Source of book: Borrowed from my brother
So, some background here. I am not good at sports, although I enjoyed playing co-ed adult soccer in my 30s. As a kid, I was downright terrible - the kid in the outfield who gets hit by the fly balls…that’s me.
However, I come from a family that has more of a sports background. My dad and uncles played basketball in high school, and my brother did the little league thing. Also, my dad was an avid Dodgers and Lakers fan, so I have a lot of memories of watching baseball and basketball on TV. My brother would drag me out to play one-on-one baseball, and tried to go easy on me, because he was so much better at it. (He is the younger brother too, so it was embarrassing.)
Somehow, out of all of this, I got him interested in academics, and he made a baseball fan out of me.
The last 8 or so years, we have made a point of going to a Dodger game together, with whichever the kids want to come along. Good memories.
Anyway, both of us have enjoyed Jon Weisman, particularly when he was starting dodgerthoughts.com and still writing regularly. He also wrote this book in 2009 - this edition has been updated for 2013. So it lacks most of the Clayton Kershaw era, but more than makes up for it with well over 100 years of Dodger history.
I have been a Dodger fan since my childhood in Los Angeles. And really, they are an easy team to love. They broke the race barrier with Jackie Robinson, they have always and continue to be on the cutting edge of international scouting, and the historic Dodger Stadium has a great family-friendly atmosphere. (We’ll just pretend the Fox Media era didn’t exist…)
When I was a kid, of course, it was Tommy Lasorda, Orel Hershiser, Fernando Valenzuela, and Kirk Gibson. I remember well that famous home run, and Hershiser’s incredible scoreless inning streak. (I got to see both of them play live, although never did see Fernando pitch in person.)
Back then, of course, the team was owned by the O’Malley family. After it was sold to News Corp (Rupert Murdoch’s Fox conglomerate), things went downhill pretty badly. For Dodgers fans, as problematic as the McCourt era was, it was at least a significant improvement on the Fox years. Now, ownership is back in the hands of people who actually care about winning, team building, continuity, and player development. You know, the things that make FANS happy, not shareholders.
There is a ton of history in this book, which actually has more than 100 short articles, if you count the sidebars. This stretches back to Brooklyn before the Dodgers were the Dodgers - when they went by names like the Robins, the Superbas, or the Bridegrooms. (Honestly, what on earth?) Eventually, they became the Trolley Dodgers in 1896 - fans had to dodge the new trolleys to get to the stadium.
One can, of course, get into the whole Yankees/Dodgers history - Queens versus Brooklyn, rich versus working class, juggernaut versus scrappy upstarts. But the book is mostly just about Dodgers and the history.
Anyone who is a Dodgers fan will greatly enjoy this book. It is well researched (that’s what got Weisman his start - his historical information) and well written for its genre.
There is far too much in this book to really describe, but I thought I would give a few fun highlights. For example, the opening to the first part, about Jackie Robinson. (Who else?)
From beginning to end, we root for greatness.
We root for our team to do well. We root for our team to create and leave lasting memories, from a dazzling defensive play in a spring training game to the final World Series-clinching out. With every pitch in a baseball game, we’re seeking a connection to something special, a fastball right to our nervous system.
In a world that can bring frustrations on a daily basis, we root as an investment toward bragging rights, which are not as mundane as that expression makes them sound. If our team succeeds, if our guys succeed, that’s something we can feel good about today, maybe tomorrow, maybe forever.
The pinnacle of what we can root for is Jackie Robinson.
That’s good writing, and it expresses the way that sports can serve as an outlet for a part of human nature that is all too often expressed in antisocial ways. (See note at the end of the post.)
As expected, there is a bit on the immortal Vin Scully, arguably the greatest sports announcer of all time. I was glad to see a mention of Jaime Jarrin, who recently retired after a decades-long run as the Spanish language broadcaster for the Dodgers. Another true legend.
