100 Things Dodgers Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die (30 page)

88. Go to a Minor League Game

If you're invested in the Dodgers, check out the futures market. Attending any minor league game can be great fun, but finding one that features Dodgers farmhands helps get you an early seat on the “I saw him when” bandwagon.

The locations change over time, but the Dodgers ended 2012 with affiliates in seven cities:

1. Albuquerque (AAA)

2. Chattanooga (AA)

3. Rancho Cucamonga (High-A)

4. Great Lakes in Midland, Michigan (Low-A)

5. Ogden (Rookie)

6. Arizona League Dodgers (Rookie)

7. Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic (Rookie)

 

That puts the Dodgers in a wide variety of longitudes and latitudes, so with any luck you're in striking distance of one of these locations, all of which are intimate enough for you to get a close look at the ballplayers from the cheap seats and maybe even a casual chat if you can catch them before the game. Amateur scouts among you can suss out the kind of work pitchers and hitters need in order to make the leap to Dodger Stadium.

Just imagine if you had seen Jackie Robinson testing the waters in Montreal, or Mike Piazza slamming homers in Vero Beach. Those would be incredible memories to cherish. But you know what? Even seeing a shortstop destined to get only the briefest of careers in the bigs—or a pitcher who will never even set foot on a major league mound, but is fulfilling his destiny in an outpost far from the spotlight—those are moments to remember, too.

 

89. Free Baseball

Radio reporter: “Good morning.”

Tommy Lasorda: “What's so...good about it?”

The 21
st
-inning stretch is nothing new for the Dodgers. On the first of May in 1920, Brooklyn played in the longest game in major league history, a 26-inning contest that ended in darkness with the score tied, 1–1. The Robins' Leon Cadore and Boston Brave righty Joe Oeschger each threw complete games. As Glenn Stout notes in
The Dodgers
, Cadore allowed two hits over the final 13 innings, while Oeschger finished the final nine innings one walk away from perfection. “It seems reasonable that each man broke the 300[-pitch] barrier.... Even more remarkably, each man would pitch again within the week and finish the season without apparent arm trouble, although Uncle Robbie would later complain that Cadore was nothing more than a ‘six-inning pitcher,' and later both men would admit to never being quite the same.” Brooklyn then played 13 and 19 innings in its next two games—Burleigh Grimes and Sherry Smith each pitching complete games themselves. All losses.

Six decades later, the Dodgers found the treadmill again. Their struggles actually began on June 1, 1989, with the opening of a four-game series in Houston, when Astros starter Jim Deshaies no-hit the Dodgers for 7
2/3
innings on his way to a 7–2 victory. The next night, Houston's Mike Scott shut out Fernando Valenzuela and Los Angeles, 1–0. The lone run scored following an infield grounder that Valenzuela tried in vain to scoop with his glove to Eddie Murray at first base. If it had worked, Valenzuela told Jerry Crowe of the
Los Angeles Times
, “we'd probably still be playing.”

Be careful what you wish for. On June 3, the Dodgers led 4–1 going into the bottom of the sixth inning, when three consecutive and excruciating two-out walks, followed by two singles, tied the game. And tied it remained until almost eternity, the innings peeling away without any team scoring. Dodgers center fielder John Shelby came within one at-bat of a major league record by going 0-for-10. Orel Hershiser, the last remaining Dodgers pitcher that manager Tommy Lasorda could use (short of waking the next day's starter, Tim Belcher, from his hotel-room slumber), entered the game in the 14
th
and threw seven shutout innings of relief before finally reaching his limit.

Jeff Hamilton, who had played third base for 20 innings, sidled over to pitch for the first time since high school. First baseman Eddie Murray moved over to third base for the first time in more than 11 years, and Valenzuela, who had thrown 114 pitches in his loss the night before, stepped in to play the role of slugging first baseman. Lasorda would later tell Crowe that he had no illusions about his remaining lineup. “It felt to me that we were conceding the game,” he said.

Remarkably, Hamilton pitched a one-two-three 21
st
inning, striking out Billy Hatcher looking while being clocked as high as 91 miles per hour. But after the Dodgers went out in order in the top of the 22
nd
, Hamilton gave up a leadoff single to Bill Doran. After Doran went to second base on a groundout, Hamilton walked Terry Puhl intentionally—then got Ken Caminiti swinging for the second out.

With Rafael Ramirez as the only remaining hurdle to a 23
rd
inning, Hamilton quickly got ahead 0–2. He had thrown 20 of his 29 pitches for strikes.

“He was hitting the black,” Hershiser later said. “He wasn't just throwing the ball down the middle. He was throwing the ball on the outside corner with movement.

“He just made one bad pitch.”

