Take It From the Grapevine: When Mike Scioscia Talks Now in Any Language, the Dodgers Listen : Time to Catch a Rising Star

The Dodgers are endorsing a new star this year. In their first newspaper ads, they have used an action picture of a catcher, Mike Scioscia.

Last season, an off-year for the Dodgers, Scioscia played good baseball more consistently than most of the others.

He’s heading for even better times, Manager Tommy Lasorda predicts.

“A big-league catcher should be able to block the plate like a tank,” Lasorda said the other day. “Second, he should be a knowledgeable leader. And that’s Scioscia. It troubles me when people say I like him because he’s Italian. That is absolutely untrue. I love him because I’m Italian.”

It was in 1981, Scioscia’s first full season with the team, that the Dodgers began to appreciate his leadership. A young left-hander named Fernando Valenzuela also had come up that season and found himself pitching the third game of the World Series after the Dodgers had lost two.

“Fernando was struggling and we were losing again when I put Scioscia in the game,” Lasorda recalled. “Scioscia steadied him right down and we pulled it out. He’s just great with pitchers, a great leader. He learned Spanish just so he could communicate with Fernando.”

Scioscia’s wife, Anne, believes that his ability to lead in two languages is second to an even more remarkable thing about him, his penchant for trivia.

She came to that conclusion, she said, while they were riding down the Hollywood Freeway one night early in their relationship.

She recalled: “I was saying something important when Michael interrupted to ask: ‘Quick, what’s the name of that song?’

“I listened a moment and said: ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine.’

“He asked: ‘Who recorded it originally?’

“I said: ‘Marvin Gaye.’

“He asked: ‘Who’s singing it now?’

“That stumped me, so he said: ‘That’s Gladys Knight and the Pips.’

“Then he told me when she recorded it, when Marvin Gaye recorded it and who else has done it. And that isn’t all. In the last three years, I’ve learned that Michael can tell you everything there is to know about Motown Music--every last unimportant, irrelevant detail.”

How does that make him a good major-league catcher?

“It’s his memory for numbers and details,” Anne said. “Michael can tell you how many sides the Pips cut in 1980 and how many pitches Steve Garvey has swung at outside the strike zone in the last four years. He can tell our pitchers how every batter has made out since he’s been in the National League. You ought to see him play ‘Trivial Pursuit.’ If a question is trivial enough, nobody ever beats him.”

As a consequence of all this--plus a knack for hitting line drives--Scioscia, at 26, has become one of the Dodgers’ more valuable players.

His .273 batting average was second only to Pedro Guerrero’s .303 last year, and during most of the season, he and Guerrero both were hitting around .280.

With runners in scoring position, Scioscia batted a club-leading .328.

Although he hit only five home runs, Scioscia matched Guerrero in game-winning hits with eight, and only Mike Marshall had more, 10.

If that throws some light on what went wrong with the Dodgers last year, it also shows that they drafted well in June, 1976, when they picked Scioscia first. As a senior that spring, he had hit .450 for Springfield, Pa., High School.

Good-natured, cooperative and persevering, Scioscia has the temperament--and the size--for effective, quiet leadership. He stands 6-2 and weighs 220.

Several years ago, during his first season as a major-league player, Scioscia went to a charity luncheon that also was attended by Peter O’Malley, the Dodger president.

“As a rookie, Mike didn’t expect to speak,” O’Malley said. “We both cringed a bit when they called on him for a few words. But he surprised everyone with a mature, solid performance. He’s a very poised young man.”

THE BULLDOG As a kid in the 1960s, Mike Scioscia began his athletic career in suburban Philadelphia, Delaware County southwest of the city. Most of his pals still live there.

The thing the folks remember in Springfield, and in nearby Morton, where the Scioscias lived, are Mike’s tenacity and determination. When his mind was made up, nothing could stop him.

“Mike came home crying one day because he was too big for the 75-pound football team,” said his father, Fred, who for many years was a salesman for a Philadelphia brewery. “When I told him it was easy to lose two pounds, he brightened up and went right at it.”

A big eater, Mike simply quit eating for a day. He also gave up milk and water. Then, wearing three or four sweat shirts, he ran around the neighborhood until he had sweated down to 75 pounds.

“For a little kid, that kind of awed me,” his father said.

Even earlier, Mike had awed his brother, Fred Jr., who is 14 years older. Now a systems analyst for an insurance company, Fred Scioscia Jr. said:

“Mike is a bulldog, the most stubborn person I’ve ever known. When he was about 3 years old, he took an interest in the biggest table lamp we had in the house and decided to tip it over. No matter how often his hands were spanked, he kept rocking the table. He’d never quit. And one day he got it. As the lamp fell, the bulb exploded like a bullet. And this finally cured him.”

Within the year, looking for new worlds to conquer, Mike began swinging a bat--though not at a ball.

According to Rose Buffington, Mike’s aunt, the Dodger catcher launched his career by swinging at cottage cheese.

