100 Things Dodgers Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die (19 page)

50. Chaos at Candlestick

“This was the worst I've seen since I've been born. And I've been in World War II.”

— San Francisco Giants president Al Rosen, quoted by Sam McManis in the
Los Angeles Times

 

It was the afternoon, and the night, and the morning...that the heated Giants-Dodgers rivalry boiled over into a
Lord of the Flies
remake.

You could blame it on Bruce Springsteen if you want. According to Ray Ratto of the
San Francisco Chronicle
, after the Dodgers were rained out at Candlestick Park on April 22, 1988, they voted against making up the game on an open date three days later, because a number of players had tickets to see the Boss that night at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. So instead, the teams scheduled a doubleheader for 5:30
pm
on a midweek summer day, July 26.

They might as well have penciled mayhem into their calendars. As the day began, the Dodgers had a 5
1/2
-game lead over Houston, but the feisty Giants—the defending NL West champs—were six back after beating Los Angeles the night before and looking to make a move.

Tensions began building as the teams entered the seventh inning of the first game tied 1–1. Dodger catcher Rick Dempsey hit a two-run homer in the top of the seventh, though San Francisco kept it close in the bottom of the eighth with a trio of singles producing a run. In the ninth inning, a homer by Jeff Hamilton and a two-run triple by Steve Sax built the Dodgers lead up to 6–2.

For years inside the multipurpose stadium at Candlestick Point, there was a gap between the front row of the left-field seats and the chain-link outfield fence, and after home runs, fans would bound into the area in pursuit of the ball. With the heat of the rivalry and copious amounts of alcohol being consumed on a summer's day-turned-night, the pursuit splintered into something particularly zealous. Regardless of whether there was a home-run ball to retrieve, fans began climbing the chain-link fence to throw objects at Dodgers left fielder Kirk Gibson and, as the
Chronicle
recalls, trying to shake the fence from its moorings.

And as if the drunken behavior needed a chaser, this was baseball's Year of the Balk. Baseball's rules committee had asked umpires that year to strictly enforce baseball's arcane “discernable stop” rule requiring pitchers to come to the set position, which led to record numbers of violations (924 balks in 1988, compared to 356 the previous year) and endless aggravation for the victims.

So when Scott Garrelts balked Sax in for the Dodgers' seventh run, the call seemed to twist the knife in the Giants and the Candlestick crowd (even though home-plate umpire Jerry Crawford called one earlier on Dodgers winning pitcher Orel Hershiser and later on closer Jay Howell). The Giants clawed for a run in the bottom of the ninth, but with two runners on, Howell struck out Robby Thompson and Will Clark to end the game.

Amazingly, that was only the prelude. The second game was the doozy. In the nightcap, which began at 9:08
pm,
San Francisco struck first on a third-inning Chris Speier homer off Tim Belcher, but the Dodgers quickly trumped that with a four-run fourth, capped by Belcher's two-run double.

Back-to-back doubles by Mike Aldrete and Ernest Riles knocked out Belcher in the sixth and cut the Giants' deficit to 4–2. Howell entered the game in the bottom of the eighth bidding for his second save of the day, but instead gave up a game-tying two-run triple to Bob Melvin. Sax put the Dodgers back in front in the ninth with an RBI single, but the Giants tied it yet again. They even loaded the bases for a chance to win the game, but Kevin Mitchell grounded out.

Past midnight and into extra innings went the teams; past midnight and into havoc went the fans. The
Chronicle
later tallied 30 arrests and more than 100 fan ejections at the park that night. At one point, crew chief Doug Harvey was going to order the Dodgers off the field for their protection. Gibson, amid a minefield of bottles and batteries, was cowed enough after the game not to comment. “I've got to go out there again,” Gibson said. “I'm not saying anything.”

In the top of the 11
th
with the score still 5–5, Franklin Stubbs led off with a double and advanced to third on a Tracy Woodson groundout. Dave Anderson stood at the plate against Garrelts.

Balk.

Stubbs was waved home. Candlestick went berserk. Giants manager (and former Dodgers pitcher) Roger Craig and pitcher Mike Krukow—then on the disabled list—were ejected for arguing. A fan was arrested for nearly beaning umpire Greg Bonin with a baseball, and more debris rained on the field.

When Brian Holton struck out Candy Maldonado to end the game at 1:21
am
, what was left of a bitter, strung-out Giants crowd stumbled out into the night.

The Dodgers needed every inch of that doubleheader sweep. The Giants extracted some revenge with an extra-inning victory the next night, sending the Dodgers into a 3–9 spin that would cut their lead in the NL West to half a game over the Astros and 3
1/2
games over San Francisco, before Los Angeles recovered to win the division and more.

