Still in the Ball Game : Former Dodger Cey Stays Active, but This Time the Sport Is Racquetball

You’re taken at first by the no-nonsense approach of the stocky, unsmiling player.

Then you notice the way he moves about the court--with quick, mincing, stiff-legged strides that accent a whimsical sort of grace.

Who else but Ron Cey?

The former Los Angeles Dodger third baseman, who lent stability to a position in which 43 players had tried and failed in the 13 years prior, has taken his considerable baseball talents and unique style to the racquetball arena.

And to hear him tell it, the transition has not been that difficult. It just has to do with a transference of skills.

“Baseball and racquetball are similar in so many ways,” said the sandy-haired, mustachioed Cey, whose ingenuous face shows no signs of surrendering to time.

“In both sports you’re trying to hit a ball that’s moving fast, so hand-eye coordination comes into play. You’ve got reflexes and quickness too. And, most important, you need to be prepared mentally.”

According to Cey, 43, those attributes are most becoming to an infielder and, it follows, a third baseman, who has less time to react to a batted ball than other players.

“Baseball is slow for those who watch but fast for those who play (the infield),” he said. “You’re always anticipating. About 75% of the game is in the infield, if you measure the number of plays. Infielders have relays, bunts, double plays, pickoffs, more different things to think about. Outfielders, they can sleep their way through most of a game.”

Baseball people love to bestow nicknames on their icons, and Cey earned the sobriquet of Penguin. Comparisons to that flightless, sometimes awkward-looking bird were valid, as any Dodger fan who saw him motor from first to third on a single to right would nostalgically recall.

Strangely, he played with an intensity belying that playful creature--and belying his own choir-boy appearance. Ron Cey hated to lose then, hates to lose now. He is one serious bird.

Jerry Hilecher recalls that intensity. He met Cey on a racquetball court in 1976 for an exhibition during a charity tournament hosted by Steve Garvey.

It was an interesting matchup of players at the top of their games--in different sports. Cey, although a racquetball neophyte, was in the midst of a 12-year Dodger career during which he anchored an infield that included Bill Russell, Davey Lopes and Garvey. They remained as a unit for a major league record eight seasons.

Hilecher, then 23 and ranked among racquetball’s elite, had been playing professionally for about four years. He thought the exhibition was for laughs.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Hilecher, who runs a youth program at Racquetball World in Canoga Park. “This was supposed to be for fun, and he was diving for balls, getting mad when he missed a shot. He thought he could win; he wanted to win. I mean, the only way to compare it would be like me putting on a baseball uniform and expecting to strike him out.

“But I realized later that that intensity was a part of him and what made him a great baseball player. I’ve just never seen anyone that focused.”

Cey makes no excuses for his businesslike approach to a game, for that mental preparation. It is what he is most eager to talk about regarding a 17-year career that included a major league record for runs batted in during April (29, in 1971). He was one of the game’s most well-known streak hitters, further testimony to his ability to concentrate.

“People in the Dodger organization still remind me of my work ethic,” Cey said. “Even when I was an established player I didn’t use that as an opportunity to duck anything. I still took ground balls and batting practice.

“The coaches used me as an example to the younger guys to show the importance of not letting up and always being prepared. Sure, baseball is a team game, but each individual has to do his job and not let the team down.”

And all that homework paid off. Cey, a complete player, led National League third basemen in fielding in 1979, committing just nine errors. The knock on Cey, a Tacoma, Wash., native, was that he could have been faster, which although true was probably irrelevant.

An accurate arm, extraordinary reflexes and anticipation more than made up for lack of speed in a position that did not require great range.

And the 315 career home runs--just one of them inside the park--served to mollify most of the clock-watchers.

Sprinter’s speed isn’t a prerequisite for playing in the middle-to-upper echelons of racquetball society, either, which is where Cey is right now. And that isn’t too bad, considering he had just been tinkering with the game until he left baseball four years ago.

“There were a lot of don’ts in my contract,” he said, “and racquetball was one of them. I wasn’t permitted to play tournament ball, but I didn’t really care about that. I just wanted the exercise.”

He remembers being introduced to the game a few years after joining the Dodgers, playing on an undersized court at a friend’s Brentwood home. He wonders now whether he benefited from the experience.