“His mother had gone to the store and left Michael’s 5-year-old sister, Gail, as the baby sitter,” Buffington said. “When Gail went upstairs, Michael went out to the refrigerator, took out the cottage cheese and spread it around the living room. Then he picked up a (whiffle-ball) bat and tried to pound the cottage cheese into the carpet.”

He had made considerable progress when his mother came home, saw what was happening and screamed. That brought Gail racing down the stairs and out to the kitchen, where she slipped and skidded all the way to the wall in a wave of soapsuds that covered her from head to foot.

Before busying himself with the cottage cheese, Mike had poured a bottle of detergent around the kitchen.

“Right about then, I happened to phone Michael’s mother for a little visit,” Buffington said.

“I asked: ‘What’s new, Florence?’

“She said: ‘Oh, nothing much, Rosie--but I haven’t been upstairs yet.”’

THE LEFT-HANDER To this day, the Scioscia family traces Mike’s prosperity as a ballplayer to his little whiffle-ball bat, an early birthday present from his father.

Not that Mike could hit the ball--even when they rolled it at him. He also was slow. “I’ve seen the home movies of those days,” Mike said. “When I was running as hard as I could, I seemed to be taking three steps forward and two backward.”

All the same, he kept swinging the bat.

“You never saw a guy more interested in bats and balls,” his father said. “It was so sad to watch him. He had a swing like a girl’s. Most of the time he’d take a big cut, swing all the way around and fall down.”

Then one day little Mike was eating a sandwich with his right hand when he picked up a bat with his left and took a southpaw cut.

“What a sweet swing that was,” his father recalled. “You should have seen it. He was a natural lefty hitter. And overnight he was the best 7-year-old hitter for miles around. He can’t do anything else left-handed, but he was born with a lefty’s batting eye. Mike’s grandfather would love to see him today.”

Mike was named for his grandfather, Michael Scioscia, a cabinetmaker who had migrated from Italy.

“It was great to watch young Mike hit the ball, but he still couldn’t run,” Fred Scioscia said. “So when he was 8 years old, I made a catcher out of him.”

THE WINNER On a Christmas trip back to Pennsylvania three years ago, Mike got together with the old gang, as usual, to see the old sights and to show off his new girlfriend, Anne McIlquham, who became Anne Scioscia this year.

The first night back, at a party with his old buddies, Scioscia relived the years when they played whiffle-ball and baseball together, and when one of them--Jim Kearney, now a salesman in Norristown--had outhit him as a high school senior until the last day of the season, when Scioscia went 5 for 5.

What did Scioscia have? What quality separated him from the others and helped him to the big leagues?

A member of his group, Sean Duffy, told this story:

“Mike and I are both big men. He’s wider, but I’m taller, 6-4 and 230. And when we run into each other, instead of saying hello, we always greet each other the same way.

“ ‘Man, you’re fat,’ he says.

“I say: ‘Hey, fatso.’

“Well, I could see he was bigger than usual when he came home for Christmas that year, probably 235, so I decided to have some fun with him.

“I said: ‘It’s two weeks until New Year’s Eve, fatso. And I’ll bet you a dinner for four--at the best restaurant in Beverly Hills--that you’ll still be fatter than me at midnight.’

“He said: ‘At midnight New Year’s Eve? You’re on, fat man.’

“He worked at it and slimmed down some. But when I saw him early New Year’s Eve, I knew I had him because I’d talked my wife, Sandy, into going out for a Chinese dinner. At the same time, I knew, Mike would be having a big Italian family dinner. He couldn’t avoid it.”

When the gang regrouped at midnight, Scioscia and Duffy each stepped onto the Duffy family scale. Each tipped the pointer to 219, exactly.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Duffy said. “The big lummox had tied me. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Suddenly, Anne said: ‘Why, Mike, you’re still wearing your World Series ring. Take it off!’

“So he did, and we had to get on the scale again, and he beat me by one ounce.”

Duffy said he asked Scioscia: “Did your family have dinner for you tonight?”

“Sure,” Scioscia said.

“Did you eat?”

“No,” Scioscia said . “Not yet.”

And, opening a paper sack, he brought out five big sandwiches--Italian meatball sandwiches.

“You’d do anything to win!” Duffy screamed.

“Here,” Scioscia said. “Have a sandwich.”

THE PRINCESS Anne McIlquham Scioscia, whose children will be part Scottish, part Norwegian, part Irish and half Italian, is a 23-year-old X-ray technician who has been busy writing thank-you notes this spring at Vero Beach, Fla. On Jan. 26, she and Mike were married at St. Paschal Baylon Church in Thousand Oaks.

This is her third visit to the Dodger camp, where Mike has a seaside condo. In the L.A. area, they share her two-story condo in the foothills of Claremont, which is a long way east of Dodger Stadium.

“Mine is furnished better,” Anne remarked.

She will precede Mike out of Florida this year. Her sister, Lisa, 21, has entered the state beauty contest in Los Angeles, and Anne wants to help.

The look-alike McIlquhams are the daughters of an insurance office manager. A former homecoming princess and cheerleader at Thousand Oaks High School, Anne is 5-6, brown-eyed, brown-haired and “working on a good tan” at Vero Beach.

