It was a close play. In replays it appears that Garvey beat the tag, sliding just around the diving reach of Munson. Garvey certainly insisted as much after the game. “I was safe,” he said. “I came through the outside of the plate and he had to dive back toward me. I thought I had my right toe in there.”7 Unfortunately for Garvey and the Dodgers, however, the home plate umpire, old Nestor Chylak, who had been the plate umpire for the 10 Cent Beer Night debacle (and so had a history with Billy Martin), had set himself a good ways down the first base line. In the TV announcer’s booth, after Chylak had called Garvey out, Tom Seaver was the first to point out the obvious. “The umpire is out of position!” Seaver yelled. “The umpire is down the line! He’s not even in the picture! Where is he?!” With Munson’s body shielding the play at the plate, Chylak essentially had to guess what happened, and he gave Munson the benefit of the doubt. Garvey immediately leaped to his feet, arguing that Chylak had not seen the play. But no amount of arguing would overturn Chylak’s judgment call, even if his judgment was just a guess. Garvey was out. The game remained tight, and, even though the Dodgers still led, it was beginning to feel like this was not going to be their night.
The final moment that determined the results of Game One, the event that everyone would be talking about afterward, came in the bottom of the twelfth inning of what had become a deadlocked game. With runners at first and second and no outs, Dodger reliever Rick Rhoden, who was normally a starter for the Dodgers and seemed somewhat out of sync here, faced Yankee veteran backup outfielder Paul Blair. This was the same Blair who had factored prominently in the Dodgers’ 1966 World Series loss against Blair’s team of the time, the Baltimore Orioles. In that Series Blair, a twenty-two-year-old platoon outfielder who was paid the league minimum in 1966 (eight thousand dollars), crushed a monster home run off Dodger pitcher Claude Osteen in the fifth inning of the third game to secure a 1–0 victory for his team. The Orioles would eventually sweep the Dodgers in four games.8
In the 1977 Series Blair, now a defensive specialist for the Yankees at age thirty-three, had replaced Jackson in the field in the ninth inning. Batting against Rhoden in the twelfth inning, Blair dug in. Twice he attempted to move the runners over with a sacrifice bunt, and twice he bunted foul. On a two-and-two pitch, however, Blair smacked a grounder just out of Bill Russell’s reach, sending Willie Randolph home with the winning run. Yankee fans, who had been restive since about the eighth inning—when they started throwing streamers and toilet paper rolls out on the field—mobbed the field.
Game Two’s results on Wednesday also had the quality of predestination, the game’s outcome never in doubt after the Dodgers took a quick 2–0 lead on a Ron Cey home run against Catfish Hunter in the top of the first inning. They extended the lead to 3–0 in the second on a home run by Steve Yeager and then to 5–0 on a two-run homer by Reggie Smith in the third. While the Yankees scored a run in the fourth, for the most part they were quiet, as Burt Hooton, the Dodgers’ starting pitcher, pitched masterfully for nine innings. The Yankees managed just five hits against Hooton’s “knuckle curve.” (“It’s one hellacious pitch,” said Dodger catcher Steve Yeager after the game.) The final score was 6–1.
