100 Things Dodgers Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die (14 page)

34. One Postseason, Three Comebacks

Two-strike hitters don't come much better than the 1981 Dodgers. After losing the first two games of a NL West division playoff, two of the first three of the NLCS and the first two of the World Series, the Dodgers went a combined 10–0 to bring Los Angeles its first Fall Classic title in 16 years.

The players' strike split the '81 season in half, and in the opening round of a first-of-its-kind postseason intra-division series, the Dodgers found the Astrodome in Houston every bit as inhospitable as it had been to them for years. Los Angeles scored one run in 20 innings, losing Game 1 by a 3–1 score and Game 2 in 11 innings 1–0. The Astros won both games in their last at-bats. But the Dodgers turned it around, holding the Astros to two runs over the final three games, Jerry Reuss capping the series with a 4–0 shutout in Game 5.

In the NLCS against Montreal, the Dodgers won Game 1 for the only time in the postseason, but lost the next two games to face elimination again. Burt Hooton came through with a 7–1 Game 4 victory to force another winner-take-all finale. With the score tied 1–1 in the ninth inning (Fernando Valenzuela had the RBI for the Dodgers on a groundout), Expos ace Steve Rogers came out of the bullpen to pitch. With two out, Rick Monday pounced on Rogers' hanging sinker for a raucous home run to give the Dodgers a 2–1 lead—arguably the biggest single hit for the Dodgers since the 1960s. Valenzuela was one out away from the pennant when he faltered, walking two batters, but Bob Welch entered to get Jerry White to ground out and send the Dodgers into the World Series.

For the third time in five years, the Dodgers would face the Yankees in the Fall Classic. In their last meeting three years earlier, the Dodgers had won the first two games before losing the final four. This time around, the Dodgers quickly had to cling to the hope they could reverse that circumstance and complete another comeback. Bob Watson's three-run first-inning homer put the Dodgers in an immediate hole with Game 1 going to New York at 5–3. Los Angeles lost quietly in Game 2 with 3–0.

In Game 3, Ron Cey hit a three-run first-inning homer of his own, but Valenzuela surrendered the lead by allowing two runs in the second and again in the third. However, Pedro Guerrero tied the game with an RBI double in the bottom of the fifth, and the Dodgers regained the lead on a double-play grounder.

Not to be forgotten from this game is the sparkling defensive play Ron Cey made on Bobby Murcer's pop bunt with two runners on. Cey dove to catch the ball in foul ground, then fired to first base to double up Larry Milbourne. With the Dodgers still winning by a 5–4 sliver, in the game that would define his ability to pitch in adversity, Valenzuela, after escaping a threat in the eighth, set the Yankees down in order in the ninth. Lou Piniella, the 40
th
batter Valenzuela faced went down swinging.

The fourth game was madness. Again, the Dodgers found themselves trailing 4–0 in the third, with Dave Goltz relieving 1978 hero Welch after he allowed three hits and a walk to the first four batters. Goltz allowed the second run to score on a sacrifice fly, then gave up single runs in the second and third.

It was 6–3 Yankees in the bottom of the sixth when team prankster/pinch-hitter Jay Johnstone hit a two-run homer to cut the lead to one. (According to Mark Heisler of the
Los Angeles Times
, the following exchange took place: “Johnstone was asked later if he'd hit a fastball. ‘Does he throw anything else?' Johnstone asked. ‘Can you hit anything else?' asked a man who has followed Johnstone's career closely.”)

The next batter, Davey Lopes, lofted a fly ball to right field that hit Reggie Jackson inside the shoulder after he lost the ball in the sun. Lopes stole third, and Bill Russell singled to tie the contest.
Times
headline the next day: “Jackson Gets Something Off His Chest...It's the Ballgame.”

In the bottom of the seventh, a dying fly ball by Monday landed just out of Bobby Brown's glove leading to a two-run rally, capped by an infield chopper by Lopes. Jackson homered in the eighth to cut the lead to 8–7, but Steve Howe pitched the final three innings and saved the game.

Game 5 provided the Yankees one more early lead, but the 1–0 margin could not withstand dramatic back-to-back homers in the seventh by Guerrero and Steve Yeager. That was enough for Reuss to survive a complete-game, 2–1 victory and give the Dodgers their first Series lead in '81.

Game 6 turned on a decision by Yankees manager Bob Lemon to pinch-hit for ex-Dodger pitcher Tommy John with two on in the bottom of the fourth and the game tied at 1–1. Murcer flied to the warning track, and George Frazier got hammered in the fifth. Cey, who was beaned by Goose Gossage in the eighth inning of Game 5, broke the tie with an RBI single, and Guerrero ended up driving in five runs. When Watson flied to Ken Landreaux in center field, the third and final comeback was complete. The Dodgers were champions again.