Of interest to lawyers as well as sports fans is that Wiesman spends several pages detailing the real history of how Dodger Stadium came to be at Chavez Ravine. Originally, it held a Hispanic neighborhood, but was eyed by developers who appealed to a number of ugly prejudices in their attempt to get the City and County of Los Angeles to use eminent domain to seize the land. Race was used, of course, and later the Red Scare - the intent to try to use some of the land for low-income housing for the displaced residents was tarred as “communist.” (Pretty much all of the governmental segregation policies were in play.) In the end, the development plans fell through, leaving the City with a parcel of land, and no politically viable way forward.
Thus, the plan to use it for Dodger Stadium, which was relatively easy to sell to Los Angeles voters. Particularly compared to any of the development plans, all of which had become politically toxic by that point. The Dodgers ended up benefiting eventually at the expense of the former residents, but by the time a stadium there was even envisioned, the injustice was already a done deal. The Dodgers weren’t complicit.
Whether one considers a stadium to have a public purpose or not, it would at least seem to have provided more of a benefit for everyone than just a bunch more mansions for billionaires, which was probably the alternative at that point.
In the section on Don Drysdale, who really should be in the Hall as a player, not just an announcer, I was struck by just how often even the great players ended up with early retirements. Drysdale was in his twilight by age 31, and Koufax was gone at 30. Nolan Ryan was unique, of course, but he was also at the dawning of an era of better training and medical care. These days, many good pitchers make it into their late 30s still contributing.
A big reason for that is the late legend, Dr. Frank Jobe. It is difficult to fathom just how revolutionary he was, and how much good he contributed to humanity. And I don’t say that lightly.
Best known for “Tommy John” surgery - the replacement of the ulnar collateral ligament, he raised sports surgery to an incredible level never dreamed of 100 years ago. And his techniques benefited millions who will never play sports professionally - or at all.
Back when I was a kid, our next-door neighbor took a bad fall (dang dog…) and tore her rotator cuff badly. In the old days, she would have had to live with an arm she couldn’t raise level, let alone over her head. It would have been a serious functional disaster.
But, just a few years prior, Orel Hershiser had undergone a similar injury, followed by surgery by Jobe. He gained a solid decade of his career. Likewise, that surgery was done on our neighbor, and, after rehab, she regained much of her range of motion and strength. It was literally a quality-of-life miracle.
I also appreciated the chapters on the two O’Malleys. Walter O’Malley, the father, started off as a lawyer, which I think contributed to his management ability. He ended up with the Dodgers after working for a bank that was owed significant money by a team that was mismanaged by its other owners. O’Malley had both the business sense to keep the team solvent and a love for the game that meant he invested in putting the best team on the field he could.
In contrast, ask any Dodgers fan of my age about Mike Piazza, and expect to hear endless vitriol about how stupid and shortsighted News Corp was as an owner.
Piazza’s story is the kind of cool “out of nowhere” narrative that humans love. He wasn’t selected until the 62nd round of the draft - nearly 1500 players were selected first - and even then, it was because Tommy Lasorda was friends with his dad.
He ended up in the Hall of Fame. Yeah, the Dodgers traded a hall of famer during the peak of his career, and not for good baseball reasons, but because News Corp wanted to save money. God, I hate Rupert Murdoch.
Another anecdote that stood out was the interview of Al Campanis by Ted Koppel. For all his other virtues and vices, Campainis was also a racist. During Koppel’s interview, Campanis opined that the reason that back then, there were zero black managers, general managers, or owners, was that black people weren’t capable of it.
Campanis wasn’t alone, so that isn’t what stood out to me.
What stood out is that Ted Koppel fucking went AFTER Campanis for it, telling him that sounded like garbage, like straight up racism. And when Campanis tried to double down, and started talking about swimming (“black people don’t have the buoyancy”), Koppel would have none of it, stating that maybe it was because black people didn’t have access to public and private pools.
