AL CAMPANIS FINDS BASEBALL HAS : A Long Memory : Five Years Later, Comments on Blacks Keep Former Dodger Executive on Sideline

It has been five years since anybody asked his advice, but Al Campanis still takes notes.

Fifty-two years of experience are scribbled on yellow sheets of paper. Each scrap is neatly folded and carefully placed into his pocket.

He takes notes while sitting in the club level at Dodger Stadium, behind home plate in Anaheim Stadium, in front of his television at midnight.

During his annual week as a guest at Dodgertown this spring, Campanis was invited to witness one of the Dodgers’ organizational meetings.

While sitting at the large round table, he pulled out a yellow sheet and began writing.

When the meeting ended, Dodger President Peter O’Malley joked that Campanis could not take those notes with him.

It has been five years since anybody needed his demonstrations, but Campanis still carries a handkerchief.

It is for times such as last summer, when he visited Bobby Valentine, a former protege and manager of the Texas Rangers.

Upon entering the visiting clubhouse at Anaheim Stadium, Campanis told Valentine he thought the previous night’s game had been lost because of a failed double play.

Campanis pulled out his handkerchief and threw it on the floor. He pretended the handkerchief was second base.

“Here,” he told Valentine. “Here is how Julio Franco should have moved around that base.”

Campanis finished his lesson, retrieved his handkerchief and returned to the stands.

It has been five years since Campanis, as a Dodger vice president, was fired after making his remarks about blacks on the nationally televised “Nightline” talk show.

There has been much written about the long-term effect of Campanis’ comments on the minority makeup of baseball’s front offices.

But nobody has been affected more by Campanis’ comments than Campanis.

He is still looking for a job.

“All somebody has to do is call,” said Campanis, 75.

He attends about 140 games a year to keep his evaluation skills sharp. He comes to spring training and walks to distant fields to watch teen-agers.

“He sits in the stands and talks like he is still a general manager,” close friend Merv Brown said.

Campanis said he doesn’t want to run a team, or even report to an office. He doesn’t even want to be paid.

“I just want to use my experience,” he said. “Maybe consult, maybe give advice. . . . I think I could be of some help to somebody.”

The baseball world does not agree. The Dodgers, in particular, do not agree.

He is given free tickets, parking passes and near-total access by the organization that he helped build with one World Series championship, four league championships and two division titles during his 19-year tenure.

But the Dodgers still refuse to formally affiliate themselves with him.

“It would have been difficult,” O’Malley said.

For those close to Campanis, it is not so simple.

“That the Dodgers have not given him something surprises me, especially because he had been with Peter so many years,” Jimmy Campanis, a former major league catcher, said of his father.

“We’re not talking about a full-time thing here, just a little thing. My dad just wants to be part of something.”

Jimmy Campanis said he has asked his father to formally retire. He refuses.

“He says, ‘Jimmy, if the game had passed me by, fine, but I feel I can still help some people,’ ” the younger Campanis said. “So my dad still takes this notes, whether this guy should play this hitter more to the right, or whether this guy needs help with his left foot.”

Jimmy Campanis sighed and said: “You know, if somebody didn’t get hired because they were black, the whole world would be up in arms.”

Al Campanis recently received certification as an agent, but it is only to represent grandson Jim, a catcher in the Seattle Mariners organization.

The Mariners are the only organization that has expressed interest in hiring Campanis during the last five years. They called him about a job in 1988, the year after he was fired.

“But then somebody from the NAACP up there got involved,” Campanis said. “And that was it.”

Since then Campanis has talked to every organization at least once. He even attended baseball’s winter meetings in Miami in December in an attempt to drum up a job.

But he remains on the outside. He is close enough to watch, but not close enough to touch.

“I didn’t think that incident would keep him out of baseball this long,” said Jack McKeon, former San Diego Padre general manager and Campanis rival. “Sure, you say something like that, you’ve got to get reprimanded. You’ve got to pay a price. But hasn’t he paid it?”

Campanis has been haunted for five years by the words “necessities” and “buoyancy.”

So when he thinks about the night of April 6, 1987, he prefers to think about two other words.

Jose Cruz.

If the Houston Astros’ Jose Cruz had not hit a seventh-inning home run against the Dodgers’ Orel Hershiser during the season opener that night, giving the Astros a 4-3 victory, the game might have gone extra innings.

“And if the game goes extra innings, that ‘Nightline’ show never uses us,” Campanis said. “A lot of things happened that night to prove it was just meant to be.”

A couple of weeks before opening day, Campanis had been asked by the “Nightline” crew to participate in a commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s first year in major league baseball. Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier by playing with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.

Campanis was not asked because anyone thought he had racist tendencies, but because he was once Robinson’s minor league roommate and supporter.

Interviewer Ted Koppel recalled last week that he had never even heard of Campanis.

“The people in the office jokingly call me Dr. Baseball, because I know nothing about the sport,” Koppel said. “All I knew was that we had this guy named Campanis, and he was once Robinson’s roommate. I had no expectations other than that.”

