Now They Leave ‘em Laughing

Once upon a time, there was this team called the Dodgers and they were the scourge of the National League.

Other players used to dream of joining them. They were known as The Organization and they were supposed to be the best in the business.

When they came to town, autograph seekers lined up in force around the hotel lobbies, in the airports, and on the approaches to the ballpark.

Other teams cursed when they looked down their lineup card. Cleanup hitters came up with mysterious back ailments on the days they had to face Dodger pitching. Good pitchers found they had developed blisters overnight and would have to skip a turn in the rotation.

The Dodgers didn’t overwhelm you, they just beat you. They didn’t have any guys who were in danger of batting .400. They didn’t have anybody challenging Babe Ruth’s records. But they had a whole bunch of people who played to win. They did have Cy Young Award winners on the mound and they had a guy who revived the art of base-stealing, but this was Jackie Robinson’s team. And Branch Rickey’s. And once, long ago, Leo Durocher’s. Whatever it took.

There was an aura to being a Dodger. They didn’t swagger exactly. They weren’t haughty like the Yankees but they came through the front door, all right.

But, most of all, I think, they expected to win. It was, after all, a Dodger tradition. Occasionally, they lent the title to somebody else for a year or two. Bobby Thomson hit a once-in-a-lifetime home run, they let a playoff with the Giants get away from them.

But they never let it get permanent. In a year or so, order would be restored.

The ballclub was owned by the O’Malley family and the patriarch was a rasp-tongued, cigar-smoking, Irish-whiskey-drinking canny old party who, like England, expected every man to do his duty.

Walter O’Malley was particular who became a Dodger. You kept your shoes shined and your hair combed and you were good to the wife and kids and it didn’t hurt if you went to church on Sunday.

O’Malley had paid a steep price for this team and Walter liked to get interest for his money. He was patient. But he wasn’t Job. He had jerked the team out of Brooklyn when he got sick of the politicians’ lies but he didn’t come 3,000 miles to preside over a second-division operation. When the team finished next-to-last in its first full season in L.A., Walter let them know that would be all right. Once. But not to let it become a habit.

When they won the pennant and the World Series the very next year, O’Malley acted as if he was the least surprised person in town. That’s what he paid them for.

L.A. went ape over the Dodgers, and Walter O’Malley didn’t want to let it down. He never interfered with the day-to-day operation of the team. No one ever saw him in the locker room. But he checked the standings very carefully. Walter was a bottom-line man. If the players were bad, he went to the man who had hired them. If the ship ran aground, O’Malley looked to the bridge, not the crew.

“Dynasty” may be too strong a word for the Dodgers, but the pennants flowed. In 1963, they stood the baseball world on its ear when they did the unthinkable. They took the lordly Yankees, no less, pulled their hats down over their ears, kicked their tails and swept them in four humiliating games. That was supposed to be the Yankees’ trick.

So, what happened? When did the Dodgers turn the clock back to the ‘30s when they were the Flatbush Follies, the laughingstock of the game?

That wasn’t supposed to happen west of the Gowanus. Dodger Stadium is not Minsky’s. It’s the Old Vic.

Baseball changed. But people thought the Dodgers wouldn’t. They were no longer the third banana in the Big Apple. They were a Star in Hollywood. No one else in the game got 3 million people a year just by opening the doors.

Walter O’Malley died, but Peter O’Malley is Walter II. A Xerox. It isn’t as if they sold the club to some conglomerate with some fuzzy notion that a ballteam could be run like a fast-food chain.

But you would have to wonder what Walter O’Malley would do with the cast of characters the Dodgers have become. The teams that won five pennants in the ‘50s, and three in the ‘60s and again in the ‘70s, the team that had the Jackie Robinsons and Duke Sniders and Don Drysdales and Sandy Koufaxes and Steve Garveys suddenly had a lot of guys who played in three other places and couldn’t remember how to do it.

This O’Malley can’t seem to stop the bleeding.

The Dodgers came limping into St. Louis Monday night with all the civic fanfare of a guy hopping off a freight. The once-feared cast of characters was about as excitement-causing as a road company of “Carmen.”

So far as the host Cardinals were concerned, this cast was just the piano for their latest concert. The Cardinals are the ones winging their way to the National League pennant this time. The Dodgers are just an easy little par-3 over a brook. An almost a rest-the-regulars opponent. If they were in the same division, the Cardinals would be leading by 13.

The rain held down the crowd. Of course, so did the Dodgers. More people managed to miss the game than showed up for it. The empty seats outnumbered the full ones two-to-one.

The game was interrupted frequently by rain and Dodger pitching changes but was a fairly typical Dodger road adventure. The Dodgers opened the game with two third basemen in the lineup, one playing first and one playing left field, and their best hitter was on the bench, but not even Ty Cobb could help this lineup--and there was nobody who even resembled him in this bunch.

The pitcher was working on a seven-game losing streak and hadn’t lost any of his consistency. Jack Clark hit a home run off him. But that can happen to anybody, particularly a Dodger. The Dodgers are to Jack Clark what pork chops were to Henry the Eighth.

In the third inning, the Cardinals had men on first and third (the pitcher) with one out when pitcher Rick Honeycutt threw some of his best stuff of the game. Only, it was to first base, not the batter. He picked off the runner, Ozzie Smith. But, as Ozzie was in a rundown, the pitcher, on third, broke for home. The Dodger infield thought this was so interesting, it stood there and watched it. While it did, Ozzie Smith sneaked back to first base while the run scored.

I rest my case. Were the 1937 Dodgers any funnier? Was Chaplin? Sooner or later, Hollywood spoofs everything--”Camille,” “The Three Musketeers,” “Cyrano”--and turns it into script for the Ritz Brothers. All these Dodgers need is a busty blonde, a pig’s bladder, a bottle of seltzer, horned-rim glasses and baggy pants. They have to learn to wait for their laugh. This has to be a remake of “A Night At the Opera.” The Keystone Dodgers.