BLEEDING BLUE : A Lifelong Dodger Fan Chronicles His Team’s Decline and Suggests a Remedy

I WAS 7 YEARS OLD in the summer of 1949 when I turned on a console radio in Galveston, Tex., and discovered baseball. Someone named Jackie Robinson hit a home run into a street called Bedford Avenue as the Brooklyn Dodgers beat the New York Giants. Not one summer day since has passed without the Dodgers being a part of my life.

Thirty-eight years is a long time to stay married to one team, especially when you’re forced to live apart. I admit to brief flings with teams closer to home, if not closer to heart--the Astros, and before them the Cardinals--but honest, dear, they didn’t mean a thing, and what really matters is that I never once even looked at the Giants.

All this time I have been a member of baseball’s largest family: the Dodger diaspora. Scattered throughout the country, we knew that the Dodgers were truly America’s Team long before the Dallas Cowboys dreamed up the phrase or the Atlanta Braves cheapened it. We understood, long before people began writing nostalgic books about the Dodgers, that the history of the team mirrored the American experience: the end of segregation, the struggle to be free of Yankee dominance, the westward odyssey, the discovery of riches in California. The allure of the Dodgers made up for the hardships of separation--the mornings of opening the sports section only to discover that once again the West Coast games had been left out; the nights of staying up past midnight to spend yet another 50 cents on a 900 telephone number that offers the latest scores; the disorientation that comes from distance, from not being able to listen to Vin Scully, from having to find out about a trade by coming across a new name in the box score.

Still, it’s been a good life--up until now. The trouble started last September, when the Dodgers lost 17 of their last 22 games and finished a scant half-game out of last place. Last place! Surely this year would be better, yes?

No. On opening night, Dodger executive Al Campanis touched off a firestorm when he said on ABC-TV’s “Nightline” that blacks weren’t qualified to manage in the major leagues. The team lost its first five games. Campanis lost his job. As the team struggled through the summer, Sports Illustrated sent a writer to Los Angeles to compose an obituary for the Dodger Blue mystique. The entire baseball world put the Dodgers on the couch.

As the Dodgers sank closer and closer to the suddenly familiar climes of last place, I made a pilgrimage to Los Angeles from Texas to see for myself what had gone wrong. I talked not to the players (ballplayers always think they’re just a hit here and a cliche there from winning) but to the organization men who run the Dodgers, names unknown to the average fan, names like Executive Vice President Fred Claire and minor league operations director Bill Schweppe.

What I found was not reassuring. The Dodgers, the most successful organization in baseball since the team moved to the West Coast, are going through the most Californian experience imaginable. They are having an identity crisis.

THE FALL OF THE Dodgers has been dissected as thoroughly as the fall of Rome. Theories abound. On the weekend that I spent at Dodger Stadium, the patrons in the left-field seats were an Oxford of baseball scholarship.

“This team’s got no chemistry.” This was the most common complaint by far, generated by the summer-long bickering between Pedro Guerrero and Mike Marshall. But Don Sutton and Steve Garvey feuded for years, and that didn’t keep the Dodgers from winning three pennants.

“Lasorda’s a clown.” Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda is Rodney Dangerfield in uniform. His eyes pop, his belly sags, his blood bleeds blue, he gets no respect. More to the point, though, he’s guided the Dodgers to five first-place finishes in 11 years. Nobody thought Walter Alston could manage, either.

“The scouts can’t tell a curve ball from a fastball.” In recent years the farm system hasn’t produced talent the way it once did. But it’s hard to put all the blame on the scouts. Players like Reggie Williams and Jeff Hamilton verified the scouts’ judgment by looking good in the minor leagues. Only when they got to the Dodgers did they start to look bad.

“Nobody is in charge.” News reports have made it sound as if there is more intrigue in the Dodger organization than in Lebanon--in particular, a power struggle between Lasorda and Fred Claire. If there is one, Lasorda is as foolish as his critics believe. The line of authority was settled in 1982, when owner Peter O’Malley elevated Claire from vice president of public relations to executive vice president. Claire is firmly entrenched as the man ultimately responsible for the fate of the Dodgers.

All these criticisms are superficial. To understand why the Dodgers are losing now, it is first necessary to understand why the Dodgers won for so many years. And win they did. In almost half a century of seasons, 1938 through 1985, they finished first 16 times and second another 15. Only the Yankees have had more good years than the Dodgers, but they have also had many more bad ones. In the last decade there is no comparison: The Dodgers have won five titles to the Yankees’ three, while just missing two others on the last day of the season.

