Dodgerland

by Michael Fallon

I was just hoping somebody got the license number.

  —Steve Yeager, Chuck Yeager’s cousin, after being flattened in a play at the plate by Pittsburgh’s Dave Parker in August 1977

  Despite the Dodgers’ recent struggles, in August it became clear that, barring some unexpected catastrophe, the Dodgers would at least limp into the playoffs as winners of the Western Division in the National League. On August 16, with just forty-three games remaining in the season, the Dodgers stood atop the Western Division by eleven games over the second-place Reds, who were themselves struggling. Now, Lasorda realized, he needed to balance the urge to push his Dodgers to win games against his desire to be sure that his players were rested and ready for October. That is, as the playoffs loomed, Tom Lasorda’s main concern was Mission Readiness.

  Chief among the Dodger manager’s concerns was, of course, Steve Garvey’s slump. No matter how long he pondered the options, he saw precious few ways to salvage the situation if Garvey didn’t come around. But then Lasorda knew Garvey. The slump would fade, and Mr. Consistency, Lasorda knew, would eventually start hitting again.

  Beyond Garvey Lasorda was plenty worried. Something was generally off with the Dodgers. Perhaps Sparky Anderson had been right. The hungry, fired-up clubhouse he had helped create in December had faded to something much more tepid. Instead of playing like the explosive unit they were in April, May, and June, his boys had lost their pop.

  As if his team’s decaying energy wasn’t enough, at the end of August Lasorda had another concern. What in holy hell, he wondered, was he going to do with Steve Yeager? The starting catcher was a compelling character on the Dodgers and a generally unappreciated factor in the team’s success ever since he had become their regular catcher in 1974. In 1977 Yeager was considered by many to be as good behind the plate as perennial All-Star (and future Hall of Famer) Johnny Bench. Quick, strong-armed, and sure, Yeager was, according to Lou Brock, the premier base stealer of the era, the “best-throwing catcher in the game.”1 Famously, one of Yeager’s throws to second base was clocked arriving at ninety-four miles per hour. Twice during his career Yeager would lead the league in the percentage of base runners he caught stealing, and overall he would throw out a respectable 38 percent of base stealers. Yeager was also, in many ways, the quintessential 1970s-era Dodger. Born in Huntington, West Virginia, Yeager had been drafted out of high school in 1967 as a top athlete who had lettered in three sports. Yeager developed through the team’s farm system alongside the vaunted draft class of 1968. When he arrived in Los Angeles for his first call-up in 1972, he still had the vaguely square look of a small-town boy—dated sideburns, too short haircut, unfashionably oversize glasses, a vague deer-in-headlights stare. By 1977, however, in his fourth season as the Dodgers’ regular catcher, Yeager was a far cry from his rookie self. Part of this might have been genetic predisposition. Steve Yeager is the cousin of the highly decorated American test pilot Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier in 1947 and a noted tough customer. (Not only did Chuck Yeager break the sound barrier, but he do so with two painful broken ribs from a recent horse-riding accident.) Chuck Yeager was also a natural leader, serving as the founding commandant of the U.S. Air Force’s Aerospace Research Pilot School, which produced astronauts for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. Air Force.2

  Steve Yeager’s own astronaut-like bravado manifested in several ways. By 1977 he had ditched the geeky glasses, grown out a full head of wavy hair, let the California sun tan his face to an appealingly weathered look, and taken on the lifestyle of an L.A. playboy. As of 1976 Yeager had emerged as a major social figure on the team, well known for late-night carousing at the bars and music clubs of his adopted city.3 So notorious had his exploits become that a divorce from Brenda, his wife of eight years, was followed by a marquee wedding to local rock musician Gloria Giaone. The wedding would be a noted social event in the city—occurring on the steps of city hall with Tom Bradley in attendance.4

  In the mid-1970s Steve Yeager became particularly valuable to the Dodgers because of his on-field leadership. He was a master at managing the game from his position and at handling both inexperienced pitchers and world-weary veterans. For instance, Yeager had solved a particular problem on the Dodgers in 1977 when Lasorda decided to use knuckleballer Charlie Hough as his closing reliever. When Hough pitched Yeager made use of an oversize catcher’s mitt, and, putting practicality over comfort, he turned his hand around to catch the ball with his palm facing upward instead of in the more customary upright position. In this way Yeager minimized the number of wild pitches that you’d expect from a knuckle-ball reliever.

