100 Things Dodgers Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die (4 page)

6. '47, Heaven and Hell on Earth

You're a fan, and you're on the edge of your seat at the ballpark.

Someone's about to shout something filthy, absolutely vile. You're straight-backed rigid because you know it's coming. Or because it's already come, hitting you like burning pricks of spit. Or because you're the bullheaded angry man himself, incensed at the black man running inside the white lines of Major League Baseball.

It's April. It's the Dodgers, it's Brooklyn, and there's no mystique here. It's 1947, the century almost halfway over, and they've got all of four NL pennants to show for it. They had tied for the flag the year before, only to get swept by the Cards in baseball's first league playoff. Now, they're victims of cards again—a bad hand to be sure. Manager Leo Durocher has been shoved off for a year, suspended on account of being on the good side of some gamblers, the bad side of some baseball brass or some combination therein.

But they're up to something now. Insolent are these Dodgers with their Jackie Robinson. And some of you, maybe most of you, fell in love with them for that insolence. But it wasn't safe love, it was Romeo and Juliet love—love that causes blood to spill; love with arrows flying from the stands and on the field; love that induced joy or even serenity but also hate and hardly a moment's relaxation.

It's April. It's May. Robinson and the Dodgers are setting the world on fire in one sense, but not on the scoreboard, where they're flickering in and out. In first place one week, in fourth place the next. It's the end of June, and still it's a jumble; Brooklyn and the Boston Braves tied for first, but four other teams within six games of the leaders.

But time is on the Dodgers' side. Robinson isn't being defeated. Spikes still fly at his legs, barbs everywhere. He hasn't won everyone over. But he's winning. He can start to breathe at the ballpark. So can you. The fear is abating. If you're angry, your anger is becoming more patently pointless.

From the inferno, a baseball season is emerging. Thirteen wins in a row, and suddenly with a 10-game lead heading into August, the Dodgers take control. Except, wait—nope, they haven't. Eight losses in 11 games later, the lead's down to 3
1/2
. But never lower, and on September 22, the Dodgers clinch the pennant. Robinson plays 151 games, has a .383 on-base percentage, 48 extra-base hits, and 29 stolen bases to win the first Rookie of the Year award.

You're a fan, and the Dodgers are going to the World Series. And that's all that matters now.

In the Bronx, the Yankees get a five-run fifth in Game 1 and a four-run seventh in Game 2 to take the Series lead. Back in Brooklyn, the Dodgers score six in the second inning of Game 3 and hang on for a 9–8 win.

And then, Game 4. Game 4.

Harry Taylor walks the Yanks' Joe DiMaggio with the bases loaded in the first inning for a run. Hal Gregg relieves and pitches admirably for seven innings, allowing only a run in the fourth. The Dodgers scratch for a run in the bottom of the fifth without the aid of a hit, a Pee Wee Reese grounder scoring Spider Jorgensen, who had walked.

Walks. Bill Bevens of the Yankees had a whole different idea for infusing an entire ballpark with tension. One out, bottom of the ninth inning, Yankees lead the game 2–1, and Bevens has walked eight batters while retiring the other 25.

It doesn't stop. Carl Furillo walks. Jorgensen fouls out. After pinch-runner Al Gionfriddo steals second, pinch-hitter Pete Reiser, standing at the plate with an ankle swollen twice as thick as his bat, is walked intentionally. He's the winning run of the game—you don't do that. Then again, how's he gonna score? Bevens has walked 10—a World Series record—but he won't walk three more. And somehow, God knows why, the man who stepped into Durocher's spats, Burt Shotton, has decided to remove Eddie Stanky and replace him with Cookie Lavagetto, who had 18 hits in his final major league season. Lavagetto thought Shotton wanted him to pinch-run. “He had to tell me twice that he wanted me to go up and hit,” Lavagetto said in all sincerity, according to Glenn Stout in
The Dodgers
.

But Eddie Miksis went out to be Reiser's legs. Lavagetto was really batting. Bevens, who had struck out five, got ahead in the count with Lavagetto whiffing at the first pitch. On the second, Lavagetto sliced one toward right field, diving, landing…fair! Gionfriddo scores! Miksis…SCORES!

You're a fan, and—Holy Mother of Mercy!—you're beside yourself. It's incredible!