What has been the Dodgers’ secret? Ask people connected with the organization, past or present, and the one factor they hardly mention is players. No Robinson, Reese or Furillo; no Snyder, Campanella or Hodges; no Koufax or Drysdale, no Garvey, Russell or Cey. The only player whose name comes up repeatedly is Maury Wills, not because of his skills but because he labored so long to perfect them. In the 1950s Wills spent 8 1/2 years in the minors. That would be cause for regret in most organizations, half a career wasted; for the Dodgers it remains a source of pride, proof that their system was working the way it was supposed to.

“When you stabilize talent at the major league level, you let your minor league talent develop,” says Claire, who, since Campanis departed, is in charge of both the business and baseball sides of the organization. “What’s happened in recent years is that we’ve called upon players who haven’t had the minor league training that they need. Take Maury Wills. . . .”

The phrase that the Dodgers use to describe their system is “the Dodger way.” It means having the best of everything--the best stadium (naturally they built it themselves), the best spring-training facilities (complete with two golf courses and a movie theater), and at one time it even meant traveling in their own airplane. It means, says Claire, “having the right structure.” It means, says Schweppe, “a continuity of operation and philosophy that is reflected on the field.” It means, says Buzzie Bavasi, the Dodgers’ general manager from 1951 to 1968, “the right way to play baseball.”

In short, Dodger management believes that the system wins, not the players. The faith that club officials have invested in their style of management is reminiscent of another Big Blue: IBM. The Texas Rangers once went through four field managers in a single week; the Dodgers have had two managers in 33 years. The Chicago White Sox have had three directors of player personnel in three years; before Campanis’ departure last April, the Dodgers had had three executives with those duties in 43 years.

Only now, the system isn’t winning. It isn’t winning in Los Angeles and it isn’t winning at the minor-league whistle-stops in the Dodger organization: Albuquerque, San Antonio, Bakersfield and Vero Beach, the top four farm clubs. Between 1981 and 1983, those four teams among them posted only one losing season. But from 1984 through 1986, the top four teams managed to accumulate only one winning season. Albuquerque did win the Pacific Coast League this year, but it wasn’t a typical Dodger farm club: Almost half of the players were rejects from other organizations.

Another professional sports franchise is going through much the same turmoil as the Dodgers. As a Texan, I know it well: the Dallas Cowboys. Like the Dodgers, the Cowboys consider their system more important than their players. Like the Dodgers, the Cowboys will dump star athletes who misbehave. Like the Dodgers, the Cowboys would rather develop their own talent than acquire players from other organizations. Like the Dodgers, the Cowboys believe in stability; rarely does a Cowboys’ telecast pass without an announcer noting that Tom Landry is the only head coach the team has ever had. Like that of the Dodgers, the Cowboys’ organization is considered arrogant by the competition. And there are other, darker similarities. Both teams are losing. Both teams have a recent history of making poor first-round draft choices. Both are asking themselves whether their sudden lack of success has occurred because they deserted their system, or because their system deserted them.

I AM SITTING FAR OUT along the left field line of Dodger Stadium, about two hours before game time. Watching batting practice with me is the team’s assistant publicist, Toby Zwikel, who is trying to explain why the Dodgers really aren’t out of the pennant race, even though they are far in arrears of first-place Cincinnati this early August weekend. “If the Giants can win three of four from the Reds this weekend,” he says, “and we sweep Atlanta, then Cincinnati has to come here. We beat them three out of four and we’re right back in it.”

In the empty stadium, amid the resonant rhythms of bat against ball and ball against glove, everything seems possible. Seven palm trees, so high and thin that they appear vulnerable to the first late-afternoon breezes from the ocean, loom over a cantilevered roof. Beyond them a hillside shuts out the city, as if to announce that the prosaic and the profane are forbidden here. No ballpark has ever been so perfect. But then the game starts. In the fourth inning, Dodger pitcher Bob Welch fails to cover first base in time to complete what would have been an inning-ending double play. Retribution is swift and total: His next pitch is hit for a home run. The Dodgers lose by one run. They will lose again the next day. In a single inning, their fielders will misplay an ordinary ground ball into a hit, let a catchable line drive fall harmlessly for another hit, make an errant throw on a bunt, and lackadaise what looks like a double-play ball into just one out. Three runs. The Dodgers lose by two. The dream is over.

I have seen Dodger teams that couldn’t pitch and others that couldn’t hit, but until this one, I’ve never seen one that didn’t know, as Bavasi put it, “the right way to play baseball.” This isn’t supposed to happen; a ground ball to the shortstop is not supposed to be an adventure. The system is designed to ensure that, win or lose, the Dodgers will always have a basic level of competence.

