DODGER BLOOD: Hating and Loving the Team of Clean
By Greg Burk
L.A. Weekly, May 26, 1989
I like baseball and the Dodgers. Baseball is stupid. The Dodgers are reactionary. Therefore, I am a stupid reactionary.
No, no, no. Don't call me that.
Don't call me that, or I'll kill you. No, I guess I won't. Killing is bad. Instead, I will tune in the Dodger game on my AM-only Panasonic shirt-pocket-size transistor radio ($5.95 during Thrifty's Dollar Days). Yes, now, yes. Clear as a meat cleaver it comes, a voice, the voice of Ross Porter, one of the announcers for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Ross is here, here with the stats. All the stats, on everybody -- maybe even you. He must be great at parties, more fun than a box of 3-by-5 file cards. Or just as much fun. Why, did you know that . . .
"Pitcher Orel Leonard Hershiser IV was born on September 16, 1958, in Buffalo, New York. He is 6-feet-3-inches tall and weighs 192 pounds. He throws and bats right-handed. In 1987, when the Dodgers finished a dismal fourth, Orel -- or 'Bulldog,' as manager Tommy Lasorda calls him -- still had a respectable 16-and-16 record, with a 3.06 earned-run average, 10 complete games, 190 strikeouts and only 74 walks in 265 innings pitched. And we all know how much of a factor he was in last year's World Championship season, pitching a major-league record 59 consecutive scoreless innings and claiming the Cy Young Award. Orel, a devout Christian, lives in Pasadena with his wife and two children. He is circumcised. Before the game today, Orel told me that last night he dreamed of cutting off his father's penis and feeding it to his mother. I thought that was filthy, so I called him a stupid reactionary. "Nobody calls me that," he shrieked, and yanked a Louisville Slugger from the bat rack, emitting doglike barks and growls and smashing me over the head and shoulders -- again, and again, and again.
"He winds and delivers. Strike two on the outside corner, and the count is one and two."
Baseball is good. During a baseball game, there is lots of time. Time to drift, time to abstract your emotions and indulge in wishful thinking about straight-arrow pitchers. Time for trivia.
The Dodgers are just the team to provide you with that time. Hershiser is only the latest marble-bust exemplar of the Dodgers' character and style of play, which changed to suit the climate when the club moved here from Brooklyn. The explosive hitting of Duke Snider, Jackie Robinson, Carl Furillo and Roy Campanella, so appropriate to a place known for crude extroversion, was replaced with an emphasis on great pitching. In L.A., where everyone does his best to appear happy, the correct approach (in baseball as in life) is repression: instead of blowing away opponents with your fearsome firepower, you bring in unhittable pitchers (Sandy Koufax, Don Sutton, Bob Welch, Fernando Valenzuela) and gently smother the enemy with a pillow. This has become L.A. Dodgers tradition, history.
Baseball's sense of history is religious. The fact that the game's invention was erroneously dated 1839 and attributed to Abner Doubleday, who really didn't have much to do with it, is irrelevant, like the tenets of any faith. The important thing is that the tenets be believed, or at least recited. The Hall of Fame in Abner's home town of Cooperstown, New York, is a shrine to baseball's pajama-suited gods and their battles. Walter Johnson, Ruth and Gehrig, Dizzy Dean, Mays and Aaron, Koufax, Seaver -- everyone knows about these guys: professional athletes, entertainers, whose silly deeds are puffed up ridiculously out of proportion to their importance in the real world.
Not important, BABE RUTH??!!?? Of course they're important. And "Marvelous Mary" Throneberry, who was once hit on the head by a fly ball while with the 1962 New York Mets, is important. And Chuck Connors, who played first base for the 1949 Dodgers for about five minutes and went on to have a crappy TV acting career, is important. They are important because they generate stories, and statistics, statistics vital and definitely not vital.
