Long Shot (25 page)

In the first game of the playoffs, in Los Angeles, I reached Schourek for a home run but we fell short, 7–2. In the second game, Karros hit two home runs, I went 0 for 5—including a strikeout, looking, in the ninth, against Jeff Brantley—and we lost, 5–4. Butler and Chad Fonville were on base all day in front of me, and Eric was crushing the ball behind me, so you can imagine how I felt—especially having it go down that way in our own ballpark. The strange thing was, though, that Dodger Stadium felt different in the playoffs. Since the games started at five o’clock for national TV, the sun would be setting for a good portion of them, and it wasn’t the same hitting atmosphere that we were accustomed to. That’s not an excuse, because the other team played in the same atmosphere, but the upshot was, we didn’t feel too badly about having to go to Cincinnati for game three. Besides, we had Nomo lined up. David Wells blew us away, 10–1.

The sweep was a miserable end to a season that I felt pretty good about, otherwise—which, of course, only made it worse. Had we won or even made it to the World Series, I could have relished the facts that I’d put up the highest slugging percentage (.606) in Dodgers history; that, after three years in the big leagues, nobody but Babe Ruth and my hitting idol, Ted Williams, had ever hit more home runs (91) with a higher batting average (.327) than I had; and that I’d finished a very close second to Barry Bonds (1.009 to 1.006) in OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage), a favorite statistic of the sabermetrics people. The great Jim Murray of the
Los Angeles Times
wrote a column comparing me favorably to the most renowned catchers in history. With the MVP vote coming up, I liked my chances.

The irony, though, was that they would probably be compromised by my best friend in baseball—as would his by me, for that matter. Karros and I had the same number of home runs that year, and he actually drove in more runs. He was also in better graces with the press. There was some consensus among the Dodger media to push Eric for MVP. That was all good, except that I couldn’t agree entirely with the rationale. Writers kept saying that Eric had held the team together when I was hurt. He did hit well in those times—he hit well
all year
, especially in the clutch—but the fact was, we had a losing record when I wasn’t in the lineup. From my perspective, that seemed to underscore my value to the ball club. I guess it was a matter of how you looked at it.

At any rate, I thought we both had better seasons than Barry Larkin, who, after a full frontal assault by the media starting in early September, ended up winning it, with Dante Bichette of Colorado—who led the league in home runs and RBIs—second. And Greg Maddux (19–2, with a 1.63 ERA) third. I finished fourth, one place ahead of Eric.

That was the beginning of a growing cynicism I nurtured over the years toward the MVP award. And the writers, too.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Hideo Nomo shut out the Braves, 1–0, in our first home game of 1996, outpitching Tom Glavine. As great as Glavine was, somehow I went three for three against him, all singles, to make it eight for sixteen in my career. I suspect it’s because I was willing to be patient and take the ball to right field. That year, I would actually lead the major leagues in opposite-field hits, which served me well against craftsmen like Glavine, who will abuse impatience. In any case, we took two out of three from the Braves, which was a good sign, seeing as how Atlanta set the standard in the National League.

It wasn’t long, though, before the season took a grim turn. Early in May, Brett Butler left the team to have a cancerous tumor removed from his throat. Butler was still one of the best center fielders and top-of-the-order hitters in the game, but he was almost thirty-nine and would have to undergo intensive radiation treatments. Most people figured he was through as a ballplayer.

We never found a long-term replacement for Brett in center field, but Todd Hollandsworth, a rookie playing mostly in left, picked up a lot of the slack in the batting order. Amazingly, he would become our fifth consecutive Rookie of the Year (following Karros, me, Mondesi, and Nomo).

Eric, Mondesi, and I did our parts, as well, in holding things together. I was leading the league in hitting late in May, when I slid clumsily into second base—the only way I knew how, it seemed—and hyperflexed my knee. Players don’t ordinarily admit this, but I badly wanted to win a batting championship. I would have preferred it even to a home run title. As I’ve noted, I didn’t like to make outs.

My knee was swollen and sore, but it was playable, and we were straining to hang close to the Padres, of all teams. In June, we asserted ourselves by taking three out of four in Atlanta, the last of them coming behind Candiotti, 3–2, when I hit a couple of homers. That finally pulled us even with
San Diego. We then won two out of three in Chicago, wrapping up the final game in thirteen innings after some strong relief work by Chan Ho Park, who actually drove in the winning run with a bases-loaded walk.