It was the 635
th
pitch of the game. Ramirez lined a shot over first base. Valenzuela, the athlete in roly-poly disguise, jumped up, but the ball tipped off his glove and went into right field. Doran rounded third. Right fielder Mike Davis charged the ball and threw home. Mike Scioscia, who had held on to the ball in home-plate collisions to prevent Houston from scoring the winning run in the 11
th
and 15
th
innings, caught this one as well, but it wasn't in time.

“He had Ramirez 0–2 and he could have thrown three balls there and I guarantee you [Ramirez] would swing at one,” Hershiser said. “But he threw him a fastball on the outside part of the plate and he got a hit.... But who's going to second-guess a third baseman?”

The Dodgers trudged back to their hotel rooms, only to have to return to the Astrodome hours later for Sunday's day game. As if determined to put the previous night's misery behind them, they scored five runs in the first, capped by a grand slam by Scioscia, who had caught the final 16
1/3
innings the night before. But after building the lead to 6–0, Belcher allowed a grand slam in a five-run fifth, Jay Howell allowed a game-tying homer in the ninth and the game went into extras again. Scott, two days after beating Valenzuela as a starter, pitched the top of the 13
th
in relief and then drove in the winning run in the bottom of the inning with a sacrifice fly.

Fifty-three innings in four games, and the Dodgers lost all four—the last three by one run. And even that wasn't all. The next day called for a doubleheader at Atlanta that ended at 1:44
am
, giving the Dodgers 71 innings in five days, including 53 innings of baseball in their last 54 hours. Fortunately for them, the Dodgers swept the twinbill, with 21-year-old callup Ramon Martinez throwing a shutout in the first game.

Fewer than three months later, on August 23, the Dodgers were at it again. Another 22-inning game (kicked off by seven shutout innings by Hershiser as a starter), this one was scoreless until the very end, with the Dodgers poised to set a record by knocking 19 hits without a run before Rick Dempsey hit a leadoff homer off Dennis Martinez. Dempsey then threw out Rex Hudler trying to steal in the bottom of the 22
nd
to end it.

Not to be forgotten were the feats of broadcasting that accompanied these long affairs. With Don Drysdale unavailable because of laryngitis, Vin Scully called 10 innings in Chicago for NBC on the afternoon of June 3, arrived in Houston as the national anthem was being played and broadcast 22 innings that night, and then returned for Sunday's game, making it 45 innings in 29 hours. And in the August game, with both Scully and Drysdale absent, Ross Porter called all 22 innings by himself.

 

Suspended Animation

Lest it be forgotten, the Dodgers also tried to burn the midnight oil one time in Chicago—but that was back when Wrigley Field had no midnight oil to burn. On August 16, 1982, the Dodgers and Cubs played 17 innings of a 1–1 tie before umpires suspended the game due to darkness. It resumed the following day with the Dodgers winning 2–1 in 21 innings.

“The guys who had already been in the game were cheering the other guys on,” Rick Monday told Mark Heisler of the
Los Angeles Times
. “Someone made the observation that it was like a Pony League game. We were going, ‘Hey batter, batter, batter!' all the way to ‘Pitcher's got a rubber arm!' Yeah, we were a little nuts.”

So was the Dodgers defense. Fernando Valenzuela logged time in the outfield after Ron Cey's ejection in the 20
th
inning left the team one player short. But in the top of the 21
st
, Steve Sax scored on a sacrifice fly that saw umpire Eric Gregg raise his arm to call out before switching to the safe sign midway through. Bob Welch entered the game in the bottom of the 21
st
as, of all things, a defensive replacement for Valenzuela, and Jerry Reuss finished his fourth inning of shutout ball to win in relief—just before throwing five innings in the regularly scheduled game, a 7–4 Dodgers victory, to grab that decision as well.

 

90. Luck of the Draw

The dream comes true in '68. The dream about the future. You scout the high schools and colleges, driving up and down and through the country, scrounging for ballplayers like a hobo scratching change off the sidewalk. And then, one year—a year so rare that people would still talk about it decades later—there's cash everywhere you look.

You get Davey Lopes. Steve Garvey. Ron Cey. Bill Buckner. Joe Ferguson, who would later be traded for Reggie Smith. Bobby Valentine and Geoff Zahn, who would be flipped for Cy Young Award candidates Andy Messersmith and Burt Hooton. It's a collective haul that has never been topped. Pennies from heaven.

That this is considered the pinnacle of major league drafting shows just how much of a dart-toss the process is. The Dodgers selected 101 players in 1968 over the four phases that used to constitute baseball's amateur drafting process. Fourteen never reached the major leagues, even for a cup of coffee. Only the eight mentioned above earned more than the right just to say they had made the show. And during their major league careers, the Dodgers won four NL pennants and a single World Series. That's success.

Los Angeles found other gems through the draft in subsequent years, but never the single-year bounty that 1968 provided. To illustrate, the Dodgers only signed five noteworthy players—and just one starting position player—in their next
eight
years of drafting: Lee Lacy (1969), Rick Rhoden (1971), Rick Sutcliffe (1974), Dave Stewart (1975), and Mike Scioscia (1976).