Statistics like the ones Ross spews are essential because they are one of the wonderful things about baseball that keep people from killing each other. Because the effect of the unrelenting repetition of baseball trivia in the long intervallic spans of a game is not, as you'd expect, irritation. The listener's response is one of unconscious anesthesia, tranquility and gratitude. This is reassurance: here is a microcosm that is comprehensible, controllable, entirely different from the terrifying random vomit of the non-baseball cosmos. The announcer's voice burbles; the AstroTurf is green; the sky is blue. Like the song says, I don't care if I never get back.
Baseball, though childish, convoluted and meaningless, is a terrific, necessary bulwark standing between us and our neighbors' throats. Here is man: primitive, hateful, dangling on a broken lower rung of the evolutionary ladder, trying not to slip back. Everywhere is the enemy. Kill him, or be killed. This is the message of the blood. But the message of the hostile society in which he lives is: "Thou shalt not kill." A part of man's blood rebels against this relatively recent innovation, handed down from a violent and fickle god just a few thousand years ago. "Not kill, Lord? How shall we live?" The repression of bloodlust spreads to the tip of every finger; the blood boils.
What can we do with this deep frustration? How can it be released -- safely?
Sports. Sports circumscribe small wars in which no one is killed (except in your occasional boxing or soccer match). Baseball is a pat example, maybe the most evolved mass-spectator sport. Although you're given the symbolic sticks and stones, it's a large-team game, so you're spared the hot one-on-one gladiatorial element. There is virtually no contact; the players stand at a safe distance from each other. It's slow, slow, slow. Give us a minute; we are thinking.
Yes, the players and the coaches are thinking. The fans are thinking and strategizing. And bellowing and hating. Hating, and substitute-killing.
And loving. Yes, we love our home team, and root, root, root for it. Here we are supplied another staple of our tribal roots: territory. We are here. We are good. Men come from other city. They are bad. We "kill." Or our men go to other city, kill bad men. If they don't win, it's a shame.
Any schoolchild old enough to recite the Pledge of Allegiance knows that there's nothing special about the home team, that all baseball teams are created equal. They are business concerns owned by invisible, amoral plutocrats and fast-food magnates, and manipulated for these persons' further enrichment. The home-team hero we applaud today can be traded to the other side in time for tomorrow's game, and when he walks out onto the field he will be the enemy.
Here in Los Angeles, baseball fans hungry for identity transference have a leaden cross to drag up a steep hill: We must cheer for the Dodgers, an often faceless team ensconced upon a land grab, conceived along the lines of IBM, and dedicated to the sterilization of every vibrant human impulse. We must love them, though it be hard.
Until recently, the Dodgers, their stifling pitcher-power aside, have seemed to win with less: less personality than the Red Sox, less offensive power than the A's, less speed than the Cardinals, less intensity than the Mets. Last year they still had less, but something was added, and it made all the difference. The new ingredient was Kirk Gibson.
You can take a glass of water and dump in all the sodium chloride you want, and nothing will happen. But take away the chlorine and put pure sodium in the water, and you'd better stand way back. Kirk Gibson was the sodium.
Gibson, a hard-hitting outfielder gratefully cut loose by the Tigers, is an asshole, the kind of guy no kid on a sandlot wants on his team. He's angry, obsessive, totally humorless. He comes to bat wearing a four-day stubble just to scare the pitcher. He was the opposite of the Dodger image, and exactly what the Dodgers needed. He kicked butt around the clubhouse, playing the role of boot-camp D.I., and succeeded in grafting unmellow attitudes of determination and teamwork onto a squad that was coming off two consecutive miserable seasons.
Everyone was expecting the Dodgers to go spiraling down the toilet a third time last year. And, true, they were not pretty. But they got the traditional good pitching from surprising new sources (Tim Leary and Tim Belcher), got hits when they needed them, and won the National League West (albeit with a record that would have placed them no higher than second in any other division). Playoffs against the greatly favored Mets: Dodgers win in six. World Series against the enormously favored A's: Dodgers in five. Goofball utility man Mickey Hatcher and second-string catcher Rick Dempsey had key homers. Limping Gibson dragged himself off the trainer's table to deliver a crushing blow.