Afterward, Park was having a wonderful time talking to the writers when one of them glanced into his locker and noticed that the sleeves and pants of his suit had been chopped off. Raul Mondesi was the perpetrator in an act of good-natured rookie hazing, a tradition we observed to make new players feel like part of the ball club. Chan Ho didn’t see it that way. He went into a rage, flinging a chair across the clubhouse. Apparently, sophomoric humor wasn’t cool in Korean clubhouses, but showing up your teammates in front of the media wasn’t cool in ours. I kind of ripped him in the papers for that, and he, in turn, made a public thing of it. I suppose I should have been more sensitive to the cultural considerations, but the bottom line was, I didn’t click with Chan Ho the way I did with Nomo.

Nevertheless, we arrived home in first place, looking good and gathering steam. That Sunday, we came from behind to tie the Astros with two runs in the eighth and beat them in the bottom of the ninth on my one-out home run against Xavier Hernandez.

It was June 23. After that date, nothing was ever quite the same.

• • •

For all of the difficulties I had with the Dodgers over the years—from their lack of interest in me after the draft to the minor-league drama to the contentious contract negotiations—I always appreciated the fact that they weren’t just another baseball team. The Dodgers had a soul.

Actually, they had
two
souls. One belonged to Peter O’Malley, the family-oriented owner and gentleman whose father, Walter, had brought the team over from Brooklyn in 1958, ten years before I was born; and the other—proud, public, loyal, loud, and a little chaotic—was, unmistakably, Tommy Lasorda’s. Tommy, of course, had replaced Walter Alston, who had accompanied the club from Brooklyn and managed it well for twenty-three years. Alston went about his business in a strong but quiet and conservative style, which fit right in with the O’Malleys—especially Peter. When the time came, credit Peter for having the self-assurance to hire a flamboyant Italian cut from a drastically different cloth. Between them, O’Malley and Lasorda
were
the Dodgers, as we knew them.

That lasted until the moment I stomped on home plate to put away the Astros.

Sometimes, it seems like the game of baseball is out of our hands. We think we’re swinging a thin-handled bat at a two-seam fastball, taking
Glavine the other way or going deep against Xavier Hernandez, and really, it’s some other power taking over—God, fate, poetry, whatever you want to call it. The victory on June 23 was the 1,599th of Tommy’s incredible, Hall of Fame career as a major-league manager. And the last.

That night, he attended a charity dinner at the Century Plaza Hotel and complained to his wife, Jo, about abdominal pain. She took him to the hospital the next day, an off day. On Tuesday, he was diagnosed with an ulcer. On Wednesday, he underwent angioplasty surgery. Tommy had suffered a minor heart attack, and the doctors weren’t sure when.

Billy Russell, his old shortstop and coach, took over the team, expecting to return it to Tommy in a week or two. Tommy expected the same. Meanwhile, the docs were telling Tommy to start taking things a little easier. He knew that wasn’t feasible as long as he was managing the Dodgers. Maybe somebody else could take it easy in that job, but not Tommy Lasorda. About a month later, there was a press conference at Dodger Stadium, and Tommy’s voice was shaking when he said, “For me to get into a uniform again—as excitable as I am—I could not go down there without being the way I am. I decided it’s best for me and the organization to step down . . . . That’s quite a decision.”

Yeah, it was. I wished I could have lightened the moment somehow. In the best tradition of Tommy himself, maybe I should have pulled him aside and jumped all over him the way he always jumped on me when I felt like I shouldn’t play: “You mean to say you can’t sit in the fuckin’ dugout and tell Billy Ashley to go up there and pinch-fuckin’-hit? You can’t walk out to the fuckin’ mound and hold up your right fuckin’ hand for Todd Worrell? What the fuck? I’d love for you to get some rest, Tommy, but we don’t have a lineup card big enough that we can read it from your fuckin’ house in Fullerton.”

On one hand, even though he was sixty-eight, managing the Dodgers was everything to Tommy, and I’d always thought they’d have to haul him out of the dugout in a box. On the other, I suppose we could see it coming while he was convalescing. He was scheduled to coach at the All-Star Game, which was in Philadelphia that year, and there was no way he’d miss the trip back home if he could help it. But he watched from his couch in California.