The only drama in Game Two, in fact, came from the Yankees’ fans, who were again unruly and disruptive throughout the game. In the ninth inning play was halted after fans threw firecrackers and a smoke bomb onto the field, and then, after Reggie Jackson tossed the device back over the right-field fence, play was disrupted all over again when several successive fans got loose on the field before being tackled by stadium security officers. The moment was so ugly that ABC TV commentator, and noted New York apologist, Howard Cosell fumed. “I want to make something clear to the viewers,” Cosell said, interrupting his cocommentator, Tom Seaver, “We are not showing the antics of America’s young heroes, because we don’t want to encourage this kind of activity. It is tasteless, it is wrong, and we don’t want any part of it.” And this was just the tip of the iceberg. As would come out after the game, fans had been dangerously abusive to the Dodgers from the start of Game Two. First, it was a nameless obscene chant that rose up in the left-center-field bleachers. “That we can tolerate,” said a Dodger bullpen pitcher who was located just below the bleachers. What the team couldn’t tolerate, he explained, was the other stuff that came from the stands. “Whiskey bottles, beer bottles, little rubber balls. They were throwing anything they could get their hands on. The bad part was the security officers out there were doing nothing. . . . This is something a ballplayer shouldn’t have to put up with. You get hit in the head by a beer bottle and it’s all over.” Another target of the fans, right fielder Reggie Smith, was unfortunately unable to avoid the Bronx missiles of Yankee Stadium. “Somebody hit me with a hard rubber ball,” he said. “Right on top of the head. It jammed my neck down. It was like somebody hit me with a hammer.”9
After Game Two the crowd’s antics throughout the first two games would be the talk of the Dodger clubhouse, at least until the news of a major kerfuffle in the Yankees clubhouse made the fans’ antics seem anticlimactic. The Yankees’ troubles started, as with many of their problems in 1977, with something Reggie Jackson said. When asked by a reporter about Billy Martin’s decision to pitch Hunter, who hadn’t started a game since September 10 because of various injuries, Jackson had answered bluntly. “In a World Series,” Jackson asked, “how do you make a decision like that on a guy like Hunter? Cat did his best but he hasn’t pitched in so long. . . . [A]h, the hell with it.” A day later, on reading Jackson’s comments, the fiery Martin went ballistic. “If I’m going to back that ass,” Martin reportedly said, “why doesn’t he back me? I didn’t knock him when he messed up that play the other night” (when Jackson forced weak-armed Mickey Rivers to field a ball to the outfield with Garvey trying to score), “so what business does he have knocking me?” Martin paused to catch his breath, before he continued frothing. “This isn’t a one-way street. He has a lot of growing up to do. He’s having enough trouble in the outfield without second-guessing the manager. We have a chance to win the world-championship and we’re not going to do it with our mouth.”10
Jackson, for his part, was apologetic afterward, suggesting he had been misrepresented. “It seems that more times than not everything Reggie Jackson says becomes controversial,” said Jackson. “Either I don’t say it properly or it’s taken the wrong way, out of context. Maybe I said it the wrong way last night. I was emotional. I was talking about a friend. If the timing was wrong I’ll take the blame.” Jackson was then asked again, for the umpteenth time, about his relationship with Martin and whether he intended to second-guess him. “I haven’t really said anything about the manager all year,” Jackson continued, absurdly enough. “What’s between Billy and I is between Billy and I. I have nothing to say about how he manages the team. I don’t know how to handle a pitching staff. I don’t know how to handle myself.” After Jackson’s clarification, reporters then went back to Martin and asked if he felt the latest act in this “persistent soap opera” would affect his team’s chances in the Series. “No,” Martin said. “Reggie’s teammates don’t pay any attention to him and why should I?” Yankee captain Thurman Munson took Martin’s comments one step further. “I couldn’t give a bleep about Billy Martin’s or Reggie Jackson’s comments,” said the pugnacious catcher. “I do think it’s unfortunate that at a time when we have a chance to win the championship, there’s a guy out there trying to second-guess the manager. . . . I used to know what was going on around here but I stopped mixing drinks a long time ago. I’ve got only five more games at the most to worry about all this crap.”11
With the Yankee clubhouse burbling, and the controversy over the Yankee Stadium hoodlums still roiling (“What a World Series!” wrote one Dodger fan to the L.A. Times. “The New York Muggers vs. the L.A. Huggers”), it was difficult to discern what tilted the next two World Series games. Now back in Los Angeles, in front of the generally laid-back home crowd, the
Dodgers barely had time to pause before the next two games were over.
Tommy John, pitching in the first World Series game of his career (in his fourteenth season), started off Game Three with a rough first inning, giving up three runs on a slew of Yankee hits. And while the Dodgers tied the game in the bottom of the third inning on a three-run home run by Dusty Baker, the team never really seemed to be in the game. The Yankees went back ahead, scratching a run out in the top of the fourth, following that with another run on a string of singles in the top of the fifth. And that was pretty much it. Mike Torrez, the Yankees’ hulking (six-foot-five) right-handed starter, stymied the Dodgers’ right-handed hitters, completing the game for a 5–3 win.