The 1977–79 drafts reversed the recession, with Bob Welch, Mickey Hatcher, Tom Niedenfuer, Mike Marshall, Steve Sax, Brian Holton, Steve Howe, and Orel Hershiser all playing for future Dodgers World Series champs. But then the bear market really hit. You could take the best of the entire draft roster from 1980 all the way through 2001 and you wouldn't have a group much better than the '68ers by themselves. Yes, Mike Piazza, the courtesy 62
nd
-round pick in 1988, is the best Dodgers draft pick ever. Eric Karros (1988) holds the Los Angeles career home run record. Todd Hollandsworth (1991) was a Rookie of the Year. But after that, though Franklin Stubbs (1982), Jeff Hamilton (1982), Dave Hansen (1986), Darren Dreifort (1992), Paul Lo Duca (1992), and Alex Cora (1996) all had their moments, the 20-plus years of picks start to look rather enfeebled. (It would have helped if the Dodgers could have stopped donating young talent from that era to other teams in poor trades: Sid Fernandez, John Franco, John Wetteland, Paul Konerko, and Ted Lilly all had fruitful careers after leaving the Dodgers.) The pit was the Dodgers' 1992 draft, which yielded four major league at-bats (by fourth-round pick Keith Johnson, all with the Angels).

During those barren years, international signings of amateur players like Ramon Martinez and Hideo Nomo kept the Dodgers afloat. But with the arrival of scouting director Logan White in 2002 came a revival of the Dodgers draft fortunes. The 2002–2004 crop of James Loney, Jonathan Broxton, Russell Martin, Eric Stults, Chad Billingsley, Matt Kemp, Scott Elbert, Andy LaRoche (included in the trade for Manny Ramirez), Blake DeWitt, and Cory Wade was the team's best since the late '70s, giving the Dodgers the option not to be compelled to chase every free agent around (not that they fully exercised that option). Clayton Kershaw, the seventh overall pick in 2006 and the team's highest since Dreifort, was gold.

No draft can generate a champion by itself. The draft gives you a chance to find good ballplayers to develop. Developing good ballplayers gives you a chance to win the whole magilla. It's not the entire solution, but it's part of it.

 

 

Here Come the Sons

It was all in the family for the Dodgers on June 1, 2012, when they became the first franchise in history to have a starting lineup with five sons of former major leaguers—including an entire infield. Tony Gwynn Jr. led off in center field, with Ivan De Jesus Jr. batting second at third base, second baseman Jerry Hairston Jr. batting cleanup, Scott Van Slyke (son of Andy) batting fifth at first base, and Dee Gordon (son of Tom) batting eighth at shortstop. Although they went 6-for-19 with two walks, Los Angeles was blown out by Colorado, 13–3.

91. Free (But Expensive) Agency

Baseball's free agency era began with a Dodger. In December 1975, arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that right-hander Andy Messersmith, along with retired Montreal pitcher Dave McNally, no longer had contracts with their teams and could negotiate with any franchise. The decision overturned the major leagues' interpretation of the reserve clause, which the executives felt entitled teams to renew player contracts in perpetuity, even though the language of the contracts stated that teams could do this for one year after the player's last contract had been signed. Ironically, as players union leader Marvin Miller wrote in
A Whole Different Ball Game
, Messersmith's contract dispute with the Dodgers originated with his desire for a no-trade clause that would help ensure he remained a Dodger. Instead, baseball's owners and commissioner Bowie Kuhn bet that Seitz would uphold the sport's longtime precedent that gave them the power to refuse Messersmith's request—and lost. In March 1976, the owners ended their attempts to appeal the decision, and there was no looking back. Free agency was here to stay.

Though fans had to bid farewell to some of their favorites sooner than they might have liked, everyone ultimately came to agree that the unilateral binding of players to teams, like puppies to their masters, was unfair, and subsequent history quickly proved that free agency would not ruin the game as baseball's leadership had insisted. However, it's no understatement to say that the Dodgers themselves have had mixed success in the free agent market, at best.

The Dodgers' first foray into free agency was belated and modest. They signed relief pitcher Terry Forster in November 1977, and he turned in a 1.93 ERA (182 ERA+) the following year, before faltering in subsequent seasons. Two years later, the Dodgers grew bolder—and the results scarred them for nearly a decade. Coming off their first losing season in 11 years, Los Angeles shelled out for free agent pitchers Dave Goltz and Don Stanhouse in November 1979. Goltz had been one of the AL's most consistent pitchers of the 1970s, posting six consecutive above-average seasons, while Stanhouse had been a top reliever for the AL champion Baltimore Orioles. Had either retained their value, the Dodgers no doubt would have taken the NL West instead of losing in a playoff game, but both pitchers were almost hopelessly ineffective.

