A SYSTEM THAT WORKED : Campanis Strikes a Blow for the Dodger Way With Another NL West Championship

It was a throwaway line in May, buried in the small print of a newspaper game story, but it became an obsession for Dodger Vice President Al Campanis.

Campanis was going to Florida, the reporter wrote, but no, he wasn’t headed there to retire. He was planning to watch pitcher Bob Welch, who was rehabilitating his right elbow in Vero Beach with the Class A Dodgers.

Ha, ha, Al, and don’t forget the bottle of Geritol.

But Campanis, who will be 69 on Nov. 2, wasn’t laughing. There may be a lot of guys his age living off their pension and Social Security benefits while basking in the sunshine of senior-citizen colonies, but Campanis took this one personally.

“That was an under-the-belly punch,” Campanis said months later, still bringing it up in almost every conversation he has with reporters. “And I don’t like low blows.”

To Campanis, that line represented the dark suggestion that he had outlived his usefulness. Take your bat and ball and telephone and go to Florida, Al, where it’s 90 degrees in the shade but far, far away from the limelight.

Already, there were people--”pied pipers,” Campanis called them--break-dancing on the imagined grave of the vaunted Dodger system, which churned out winners for decades but finally, or so it appeared, churned to a halt. What Branch Rickey had wrought, the pied pipers were saying, Campanis was now tearing asunder.

Look at the trades he’d made, or the ones he’d failed to make. Al Oliver for Pat Zachry? The most useless trade in baseball, the critics sneered. Rickey Henderson, the outfielder and leadoff man Campanis so coveted but lost to the New York Yankees in part, or so the story went, because the Oakland A’s were put off by Campanis’ fish-or-cut-bait arrogance.

Why, Campanis had furnished Cincinnati with an entire bullpen--Ted Power and John Franco--and had nothing but cash and Rafael Landestoy to show for it, and Landestoy was history. He had given the New York Mets a young left-handed pitcher, Sid Fernandez, who had a better strikeout-to-innings-pitched ratio than phenom Dwight Gooden, for a journeyman reliever and a bench-warmer. Rick Sutcliffe, Cy Young winner, gone. Ron Cey, gone.

And then there was last spring’s biggest joke, the so-called “miracle deal” Campanis hinted he might pull off. Even with their pitching, only a miracle, it seemed to some, could salvage a Dodger team that the year before had finished in the second division for the first time in 15 years.

But there would be no miracle deal, if there ever was one. “Luck is the residue of design,” Campanis often says, quoting his mentor, Rickey. But disaster is the residue of a design gone awry, and the Dodgers seemingly had drawn up a blueprint for a fall.

Or so it appeared to the so-called pied pipers. Campanis, however, still believed in the Dodger system, and he was supported in that belief by owner Peter O’Malley. And now that it is fall and the Dodgers are champions of the National League’s Western Division for the sixth time and third time in the last five seasons, that faith has been vindicated.

The Dodgers did not win the division due to spontaneous combustion: the idea that because MVP candidate Pedro Guerrero started to hit, so did everyone else, although that did, in fact, happen.

And they did not win simply because others--the San Diego Padres and the Atlanta Braves--failed in a weak division.

They won because Campanis succeeded in dismantling one championship team--the Garvey-Cey-Lopes-Baker Dodgers--and found the replacement parts within the Dodger system for another. Just as he said he would. And Dodger Manager Tom Lasorda exercised the patience to let them develop.

Mike Scioscia, groomed within the Dodger system. Mike Marshall. Greg Brock. Steve Sax. Mariano Duncan. Fernando Valenzuela. Orel Hershiser. Welch. Tom Niedenfuer. Ken Howell. All scouted, signed and developed by the Dodgers. Guerrero, plucked from the Cleveland Indians at age 17 but all but home-grown.

Perhaps the most amazing thing is that the Dodgers could give away as many quality players as they have, or could lose a valuable starting pitcher like Alejandro Pena for the season, and still have enough native talent to go around.

And there were two valuable late-season additions, Enos Cabell and Bill Madlock, who were obtained with what were leftovers from the Dodger system but considered future prospects to the teams that traded for them.

“Cabell and Madlock gave this team stability,” Campanis said. “They taught them how to win in the seventh, eighth, and ninth innings, just like guys who help a basketball team win in the last two minutes.

“The players we gave up for Cabell we felt couldn’t make our club. The players we gave up for Madlock, we went for now . That’s the way we had to look at it.”

Perhaps the most revealing illustration of the wealth of the Dodger system is the case of Duncan, who was supposed to be a second baseman in Class AAA Albuquerque this season and wound up being the shortstop that transformed the Dodger defense from laughable to often laudable.

In early July, when the Dodgers were still 3 1/2 games out of first place, Campanis saw this team coalescing into a winner. “We’re going to win the pennant,” he said that night.