“The court was so short that there were never any defensive shots taken,” he said. “I didn’t know what a ceiling ball was (a shot taken to move an opponent out of the control area) until I saw racquetball being played on a regulation court.

“I had to relearn the game, and it took a while.”

Cey rarely played racquetball during baseball season, implementing it in his off-season conditioning program as a way to stay sharp while burning calories.

He concluded his baseball career in 1987, with the Oakland Athletics. And when it was over, Cey wasted little time becoming a racquetball junkie.

He said goodby to the Bay Area and hello to Mid-Valley Athletic Club in Reseda, playing on an almost-daily basis and, he says, “trying to find my game.” Indications are that he has, but he feels he still has work to do.

Jerry Feldman, on the other hand, says Cey is doing just fine. Their relationship goes back to 1970, when they were minor-league opponents. Cey was playing for Albuquerque at the time, Feldman for El Paso.

They hooked up again for some serious racquetball shortly after Cey retired, eventually becoming doubles partners for their club’s annual invitational handicap tournament. The event consistently attracts the best amateur players in the Southland, but in the past three years Cey and Feldman have won two titles and finished second the other time.

Feldman, who lives in Calabasas, is impressed.

“Ronnie’s always facing guys who have more tools than he has, but he’s got such a strong mind-set, such a competitive desire. It’s a pro mentality.

“He’s able to pick up his game with this desire to win, as opposed to just getting out there and playing. It’s a mentality that comes from competing against the best in his sport, and it definitely gives him an edge.”

In other words, we’re not talking Marty Hogan here, but you’d better be better if you’re going to beat him. He doesn’t lose to people he should beat, and he can find ways to bring down opponents who have greater skills.

Cey concurs with the notion that racquetball, like baseball, is as much cerebral as it is physical. “It’s a matter of trying to discover strengths and weaknesses and exploiting them,” he said.

Despite the similarities of the sports and the ease with which the requisite skills can be transferred, Cey is unaware of other former baseball players who have made such a strong commitment to racquetball.

Andy Etchebarren, who caught for the Orioles, and Eric Soderholm, who played third for the White Sox, do own clubs, though.

“To begin with,” said Cey, who has managed to hold his weight at 180 pounds for 25 years, “baseball players have never been real active in the off-season. And when they retire, for fitness they seem to just gravitate into sports that are a little more passive than racquetball--golf or tennis, mostly.”

Not your everyday extrovert (“I don’t enjoy verbal exchange no matter what sport I’m playing, especially with people I don’t know well”), Cey stepped out of character while with the Dodgers and cut a record. It never made the Billboard charts but it continues to be a hit at the team’s training camp.

“Just make sure you tell people that it isn’t a ballad,” Cey said, laughing. “It’s a baseball jingle we ran off as a fun thing.”

Fifteen years later “One Game at a Time” (flip side--”Third Base Bag”) is still No. 1 in Vero Beach, Fla., where Cey says it is played during half-inning stretches at spring exhibitions.

“My in-laws came to camp one year when I was still with the Dodgers,” he recalled. “An elderly lady in the row behind them turned to her husband when the song came on and said, ‘Honey, isn’t that Glen Campbell?’ I still get a kick out of that one.”

It’s a good life for Ron Cey, who lives in Woodland Hills with Fran, his wife of 20 years, three poodles--”They meld our family together. They’ve all got different personalities and they don’t talk back when you holler at them”--and two children.

Amanda, 13, will be a freshman at El Camino Real High and will try out for the tennis team while Daniel, 16, will be entering his junior year and is blossoming in the sport that employed his dad for so long.

“He played second base last season,” said Ron of Dan, “but they’re going to move him to shortstop (where he played this summer on an American Legion team that made the District 6 playoffs). He’s a player and he’s a 3.5 (GPA) student. And if you’re thinking I’m proud of him, you’re right.”

Cey has plunged into retirement with a vengeance, but if you’ve got something of interest he’ll listen. Meantime, Fran runs a collective arts store in Santa Monica while he does the shopping and oversees the family’s real estate and stock portfolios.

He also has done a legal-aid commercial that is appears on local television. “I can see people getting real tired of looking at me because it’s gonna be on for five more years,” he said.

And how does he rate himself as a Mister Mom?

“Not bad. About an A-minus, same as racquetball. I’d like to say I’m perfect, but I have to leave a little room for the times when I make mistakes.”