  Even beyond his innovative and dynamic backstop play, it was what Yeager did in 1976, after a freakish accident nearly took his life, that perhaps gives the best sense of the catcher’s character. On September 6, 1976, as the Dodgers played out the last month of another disappointing season, Yeager stood in the on-deck circle in a game against the San Diego Padres. With the Dodgers leading 3–0, Bill Russell was at bat against junk-ball pitcher Randy “Junkman” Jones. When the shortstop got a piece of one of Jones’s pitches, his bat shattered, sending debris flying in the direction of the on-deck circle. Yeager fell, stricken, and when Dodger trainer Bill Buhler reached the catcher he found a piece of bat the size of a small dagger jutting from his neck. Buhler dared not dig around the area where the catcher’s jugular vein, windpipe, esophagus, Adam’s apple, and crucial nerves were located. Instead, Yeager was rushed to the hospital, where he underwent ninety-eight minutes of surgery and had nine pieces of wood removed from the region. The surgeon afterward, in examining the recovering catcher, touched a spot on Yeager’s neck and said if the wood had struck here, he would have had thirty seconds to live. Yeager would not play for the Dodgers again in 1976, and, even after he seemed fully recovered, there was concern, because of lingering damage and sensitivity to his neck area, about his suiting up again. After all, catchers’ necks are vulnerable to foul tips and other blows, and he couldn’t risk any further damage to the area. But Yeager was not one to be kept back—he came up with an idea and brought it to the team’s equipment manager, Bill Mueller.5 Together they invented a catcher’s throat protector, sometimes dubbed the “King Tut,” which would give Yeager some measure of security. At least Yeager’s career seemed secure until the daredevil catcher had Tom Lasorda tearing his hair out all over again.

  People have, through the years, compared baseball to any number of other activities. Philip Roth compared it to writing, all but attributing his success as a writer to his love for baseball. Jackie Robinson said baseball is like a poker game: “Nobody wants to quit when he’s losing, and nobody wants you to quit when you’re ahead.”6 Wes Westrum, a Giants catcher in their years prior to leaving New York, said baseball is like church. “Many attend,” he explained, “but few understand.” Ty Cobb said baseball was “not unlike war.” Joe Garagiola, in his book Baseball Is a Funny Game, called the sport a “drama with an endless run and an ever-changing cast.” And Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers’ owner up until 1977, said, “Baseball isn’t a business, it’s more like a disease.”7

  In the figure of Steve Yeager we can perhaps see that baseball has another more distant analogue: astronautics. Look at it this way: The long baseball season is a procession of dull, empty stretches broken by sudden bursts of activity. The trick to playing, or managing, or even rooting for a baseball team through the season is knowing, as astronauts do, when to pour it on, how to scan the horizon or the deep empty reaches of space and know when to turn on the rocket boosters. Baseball players and astronauts face similar work conditions. Each of them, when they are at the top reaches of their profession, maintain themselves in the peak condition needed to maintain a poised readiness. They are able to wait and to watch and to keep their mental faculties and physical bodies sharp enough to perform, over and over, difficult, risky, and complex tasks. Perhaps because of this dichotomy in activity—the need for quiet readines
s, punctuated by quick, risky, often violent motion and activity—the participants of these two pastimes have another thing in common. In each field participants operate under an unspoken honor code of bravery, silence, and machismo. Alan Shepard’s famous prayer, said to have been created on the spot just before his first mission into space, gives a good sense of the attitude of anyone daring and brave enough to do what astronauts and ballplayers are paid to do: “Please, dear God, don’t let me fuck up.”