As a footnote, the doubleheader also might have been a flashpoint in baseball's decision to abandon its attempt to enforce the balk rule so strictly in following years. “It's a tough way [for the Giants] to lose,” the level-headed Hershiser told McManis. “But I have no gripe with the umpiring crews on balk calls. My gripe is with the National League office for telling them how to call it.”

But most of all, the doubleheader remains vivid for how it changed Candlestick and the nature of Dodger-Giant games forever. The events of July 26-turned-27 compelled officials to finally lay down stricter rules for the ballpark.

“I talked to Bart Giamatti because it's frightening,” Dodger general manager Fred Claire told McManis. “That's the only word for it. The Giants and Al assured us they'd take all the steps they can. There's a problem that's here. I called upon the National League to put a stop to it.”

Rosen didn't argue. “The beach at Okinawa was safer,” he said in the
Chronicle
. Before the next game, in addition to adding security, the Giants put an end to the fans' scramble for home run balls, lining the area with protective steel barriers. The distinctive sight of fan participation, which was part of the fun of Candlestick on calmer days, was gone.

The Dodger-Giant rivalry, egged on by September pennant-race clashes, burns brightly today. But since the witching hour July 27, it hasn't been the same.

 

 

 

51. Don Sutton

In the Dodger media guide listings of the franchise's career pitching records, the name “Sutton, Don” is found atop the categories for wins, losses, games, games started, strikeouts, innings pitched, hits, walks, and shutouts. Accompanying the section is a photo with the caption,
Don Drysdale's name can be found throughout the Los Angeles Dodgers' Career Top 10 lists.

And therein lies the invisibility of Don Sutton.

It's not as if Sutton toiled in obscurity or faded into reclusiveness. He pitched more than 15 years in the media center that is Los Angeles, and then became a major league announcer the year after his 1988 retirement, mostly before a national cable TV audience for the Atlanta Braves. The Hall of Fame welcomed him after only a bit of hesitation in 1998. Yet you get a sinking feeling that Sutton is becoming more and more obscure in Dodger history.

So let's refresh some memories. Those record-setting numbers for Los Angeles include 3,814 innings, 533 starts, 233 victories, 156 complete games (tied with Drysdale, who tops the list thanks only to the biases of alphabetical order), and 52 shutouts. For his major league career, which after 15 seasons with the Dodgers also included stops at Houston, Milwaukee, Oakland, and with the Angels, Sutton collected 5,282
1/3
innings and 3,574 strikeouts—seventh all-time in each category. His 58 shutouts rank him 10
th
in major league history.

 

 

 

Pitcher Don Sutton's 15-year career with the Dodgers puts him at the top of several “Best of ” lists in Dodgers history. His record-setting 156 complete games is tied with Don Drysdale, yet Sutton gets less recognition as a major league pitcher.

 

Sutton and left-handed contemporary Steve Carlton became eligible for Hall of Fame balloting in the same year, 1994. Carlton was elected with 436 votes (95.8 percent of total ballots), nearly twice as many as Sutton—even though, as Bill James pointed out in 1994's
The Politics of Glory
, they had almost identical career innings pitched, wins, and ERA. Carlton struck out more but also walked more. Similarly to Carlton, Sutton's more-than-respectable career ERA of 3.26 would have been lower if not for the 1,000-odd innings he threw in his late 30s and 40s.

What Sutton never seemed to have was the legendary season of someone like Carlton, who memorably won 27 games for a 59-win Phillies team in 1972 with a 1.97 ERA (182 ERA+). Sutton's best year wasn't anything to sneeze at, but his 2.08 ERA (161 ERA+) in '72 was overshadowed by Carlton's campaign and earned him only a fifth-place tie in the Cy Young voting, and his quest to win 20 games in a season seemed to take forever, partly because he was an established big-leaguer at age 21 and didn't top the mark until 10 years later. Sutton had the kind of career that never had a no-hitter—merely five one-hitters and nine two-hitters. It's possible that some remember Sutton more for his 1978 clubhouse fight with Steve Garvey or his rumored scuffing of the baseball than appreciate the overwhelming totality of his accomplishments. Though Sutton's longtime reliability shouldn't be undervalued, his greatness isn't a byproduct of mere endurance.

As a rookie on a team that already featured Sandy Koufax at the height of his powers, Sutton immediately made himself a candidate for the Cooperstown pantheon. He struck out 209 batters, the most by a National League rookie in more than half a century. If the rest of Sutton's career somehow seemed less than godlike, he nevertheless needs to be remembered as a Dodger immortal.

 

 

 

52. Boom Boom Boom Boom

Gil Hodges and Shawn Green each played the game with dignity, but try telling that to the pitchers they humbled and the baseballs they smashed.

