A TALE OF THREE CITIES: NEW YORK, L.A. AND SAN FRANCISCO IN OCTOBER OF ‘62 (57 page)

John Roseboro was not much of a drinker, so he
dressed and left. "It was the worst scene I ever saw with the
Dodgers," he said. "It was the one time we did not conduct
ourselves with class."

They guzzled liked pirates or old-time Western
saloon cowboys, getting nastier and louder. The scene was
unprecedented in sports history and has probably never been
equaled; not by the fightin', hairy "swingin' A's,"
The Bronx
Zoo
Yankees, or the mid-'80s Mets. Alston locked himself inside
his office. Listening to the clawing, screaming players trying to
get at him from outside, it was like George Romero's
Night of
the Living Dead
; the poor manager huddled inside, waiting out
the darkness.

"Come on out here, you gutless sonofabitch!" screamed
one veteran. "Tell us about your strategy, skipper. How we gonna
play the World Series, you bastard?"

"Walt, you stole my money," screamed Tommy Davis,
apparently oblivious to the fact that Alston also was out his
Series share. "$12,000. You stole it."

"Smokey lost it, boys," cried Podres, who had seen
the agony and the ecstasy in seven years. "Old Smokey lost the
pennant for us."

"We should have won," another screamed. "We could
have won, too, if Durocher was managing this club."

Bottles crashed about, players walking amongst the
broken glass. Uniforms were ripped to shreds, other times tossed in
fury. Some were blind drunk. Daryl Spencer and two others passed
out in the shower. Spencer, who did not drink, had consumed a fifth
of VO in 30 minutes and later said he did not know how he got home.
The club apparently made no provisions for drunk driving. No cabs
were called. The players were left to their own devices. Dodger
Stadium is not near where most players lived, which meant a
perilous traversing of the L.A. freeways.

Griffin was annihilated, fell down wedged into a
cubicle, and needed three men to pry him loose. Roebuck, one of the
day's goats, dressed quickly and drove home in silence with his
wife. "It was like a death in the family," he stated.

Williams stayed in the clubhouse, filled with remorse
and self-recrimination. He eventually played putt-putt golf on the
clubhouse carpet, but despite his poor performance, the wrath was
deflected off of him and directed at Alston.

Of all the players, Drysdale spilled the worst bile.
He was known to be loud and opinionated, but Don was always a man
of class; friendly, helpful and not ostentatious. But that day was
not his finest hour. Oddly, his tantrum could have been directed at
himself. The 25-game winner and Cy Young award recipient had not
pitched well in key games. Exhausted without Koufax in the
rotation, taking it all on himself, he had not been reliable when
most needed.

Bavasi lost his composure entirely, locking himself
in his office, where he grabbed a blanket, turned off the light,
and lay on the couch in the dark. He was literally ill from the
stomach-churning game, speaking to nobody because he knew he would
say something terrible. His phone rang in vain. Knocks on the door
were repeated, shouts un-unanswered. His wife could not get through
and she became concerned. He re-played the season over and over in
the dark, hating everything, filled with doubt and guilt in a
self-imposed hell on Earth. He stayed in his office for seven hours
and left, stunned, at 12:30 in the morning. Drunk Dodgers were
still pounding away in the clubhouse.

In Bavasi's mind, Alston had blown it, no question
about it. Years later, despite his affection for Alston and
subsequent glory attained by the Dodgers, he still blamed the
manager for not bringing in Koufax or Drysdale.

"You've gotta go with your best," he said.

The Giants won the game on "spotty pitching,, and
spottier managing," according to the
1963 Official Baseball
Almanac
. That was one of the kinder assessments. When the press
finally was allowed into the clubhouse, Alston proved to the one,
single stand-up guy of the lot of 'em. He led the writers out of
the clubhouse so as to avoid confrontations, and was calm, candid
and honest, answering every question regardless of how baited or
cutting. He defended all his moves; perhaps he had made mistakes,
but he gave reasons for all of them instead of threatening to punch
people in the face, as Gilliam had done when asked why he
personally denied his teammate (Wills) the stolen base record in
St. Louis.