The Dodgers had a face, and it was a face no one recognized. Could it be that they were turning in to a team capable of disturbing one's afternoon nap? This year Gibson has been hurt, and the Dodgers are slogging. Still, there are signs of a turn away from the rice-pudding image the team has carried for 30 years. But there's a lot of the past on their backs, and it will be hard to shed.
The story of the team's rebirth in this sun-soaked soil begins in the 1940s with Walter O'Malley, a wealthy Brooklyn Trust Company lawyer who achieved a position of corporate influence through his effective mortgage foreclosures. As a reward for services rendered, he was made one of three partners in the ownership of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who owed a lot of money to the trust. One owner died, and O'Malley convinced the widow to let him handle things for her. He then forced out the team's mastermind, Branch Rickey, who was in financial trouble. By 1950, he was controlling owner.
Brooklyn, never an especially upscale locale, was in transition in the '50s toward a darker-skinned ethnic makeup with ever less purchasing power. The ears of O'Malley, hardball businessman and scion of privilege, were therefore wide open in 1956 when our own Kenny Hahn, who then had more to prove as a vigorous crusader for a greater L.A. on the County Board of Supervisors, came to him with the idea of moving the Dodgers to the land of swimming pools and movie stars.
O'Malley was brought to Los Angeles, flown above the city, and told to take his pick of all he surveyed. There was a nice parcel of precipitous land within a 7 iron of downtown that proved to O'Malley's liking. It was called Chavez Ravine. There were a few . . . technical problems to be overcome, among them the removal of the ravine's inhabitants, but the conservative, business-oriented City Council and conservative hypester Mayor Norris Poulson thought they could make a deal. In exchange for a much smaller minor-league field here that O'Malley owned, they would present for his delectation 300 acres in Chavez Ravine, spend $2 million to level the site for the erection of a stadium (i.e., remove existing roads and dwellings), and grant him half the mineral rights (the site was ripe for oil drilling).
This incredible giveaway was approved by the City Council and narrowly passed by a public vote in 1958 thanks to timely television lobbying. A few citizens with old-fashioned notions of fair give-and-take, however, filed suit that year in Los Angeles Superior Court to stop the transaction, and at first succeeded -- in the opinion of Judge Arnold Praeger, the deal was "an illegal delegation of the duty of the City Council, an abdication of its public trust and a manifest gross abuse of discretion."
It didn't take long to erase that little setback; six months later the state Supreme Court overturned Praeger's ruling, saying that it didn't see nothin' wrong with the contract, long's the council worked out a little detail with the Los Angeles Housing Authority, from which the city had obtained the land. Y'see, the Housing Authority had originally used eminent domain to condemn the property in 1953 for use as a low-income housing project. Later it decided it, uh, didn't need the land, and deeded Chavez Ravine to the city when L.A. was "looking for park land," with the proviso that it be used "for public purpose only."
It seems that the City Council and the Housing Authority were able to work out this minor kink. But the sight of such brotherly reciprocation brought little joy to the family of Manuel Arechiga, who (among 4,000 or so other Chavez Ravine residents) had been offered $10,000 and were being evicted from their home for the purpose of building new low-income housing, only to find that the land was being given away to a multimillionaire. The Arechigas were the only members of the mostly Chicano neighborhood not cowed by the relentlessness of the power structure. They served as spiritual proxy to these people in the long brawl with City Hall.
In fact, it's doubtful that the Housing Authority ever intended to use Chavez Ravine for low-cost housing. As early as 1952, the city had gone all the way to the U.S. Congress to get laws passed that would allow L.A. authorities to do whatever the hell they wanted with the land. And this information had been deliberately withheld from both the Arechigas and the court that in 1953 allowed the condemnation of their property.