A 49-homer hitter the year before, Green had gone 24 games and more than 100 plate appearances without hitting that little white ball over that big outfield fence when he snapped out of it on May 21, 2002, and hit two home runs that night in Milwaukee. Was it a fleeting glimpse of success for the Dodgers right fielder, or a sign of things to come?

Well, there were no home runs the next night, but he did triple in the only run of a 1–0 Dodgers victory. Green was starting to feel it.

“The first night here, after my first home run, I thought, ‘I finally got one,'” Green told Mike DiGiovanna of the
Los Angeles Times
. “Then I hit another one and thought, ‘OK, maybe I'm starting to catch on, and that first one wasn't a fluke.' I felt my swing was where I wanted it to be, which is something I hadn't felt all season.

“Then I hit that triple on the kind of inside pitch that was eating me up all season. Little signs like that help you realize that things are right.”

May 23, 2002, found the Dodgers playing a getaway day game. To say that Green bought a first-class ticket home was an understatement. He hit an RBI double in the first inning, a three-run homer in the second, a solo home run in the fourth, a solo homer in the fifth. Five innings in, and he had three homers and 14 total bases.

When Green came up in the eighth inning for what figured to be his last at-bat, he faced an opportunity to tie the major league record of four home runs in a single game, shared in part by his Dodgers predecessor Hodges. On August 31, 1950, Hodges faced future Hall of Famer Warren Spahn and the Boston Braves in Brooklyn. He hit a two-run homer in the second inning, and by the time he got up again, Spahn had already waved the white flag, knocked out of the game with none out in the third. Normie Roy, a 21-year-old in his only major league season before arm troubles ended his career, surrendered a three-run shot.

Hodges grounded out in his next at-bat, but in the sixth he homered off Bob Hall with a man aboard. He settled for a single in the seventh, but the Dodgers offense gave Hodges one more shot in the eighth. He hit his fourth home run off his fourth Braves pitcher, Johnny Antonelli, to cap a 19–3 Dodgers victory. His nine RBI were also a franchise record (later equaled by James Loney).

Green stepped in against Jose Cabrera of the Brewers in the top of the eighth and hit a grounder up the middle for a single. And that would have been it, except that Cabrera embarked upon a four-homer quest of his own.

Little-known Hiram Bocachica drove in Green with a homer. Cabrera closed out the eighth by getting the next two batters, and then, after allowing a double, got two outs in the ninth. But with Green in the on-deck circle uncertain whether he'd get another shot, Adrian Beltre hit the Dodgers' sixth homer of the game and third off Cabrera, thus allowing Green to bat.

Green would leave no doubt about it. He blasted the ball approximately 450 feet, giving him his four homers, a Dodger record-tying six hits, a Dodger-record six runs, and a major league record 19 total bases, breaking Joe Adcock's 48-year-old record of 18.

“That was awesome—it was like slow-motion when that last ball went out,” Dodgers third-base coach (and future manager) Glenn Hoffman said. “I had goose bumps. It gave me chills...I was like a kid watching him.”

DiGiovanna wrote that “Green made history in blue-collar fashion, showing the same kind of emotion that he did throughout his 1
1/2
-month struggle. That is, none.”

“He didn't showboat or anything,” Milwaukee coach Cecil Cooper said. “He hit that last one, dropped his head, and that was it. He's a classy kid.”

Dave Hansen followed with yet another home run to help the Dodgers set a team record of eight in their 16–3 win. When the Dodgers moved on to Arizona, the spotlight didn't leave Green. He homered once the next night and twice more on May 25, setting yet another record with seven home runs in three days. He capped his hot streak with a circuit clout on May 27—10 home runs in seven games—and managed to save enough magic to homer in four consecutive at-bats in June, spread over two games.

A labrum injury in 2003 hastened the decline of Green's power and his Dodgers career, but he left an indelible mark—a shorter-term version of Hodges, who finished his Dodger tenure with 361 career homers, second in team history only to Duke Snider.

 

Kevin Elster

The inaugural Opening Day at San Francisco's long-awaited, beautiful new ballpark, had finally arrived. A day for celebration. But it was a Dodger who put the first imprint on the Giants' new home in a bold but unlikely way.

Kevin Elster hadn't even played in the majors in 1999. The Dodgers signed him as a backup to help plug a gap in their middle infield. But getting the start on April 11, 2000, Elster hit the first home run at what was called Pacific Bell Park in the third inning, tying the score at 1–1. Then, after Barry Bonds hit the Giants' first homer in the bottom of the inning, Elster answered with a two-run shot to put the Dodgers ahead 3–2. And in the top of the eighth, Elster hit a third homer, giving the Dodgers an insurance run they would cash in for a 6–5, festivities-spoiling victory.

This would be Elster's only season with the Dodgers and his last in the majors, but he still became an enduring talking point in Giants-Dodgers history.