According to Walt, he would have done everything the
same if given a second chance. This did not endear him to anybody,
and perhaps it was wrong-headed, but it was a stand-up performance.
His voice never wavered while he patiently smoked cigarettes and
took the questions. The writers, who had clambered that they had
deadlines to meet, took their time questioning him, as if this was
an inquisition after a shipwreck. It was in truth a day game and
they indeed had the time to dissect all of it, bit by bit, before
filing their stories.

"I'm going to work their tails off on fundamentals
next spring," said Alston, expressing no concern over the
possibility that he might not be the manager by then. Finally, he
thanked
the writers and returned to the clubhouse, shutting
the door behind him.

Andy Carey went home and burned all his World Series
tickets, not realizing that they had already been deducted from his
paycheck and he could not get his money back.

A lot of the Dodgers lived in the San Fernando
Valley. They drove drunk to Drysdale's restaurant and got even more
plastered, filled with hate for Alston, fueled by Big D's alcoholic
venom. They went through the liquor stock, then went to TV
personality Johnny Grant's house for more. The bars were closed and
that was where the booze could still be found. They drank all
night, "and it was pretty rough," said Perranoski. It was a miracle
nobody crashed a car or was jailed for DUI.

The most classless of all was Leo Durocher,
who stoked emotions like Javert in
Les Miserable
, performing
the act of
j'accuse
against Alston. In the clubhouse he was
approached by everybody, never making any effort to dissuade the
premise that had he been in charge they would have won, they would
have their World Series shares, they would be getting ready for the
Yankees the next day.

A victory celebration had been planned at
the Grenadier Restaurant on the Sunset Strip. Stadium club caterer
Tom Arthur owned it. There were no players in attendance, but
Durocher was there. Liquor flowed and emotions were hot. One Dodger
official allowed that if Leo had been the manager, "we'd have won."
Reports as to what happened next vary. According to some, Durocher
told the club official he would have won the pennant.

According to other reports, he simply
stated, "Maybe."

Others stoked him on and Durocher allowed it all to
build to a head. Later Durocher said that all he said that night
was, "Who wouldn’t like to go into the ninth inning with a two-run
lead?" adding that "I was asked a question and I answered it." The
Grenadier party was "not exactly a call to mutiny," he
recalled.

But regardless of the particulars at the Grenadier,
Durocher had worked and would continue to work behind the scenes
trying for Alston's job. He looked down on the "country bumpkin,"
considering Walt unworthy of something he considered his birth
right of sorts. He had the opportunity to show class and did
not.

Somewhere during his seven hours in the darkness,
Buzzie Bavasi decided that he would not fire Walter Alston.
Loyalty, respect, and also the fact the team had just made oodles
of money, breaking the big league attendance mark; whatever reason
motivated him, Bavasi decided to stick with the manager.

O'Malley had told Walt that if his plans backfired -
principally, the decision to go against O'Malley's St. Louis
admonitions to "get tough" - then "heads will roll." Walter
respected Alston, but was inclined to fire the manager until Bavasi
told him, "If you fire Alston, then I go out the door with
him."

O'Malley had a good front office in place and didn't
want to tinker with it. A win here, a hit there; glory had been so
close. It was not a bad season. It was, in fact, one of the best
years in Dodger history if one could separate the final result for
what came before it. O'Malley told Bavasi it was his call.

The next day, Bavasi met Alston. "I wouldn't blame
you if you fired me right now," said Alston, the stand-up guy.

"Everyone 's entitled to a bad game, a bad year,"
Bavasi told him. They shook hands and that was that. Then, after
Walt left, the phone rang. Hank Greenberg, a Hall of Fame slugger
who was then the president of the Chicago White Sox, had been at
the Grenadier. He told Bavasi about Durocher popping off, saying
that Leo second-guessed and humiliated Alston in full view of
everybody, including the varied Dodgers officials. The story got
out and was printed in the papers.

Bavasi was very angry. Soon afterwards a Friar's Club
roast was held for Maury Wills. Bavasi was coming down the stairs
with Vic Scully when Leo appeared. Bavasi confronted him, calling
him "an ungrateful sonofabitch." Leo tried to lie his way out of
it, but Bavasi knew what he had said. He fired him on the spot.

