Baseball ’90 PREVIEW : TRIUMPHANT AT 100 : From the Bums of Brooklyn and Boys of Summer to the Blue Crew in Los Angeles, the Dodgers Have a Special History

Has it only been 100 years?

Can a mere century contain the epic sweep of the Dodgers, the franchise that taught baseball integration, bicoastalism and prosperity?

Uncle Robbie, Mr. Rickey, Jackie Robinson, the Bums, the Boys of Summer, Sandy, Drysdale coming inside, Fernandomania, Orel, Gibson’s swing. . . . Any team would be hard pressed to match it for romance.

None certainly can touch its bottom line, this family-owned empire seated high on a hill atop downtown Los Angeles. “Probably the most successful sports franchise that has ever been fielded,” Stanford economist Roger Noll said after seeing the owners’ books during the ’85 strike, and “Baseball’s answer to the Denver mint.”

Nor was this automatic, but won only with a hard-nosed dedication to the organization.

For all the talk about “Dodger family,” this is the franchise that forced out Branch Rickey, let go Red Barber, traded Jackie Robinson and Maury Wills, sold Duke Snider, abandoned Brooklyn, traded Davey Lopes within weeks of the ’81 World Championship, lost Don Sutton to free agency in 1980, and Steve Garvey in 1982 and Steve Sax in 1989, and recently purged its own publicity staff.

The organization remains triumphant at 100. The marketing dervishes at 1000 Elysian Park Ave., ever eager for a new theme to memorialize on patches on their players’ uniform shirts, have struck promotional gold. Think of it, a Dodger century! The media blitz, the merchandise-- the video! --($19.95 in an outlet near you.)

“Dodgermania is going to be sweeping the community,” said the head of the video company at a drumbeating Dodger Stadium press conference. “And only to a slightly lesser extent, New York.”

If only the ballclub can do its part, it’ll be talking major box office . . .

We’re talking hopes, we’re talking vision, we’re talking Dodgers!

Just for Laughs:

1890-1938

In the beginning, they were the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers of the American Assn., who were invited to join the National League in 1890. They played in bucolic Washington Park before thousands. Well, 1,000 or 2,000, anyway.

The team would variously be known as the Bridegrooms (seven players got married in the 1889 off-season), Robins (after Manager Wilbert Robinson) and Superbas (?). In 1913, owner Charlie Ebbets, who had joined the club as a ticket-taker and program hawker, built a state-of-the-art stadium in what was known as Pigtown. An estimated 25,000 attended the exhibition with the Yankees that opened Ebbets Field.

The Dodgers won pennants in 1916 and 1920, but lost both World Series, a precursor of things to come.

Mostly they were bad on the field and good for laughs, led by fat, popular Uncle Robbie. “Robbie was a roly-poly genial jolley fellow weighing 300 pounds,” wrote Dodger VP-to-be Fresco Thompson. “When his dentures fitted properly, you could even understand him. He missed by many miles being a baseball genius and his archrival and hated enemy, John McGraw, could have stayed in bed . . . and still outsmarted him.”

Casey Stengel played for Uncle Robbie. Ace hitter Billy Herman was said to have fielded a fly ball with his head (an apocryphal story) and once tripled and arrived at third base with two teammates (a true one). Many games were lost, comically or otherwise. Willard Mullin of the New York World-Telegraph drew the “Bum” cartoon--a ragged, unshaven tramp smoking a cigar butt--that became their unofficial logo.

The Yankees and Giants ruled the city. The Dodgers were poor relations.

Rennaisance:1938-1956

Dodger history is replete with towering figures, and now came Leland Stanford (Larry) MacPhail, a swashbuckler moldering far from the bright lights in the Cincinnati front office, hired by the Dodgers on the advice of NL president Ford Frick.

The Dodgers were then in hock for $350,000 to the Brooklyn Trust Co. Walter O’Malley, who came on the scene as a collections lawyer for the bank, told “The Boys of Summer” author Roger Kahn the bank would have gladly foreclosed, except for fear of angering Dodger fans into pulling their accounts.

