100 Things Dodgers Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die (15 page)

37. 1962

Los Angeles, meet Brooklyn. Meet shock, meet despair, meet unremitting bitterness. Meet Murphy's Law. Meet the return of the Devil himself: “Wait 'til next year.”

In 1962, the year Dodger Stadium opened, the Dodgers found themselves in a heated pennant race from the start. After losing their first game, they won 16 of their next 26, including an 18-strikeout performance by Sandy Koufax, tying his own NL record. Yet they still found themselves five games back of their 21–6 archrival San Francisco Giants. A 13-game winning streak only put Los Angeles in a tie for first place on June 1. It took a 41–18 record (.695) for the Dodgers to move into first place by themselves on June 8.

Los Angeles and San Francisco jockeyed for position over the next month. Koufax, who pitched his first career no-hitter June 30, combined with Don Drysdale on a 2–0 shutout of the Giants on July 8 to put the Dodgers once more in first, where they would stay into October. But nine days later, with a 2.06 ERA and 208 strikeouts in 174
2/3
innings, Koufax was knocked out of action by injury. He would pitch only 8
2/3
dreary innings for the remainder of the year, leaving behind a void that would redouble in the season's final days.

Even without Koufax, it looked like the Dodgers would edge the Giants without looking back. They led by 5
1/2
games on August 9 and, after winning their 100
th
game on September 22, held a four-game advantage with seven left to play. But on the 23
rd
—the day Maury Wills broke Ty Cobb's single-season stolen base record—St. Louis hammered the Dodgers 12–2. Two more losses in their next three games followed, trimming the team's lead over San Francisco to two games with three left.

It still should have been enough, except Dodgers hitters showed their new, warm-weather hometown what a drought really looked like. “They didn't tail off,” Dodgers vice president Fresco Thompson would later tell
Los Angeles Times
columnist Sid Ziff. “They just went to the edge of the precipice and jumped off.”

Trailing the Cardinals 2–1 in the bottom of the seventh inning on September 28, the Dodgers tied the game on a Wills RBI single. Los Angeles wouldn't score again for 35 innings. St. Louis won in the 10
th
inning, and then on September 29, backed by two unearned runs off Drysdale, the Cardinals' Ernie Broglio two-hit Los Angeles, helping reduce the Giants' deficit to a single game heading into the final day of the regular season.

That afternoon, as Johnny Podres and Curt Simmons battled in a scoreless duel at Dodger Stadium, word came from the Bay Area that Willie Mays had homered in the eighth inning to break a 1–1 tie. Minutes later, the Giants sealed that victory. Then, when the same eighth inning rolled into Los Angeles, the Cardinals' Gene Oliver homered off Podres, dropping the Dodgers into the same three-game playoff series they had in New York with the Giants in 1951—the least awaited rerun in Dodgers history.

Upon the first game in San Francisco, the collapse of the Dodger offense—which despite it all was second in the NL in runs and on-base percentage—was joined by the full impact of Koufax's ailing digit. Having made three mostly ineffective appearances since returning to action September 21, Koufax tried again but lasted only seven batters, allowing three runs on four hits. Mays (3-for-3, two homers) and the Giants pounded six Dodger pitchers while San Francisco's Billy Pierce threw an 8–0 shutout. After 163 games, the Dodgers finally faced elimination.

By the time the Dodgers entered the sixth inning of the playoff, which moved to Los Angeles for the second game, they had amassed only 21 base runners in those 35 scoreless innings. Drysdale, who according to Baseball-Reference.com had thrown his 4,500
th
pitch of the season earlier in the game, ran out of gas and allowed a walk, a double, and two singles, adding to the damage by slipping while fielding a grounder for an error. Four runs came across, giving San Francisco what seemed obviously to be an insurmountable 5–0 lead.

Remarkably, the Dodgers actually scored. Even more remarkably, the Dodgers didn't stop scoring. Seven runs came across in the inning, with reserve Lee Walls doubling home three and then scoring for a 7–5 lead.

Although the offense had come to life, the Dodgers pitching and defense were still on life support. San Francisco tied the game with two in the eighth, aided by another Dodgers error by Frank Howard. But in the bottom of the ninth, despite manager Alvin Dark's use of four pitchers, the Dodgers loaded the bases on three walks and then won the longest nine-inning game in major league history to that point on Ron Fairly's sacrifice fly. As in '51, one more game would decide it all.

Podres, whose 1–0 loss in the regular season finale had come three days earlier, started the finale. He allowed two runs in the third inning including yet another unearned run, but Los Angeles came back with one in the fourth, two in the sixth on a Tommy Davis homer, and one in the seventh when Wills singled, stole second and third, and scored on a throwing error for a 4–2 lead.

In the bottom of the eighth, after Davis reached third base with two out, Alvin Dark dared the Dodgers to go for broke. He had reliever Don Larsen (of 1956 World Series perfect game fame) walk Johnny Roseboro and Willie Davis intentionally to get to the pitcher's spot. Rather than pinch-hit, Dodgers manager Walter Alston let bat Ed Roebuck, who had given him a much-needed three shutout innings.