She was working as an X-ray technician three years ago when a friend decided that Anne needed a night out and recommended baseball.

“We looked it up and found that the Angels were out of town and the Dodgers home,” Anne said. “So we went to the Dodgers.

There she heard about Mike Scioscia for the first time.

“We couldn’t see his face, but I liked the way he looked,” she said.

She went home and thought about that and then did something about it.

“I baked a batch of chocolate-chip cookies and went back to Dodger Stadium the next Sunday,” she said. “The way to a man’s heart . . . a woman slaving over a hot stove . . . and all that. I felt Michael would have to talk to me if I brought him some cookies.”

She had guessed right. Afterward, he asked Anne to walk with him to his car.

“When we got outside the stadium, there must have been 300 fans waiting for the Dodgers,” she said. “Most of them were girls--and six different girls had baked cookies for Michael. I was never so embarrassed in my life.”

He smoothed things over the next day, however, calling to say that Anne’s cookies were far and away the best of the lot. The romance was on, leading to a church in Thousand Oaks this year.

After the wedding, there were 200 guests at the reception at the Thousand Oaks Racquet Club, where Anne, who earned thee varsity letters in high school, is a devoted tennis player.

“It was a delightful reception,” Rose Buffington said. “But I knew the children had a midnight plane to catch, and I remember hoping they could tear themselves away.”

Finally they did, getting into the limo Mike had hired for the 60-minute ride to Los Angeles International Airport--the takeoff point for their honeymoon cruise in the Caribbean.

They were running late, but the limo driver didn’t see the urgency of the situation.

“We breezed along at 55 miles an hour,” Anne said. “Everybody stared at us--and overtook us.

“Michael kept tapping on the window and shouting: ‘60! 60!’

“The driver kept looking straight ahead and shouting back: ‘Not me! Not me!’

“Maybe they paid him by the minute. We never found out.”

At the airport, they sprinted for the plane.

“It was close,” she said. “When we got there, they had just closed the gate. We missed the plane by one minute.”

They found a room at an airport hotel, the Marriott, then caught the first plane south the next day.

“Everything turned out all right,” Anne said. “We got to the boat with two minutes to spare.”

THE STADIUM In a Dodger game a few years back, Montreal had two men on base when the next batter hit the ball sharply to left field.

That called for a plate-block by Scioscia, who, as he tagged the runner out, was knocked upside down. For an instant he had both feet in the air, with his chin in the batter’s box.

But he came up throwing to the right base, and the Dodgers had the hitter in a rundown when the other runner broke for home and bowled Scioscia over again.

“Twice in one play,” Lasorda marveled. “A new league record.”

Said Scioscia, who had been captain of his high school football team: “On the whole, football is more fun. Offense or defense, you get to attack them. A catcher has to wait for them.”

If, as the ballplayers say, Scioscia blocks the plate more effectively than any other catcher, one reason perhaps is that he is better padded than most catchers.

“Mike likes to eat good food,” Lasorda said. “It’s his only weakness.”

But Dodger President O’Malley said: “I don’t think it (his weight) is really a problem for Mike anymore. He has a handle on it now.”

Scioscia did have a problem last year on a Dodger trip to Philadelphia. Instead of bunking with the club, he stayed in the suburbs with his aunt and his grandmother.

“I’ll put grandma’s spaghetti and meatballs up against any in the world,” Buffington said. “For days before Mike came, she was getting the meatballs together and packing them in the freezer.”

After dinner, Scioscia headed for Duffy’s house to work it off, playing whiffle-ball with the old gang again at Decimal Memorial Stadium.

Jack Duffy is Sean’s father. A commercial artist, he built the stadium for the kids in his back yard years ago, using a portion of his two-acre lot to make a whiffle-ball park, which looks like a miniature big-league stadium.

There are lights, dugouts, a backstop, a lined field, fences with signs, and three prominent flags--American, Polish and Irish.

“We’d have an Italian flag if we had to,” Jack Duffy said. “But the Irish and Italian flags look something alike. And those Italian hitters think ours is theirs.”

The stadium was named for a deceased pet dog, Decimal, and those who have played there for 20 years, including Scioscia, call themselves the Decimal gang.

He tries to get in a game whenever the Dodgers play in the East, but has never been much of a factor at Decimal Stadium. The Decimal gang uses a plastic bat to hit a whiffle-ball--a lightweight plastic ball full of holes--over the fence, if possible. Over the fence is two bases.

Duffy said: “Mike has warning-track power.”

Asked how they get Scioscia out, Duffy said: “We throw strikes.”

Scioscia protested: “Hitting a funny ball is different.”

Even so, he always seems happiest with the Decimals, or at their stadium, where the regulars wear T-shirts with the Decimal emblem--a dog and a ball.

When the Dodgers won the 1981 World Series, a Pennsylvania reporter asked Scioscia why he wasn’t wearing his Decimal Stadium shirt.

Scioscia smiled and pulled up his Dodger shirt. There it was, underneath.