 

 

 

35. Pee Wee Reese

The regal career of Harold Reese has fallen more than a little under the shadow of Jackie Robinson. On May 13, 1947, the Dodgers shortstop from Louisville, Kentucky, legendarily wrapped his arm around his besieged teammate, casting a visual testament of their closeness. The irony is that while this memory is indicative of the close, meaningful bond the two developed, it offers myth mixed with fact. “No one else wrote about it...not in New York, not in Cincinnati, not in white papers, not in black—not in 1947,” said Jonathan Eig after investigating the story for
Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season.
“It's possible that the Robinson-Reese moment took place just as...others remembered it, in 1947. But it seems unlikely.” Eig and Arnold Rampersad (in 1997's
Jackie Robinson: A Biography
, noting that Robinson himself made no mention of the gesture in his 1948 autobiography) suggest that the substance for the tale of Reese's support for Robinson was real, even if the particulars of when and how it was expressed remain in doubt. While historians and fans, insiders and outsiders can natter over the details of this most famous moment, they risk overlooking the greatest shortstop the Dodgers ever had.

Wasn't he, though? He provided 12 above-average seasons from the position, despite World War II waylaying his career in 1943, 1944, and 1945. He hit nothing like an Alex Rodriguez, but when it comes to the best offensive performances by Dodgers shortstops in OPS+, Reese has two of the top three, three of the top five, and 11 of the top 30. Even though he didn't play a major league game from the time he was barely 24 years old until he was almost 28, Reese finished his Dodgers life as the team's all-time leader in runs and walks, second in hits, and fifth in total bases. And for good measure, as baseball writer Rob Neyer notes in his
Big Book of Baseball Lineups,
Reese was the only man to play in every World Series game—44 in all—between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Yankees.

At the turn of the present century, historian Bill James ranked Reese the 10
th
-best shortstop of all time and added that “among the shortstops who were leadoff men and who had long careers...Reese was the most effective leadoff man. [Maury] Wills was more celebrated in the role, but as a practical matter, Pee Wee's walks led to a lot more runs than Wills' stolen bases.”

There's nothing wrong with being remembered for your personality, your good graces and, certainly your uncommon humanity in the face of opposing forces, but it shouldn't necessarily come at the expense of your accomplishments—even if you have trouble believing them yourself.

“Three themes sound through the years of Harold Henry Reese, son of a Southern railroad detective and catalyst of baseball integration,” Roger Kahn wrote in
The Boys of Summer
. “The first was his drive to win, no less fierce because it was cloaked in civility. A second theme was that civility itself. Reese sought endlessly to understand other points of view, as with Robinson or with Leo Durocher or with a news photographer bawling after a double-header, ‘Would ya hold it, Pee Wee, for a couple more?' The final theme echoed wonder. He played shortstop for three generations of Brooklyn teams. Yet near the end, sitting on a friend's front porch and watching a brown telephone truck scuttle by, he said with total seriousness, ‘I still can't figure out why the guy driving that thing isn't me.'”

Instead, Reese drove an entirely different kind of vehicle, right to Cooperstown. He was his own kind of special. James passes along one more Reese anecdote to remember, an origin story specific to the man himself.

 

Dodgers captain Pee Wee Reese—shown here at Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Florida, with his wife Dottie and daughter Barbara—played shortstop for the Dodgers from 1940–42 and 1946–58 and was a 10-time National League All-Star. He played on seven Dodgers pennant-winning teams, and was a member of the 1955 world champion Dodgers. Photo by Barney Stein. All rights reserved.

 

“In 1939, Tom Yawkey and two ‘partners,' Donie Bush and a man named Frank McKinney, purchased the Louisville Colonels for $100,000,” James wrote. “The Colonels had Pee Wee Reese on their roster, a year away from the majors, and Yawkey figured that Reese alone would be worth what he paid for the team. But Bush and McKinney, who were not Red Sox employees, decided they had no reason to let their partner have Reese for free, and voted 2–1 to sell Reese to the highest bidder. Yawkey refused to bid for his own player, and Bush and McKinney sold Reese to the Dodgers for $100,000—the same amount they had paid for the team.”

 

The Handshake Deal

Before Pee Wee Reese, there was George Shuba. On April 18, 1946, playing for his first game the Dodgers' farm team in Montreal on Opening Day of the International League, Jackie Robinson homered in his second at-bat. Awaiting him at the plate was George Shuba, who extended his hand in the customary greeting—except that it was anything but customary for a white man to shake a black man's hand on a baseball field. On the first day of the Robinson's path to integrating baseball, a meaningful impression had been made.

 

36. Roseboro & Marichal

The idea of a bat hitting a skull is about as frightening an image as one can conjure at a baseball game. Baseball can be a surprisingly violent sport, from home-plate collisions to intentional beanballs, but in the modern game, few moments stand out as shockingly as what happened between the Dodgers and the Giants on August 22, 1965.