  Having in common some genetics, Steve Yeager must have had something of his cousin Chuck’s attitude about the dangerous risks of each of their chosen professions. The way Tom Wolfe had explained the character of test pilots and astronauts, in his Rolling Stone articles of 1973, is revealing. “The main thing to know,” Wolfe wrote, using the voice of an imaginary collective astronaut—a kind of space-traveling Greek chorus, if you will—“is that the capsule right now is filled up with three colossal egos. Titanic egos, one might say, but of a type you’ve probably never known in your life . . . because it is extremely doubtful that you have ever been involved in a particular competition known at The Right Stuff.” The Right Stuff, or a kind of fearless, surpassingly reckless, adventurous spirit imbued with almost endless doses of strong ego, was what space travel was all about, according to Wolfe. “It’s a vast competition,” he continued in the collective astronaut voice,

  [and] the main thing to know about an astronaut, if you want to understand his psychology, is not that he’s going into space but that he is a flyer and has been in that game for fifteen or twenty years. It’s like a huge and very complex pyramid, miles high, and the idea is to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you are one of the elected and anointed ones who have the right stuff and can move ever higher and even—ultimately, God willing, one day—that you might be able to join that very special few at the very top, that elite who truly have the capacity to bring tears to men’s eyes, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself.8

  To Wolfe, Chuck Yeager, who had been the first pilot to break the sound barrier, was the epitome of the Right Stuff. It was this very American characteristic that made it possible for President John F. Kennedy to look to the skies and tell a crowd gathered at Rice University, with a certain kind of swagger, “We choose to go to the moon.” That America swagger, after all, was very recognizable to a 1960s public used to seeing countless westerns—like Rawhide, Maverick, Gunsmoke, Rio Bravo, The Alamo, How the West Was Won—on television and on the silver screen. “Up to the time of Kennedy’s death in 1963,” Wolfe continued, “the space program was a cowboy operation. We were riding hell for leather to try to catch up with the Russians. To find out if there were Indians over the next hill, what you did was ride at full gallop over the next hill. That way you were sure to find out; there was no time to be fooling around with scouting reports.” America’s blind bravado, ironically, was very nearly the downfall of the space program before it even got off the ground. While Kennedy still lived, in fact, NASA was called before the President’s Science Advisory Committee to present its plans for going ahead with the first manned American space flight. The USSR had put Yuri Gagarin into orbit in April 1961, and the United States hoped to put Alan Shepard into space immediately afterward, but the program was undeveloped at best, with little significant test data and a lot of unanswered questions. The gathered scientists were shocked, telling Kennedy it would be suicide to go forward with the current plan. “But Kennedy, God bless him,” wrote Tom Wolfe in the collective voice of the astronauts, “told us to go ahead if we felt we could do it. Our reaction was: Well, there’s one way to find out! It was cowboy stuff . . . and it was a beautiful time. . . . Everybody who came close to the program in those days—we can’t think of any exceptions—got caught up in the mystique of the Right Stuff.”9

  As a rule ballplayers, being young men in prime condition and in the peak of life, are prone to playing with the reckless abandon of cowboy astronauts. What did such men have to fear, after all? They had their whole lives, all their playing careers, ahead of them. Yeager, of course, had already learned—in 1976—how quickly a player’s career could come to a fluke end. But then the catcher, with his macho bravura, had promptly forgotten this lesson. On a bus during spring training before the start of the 1977 season, Yeager talked with a reporter about his love for another even more physical sport. “Love football,” Yeager said. “Love that contact. Sometimes I regret not taking one of all those scholarship offers and playing football in college. I was a quarterback. I could throw the ball 70 yards. . . . There’s nothing like the sound of two bodies cracking together.”10 Yeager then spoke of the “contact men” that he most respected around the league: Pete Rose, Bob Watson of the Houston Astros, and, as fate would have it, the massive outfielder Dave Parker of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

  On August 24, 1977, ironically thanks to Dave Parker, Steve Yeager would again learn a lesson about his own human fragility. He would also make a play that, arguably, staunched the team’s recent bleeding and set them up to make a final push for the pennant.