“We had a two-run lead, and I'd rather have Roebuck pitching for us with a two-run lead than anybody I've got,” Alston told John Hall of the
Times
.

Later, Jim Murray would write that “another baseball official couldn't believe his eyes, all four of them, when he wandered into the locker room in the late innings of the game where the wirephotos had rigged up machines and found Drysdale idly standing there watching the transmissions of pictures. ‘Why the hell aren't you out there heating up?' he exploded. Drysdale shrugged. No one had asked him to.” But considering how overworked his staff was, no option that Alston faced offered refuge once he committed to leaving Roebuck in.

Not only did Roebuck ground out to end the eighth, but needing only three outs for the pennant in the ninth, he ran into immediate trouble. Matty Alou singled, and after he was forced at second on a hard smash by Harvey Kuenn, Willie McCovey walked on four pitches. Then Alou's brother Felipe walked on a 3–2 pitch. Then Mays came up, and hit a ball that went off Roebuck's glove for an infield single and an RBI. Bases loaded, Dodger lead cut to one run, and Alston's gamble on Roebuck had busted. He called in Williams, the winning pitcher from the previous day.

“It had to be Williams,” said Alston. “The only right-handers left in the bullpen were Stan and Larry Sherry. And Sherry couldn't get loose. His shoulder's been stiff. Williams was well warmed up.”

Orlando Cepeda hit a sacrifice fly to tie the game, but at least it gave Williams and the Dodgers a second out. However, with catcher Ed Bailey up, Williams threw a wild pitch to move runners to second and third. That meant Williams would walk Bailey intentionally to load the bases again. And lacking any margin for error, Williams followed up by walking Jim Davenport on five pitches to force in the go-ahead run.

Appropriately, after Ron Perranoski relieved Williams, the Giants added another run on a bobble by Dodgers rookie reserve second baseman Larry Burright—the team's fourth error of the game. Though Perranoski got a strikeout to end the inning, the Dodgers were back in a hole. Game 1 winner Pierce came in to close the pennant out, and did so on 12 pitches, Walls flying to center to end it.

Reporters were held out of the Dodgers locker room for nearly an hour after the game. Eavesdroppers heard only silence punctuated by fierce cursing. When the doors finally opened, Hall observed, “There were several empty whisky bottles. Ripped uniforms were scattered on the floor.” Said Duke Snider, the lone Dodgers remaining from the '51 defeat: “They're all still in a daze.”

Though Los Angeles would find relief the following year, the collapse gave the team's new supporters their initiation. Truly, they were Dodgers fans now.

 

Fall of '42

Trailing the St. Louis Cardinals by 21⁄2 games with a week to go in the 1942 NL pennant race, Brooklyn roared to the finish line by winning its final eight games.

The problem was that in the final third of the season, St. Louis was hotter than a Missouri summer's day, winning their final six games, capping a run that saw them lose only eight of their final 51 contests. The Dodgers had a 10-game lead over the Cardinals on August 5 and won 60 percent of their remaining games, and still it wasn't enough.

The pivotal swing came in a two-game series between the teams September 11–12 in Brooklyn. St. Louis held the Dodgers to one run in 18 innings, winning 3–0 and 2–1. That would be the difference between making and missing the World Series in 1942.

38. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go.

He was a vision of the word
go
; a living, racing vision, everything you think and feel when you close your eyes and say the word to yourself, as you hear 50,000 fans at brand new Dodger Stadium chanting it. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go.

After more than half a century of baseball that had been won and lost by the power of players' arms, Maury Wills brought legs back to the sport. He tore across the diamond like scissors through paper, carving his indelible place in Dodgers history.

In that 1962 season, Wills stole 104 bases, the most by a baseball player since 1891 and 41 more than anyone had swiped since 1920. His 31 steals in 35 attempts that year after August 31 were by themselves more than Jackie Robinson had in all of 1947 when he led the league.

“If the Los Angeles Dodgers hold together and win the National League pennant,” Tom C. Brody wrote in
Sports Illustrated
just before the end of the regular season, “it may be said that they stole it. More accurately, a slight, almost frail Dodger stole it. Maurice Morning Wills is his name and the first time this larcenous son of a Baptist minister gets on base against the Yankees' left-handed Whitey Ford, possessor of one of the most unfathomable pick-off motions in baseball, a dramatic high point of the World Series already will have been reached. Will Ford pick him off? Will little Maury steal? For the answer, tune in next week.”

The answer was that in the ninth inning of the third and final tiebreaker playoff game of '62, the Dodgers lost the pennant, forestalling Wills' World Series showcase. But Wills didn't lose his 1962 NL MVP award or his place in history.

It's true that the impact of Wills' revolution isn't quite what it's been touted to be. Baseball fans and insiders alike heralded him for bringing the stolen base back to the game, but NL stolen base totals declined in '63 and '64, and failed to return to '62 levels for another five years after that. Wills himself would only top 60 steals one more time in his career, perhaps not surprisingly since he turned 30 at the end of the '62 season.