MacPhail was unorthodox and unafraid. As a captain at the end of World War I, he joined a plot, hatched over a couple bottles of wine, to kidnap Kaiser Wilhelm who had sought refuge in a castle in nearby Amerongen, Holland. MacPhail and seven U.S. officers were turned back by German troops at the castle, but MacPhail escaped with an ashtray he said was the Kaiser’s.

In Cincinnati, MacPhail introduced night baseball. In Brooklyn, he ended the agreement with the Yankees and Giants not to broadcast games on radio and brought in Reds announcer Red Barber. MacPhail hired a stadium organist, ushers and Babe Ruth as a coach.

More to the point, he insisted on a lot of additional working capital and acquired players like Pee Wee Reese, Dolph Camilli and Joe Medwick. He brought in the fiery captain of the Cardinals’ Gashouse Gang, Leo Durocher, as manager.

In 1941, the brilliant Durocher led the Dodgers to their first pennant in 21 years. Brooklyn went wild, like Chicago at the end of the Cubs drought. Attendance was a record 1,200,000. Cowbell Hilda Chester became famous, and the Dodger Sym-phony began serenading umpires with “Three Blind Mice.”

“I gave them that name,” Barber says in the Dodger video. “They couldn’t play a note. They couldn’t read a note.”

But ask a Cubs fan, this hoping is dangerous. The Dodgers lost the World Series to the lordly Yankees, 4-1.

Worse, they blew their chance to square it on Owen’s famed Muff. Down 2-1 in Game 4, but holding a one-run lead with two out and none on in the ninth inning, Dodger catcher Mickey Owen let Hugh Casey’s swinging third strike to Tommy Henrich--a banned spitball?--bounce off his glove. Henrich beat the throw to first base. Then Joe DiMaggio singled, King Kong Keller doubled two runs in, Bill Dickey walked and Joe Gordon doubled in two more.

A year later, the Dodgers won 104 games, but the Cards won 106. MacPhail, always in search of new challenges, went back into the Army.

He was replaced by the already legendary Rickey, a brilliant, pedagogic and pedantic man who had set the Cardinals atop baseball by building a huge farm system but was now fighting with Card owner Sam Breadon.

At Rickey’s Brooklyn zenith, the Dodgers would have 27 farm teams. Hundreds of faceless prospects were housed in the old Naval Air Station barracks at Vero Beach, all ready to kill the guy in the next bunk for one of those precious spots on the varsity. The system produced Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, Carl Furillo, Billy Cox, Carl Erskine, Kahn’s Boys of Summer who’d dominate the NL for a decade. Falling by the wayside as players but building reputations later as managers were Dick Williams and Gene Mauch.

Introducing Jackie Robinson

Rickey also broke the color line in 1947 with Robinson. Robinson was an unorthodox-looking player with a sweeping swing and a football player’s wide-set stride. He may have lacked only opportunity to be the Bo Jackson of his day, and more. It’s been suggested that baseball wasn’t even his best sport; he had a 12.2-yard rushing average in 1939 as a Bruin halfback. Duke Snider, then growing up in Compton, remembers going to see Robinson play baseball for Pasadena City College, and watching Jackie win the broad jump between innings of a track meet going on next door, in his baseball uniform and spikes.

Robinson was 28 when he arrived amid great controversy. Dixie Walker asked to be traded rather than play with a black and was sent to St. Louis. Furillo kept his own counsel but told Kahn later that he hadn’t liked it, either. Snider remembers opposing base runners trying to step on Robinson’s ankles, rather than the first-base bag.

Robinson hit .297 and was named rookie of the year. From 1949-54, when he turned 35, he was never under .308. He won the MVP in ‘49, when he hit .342 with 122 RBIs.

Rickey went into the Negro League with a vengeance. Roy Campanella became the MVP in 1951-53-55. Only Mike Schmidt has won three since. Don Newcombe became the only man ever to win rookie of the year, the Cy Young and MVP.

The Dodgers won pennants in 1947-49-52-53 but lost to the Yankees each time. In 1952, the Dodgers blew a 3-2 series lead. The ever-enthusiastic Brooklyn Eagle trotted out its famous headline: “Wait ‘Til Next year!”