The architect of the system was the late Branch Rickey, a name that comes up regularly in conversations with club officials--even though he hasn’t been with the team since 1950, long before it left Brooklyn. “Mr. Rickey used to say that baseball depends on ‘many pleasing little skills,’ ” says Schweppe. “A pitcher learns how to hold a runner close to base so he doesn’t get to third on a single, he can’t score on a fly ball. A pleasing little skill.”

The essence of the Rickey philosophy--the Dodger philosophy--is that “many pleasing little skills” are the difference between winning and losing. The catch is that it can take a long time to perfect them. Most teams are not willing to wait. The Dodgers are. That is, they used to be. In the late years of the Campanis regime, shortstop Mariano Duncan was rushed to Los Angeles. So was first baseman / outfielder Franklin Stubbs. Both players remain untutored, unfinished, un-Dodgerlike. “Baseball,” says Schweppe, “is a game of gradual development. Take Maury Wills. . . .”

Schweppe is one of the few people left in the organization who made the move from Brooklyn. Bald except for a bit of fuzz over each ear, with a long, oval face punctuated by gold-rimmed glasses, Schweppe is sitting beside a typewriter that looks as if it too could remember Mr. Rickey. Off to his right, on the other side of a glass divider, a green bulletin board extends the length of a wall. On it are eight columns of names. Each one represents the roster of a different team in the organization, from the major league Dodgers on the left to players in the Dominican Republic on the right. From 1979 through 1982, the green board produced four consecutive National League rookies of the year: Rick Sutcliffe, Steve Howe, Fernando Valenzuela, Steve Sax. Since then, none.

The reason for the diminution of talent, the Sports Illustrated article suggested, is that owner Peter O’Malley allowed the Dodger organization to grow old. Campanis was 70 when he blundered on national television; Bavasi had advised him to quit a year and a half earlier. Scouting director Ben Wade is 64. Schweppe, who

is retiring this year, is 73, and the criticism stings.

“All these years the Dodgers were looked up to because we didn’t bring in new hands to do untried things,” Schweppe says sadly. “Now we’re criticized for the very thing that’s made the organization fine--I hesitate to use the word great .

“I acknowledge getting old as a fact of life but not as a reason for being in fifth place.”

NO ONE WOULD mistake Fred Claire for a Brooklyn transplant; he is Southern California all the way. Even his initial “Hi” is delivered in a soft, sincere voice. Deep-set blue eyes, so light that they seem almost gray, bore in on the visitor. Above them the thickest eyebrows this side of Speaker of the House Jim Wright protrude like ledges. A trim 51, he would see much younger but for hair that at first impression seems blond, then on further inspection emerges as a muted silver. Tan, muscular forearms issue from the short sleeves of a blue-and-pink striped sport shirt with two buttons open down the front.

A former publicist for the Houston Astros remembers having met Claire at a winter baseball convention during the early 1980s. “There was a presence about Fred that epitomized the Dodger organization,” the publicist recalls. “He was very self-assured. It was so obvious that he knew the Dodgers were going to win, they were going to draw 3 million people, they were better than you.”

If Claire’s self-assurance has been shaken by watching the Dodgers commit misfeasance after misfeasance, day after day, he doesn’t show it. If anything, the results of the last two years have strengthened his faith in the Dodgers’ system of nurturing players. He believes that the team is paying the price for violating it--not only did Campanis rush players through the minor leagues in his last years but he also began trading unproven young players for mediocre veterans. Claire is not about to make the same mistake. “Those of us in management have to stay with what has worked,” he says.

To get the Dodgers back on course, Claire has filled vacancies on the roster by acquiring end-of-the-line veterans like Danny Heep and Phil Garner rather than by promoting younger players. Even Albuquerque, the highest-ranking farm team, had more than its share of aging journeymen. Claire is using the Heeps and the Garners to restore equilibrium to the organization, to keep younger players in their proper slots on Schweppe’s green board, to give the system a chance to work.

But will it ever again work the way it used to? Or is Claire, in the manner made famous by French generals, fighting the last war instead of the next one? One reason that the system worked so well is that the Dodgers were one of the few teams that had any kind of organizational philosophy. When they began their rise to prominence, three teams had dominated the National League in the 1920s and 30s--the Giants, Cardinals and Cubs won 16 of 20 pennants. That was the extent of the competition. Two teams, the Braves and the Phillies, didn’t win a pennant for more than 30 years. In the 1980s, with high salaries forcing teams to adopt businesslike approaches to the game, everyone is a threat. A Giants half-pennant means that all six teams in the National League West will have finished first at least once since 1979.