"Don't come around here anymore, you're through,"
Bavasi screamed. "I gave you a job when you needed one, and this is
what you do to me?" Scully, thinking there would be a fight,
"turned white."

Durocher later claimed that Bavasi "conducted an
investigation," and when he found out Leo had been the telling the
"truth," he rescinded the firing. That was a lie. Durocher had said
it and the "investigation" confirmed it. What did happen is utterly
remarkable, perhaps the most benevolent act in baseball
history.

Alston told Bavasi not to fire Durocher. Alston knew
that many Dodgers were "Durocher guys," and he would need them in
1963. If Leo was a fired martyred, they would gather against him.
He wanted to win it on his own, with nobody feeling sorry for Leo.
It was a move not unlike the one Reggie Jackson made in 1977.
Feuding with manager Billy Martin in New York, Reggie told owner
George Steinbrenner not to fire Martin after a publicized shouting
match between the two in Boston. Reggie felt that he would be
blamed for the popular Martin's firing and all would suffer for
it.

The
1963 Official Baseball Almanac
provided a thorough encapsulation of the memorable campaign,
written in the light of full disclosure. "It is a high-strung team
of talented malcontents and aging veterans who blame each other a
little and their manager a lot for 1962," it reported. "When Los
Angeles lost the play-off, several of the veterans, passing around
several bottles, began to abuse manager Alston, whose greatest
ability seems to be winning pennants (three in nine seasons) and
retaining his job title doing little and saying less than any other
manager in the game. "

"You never know what's going on," said
Drysdale. "General manager Buzzie Bavasi makes all the decisions
anyway."

"It took a combined effort of 25 players to lose the
pennant," Bavasi said. "It's not easy to win a game when you don't
get a run in three straight games. I don't place the blame on
Alston or any one player. I blame 25 of them."

"The more you think about it, the more impossible it
seems," said Alston. "We should never have let it happen and we
don't plan to let it happen again."

The Missiles of October

"Same size as 'FIDEL DEAD!' "

- News editor,
San Francisco Chronicle
,
when asked how big the headline proclaiming the Giants'
pennant-clinching victory should be

While Vietnam simmered amid Cold War tensions
in Southeast Asia, the most pressing dilemma for the United States
in October of 1962 was closer to home. The situation had come to a
head when Cuban strongman Fulgencio Batista was ousted by the
revolutionary forces of Fidel Castro on New Year's Eve, 1959.
Shortly thereafter, Castro declared himself a Communist ally of
Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev.

In 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy, the
Democrat nominee for President, was told of a top secret CIA plan
called Operation Mongoose. Using Cuban nationals, it was designed
to launch an invasion of Cuba and oust Castro. Both Kennedy and
Vice President Richard Nixon, the Republican nominee, were told in
no uncertain terms that the plan was not for public consumption and
could not be discussed during the campaign. Despite this, JFK
strongly urged that such a plan be put in operation to oust Castro
from Cuba. Nixon was one of the plan's main originators and
backers. He was forbidden to talk about it, much less advocate or
reveal Operation Mongoose. Indeed, Nixon was already planning to do
what Kennedy accusingly said he should be doing . . . prior to
Kennedy accusing him of not doing it! It was typical "hardball"
politics from the Kennedys; the kind that Nixon took to be a lesson
for the future.

Nixon was forced to accuse Kennedy of making
an unfounded, reckless accusation, thus denying - for national
security reasons - that any plans were in effect. After JFK assumed
office, the new President inherited the very Eisenhower/Nixon plan
he advocated during the campaign; to invade the Bay of Pigs in
April, just three months after taking office. Faced with the
reality of an invasion as opposed to campaign talk, Kennedy was
skeptical but was swept along with the CIA's plan anyway.

Exiled Cuban forces stormed the Bay of Pigs
in April of 1961, but the operation was fraught with mistakes.
Despite everything, it still could have succeeded, thus
effectuating the ouster of Castro and the liberation of an
imprisoned island, except that Kennedy refused to allowed U.S. jets
to provide air cover for the Cubans. It is seen to this day by
Right-wing Cubans as an act of treachery on the part of JFK.