“This was then, and still is to this day, the biggest explosion of noise in the history of Brooklyn,” Red Barber would later recall in his appropriately titled book,
1947—When All Hell Broke Loose in Baseball
. “The Dodgers started pounding Lavagetto, then picked him up, and carried him off. I recall I said, ‘The Dodgers are beating Lavagetto to death.' They almost did.”

Momentum took a holiday in this Series. The Yanks eked out a 2–1 victory in a taut Game 5, then rallied from a 4–0 deficit to take the lead in a potential season-ending Game 6, only to drop an 8–6 decision. The 1947 season was down to the final nine innings.

The Dodgers struck with two runs in the top of the second inning, but their exhausted pitching staff couldn't hold back New York. An RBI single by Tommy Henrich in the bottom of the fourth put the Yankees up to stay. Joe Page entered in relief and faced the minimum 15 batters over the final five innings, preserving a 5–2 victory for the world champion Yankees.

You're a fan, and you've never been so exhausted in your life. Maybe you've never been so crushed. Yet you've never had so much to look forward to. It's going to be some kind of roller coaster, but Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers are here to stay.

 

 

 

7. Fernandomania

The word “Fernandomania” first appeared in the
Los Angeles Times
as the headline of a Scott Ostler column on April 27, 1981. “The morning after Fernando Valenzuela's most recent shutout,” Ostler began, “sports announcer Jaime Jarrin arrived at the studios of radio station KTNQ and saw the phone switchboard lit up like a Mexican Christmas tree. ‘I've been doing Dodger games for [23] years and I've never seen this kind of reaction to a ballplayer,' said Jarrin.”

Fernandomania was a multicultural phenomenon.
Time
and
Newsweek
began planning cover stories on Valenzuela by May. That month, 59 percent of TV viewers in Los Angeles watched a broadcast of a Valenzuela start in Montreal. KABC radio deejays Ken & Bob campaigned to rename the San Fernando Valley “The San Fernando Valenzuela,” wrote Howard Rosenberg in the
Times.

At the heart of all this—it can too easily be forgotten—was an athlete. Valenzuela was impossibly youthful, charismatic with a winking innocence, and tubbier than life. For a heady period in the 1980s, he mesmerized a sport, drew attention to his culture, and charmed an entire city. He was absolutely a phenomenon. But he was a phenomenon rooted in an all-around athletic ability that, despite the unlikely package it came in, doesn't get enough credit.

Those who saw him game after game remember. They remember, among other things, his batting prowess—upon arrival, the greatest hitting Dodger pitcher since Don Drysdale. They remember him being one of the most agile, astute fielders ever on the mound, with brilliant reflexes and the precise knowledge of what to do in a rundown. “If Valenzuela had been 100 years old and in the majors for 90 of them, he couldn't have looked more in control,” wrote Mark Heisler of the
Times
in describing Valenzuela's reaction to a hard comebacker on Opening Day 1981.

 

 

When a 20-year-old pitcher from a small, Mexican farm pitched a shutout to Houston on Opening Day in 1981, the city and the media fell in love with the youthful and jovial powerhouse. Fernandomania was born.

 

Above all, of course, was his pitching, propelled by his remarkable ability to learn the screwball from Dodger teammate Bobby Castillo. “Pitchers have taken years to learn it,” Heisler wrote, “and others couldn't learn it at all.” Valenzuela picked it up in a week.

This preternatural talent set the stage for Fernandomania to take off. Because what Los Angeles and the baseball world fundamentally responded to was this amazing man's ability to put zeroes on the scoreboard. Fanning the flames were his mythic backstory (growing up beyond poor with 11 older siblings on a Navojoa, Mexico farm), the constant skepticism about his November 1, 1960, birthdate, and the fascination with his pudgy build and habit of looking up at the sky while in his pitching motion. But the kindling was his ability.