Tommy was the only thing missing from that night. There were about fifty family members and friends of mine in the crowd, and I had a good time with the whole scene. The year before, at the All-Star Game in Texas, I’d taken a batting-practice ball to the outfield and had Barry Bonds and a few other guys sign it. When it was covered with autographs, I held it up to
one section of the crowd and got everybody cheering and screaming, then took it over to another section and got the people worked up over there. Whichever section made the most noise got the ball. When I tossed it into the seats, it turned into a scrum to see who could come up with the prize. I reprised the act in Philadelphia, and they went wild over it.

I’d been the leading vote-getter for the game—I was hitting .363 with twenty-four homers at the break—and found that immensely gratifying. Even so, it didn’t quite equal the honor of catching the first pitch from Mike Schmidt, the guy I’d always wanted to be like. At that instant, it hit me that I really
was
like Mike, in a superficial, just-getting-started sort of way. (Thankfully, I was booed less—although, within a couple years, I would make up a lot of ground in that department.) To top it off, he signed the ball:
Mike, I think you’re the best.

That was the greatest moment of the evening . . . until the bottom of the second inning, at least, when I cranked a long home run off Charles Nagy, the American League starter. According to Bob Nightengale of the
Los Angeles Times
, Tommy sat up and screamed when the ball came down in the upper deck of Veterans Stadium.
That
was the greatest moment of the evening . . . until we’d completed the 6–0 shutout and I was named the game’s MVP (I also had an RBI double).

At the end of the night, though, the greatest moment might have been seeing my mom crying tears of joy as I held up the MVP trophy. Or watching my dad accept congratulations from half the population of Chester, Montgomery, Delaware, Bucks, and Philadelphia counties. He was beaming and bragging so much, I finally had to say, “That’s enough, Dad.”

In the postgame interviews, I told the writers, “This is a small tribute to my dad.” I meant that, of course. But if I’d known what was going through Tommy’s head at the time, I could have dedicated my award to him
and
my father. I think they both would have liked that.

• • •

After four losses, Billy Russell’s first win came in Colorado on a night when I homered three times and drove in six runs. We led 13–0 going into the bottom of the eighth, behind Ismael Valdez. The final score—classic Coors Field—was 13–10, with the tying run on deck.

At that time, I was having more trouble than ever throwing out runners, which my pitcher friends were not reluctant to point out. They didn’t have a lot to say when I homered three times and drove in six runs, but I’d hear from them on days like the very next one, when the Rockies embarrassed me by stealing ten bases, six of them by my old teammate Eric Young. We
lost that one, 16–15. For what it’s worth, I homered in that game, too. Just saying.

Russell had been my manager in Albuquerque, and he was a good bench coach for Tommy, but after he took over the Dodgers, he and I didn’t gel. I’m not sure what the problem was. There were some strange dynamics running through the organization in those days. Tommy became a vice president when he stopped managing, and a lot of people seemed to be afraid that he would take their job, or that associating with him would somehow put them on the wrong side of something or other. My dad once walked into Billy’s office and was appalled to find no trace that Tommy had ever been there. All of the old pictures had been taken down except for one of Walter Alston. Russell had actually played more for Tommy than he had for Alston, not to mention the fact that Tommy was the one who had hired him. It seemed like a slap in Tommy’s face, which of course my dad couldn’t tolerate. He said, “Billy, what the hell are you doing? How can you have that picture up there and nothing of Tommy to go with it?”

According to my dad, Russell told him, “I’ve got to protect my own ass.”

That’s the way it was around there. Billy had been warned to steer clear of Tommy. He wanted my dad to convey that message to Tommy, but my dad didn’t think it was his place to do that, per se. What he said to Tommy was, “That stupid ass is telling me that Fred Claire said he should stay away from you.”

Later in the year, when reporters asked Russell who he thought deserved the MVP award, he answered, “Ken Caminiti.” It was hard not to take that personally, as much as I admired Caminiti. A tough-guy third baseman, Caminiti was carrying the Padres while battling through a barrage of hardship. At various times in 1996, he dealt with injuries to his abdomen, biceps, elbow, groin, hamstrings, and back. Then, on August 18, a day after we’d taken over first place, San Diego was playing the Mets in Monterrey, Mexico, when Caminiti had a bout with nausea, dehydration, and Montezuma’s revenge. They put him on the training table with an IV and a Snickers bar, and he got up, marched out, and hit two home runs to bring the Padres back into a tie with us.