After passage through a labyrinth of fine distinctions and legal fumbles, it was one, two, three strikes and the Arechigas, worn out by years of courtroom slugging, were out. The Dodgers came to L.A., breaking the hearts of Brooklynites, played four years in the L.A. Coliseum during construction, then moved into their sparkling-clean new home, Dodger stadium, in 1962.
Clean, yes, very clean. When I was a kid in the Seattle area in the '60s, I hated the Dodgers almost as much as most kids hated the Great Satan Yankees. One reason was how clean they were. They looked like such an all-American bunch on the baseball cards, the ones we cut neatly off the back of Post cereal boxes before the boxes were empty. Other teams featured at least a few ugly guys who had interesting combinations of consonants in their names. The Dodgers looked like film idols and were called Moon, Drysdale, Davis, Howard. They were boring. And they were good, too, dammit.
There was only one major-league team whose broadcasts could be picked up in Seattle, and it was the Dodgers, on 50,000-watt clear-channel KFI, with the voices of smug Vin Scully and somnolent Jerry Doggett, and L.A. would always win. Fading in and out through the static of the misty Puget Sound nights, they would beat everyone -- 1-0, 2-1, 3-2 -- in maddening, actionless pitchers' duels. The worst was when Sandy Koufax pitched. You knew he would win; the only suspense was whether the other team would get a hit or not. I didn't even care -- the only reason I stayed up past bedtime was to get the scores of the other games. Dodgers, hell.
It wasn't until I moved to Los Angeles in the mid-'70s that I recognized that the Dodgers' cleanliness and excellence were not an accident. The O'Malleys, first Walter and then his son, Peter, had an image of their team that they wanted to project. The image, realized through a carefully bred farm system, was that of quiet, serious young Americans, spotless of lifestyle and humble in the fear of the Lord, who defeated the opposition because of their dedication and moral superiority. Flamboyancy, egotism and rough talk -- all the things a healthy boy identifies with -- were discouraged. The models through the years have been strong white men like WASPy Don Drysdale (now a Dodgers announcer), Steve "Mr. Clean" Garvey and born-again Orel Hershiser.
The O'Malleys have been able to lure the appropriate talent and develop it because the move to Los Angeles brought them what no other team has: virtually unlimited financial resources. Thanks to L.A.'s generous real-estate gift, the Dodgers Inc. owns its own land and its own stadium. Thus the Dodgers are the only major-league team that doesn't have to pay rent and is free to license its own concessions without restraint. And thanks to our city's warm weather and huge population, the Dodgers routinely lead the majors in attendance (although the relaxed So-Cal fans, who hate traffic jams more than they love the Dodgers, are widely known for arriving in the third inning and leaving in the seventh, when the protective O'Malley hand stems the flow of beer).
Result: big bucks. The Dodgers have the aforementioned farm system, luxurious new training facilities in Florida, high visibility and attendant endorsement opportunities in the media capital of the world, and deep pockets for signing hungry free-agent stars. (The Dodgers' own established stars, paradoxically, have always had to grapple at the bargaining table. Steve Garvey and Steve Sax are only two examples of franchise players who have left for better offers elsewhere.) Baseball, unlike basketball, is unencumbered by limits on the total salaries a team may pay its players. The combination of all these factors, coupled with the Dodgers' winning tradition, makes the club very attractive to promising baseball talent, young and veteran. And here they have come.
It's hard to like a team that has so many unfair advantages. Fortunately, the Dodgers of the '80s have proved human and thus semi-lovable.
One thing they did was hire a guy from the outbacks of Mexico, Fernando Valenzuela, and install him as their star pitcher. He was fat and taciturn and didn't speak English. He had a rookie season (1981) that is unsurpassed in big-league history, and became an instant hero to the millions of Latinos who, beholding the O'Malley Dodgers, had previously found little to identify with. And behold, not only the Latinos but everyone loved Fernando, probably in part because he looked so little like a Greek god. Right now he's having arm trouble. May the Deity favor him.