In their glory days the Dodgers were competing against rich sportsmen like Phil Wrigley of the Cubs, for whom baseball was a sideline, or baseball traditionalists like Horace Stoneham of the Giants, whose love of the game left him blind to the advantages of disciplined management. Today the Cubs are the property of the Chicago Tribune company; the Cardinals are tied into Anheuser-Busch; the Mets until this year were part of the Doubleday publishing empire. More and more owners are putting their clubs in the hands of men whose backgrounds are in business, not baseball--including the Dodgers. Campanis came up through the organization as a shortstop. Claire, a former sportswriter who once covered the Dodgers, came up through the organization in public relations, promotions and marketing.

The upheavals of the 1970s that changed the business of baseball--free agency and arbitrated contracts--actually worked in the Dodgers’ favor. While rivals like Atlanta tried to buy championships, only to end up throwing away millions on marginal players such as Claudell Washington, the Dodgers for the most part shunned the quick fix, stayed with their system and kept on winning. Who else but the Dodgers would have been able to keep a great infield--Cey, Russell, Lopes, Garvey--intact at such a time? Now, as Claire admits, “there aren’t any secrets here.” The Dodgers’ division rivals, among which used to be four of the worst organizations in baseball (Atlanta, Houston, San Diego, San Francisco) are all emulating the Dodgers’ system. So, for that matter, is most of baseball; everybody is concentrating on scouting and player development. Moreover, the clubs the Dodgers have been beating all these years have had the advantage of picking ahead of the Dodgers in the draft, because losing teams get to select players first.

The Dodgers haven’t just been copied; like any successful company, they’ve been raided as well. Many of the other 25 teams have ex-Dodgers in prominent roles, and a few of those teams have passed the Dodgers by. The organization that many baseball people now look to for a model is not in Los Angeles but in Toronto. The Blue Jays, for example, not the Dodgers, became the first club to place a baseball academy in Latin America, a fertile source of talent. Who built the Toronto organization? Peter Bavasi, Buzzie’s son. Who runs it now? Pat Gillick, who grew up in Los Angeles. Whose name comes up as the Dodgers’ next director of player personnel, should Claire decide to relinquish those duties? Pat Gillick’s. The Dodgers’ system is still working, but it’s moved 3,000 miles away.

In the next few weeks, Claire must resolve the Dodgers’ future. Tom Lasorda turned 60 late in the season. He has one year left on a two-year contract. Should he get an extension, a front-office promotion--or the boot? Then there’s the matter of a player-personnel director. Is Claire a keen enough judge of baseball talent, or does he need someone like Pat Gillick? Finally, there’s the hardest question of all. Can the system still win? “There was a time,” says Claire, “when we were ahead of the pack, more so than we are now.”

THERE WAS ONE MORE call to make before I left Los Angeles. I dialed Al Campanis.

He wasn’t giving interviews now, he said in a tired voice. But he just couldn’t help himself; disgraced or not, he was still a Dodger at heart. “I’ll give you a statement,” he said. “The Dodgers are having problems now, but they’ll overcome them. They have the best organization in baseball.”

“I’m writing a book,” he went on. “It’s all in there--the manifest destiny of the move to the West Coast; how I played shortstop at Montreal when Jackie Robinson was the second baseman. He was a fine fellow. Too bad he died young--he would have made a fine manager.”

Jackie Robinson was 53 when he died, and by all accounts he would have made a poor manager. Campanis’ predecessor, Buzzie Bavasi, says that Roy Campanella, not Robinson, was managerial material; Robinson, he says, was too withdrawn. But something else Campanis said stuck in my mind as a solution for the Dodgers’ dilemma: manifest destiny.

What did California have that galvanized the American imagination? Gold.

What do the Dodgers have that no other team in baseball can match? Money.

Only the Dodgers can be confident of selling close to 3 million tickets a year, good times or bad. Only the Dodgers are first in the hearts of a vast community that constitutes the most lucrative television market on earth. Money can be the Dodgers’ salvation. Is the scouting department weak? Buy the best scouts. Are the Dodgers being outbid for the best players in Latin America, players who are not subject to the draft? Up the ante. Is there a chronic problem in center field? Buy the next superstar who comes on the market instead of passing up a Tim Raines. Even the pinch-penny Cowboys paid $1 million for Herschel Walker.

The conventional wisdom in baseball is that money can’t buy championships. But the Dodgers can disprove the conventional wisdom, just as they disproved a different one--that baseball is a sport, not a business--in the 1940s and ‘50s. The time has come for the Dodgers to use their assets, and their beloved system is only one of them. In the age of parity and imitation, the Dodgers’ deep pockets are an advantage that shouldn’t be ignored.

My solution is not romantic, I know. But that’s the way life is: When love goes sour, we turn to money. The Dodgers ought to understand. After all, Los Angeles and the Dodgers married each other for fame and fortune 30 years ago, and that worked out just fine.