The loss was disappointing and frustrating—to fans, players, and the Dodgers’ management, who wanted to rid the bad taste of Yankee Stadium from their palates—but after the game various Dodgers worked hard to sell an alternative narrative. “Tommy John pitched a hell of a ballgame,” said manager Tom Lasorda, explaining that none of the Yankees’ nine hits was hit particularly hard. “Not to alibi, but their fourth and fifth runs were on balls hit off infielders’ gloves. I thought the guy pitched a hell of a game.” Steve Yeager added only that Munson’s sharp double down the left-field line had been solidly struck. “Rivers was jammed and got a soft liner that turned into a double. Jackson was fooled on a breaking pitch and chinked a single to left. Piniella hit one that had eyes to get it through the infield.”12 John, somewhat dejected and alone in the clubhouse after the game, even tried to put a good spin on the loss. “Heck,” John said, “Sandy Koufax, Whitey Ford, and Don Drysdale have all lost World Series games.” And his teammate Dusty Baker was more bluntly optimistic after the loss. “We ain’t losing,” he said. “We’re just behind.”13
But Game Four was a similar story to the previous game. The Dodgers’ starting pitcher, left-hander Doug Rau, gave up three quick runs in the top of the second inning, and the Dodgers’ only runs came on a two-run home run in the bottom of the third by Lopes. The Dodgers had several scoring threats against Yankees starter Ron Guidry—most notably a leadoff single by Cey in the seventh inning and a one-out double by Cey in the ninth—but both rallies fell short. In the end it was another loss—this time 4–2—and the Dodgers’ sense of desperation and disappointment, even in the face of Lasorda’s eternal optimism, was growing.
In fact, as a notorious incident in the top of the second inning would reveal, Lasorda himself may have been more frustrated with his team than he let on. Before the game ABC TV had asked Lasorda to wear a microphone so they could use his comments as continuity to provide insight during key moments. Apparently, however, Lasorda almost immediately forgot he was wearing the device. When the Yankees had strung together four straight sharp hits against Rau to start the inning, Lasorda went to the mound intent on removing his pitcher. “You give me a sign, Red,” Lasorda said to his pitching coach, Red Adams, as he left the dugout. “When I get out there, I’ll mess around for some time. Okay?” At the mound, however, Rau immediately set Lasorda off by asking to be left in the game.
“Fuck no!” Lasorda yelled at his pitcher. “You can’t get the fucking left-handers out for Christ al-fucking-mighty.” When Rau protested by saying he felt good, Lasorda continued laying into his pitcher. “I don’t give a shit, you feel good—there’s four motherfucking hits up there. . . . I may be wrong, but that’s my motherfucking job. I’ll make the fucking decisions here.” And so on it went, for nearly three minutes as Elias Sosa warmed up in the bullpen. The tirade got so intense at one point that Dave Lopes tried to intervene. “Just back off the mound,” Lopes said. “You wanna talk about it, talk about it inside. . . . This is not the place to be talking about it Okay? That’s all I’m trying to say. Fucking jump on me, shit. I’m just trying to avoid a scene out here Okay?”
“That’s right,” Lasorda agreed, before turning back and laying into Rau. “It’s fucking great for you to be standing out here talking to me like that. . . . I’m the fucking manager of the fucking team. I gotta make the fucking decisions, and I’ll make ’em to the fucking best of my ability. . . . I can’t fuck around, we’re down two games to one. If it was yesterday it would be a different story. . . . We can’t give ’em two more this fucking early.”