The prelude came in 1980, when the Dodgers called up Valenzuela before his 20
th
birthday for the September stretch run in the wake of his scoreless inning streak of 35 innings in AA ball. Valenzuela pitched 17
2/3
more innings without allowing an earned run. “Teen-Age Beer-Drinker Is Now Dodger Stopper,” headlined the
Times
. That positioned Valenzuela to join the Dodger starting rotation in 1981—he was to battle Rick Sutcliffe for the No. 5 spot. But, as if choreographed by fate, with Burt Hooton already dealing with an ingrown toenail, Bob Welch a right elbow bone spur, and Dave Goltz a groin pull, scheduled starter Jerry Reuss strained a calf muscle the afternoon before Opening Day. It would be up to the boy who spoke no English, the boy who had thrown batting practice hours before, to start the Dodger season.

When Valenzuela then shut out Houston 2–0 before 50,511 in attendance at Dodger Stadium, Fernandomania was launched.

The scoreless inning streaks of Don Drysdale and Orel Hershiser have received due attention, but one wonders if they actually compare to what Valenzuela accomplished given his level of experience: pitching nine innings in each of his first eight starts, he allowed four earned runs, chalking up five shutouts and an 8–0 record. In the first 89
2/3
innings of his major league career, Valenzuela allowed 51 hits, walked 22, and struck out 84. His ERA was 0.40.

A 4–0 loss to the Phillies ended the increasingly legitimate dreams of an undefeated season for Valenzuela, at which point he settled into simply having a very good season, one that would win him the National League Rookie of the Year and Cy Young awards. Valenzuela then passed several postseason tests. He held Houston to two runs over 17 innings in the first round of the playoffs, recovered from an NLCS Game 2 loss to pitch 8
2/3
innings of one-run ball in the clinching Game 5, and in his final start of the year, survived when he had nothing, hanging on to defeat the Yankees 4–3 in a 147-pitch complete game in which he allowed 16 base runners.

It was Valenzuela's propensity for complete games that might have sidetracked what could have been his path to the Hall of Fame. In his first seven full seasons, Valenzuela averaged 14 complete games and 255 innings. That's a tortuous workload for someone throwing a pitch like the screwball, which comes with a horror movie–like reverse twist of the arm. For a player of Valenzuela's age, it put him on the fast track for arm trouble.

Nevertheless, the highlights continued. He began the 1985 season by allowing one earned run in his first five starts and 42 innings and having a 2–3 record to show for it. Later that year, he had a memorable showdown with Dwight Gooden and pitched 11 shutout innings. In the 1986 All-Star game, Valenzuela struck out five consecutive American Leaguers. In 1990, reduced to a back-end member of the Dodger rotation, Valenzuela made history by joining former teammate Dave Stewart of Oakland to become the first combo of pitchers to throw no-hitters in two different games on the same day, prompting Vin Scully to utter another of his most memorable lines: “If you have a sombrero, throw it to the sky.”

Fernandomania came to a bitter end in Los Angeles when Valenzuela was released before the end of spring training in 1991. But what figured to be an unpleasant end denouement to his career instead was transformed into a fitting epilogue. Valenzuela would periodically find the magic again—a 3.00 ERA (143 ERA+) in 32 games with Baltimore in 1993, and a 3.62 ERA (111 ERA+) in 33 games with San Diego in 1996. Valenzuela wrapped up his career with 2,074 strikeouts and a 3.54 ERA (104 ERA+) in 2,930 innings, along with a .200 career batting average and 10 home runs. Well into his 40s, well after one wouldn't have thought it possible, Valenzuela added to his mystique. After he made peace with the Dodgers and quietly assumed a role as a Spanish-language game commentator for them, Valenzuela returned to his roots, mesmerizing hitters in the Mexican League. And it made sense. Wherever Fernando Valenzuela has gone, the crowds have always been transfixed.

 

 

Pure Joy Amid a Hopeless Cause

You can't find a moment fitting the above description that surpasses Pedro Astacio's July 3, 1992 major league debut. Called up to pitch the second game of a doubleheader—one of four twin-bills (thanks to the riots that ripped through the city two months earlier) the Dodgers had to play in a six-day stretch during their desultory 99-loss season—Astacio had struck out 10 batters while shutting out the Phillies for 8
2
/
3
innings when he faced Mariano Duncan. As Duncan's fly ball to right field headed for and settled into Mitch Webster's glove, Astacio jumped up and down like his team was winning the World Series.

Was it in bad taste for him to celebrate? Hardly. Astacio reminded us that we can never become too jaded. There's never a day in baseball when there can't be magic.