“Why would I say it?” he said the morning after the Dodgers clinched the division. “Because I saw an emotion within the team, a stability beginning to emerge, guys beginning to put it together.

“When you’ve been in the game a little bit, you can see slumps coming, but you can also see the beginnings of an upsurge. There are little signs, footprints in the sand.”

Soon enough, those footprints became a stampede. And it hasn’t ended yet.

“I don’t know why you call it vindication,” Campanis said. “We’ve had a consistency of winning here.”

It would be a fallacy to suggest, however, that the organization’s confidence wasn’t shaken in May, when the Dodger defense was making errors at an alarming rate and the Dodger offense was leaving runners on base at an equally frightful pace.

“To say we were not worried is crazy,” said Ben Wade, the Dodgers’ director of scouting. “After last year, and then to get off to the kind of start we had this year. But we knew we still had the pitching. There were 10 or 12 games we could have won but we kicked away defensively.”

Wade, too, heard the criticisms of the Dodger system.

“Sure I heard it, everybody in the organization was sensitive to it,” he said. “But when we looked around the division, we didn’t see anybody who was going to run away it. Houston? Atlanta? San Diego, no one really knew for sure how good they really were.

“The whole thing boiled down to this: We won in ‘83, and we had a bad year in ’84. Which was really the ballclub: the one in ‘83, or the one in ‘84?

“Steve Sax was coming off a very bad year, (Ken) Landreaux was coming off a bad year. Guerrero had a horrible first half. Brock hadn’t done what we thought he could do. We knew we had very good starting pitching and relief pitching, if Niedenfuer was healthy.

“I always felt Brock could play first base, hit 20, 25 home runs, drive in 80 runs and hit around .260. Sax was a good player, and Anderson, when healthy, there was nothing wrong with him.

“The only place we needed help was third base. We weren’t worried about (an outfield of) Guerrero, Marshall and Landreaux--he had just one bad year.”

The Dodgers started the season with Guerrero at third base. The plan was for Duncan to be in the minors, too, until Bobby Grich rolled onto Steve Sax’s leg on an attempted pickoff play in the Freeway Series. That put Sax on the disabled list and Duncan in the big time. And when Anderson continued to suffer back problems, Duncan became the Dodger shortstop.

“A friend of mine said to me, ‘You ought to send a letter of thanks to Grich,”’ Campanis said.

Sure, you could say the Dodgers stumbled onto something with Duncan.

“You could say we were lucky, which we were,” Wade said, “but it isn’t luck to have a guy like that sitting around in your organization. Or to have a kid like Howell, when we needed a reliever last season. That’s good scouting.”

The reason Duncan wasn’t a shortstop earlier, Wade said, was because he was such an outstanding second baseman.

“We had another good shortstop in the organization, (Carmelo) Alvarez, and Bill Russell and Anderson already were here,” Wade said.

“Sax had had a real bad year, and it didn’t look like we needed another shortstop--Craig Shipley is an outstanding defensive player at Albuquerque--so we wanted Duncan to go and play second base.

Wade chuckled. “Babe Ruth,” he said, “also started out as a pitcher.”

In the spring, Campanis had contemplated trading Niedenfuer for a third baseman, but didn’t. “As it turned out, that was just great,” said Wade, alluding to Niedenfuer’s emergence as bullpen stopper.

And when Guerrero was shifted back to the outfield (it shouldn’t be forgotten that Campanis made him an infielder in the first place), not only did he start hitting, the Dodgers began catching the ball.

“When this club started winning, Anderson played an outstanding third base for us,” Wade said, “which is when Duncan started playing an outstanding shortstop. The whole left side, you couldn’t hit a ball through there.”

Duncan also made a positive impact on Sax, who meshed better with the Dominican rookie than he had with Anderson. “Anderson is a good player,” said Al Downing, the former pitcher who now works as a broadcaster, “but Anderson and Sax operate on different wavelengths.

“Sax is so hyper and quick, while Anderson is very smooth and methodical. Duncan is more like Sax in a way, and they complement each other very well on the double play.”

Once the Dodgers stabilized defensively, their old formula for winning--pitching plus power--became preeminent again. The pitchers were no longer betrayed as often by unearned runs, while only two other National League teams, the Mets and Chicago Cubs, had as many as three players with 20 or more home runs. The Dodgers had Guerrero (33), Marshall (27) and Brock (21).

“They began winning ballgames that they didn’t have any chance of winning,” Downing said, “and they did it consistently. You no longer said the game was over.

“It seemed every time they did win it started with a bleeder, or a hit off the end of the bat, and then all of a sudden somebody hit a bomb. Everything just came together.”

Just the way Campanis always had said it would. It’s almost enough to make a man pushing 70 to decide to go out in style.

A little joke there, Al. As you’ve said yourself, if Ronald Reagan can be President at age 74, you’ve still got a few years coming.