After the game it was impossible for the Dodgers’ manager to disguise his disappointment. “Now we’ve got our backs to the wall,” said Lasorda. “It’s going to take a hungry club to come back from 3–1.” Still, he couldn’t help but try to rally his team. “They did it against the Phillies in the playoffs,” he said, suggesting they could do it again.14 He even held a closed-door clubhouse meeting with the team before Game Five, delivering an impassioned pep talk to his boys. “I told them I was extremely proud of them, of what they’d accomplished,” Lasorda said. “I told them, ‘You beat a hell of a Cincinnati club and then everybody thought Philadelphia was going to wipe you off the face of the earth in the playoffs, but you didn’t believe it. You’ve had a few tough breaks in the Series, but I wouldn’t trade this club for any in baseball.’”15
Still, the optimism was a hard sell for this Dodgers team, who no doubt saw the lights of Yankee Stadium shimmering on the road ahead. As third baseman Ron Cey put it, in response to Lasorda’s pep talk: “It’s tough to play a game from behind. It takes three now for us to win. What in hell else is there to do?”16
In Game Five veteran Don Sutton gave the team a victory at home by keeping the Yankees’ bats quiet through six innings, long enough for the Dodgers’ sluggers to get untracked for once. The final score, 10–4, disguises the fact somewhat that the Yankees were never in this one. (They squibbed pairs of runs in the seventh and eighth innings after the Dodgers had rolled to a 10–0 lead.) For the Dodgers Dusty Baker led the team with three hits, while Garvey, Lopes, Russell, and Lacy each had two. Steve Yeager and Reggie Smith had each smacked home runs. Still, it was a hollow win. While it helped further Sutton’s legend as the team’s “meal ticket” pitcher—as he still had yet to lose a postseason game over his career (against five wins)—the players had one thing on their minds. “Going to New York doesn’t bother me,” Dusty Baker said, tellingly revealing what was foremost on his mind after Game Five. “I wouldn’t care if I was in Vietnam if I was playing in the World Series.”17
After the win in their last game in Los Angeles, Don Sutton said he still believed in his team. “I don’t profess to be a prophet like Jeanne Dixon,” Sutton said. “But I believe there will be seventh game on Wednesday and that we are a good enough team to win it all.” Steve Garvey, meanwhile, explained that he too had a good feeling about the Dodgers’ chances. “I said before the game that we’d win the Series. . . . I just got this feeling. I have a lot of confidence in our next two pitchers, Burt Hooton and Tommy John, and I knew pride would take over today.”18 Yet, despite the optimism, the Yankees were winning the 1977 Series. They had, thus far, simply played better baseball. They had gotten more clutch pitching, had better and more timely hitting, and had fielded better and hit better in the clutch than the Dodgers. Some people may have said the Dodgers should be winning the World Series, yet they were not.
Behind the numbers, in fact, Howard Cosell had inadvertently stumbled upon an essential difference between the Dodgers and the Yankees during Game Three. Filling time during the lull of several slow innings, Cosell brought up a graphic that showed where each of the starters on each team had come from. In the bottom of the fourth inning, he showed that five of the Dodgers’ eight position players (Cey, Russell, Garvey, and Yeager) had come up through the Dodgers’ system after having been scouted and drafted by the team. “Basically the Dodgers build their team through the farm system,” Cosell said. “Basically . . . [t]he Dodger building processes have not changed ever since Branch Rickey first installed them, and then Mr. Walter O’Malley took over from him in the early fifties.” Then, in the top of the seventh inning, Cosell showed a similar graphic for the Yankees’ lineup. Of the eight position playe
rs on the team, only one, Thurman Munson, had come up through the Yankees’ system. The vast majority of the team had come to New York through trades and free agency. “And so you can see that this team was structured differently,” Cosell explained. “They didn’t come with farm origination and the long developmental process that the Dodgers deploy.”
The more organic development process had made of the Dodgers a kind of family. Many of these players, despite their relative young ages, had played together for nearly ten years—having come up together through all levels of the farm system, growing together as they each became full-grown men. As an organic, less manufactured product, the Dodgers were as flawed and human as any family—especially compared to the Yankees. In particular, the Dodgers’ lineup suffered from a heavy right-handed bias. That is, with their strong battery of right-handed hitters—Lopes, Russell, Cey, Garvey, Yeager, and Baker all hit from the right side—the team left itself somewhat vulnerable when opponents threw right-handed pitchers against them. And while Lasorda and Campanis had attempted to address this weakness somewhat by trading for left-hander Rick Monday, that had not turned out well after Monday’s back injury. It was no accident that right-handed starter Mike Torrez, picked up for just a half season by the Yankees to fill a need, was able to win two key games against the Dodgers in the Series, going all the way in both. The Yankees, meanwhile, were a more “manufactured” (and well-paid) team with a much more balanced battery and pitching staff.
It was also no accident that the Dodgers, who were somewhat short on left-handed pitching, had no answer to the most high-priced, ill-fitting, and controversial cog in the Yankee machine: a left-handed power hitter who had already earned the nickname Mr. October by the time he stepped up to the plate in Game Six of the 1977 World Series.
Dodgerland Page 25