Damn, I really miss having journalists who would punch back a bit. Fascists like Trump and DeSantis get away with a lot because they are coddled by the supposedly “liberal” media. Who is totally milquetoast compared to Koppel. And this was back in the 1980s, interviewing a man who was a legend for other things, not a politician.
In contrast to Campanis was Branch Rickey. The man who signed Jackie Robinson, and then stood by him publicly throughout his career. Rickey didn’t just want to crack the race barrier, he wanted to shatter it, and so picked Robinson, who was not the mild-mannered man some would have you believe. He played with a hard edge, which is what Rickey wanted.
I’m not looking to go the “white savior” direction with this, but Branch Rickey was the rare man who put his reputation and his career and even sometimes his own safety at risk for what was right. His players respected that, and he is one of the Dodgers I am proud of.
The chapter on Dodger no hitters contained this gem. After Koufax’s 1962 no-hitter, his teammates wrote on the blackboard in front of his locker, “Sandy Koufax - No-hitter - 0 for 4” - no hit on the mound AND at the plate. That’s gold right there.
One of the things Weisman says Dodger fans should do is “Question the Conventional Wisdom.” This has been something the Dodgers have been known for, particularly during the O’Malley years, and again with the new ownership. Often, fans (and especially sports writers) whine about the trade deadline deals the Dodgers do - or do not do. But a combination of caution and identifying hidden gems has been the way the Dodgers do things. I like Weisman’s way of putting it, which applies to a LOT more than just baseball.
“Too often, precedent is used as a crutch for a hollow contention.”
I’ll close with a sequence of games in 1989 (which I remember) where the Dodgers ended up playing 71 innings in five days, including - believe it or not - 53 innings in just 54 hours. That’s nuts. And that was only ONE of the two 22 inning games the Dodgers played that season.
Fortunately (in my opinion), the new rules mean that such games are a thing of the past. Since I attend games with my kids, and have a 2.5 hour drive back, I couldn’t do a 22 inning game anyway. The only time we ever left early was an extra-inning game that was late enough that kids were melting down. We heard Justin Turner hit the game-winning single as we were walking back to the car - the stadium (half empty by that point) roared…
As I said, this is a great book for Dodger fans, and would likely appeal to serious fans of baseball regardless of their home team.
***
Just my thoughts about sports in general: We humans are weirdly tribal, which can be a terrible thing. We spend far too much time killing each other, and even more battling for status and privilege.
If war and oppression represent the dangers of our tribalist instinct, and if cliques and exclusion are another, I would argue that sports represent a benign outlet for that part of our humanity.
This is why sports are different from, say, a symphony concert. Orchestral music celebrates cooperation, a common cause, and the transcendent part of our human nature. This is a good thing, and one of the reasons I love making classical music so much.
While sports can have this element - watching humans performing at the peak of their ability is inspiring and beautiful - and team play is cooperation - there is more to it than that.
When we root for our teams, we are hoping that they win - that they beat, dominate, and excel the other guys (or gals). This is tribalism.
In the context of sports, at least for most of us, this means we can talk a bit of smack to our less enlightened family and friends, who clearly root for the wrong team. Here in Bakersfield, on the borderline of Dodgers and Giants fandom, there is a lot of this going on for both sides.
And it is really pretty harmless - only the most rabid (and mentally unhealthy) fans actually hate the fans of the other team. The rivalries are a chance to safely and non-maliciously express our tribalism, to get it out of our system in ways that are not socially malignant.
That is why, to me, I don’t get the denigration of sports. Sure, there is a crap-ton of money in it, probably not the most healthy thing, but at least in the case of sports, the grifting is limited to publicly financed stadiums, not wanton environmental destruction or anti-democracy politics. Of all the expressions of toxic money in our society, sports are hardly the worst offenders. And, given the healthy social outlet for tribalism, I would say they are overall a social benefit.
I guess I’m just not good at the “the sky is falling because X” kind of thinking.
At the end of the day, Go Blue!
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