Between then and the end of the 1987 season, as mainstays like Steve Garvey played out their contracts, the Dodgers' most noteworthy free agent signing was outfielder Terry Whitfield, plucked to be a platoon partner of Candy Maldonado in 1984 (and ending up another disappointment). But in the winter of 1987–88, the first since Fred Claire replaced Al Campanis as general manager, the Dodgers dove back in.

Had Claire's efforts stopped with Mike Davis, coming off three straight solid seasons with Oakland, and Don Sutton, who returned to his original team at age 43, the Dodgers might have considered handing their finances over to a blind trust. In '88, Davis had two home runs in the regular season and a TAv of .208, while Sutton ended his Hall of Fame career in August after a struggle with a sprained elbow. But Claire made one other signing of note: a player who, like Messersmith, had been freed by an arbitrator, in response to owners colluding to drive down salaries earlier in the decade. His name was Kirk Gibson, and he came to have a bit of a memorable year, thanks in part to a single, well-timed walk by Davis in the ninth inning of Game 1 of the World Series.

Given the team's postseason record since 1988, it's no surprise that no Dodgers free agent signing since Gibson has met with that kind of success, but there have still been some nifty ones. Brett Butler had TAvs near or above .300, sparking the Dodgers of the early 1990s. In February 1995, the Dodgers again broke new ground by acquiring the rights to Hideo Nomo, who came over from Japan to become NL Rookie of the Year with a 150 ERA+ and 236 strikeouts in 191
1/3
innings.

Under new general manager Kevin Malone in 1998, the Dodgers got downright brash, signing pitcher Kevin Brown to a record seven-year, $105 million deal. Though Brown was sometimes injured, he was also sometimes spectacular, and in the end doesn't even belong in the conversation for the most disastrous free agent signing of the post-Gibson era. In the 2008 season, the Dodgers found themselves paying an injured Jason Schmidt $12 million in the middle year of his three-year, $47 million contract, at the same time they were laying out the first $14.1 million of Andruw Jones' two-year, $36.2 million sinkhole. Despite entering the year with 368 career home runs at the age of 30, Jones completely lost his batting eye, struggling to a 34 OPS+, the worst by a Dodger in 97 years. Soon after Jones and the re-signing of Manny Ramirez, the split between Dodger owners Frank and Jamie McCourt left the Dodgers handcuffed in their finances, shying away from the big spends.

The only playoff game won by a Dodger between 1989 and 2007 was a shutout in 2004 against St. Louis by Jose Lima, who had signed that year for relative pennies—and then departed just in time to collapse in 2005. Sometimes in the free agent era, the big splash has paid off for the Dodgers, but just as often it seems, a little has gone a long way.

 

Diggin' the Dugout Club

The Dugout Club, which USA Today said in 2008 offered the best premium seat in baseball, might be another story. “Fastballs hiss and pop. Players argue with umpires. Teammates hug. All right in front of you,” wrote the paper's David Leon Moore. “Being a member of the Dugout Club is sort like having a all-expenses-paid suite at the Ritz-Carlton.” With seats closer to home plate than the pitcher's mound and waiters attending to your needs, this is serious all-purpose baseball pampering.

Holdout

For all the decades before the reserve clause was overturned, baseball players had no leverage in salary negotiations except an appeal for goodwill—and the option of quitting the major leagues entirely. In January 1966, after a season in which they had combined for a 2.39 ERA and 592 strikeouts over 644 innings, Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale took their chances, banding together in the hopes of obtaining contracts guaranteeing each roughly $166,000 a year for the next three seasons. The Dodgers, not surprisingly, offered Drysdale and Koufax only slight raises from their 1965 salaries of $80,000 and $85,000, according to Steve Delsohn in True Blue.

So the Dodgers reported to Vero Beach for spring training without their two star pitchers (along with Maury Wills, who was holding out separately for a raise from $60,000 to $100,000). Wills settled, but the pitchers took their holdout to the end of spring training. While public sentiment worked against them in those pre-free agent days, Koufax and Drysdale lined up enough outside work—from book deals to movie appearances—to keep from having to cave in completely. On March 30, two weeks before the regular season began, they agreed to one-year contracts: approximately $125,000 for Koufax and $110,000 for Drysdale. It wasn't a complete success, but the 50 percent raises, give or take, were enough for people to take note.

Drysdale ended up having the worst season of his career to that point (a 3.42 ERA doesn't sound bad, but his ERA+ was 96), while Koufax was extraordinary: 1.73 ERA (190 ERA+). Of course, Koufax pitched through such tremendous pain that he ended up retiring at the end of the season. However, one still wonders what might have happened had the Dodgers been willing to give him three years. Would they have lost money on the deal, or would they have kept the superhuman lefty for longer?