Finally in 1955’s Game 7, manager Walter Alston passed up Newcombe and Erskine, both rested but both of whom had been hit hard, for 23-year-old Johnny Podres. Podres pitched a seven-hitter and the Dodgers won, 8-3. Sandy Amoros, just placed in left as a defensive replacement by Alston, made his famous catch on Yogi Berra’s drive down the line with two men on and Next Year was here.

The borough was delirious. A victory parade turned out a reported 500,000.

A year later, normalcy returned. The Dodgers blew a 2-0 series lead. In Game 5, the Dodgers became part of history--the only perfect game ever pitched in the World Series. Dale Mitchell struck out to give Yankee Don Larsen the perfect game. Sal Maglie, by the way, gave up only five hits and a pair of runs in the losing effort. Alston went with his 27-game winner, Newcombe, in Ebbets Field in Game 7, but the Yankees routed him, 9-0. Newk never pitched another postseason inning and retired with an 8.59 lifetime ERA for the World Series.

See Ya Later: Moving West

In 1950, Walter O’Malley, then 25% owner, won a power struggle with fellow 25% owner Rickey, and forced him out. O’Malley, a lawyer by training, an engineering student as a youth but first and foremost a businessman, was no retiring figure, himself. He had butted egos with Rickey through the Mahatma’s tenure.

In his book, “The Dodgers Move West,” Neil J. Sullivan recalls a P.G. Wodehouse description of one of his characters to describe O’Malley: “He looked like a cartoon of Capital in a Labour newspaper.”

Wrote Red Smith: “It had always been recognized that baseball was a business, but if you enjoyed the game, you could also tell yourself that it was also a sport. . . . O’Malley was the first to say out loud that it was all business--a business that he owned and could operate as he chose.”

Alarmed by the deterioration of both the neighborhood and his ballpark, O’Malley wanted a new stadium. His determination kicked off a debate on public policy and sports franchises that continues to this day. Al Davis, another Brooklyn native, often invokes advice given to him by O’Malley.

By today’s standards, O’Malley’s demands were modest. He intended to use his own money to build, but needed the city to condemn the land at his proposed site, the terminus of the Long Island Railroad (in which he was also a stockholder).

To make a long story short, he couldn’t get it. Robert Moses, the popular autocratic public works commissioner, was unsympathetic. Brooklyn’s powerful Congressman, Emmanuel Celler, chairman of the House Antitrust Subocommittee, asked O’Malley: “Do you think that a baseball club which has made the profits that your club has should be benefitted by acquisition of land by eminent domain?”

In fact, the Dodgers were profitable. They never drew fewer than 1,088,704 a season from 1952-56, while televising their home games. Their $1.7 million profit, Sullivan says, was the higest in baseball, higher even than the Yankees.

O’Malley wouldn’t be put off.

Says Roger Kahn: “Frank Graham, the Dodger publicist before Red Patterson, once said the competition between O’Malley and Rickey was so intense on O’Malley’s side, because Rickey had been the pioneer with Jackie Robinson, in the end O’Malley had to go to California to do something as pioneering as what Rickey had done.”

For whatever reason, O’Malley went, after the 1957 season, to be reviled in his native Brookyn ever after. If the mania over that Dodger video actually does sweep New York this summer, let’s just say times will have changed.

Golden Boys

It was as if someone passed a wand over them. . . .

One moment in history, they were the Daffiness Boys. The next, annual tragic losers.

The next they were in that warm California sun, in a joke of a makeshift ballpark, the Coliseum with its 251-foot “Chinese Wall,” giving Los Angeles in two seasons what Brookyln had to wait 65 years for--a World Championship.

After a seventh-place finish in 1958, the Dodgers rose stunningly to win the 1959 pennant behind newly acquired Wally Moon, a left-handed hitter who perfected an inside-out swing that sliced balls over the short left-field screen. “Moonshots,” they were called.