Tensions were usually heated between those two teams, of course, and a pennant race only turned up the flames. Entering the Sunday finale of a four-game series at Candlestick Park, the Dodgers led a tight NL by half a game over the Milwaukee Braves, with San Francisco just another game behind. Three days earlier, Lou Johnson had hit a game-winning, 15
th
-inning two-run home run off Gaylord Perry (in his seventh inning of relief work). In their previous game, Dodgers first baseman Wes Parker had hit a two-run homer in the 11
th
inning to beat San Francisco.

The pitching matchup on this Sunday was a beauty: Sandy Koufax against Juan Marichal. Koufax had already struck out 288 batters in his 248 innings at that point of the season; Marichal had an ERA of 1.73 and five consecutive complete games.

It wasn't long before the skirmishing began. Wills, who bunted for a base hit to lead off the game, dodged a knockdown pitch from Marichal before lining out to end the top of the second inning. In the bottom of the second, Koufax, who wasn't known for such actions, threw a fastball over San Francisco star Willie Mays' head. Then in the third, Marichal sent right fielder Ron Fairly to the ground with a near beanball.

In the bottom of the third, Marichal came up to bat, and Roseboro crafted a plan to send his own message. Returning one of Koufax's pitches, Roseboro zinged it so near Marichal's head that numerous reports stated it ticked his ear. (Roseboro would later say it was “too close.”) What indisputably happened is it ticked Marichal off.

He raised his bat and struck several blows at Roseboro's head.

“Manager Walt Alston thought at first Roseboro might have lost his left eye,” Sid Ziff wrote in the
Los Angeles Times
. “ ‘It was covered with blood,' he said. ‘I thought Gabby was badly hurt. It's just lucky he had his arm up to ward off some of the blows.'”

The ensuing bench-clearing melee lasted nearly a quarter of an hour—and it would have been longer if not for the peacemaking efforts of Mays, who helped Alston wrap a towel around Roseboro's head and get him to the dugout amid the frenzy. That didn't stop Roseboro from trying to find Marichal again, nor did it stop other Dodgers such as Johnson from trying to get at anyone in a Giants uniform.

The battle for justice after the game was more protracted than the incident itself. Several Dodgers called for Marichal to be banned from baseball, and were incensed when the punishment by NL president Warren Giles was a nine-day suspension and a $1,750 fine. (Giles said he didn't want to penalize the entire Giants team in a close pennant race.) Roseboro, though he accepted an apology from Marichal, considered pressing criminal charges and ended up suing him in court, with the case ultimately being settled.

Meanwhile, the
San Francisco Chronicle
connected Marichal's rising animosity toward the Dodgers with a Don Drysdale pitch that knocked down Mays in May. According to a Ziff column on August 26, Giants fans and the team's manager, Herman Franks asserted that Roseboro got what was coming to him and wondered aloud why he wasn't being suspended. “Something brought this on,” Franks told New York sportswriter Dick Young. “You don't believe this man would just start swinging a bat at people, do you?”

They lost not only the day of the incident (with a shaken Koufax walking two batters before serving up a three-run homer to Mays one out after the fight), but also two September games at home against the Giants after that (with Giles keeping Marichal from pitching in Los Angeles during the series), the Dodgers went on to win the NL pennant over San Francisco by two games, and ultimately the World Series.

In 1975, trying to stay in baseball at age 37, Marichal signed a one-year contract...with the Dodgers.

“Listen, nobody hated Juan Marichal more than I did,” Dodgers vice president Al Campanis told Jeff Prugh of the
Times
. “But there are times when things change, when your affections replace any ill feeling... I'm excited.”

Said Marichal: “I want to make the Dodgers fans forget the past and show them I'm not a bad guy.” But he lasted only two games with the Dodgers, getting knocked out by the fourth inning in both starts, and made the decision to retire April 18. Roseboro had hung up his spikes five years before.

Eventually, Roseboro and Marichal hung up their dispute as well, becoming friends in their post-playing days. Fans at the 1982 Oldtimers Game at Dodger Stadium saw the two of them embrace, and that October, according to Rob Ruck in
The Tropic of Baseball: Baseball in the Dominican Republic
, Roseboro urged voters to forget about the brawl and elect Marichal to the Hall of Fame. That happened in 1983, and Roseboro was one of the first to call Marichal to congratulate him.

In August 1965, Roseboro was said to be hoping to see Marichal indicted, but two decades later, he journeyed to Cooperstown to see Marichal inducted.

“It was just another baseball fight,” Roseboro said amid the 25
th
anniversary celebration of Dodger Stadium in 1987. “I never held that much animosity against Marichal, because if I was in a situation—one-on-one, going-to-fist-city situation—I'd be nervous, and if I didn't think I could kick the guy's butt, I'd probably take a bat and try to keep him off of me, too.”