Then the Dodgers had some severe lapses as saintly role models. A couple players had nasty drinking problems. A couple were deeply into cocaine. One was caught with an unlicensed handgun in his car. Another was found consorting with a transvestite. Manager/buffoon Tommy Lasorda was tangentially linked to organized crime. "Mr. Clean," Steve Garvey, was traded after O'Malley wouldn't ante up to his salary requests. Recently he's been hit with two paternity suits. None of this looks good on the old P.R. platform.
The kayo, though, came in April of 1987, when Dodgers vice president Al Campanis (to whom Lasorda dedicated his autobiography) appeared on Nightline and, asked to explain why major-league baseball had had so few black executives, attempted to delineate the distinctions between the races. "Why aren't blacks good swimmers? They don't have buoyancy," he opined. And, "How many black quarterbacks are there? How many pitchers?" To put it in a nutshell, blacks "may not have some of the necessities to be a field manager or a general manager." Like, they be dum.
Peter O'Malley took only a day to fire Campanis, who had been with the club 30 years. The burden of even seeming to endorse such statements would have been insupportable, since the Dodgers so much value their status as the organization that first integrated the big leagues in the late '40s with Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanelia. But the crisis may have been good for the Dodgers. Campanis was widely perceived as verging on dotage. He had authored a series of idiotic trades in the mid-'80s, dealing away some of the Dodgers' best talent and plunging the team into two successive years of ineptitude. His TV blunder may have provided an inelegant but expedient excuse for his dismissal.
O'Malley has since corporatized the Dodgers' office staff and stocked it with a few appropriate black faces, including new communications vice president and former media personality Tommy Hawkins. At a recent American Marketing Association meeting, Hawkins expressed his enthusiastic approval of the Dodgers' new and creative slogan -- "Try it, you'll like it" -- and aired his own hard-sell approach to making sure potential fans have a sportin' good time: "Don't let them forget about you. Coerce, coerce, coerce."
Now, I can fearlessly face whole the reality of the Dodgers -- corporate image, latent racism, moneyed interests, cynical human manipulations -- and love them, just as Winston Smith loved Big Brother and Jekyll loved Hyde, as a symbol of the repressed evil within me. It doesn't matter what the Dodgers are. Through benign sublimation, they have saved many an amphetamine-crazed cab driver from battery at my hands.
The Dodgers are very much like the United States of America, American as Tammany Hall and Madison Avenue, American as apple pie and hot dogs (or strudel and knackwurst, if you prefer). This is never more evident than at certain pre-game and post-game ceremonies at Dodger Stadium. Sometimes the Dodgers parade lottery prizes, the icons of mass greed (cars and catamarans) around the field's perimeter. Often the Dodgers will gather the best marching bands from the high schools of the greater L.A. area and put them on the field all together, a dozen bands at once. They march in uniform, in militaristic, determined formation. They play martial patriotic music. One conductor, at the end of the ceremony, attempts to lead a thousand student musicians in the national anthem. This is impossible. One section starts at one time, another half a measure later, a third staggers in just behind. They finish in grand chaos. Then a color guard comes out, uniforms pressed, flags waving, to fire a salute.
It's easy to imagine a great nuclear submarine breaching through the maw of the center-field pavilion, with sparkling bits of broken champagne bottle flying in its wake. Nuke Qadhafi! Go Dodger blue! A general, or a politician, or a Dodger From the Past, speaks over the P.A. in a series of echoes as his image's lips move out of sync on the huge Dodger Vision screen above the left-field stands. The words are unintelligible, but the message is understood by all: "These are the Dodgers. This is your country. Love them."
The USA has at various times in the last 100 years faked itself into a war with Spain, supported bloody dictators worldwide, murdered in Vietnam and Cambodia, postured in Grenada. It is a warehouse of evil, and yet a source of some real and potential good -- like all other monstrous powers before it. I recognize this, and I don't move to Sweden. There are ways of being here and still being human. I will stand for "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." I will not stand for the national anthem.
* * *
Research assistance was provided by Deborah Drooz and Carla Castillo.
* * *
burk on dodgers 1989.pdf