Underdogs to the strong White Sox, the Dodgers lost the World Series opener, 11-0, in Chicago, but came from behind to win Game 2 as second baseman Charlie Neal hit two homers. Larry Sherry got the save and Chuck Essegian hit a pinch homer; both were graduates of Los Angeles’ Fairfax High.

Sherry went on to win two games and save another as the Dodgers won in six games. The Coliseum games produced the three biggest crowds in World Series history--92,394, 92,650 and 92,706.

With a new scheme, pitching and defense, the Dodgers won World Series in 1963 and 1965. In the ’63 sweep of the Yankees, they allowed a total of four runs. The incomparable Sandy Koufax posted successive seasons of 25-5, 19-5, 26-8 and 27-9. Don Drysdale of Van Nuys won 209 games, all but 22 as an L.A. Dodger. Maury Wills, 29 when he broke into the big leagues as a banjo-hitting shortstop, broke Ty Cobb’s stolen base record and averaged 55 a season from 1960, his first full season, to 1969, when he was traded to the Pirates.

In the ‘70s, Al Campanis took over as GM and Tom Lasorda succeeded Alston. The farm system started coughing out sluggers, so they moved the distant fences in and went back to long ball.

In 1977 they became the first team with four 30-homer men--Steve Garvey, Reggie Smith, Ron Cey and Dusty Baker. In 1978, they went over 3,000,000 in attendance for the first time. They’d do it five times before any other team--the Mets in 1987--did it.

The Dodgers lost World Series appearances to the Reggie Jackson Yankees in 1977-78, but got revenge in 1981, the year of Fernandomania.

Twenty-year-old rookie Fernando Valenzuela started 8-0 with an 0.50 ERA, ran the already staggering attendance totals up by several thousand per game and won the Cy Young Award. The Dodgers came from 0-2 down in a mini-playoff to beat the Astros; from 1-2 down to beat the Expos, winning Game 5 on Rick Monday’s home run, producing the day still known as Dodger Blue Monday in Montreal; then from 0-2 down to beat the Yankees in six games.

Attendance peaked at the baseball record--3,608,881--in 1982. Dodger dedication to marketing can be measured in one statistic: their first $1 million-a-year employee was not the beloved Garvey, who left making half that much, or the sensation, Valenzuela, but their popular broadcaster, Vin Scully.

A rebuilding program produced “Baby Blue” and division titles in 1983 and 1985, but losses in both playoffs. In the latter, Lasorda pitched to the Cardinals’ Jack Clark with a base open in the final game, and Clark took Tom Niedenfuer halfway up the left field bleachers.

Prospects like Mike Marshall and Greg Brock faded and the Dodgers posted fifth and fourth-place finishes in a six-team division in 1986-87. In 1987, they failed to draw 3,000,000 for the first time in the ‘80s (their average in strike-interrupted ’81 would have put them well over). In 1987, Campanis, who’d formed a double-play combination with Jackie Robinson in the minors and was proud of it, committed his Nightline gaffe and was fired.

He was replaced by Fred Claire, an ex-sportswriter who was owner Peter O’Malley’s right-hand man, but whose experience had come on the promotional side of the organization. Claire was criticized by fellow GMs at his first winter meetings but acquired Kirk Gibson, Jay Howell and Alfredo Griffin.

Lasorda, previously derided as a push-button manager, then took his supposed also-rans to the sixth Dodger World championship. Orel Hershiser broke Drysdale’s record with 59 consecutive shutout innings. Mike Scioscia, who had 35 home runs in an eight-year career, hit a two-run ninth-inning game-tying shot off Dwight Gooden to keep the Dodgers from falling behind, 3-1, in the NL playoffs. Kirk Gibson won that game with a 12th-inning homer, then against the A’s, hit perhaps the most dramatic home run in World Series history, limping to the plate on one good leg to win the game with a pinch-hit, ninth-inning homer off Dennis Eckersley. It was his only at-bat of the series. Hershiser then won two games and the Dodgers won laughing, 4-1.

A year later, Lasorda lost a lot of weight, affording him yet another endorsement opportunity. The team lost a lot of injured players, dropped to fourth place and missed 3,000,000 (by 55,347) for the third straight season.