just occur naturally. “Homers are the root of all evil,” said Curt Blefary, an Orioles outfielder in the 1960s who won the Rookie of the Year Award before seeing his career cut short by inconsistent production. “You hit a couple and every time up you’re looking to hit the ball out. First thing you know, you’re in a slump.” A home run hitter no less than Reggie Jackson had, earlier in his career, spoken trenchantly about the desperation of a player in the midst of a slump. “So many ideas come to you,” he told The Sporting News in 1970, “and you want to try them all, but you can’t. You’re like a mosquito in a nudist camp. You don’t know where to start.”8

  As for remedies there was quite an array—from the common belief that a slumping player should sleep with the ugliest female stran
ger he could find to Rogers Hornsby’s suggestion that one should try to hit the ball straight back at the pitcher (as that was supposedly the largest unprotected area of the field of play). The great Babe Ruth, after a prolonged slump in 1933, attributed his comeback in 1934 to eating scallions. Meanwhile, Roy Campanella, the great Dodger catcher whose bat helped him win three National League MVP Awards, had a simpler, somewhat Yogi Berra–like theory, as quoted in Life in 1953: “When you’re hitting, you hit, and when you’re not hitting well, you just don’t hit.”9

  Despite all the lore surrounding baseball slumps, it is one of the strange ironies of the sport that when one happens, it is almost always an unexpected surprise. This helps explain why so many fans and reporters in 1977 seemed caught off-guard by the idea of Steve Garvey’s, and the rest of the Dodgers’, extended late-summer slump. The Dodgers had played so far above their rivals for so long by this point, it simply didn’t compute. And so Dodger fans suffered through Garvey’s first slump as it stretched on and on and on through the dog days of 1977. At the same time, after the forced merriment of the nation’s bicentennial celebration had at last worn off, much of the country seemed seriously off-track. From the moribund stock markets and continued psychic fallout from Vietnam and Watergate to continued worry about the country’s heating-oil supply and the anger over gas shortages, America was simply in the dumps. So uncertain were the economic times in August 1977 that Time said the country was on a “roller-coaster to nowhere,” its problems seemingly entrenched and all but unsolvable. Although inflation had slowed slightly in 1977, and corporate profits had increased for the first time in several years, the stock market told a story of disappointment, as analysts noted that the bread-and-butter small-time stock investors were staying away from Wall Street. “The 25-to-40-year-olds are not in the market anymore,” suggested Time. “They probably have lost money and had a bad experience. I think we are going to have difficulty attracting those people back.”10