But Wills' stolen bases meant something, no doubt about it. “Stolen bases in general were worth more in the lower-run scoring environment of the 1960s, and Wills' thefts were even more valuable in pitching-friendly Dodger Stadium,” Rich Lederer of BaseballAnalysts.com said. “I don't necessarily think Wills is a Hall of Famer. I just believe he has gone somewhat unappreciated over time, partly due to his subsequent drug problems, disastrous managerial career, and a changed game that focuses more on power, including from the shortstop position. His No. 1 contemporary was Luis Aparicio, who was voted into the Hall of Fame.... Aparicio was a better fielder than Wills. But Wills was better offensively, both at the plate and on the bases.”

Wills floated through the ballpark like a lifeline to Dodgers fans, who would all but give up on the team scoring if Wills didn't reach first base. When he was kept off the bases, the offense seemed to grind to a stop. But when he was on, it was all systems go...go...go…go...go!

 

 

 

39. “Nightline”

In the end, what you have to ask is not whether Al Campanis was a victim, but whether he was the only victim.

If he didn't deserve to see 19 years as Dodgers general manager and more than four decades in the organization come to an end over his grotesquely expressed remarks regarding African Americans on the April 6, 1987, ABC broadcast of
Nightline
, was his fate any worse than that of the nameless people deprived of career advancement in baseball because of the attitudes seeping through Campanis' inconsistent but telling comments? Even the most sympathetic interpretation of Campanis' use of the word “necessities,” an interpretation that focuses on his contention that “you have to pay your dues,” was disingenuous, as littered as baseball is with white managers who did no such thing. Black men were not getting past the gate, and Campanis could express no fault with the gatekeepers.

And so if all Campanis was doing was channeling the prevailing attitudes of his time and his upbringing, does that make his forced departure unjust? There are undoubtedly those who got 19 fewer years as general manager than he did and who are less remembered, less celebrated, and less fulfilled than they might otherwise have been.

“I was shocked,” baseball legend Henry Aaron said in response to Campanis' remarks, “and I think Mr. Campanis needs to apologize to every single black person in America for making comments like that.”

Campanis did. “My statements have been construed as indicating a belief that blacks lack the ability to hold such positions,” he said the next day. “I hold no such beliefs. However, I, and only I, am responsible for my statements. Therefore, I apologize to the American people, and particularly to all black Americans, for my statements and for my inability under the circumstances to express accurately my beliefs.... In my work and in my personal life, I have never distinguished a person by reason of his color, but only by reason of his abilities. For this reason, I feel that this is the saddest moment of my entire career.”

Whether Campanis' failings were of discrimination or articulation, they should be considered alongside his humanity. They do not negate the way he openly befriended and supported Jackie Robinson when the two were the double-play combination of the 1946 Montreal Royals, at a time when that kind of support was anything but automatic. They do not eliminate the positive things he did, as a teammate, scout, and GM.

“There are a lot of racists in the world, on both sides, and he wasn't one of them,'' said Roy Campanella's widow Roxie to Matt McHale of the
Los Angeles Daily News
. “He helped Roy so much when he was coming through the minor leagues. He molded a lot of young men into men.''

Campanis' legacy is necessarily two-pronged; it switch-hits on both sides of morality. No aspect of Campanis should be considered in a vacuum. It's a reminder that those of us who sit in judgment of others on any level still need to reexamine ourselves. We might or might not have Campanis' particular flaw, but we are all flawed, and we can all do better.

 

 

Excerpt from Ted Koppel's interview with Al Campanis

Koppel:
Why is it that there are no black managers, no black general managers, no black owners?

Campanis:
Well Mr. Koppel, there have been some black managers, but I really can't answer that question directly. The only thing I can say is that you have to pay your dues when you become a manager. Generally you have to go to the minor leagues; there's not very much pay involved. And some of the better-known black players have been able to get into other fields and make a pretty good living in that way.

Koppel:
Yeah, but you know in your heart of hearts—and we're gonna take a break for a commercial—you know that that's a lot of baloney. [Campanis laughs.] I mean there are a lot of black players, there are a lot of great black baseball men who would dearly love to be in managerial positions, and I guess what I'm really asking you is to, you know, peel it away a little bit—just tell me why you think it is. Is there still that much prejudice in baseball today?

Campanis:
No, I don't believe it's prejudice. I truly believe that they may not have some of the necessities to be, let's say, a field manager or perhaps a general manager.

Koppel:
Do you really believe that?

Campanis:
Well, I don't say that all of them, but they certainly are short. How many quarterbacks do you have? How many pitchers do you have that are black?...

Koppel:
Yeah, but I mean, yeah, I've got to tell you, that that sounds like the same kind of garbage we were hearing 40 years ago about players, when they were saying, “Ah not really…”

Campanis:
Well—

Koppel:
“Not really cut out”—remember the days when you hit a black football player in the knees. And you know—that really sounds like garbage if you forgive me for saying so.

Campanis:
No, it's not garbage, Mr. Koppel, because I played on a college team and the center fielder was black, in the backfield at NYU with a fullback who was black. Never knew the difference whether he was black or white—we were teammates. So it just might be that they, they...why are black men or black people not good swimmers? Because they don't have the buoyancy.

Koppel:
Oh, I don't, I don't—It may just be they don't have access to all the country clubs and the pools….