  In the eighth inning of a tight game against a tough Pirates team, on a Wednesday-night game in Pittsburgh on the day after the Dodgers had just lost two straight to the Cardinals in St. Louis, the Pirates’ star outfielder Dave Parker stood on second base with the score tied at 1–1. On the mound Tommy John got set to face Al Oliver, a dangerous hitter. In the stands at Three Rivers Stadium, twenty thousand fans roared for their team. John threw his pitch, and the Pirates’ outfielder laced a line drive to right field for a base hit. Parker, who had good speed despite his size, did not hesitate, rounding third base and heading for home. After fielding Oliver’s hit Dodger right fielder Reggie Smith’s throw was right on line, if a bit short, bouncing twice before it reached home plate. To make the tag Yeager had to take a step forward to catch the ball and then turn to face the onrushing Parker. That step made all the difference. Unable to set himself, Yeager was sent flying backward, head over tail, by Parker’s headfirst lunge at the plate. Parker rolled over the top of the catcher like a train gone off the tracks, but in the aftermath it was Yeager who untangled himself and got up first. He held up the baseball to show the umpire Parker was out, and then he collapsed back down onto the plate as manager Lasorda and the Dodgers’ team trainer came to his aid.

  After the game Lasorda was of two minds. On the one hand, old Tom loved to see this kind of grit from one of his boys. He couldn’t help but have a special fondness for ballplayers who put it all on the line for the good of the team, for players who exhibited his own idea of the “Right Stuff”: Garvey, for example, who had not missed a game in more than three seasons; Reggie Smith, who played through all kinds of injuries; and of course Yeager, who thought nothing of taking a bullet for his teammates.

  Because of Yeager’s play at the plate, the Dodgers remained tied with the Pirates and went on to win, in ten innings, 2–1. “To hold onto that ball,” Lasorda gushed afterward, even as the rattled Yeager was being examined on the training table, “called for some kind of determination, for some kind of outstanding play.”11 At the same time, Lasorda thought, the Dodgers were likely headed to the playoffs and, possibly, after that the World Series. He well knew he could ill-afford to lose such a valuable cog as Yeager.

  When Yeager woke up the next day stiff, sore, and unable to play, Lasorda faced an immediate dilemma. If he put his catcher on the disabled list, then Yeager would not be allowed on the Dodgers’ playoff roster because he would not be considered “active” on the prescribed cutoff day of August 31. At the same time, leaving Yeager on the roster while he could not play—for however long he could not play—left the team shorthanded. After a few days of deliberation, Lasorda gambled. He kept Yeager on the active roster and inserted into the lineup the team’s only remaining option at the position, thirty-one-year-old career backup catcher Johnny Oates. It was a major risk. If Oates got injured, Lasorda had only two emergency backups with any catching experience of any kind: thirty
-nine-year-old Manny Mota, who had played a few games at the position for the Pirates nearly fifteen season years earlier, and the thirty-five-year-old current Dodger bench warmer Boog Powell, who had spent time behind the plate in high school.

  The uncertainties and dilemmas continued. As with any baseball team at the tail end of summer, minor aches and pains of all sorts riddled the clubhouse. The day after Yeager’s flattening by Dave Parker, a sudden crisis afflicted the Dodgers’ middle infield. Backup utility man Teddy Martinez, playing for Dave Lopes, who was sitting out his fifth straight game with a stiff neck, was knocked down by a Pirate sliding into second base. Martinez left the game, the trainer fearing it was a season-ending ligament tear. And it was; Martinez would not play again in 1977. Rick Monday’s back problems continued to limit his playing time and to damage his effectiveness when he did play. This as Reggie Smith struggled with a sore knee, Dusty Baker showed worrisome signs of trouble with his legs, Charlie Hough struggled to pitch with any consistent effectiveness, and so on down the lineup.

  Then there was the sporadic thorn in Lasorda’s side, Don Sutton. As the 1977 season wore on, Lasorda realized that he and Sutton simply were destined never to get along. “I always figure twelve players on the team are going to love the manager,” he said several years later, perhaps remembering his experiences with Sutton, “twelve players are going to hate the manager, and the twenty-fifth player is going to have a gun loaded with three bullets and three blanks.”12 On the 1977 Dodgers Sutton was Lasorda’s half-loaded gun. And at the end of August, much to Lasorda’s chagrin, the gun suddenly seemed fully unloaded. Whereas the veteran pitcher had been, around the time of the All-Star Game, in the midst of one of the best seasons of his career, with ten wins against just three losses and an ERA of just 2.47, in the weeks that followed he suddenly couldn’t buy a win.