Steve Brener, however, apparently had low expectations. The longtime Dodgers publicist, who was fired after the season, warned Campanis against appearing on the show shortly before the end of the game.

Brener declined to discuss the incident, but Gordon Verrell, veteran writer for the Long Beach Press-Telegram, was sitting between Campanis and Brener in the Astrodome press box.

“Halfway through the game, this guy from ‘Nightline’ comes to the press box to remind Campanis about the appearance,” Verrell recalled. “It’s the first Steve has heard about it, and he tells Al, ‘That’s not such a good idea, because they are going to want to talk about more than Jackie Robinson.’ ”

Campanis says he did not hear the warning.

After the game he went to the darkened field, where he took part in the interview by sitting on a chair at home plate, facing a solitary camera with no cameraman.

“I remember saying, ‘He looks a guy sitting in an electric chair,’ ” Verrell recalled. “Turns out, he was.”

Koppel remembers that he wasn’t going to ask Campanis any controversial questions until Rachel Robinson, Jackie’s widow, ended an interview by saying she felt there weren’t enough blacks in baseball’s front office.

“Al was up next and I thought, ‘OK, that’s a reasonable question for him,’ ” Koppel said. “After that, he was like a careening bus going downhill.”

Although Campanis rambled throughout the interview with several questionable statements, two comments cost him his career.

When Koppel asked him why there were no blacks in positions of authority, including no black managers in the major leagues at that time, Campanis replied:

“It’s just that they may not have some of the necessities to be a field manager or general manager. I don’t know. How many quarterbacks are there? How many pitchers?”

The other comment was an impromptu question by Campanis: “Why aren’t blacks good swimmers?” he asked Koppel. “They don’t have buoyancy.”

It was such a damning interview, Koppel initially wondered whether he gave Campanis enough room to redeem himself. When Koppel watched a videotape of the interview recently, he confirmed his fairness.

“I was somewhat relieved to see that, the more he was getting into deep water, the more I gave him a chance to back out of it,” Koppel said. “But he didn’t.”

Campanis confirmed recently that he had not been drinking before the interview, and that he had not felt tricked.

He maintained, as he has for five years, that the word “necessities” was misinterpreted.

“I meant, ‘necessary experience,’ ” Campanis said. “I would never mean it like everyone thought I meant it.”

The words “necessities” and “buoyancy” are what led to a quickly executed story in The Times the next morning, a story that some charge contributed to Campanis’ problems.

“I firmly believe that if there was not that big story the next morning, the whole thing would have blown over,” Jimmy Campanis said.

“I watched the program and, knowing that is just the way my father talks, I didn’t think anything about it. But next thing I know, there are headlines.”

The Times would not have had time to react to the late-night show if a Times sports reporter on assignment in the Eastern time zone hadn’t overheard Campanis’ comments while working in another room.

The next morning, a Tuesday, O’Malley received a phone call in his Houston hotel room from a friend.

“He said, ‘Did you see the show?’ ” O’Malley recalled. “I had not seen it. So I called Al. He told me about his comments, and he did not react defensively.”

O’Malley ordered the publicity department to find a tape of the show, which O’Malley viewed that afternoon.

That night, after an apology was issued by the Dodgers and Campanis, reporters asked O’Malley whether Campanis’ job was in jeopardy.

“Absolutely not,” O’Malley said.

Within 12 hours, Campanis was out of a job.

While O’Malley had been working to smooth things in Houston, emotions had been stirred in Los Angeles.

Mayor Tom Bradley and then-Assemblywoman Maxine Waters were openly critical.

Bradley said he “does not accept” Campanis’ beliefs. Waters, who spoke at a news conference, termed Campanis’ statements “unbelievably racist.”

Waters added: “They can get rid of him any way they would like, but they should get rid of him.”

There was also the threat of a clubhouse rebellion. While many blacks were thankful that Campanis had given them their chance, then-third baseman Bill Madlock was furious.

“I wouldn’t want to play for anybody who thinks I’m stupid,” Madlock said at the time. “It’s like they are saying to me, ‘You’re stupid enough to play for me, but you’re too stupid to manage or be in the front office.’ ”

O’Malley met Campanis Wednesday morning and asked for his resignation. O’Malley then made a rare clubhouse visit to explain his position to the players and coaches.

“That (decision) was pretty clear and obvious,” O’Malley said recently. “If he had not (resigned), I could see the clubhouse divided, and the people in the community, the state, the country also divided.”

O’Malley bristles when the word “pressured” is used in relation to this incident.

“I did not use the word ‘pressure,’ ” he said.

But Jimmy Campanis wonders if that word wasn’t close to the truth.

“Peter said this would not cost my father his job, then overnight the complexion changed,” Campanis said. “The NAACP got involved and that was it.

“I don’t know if pressure was the right word, but if Walter O’Malley was alive and the NAACP or anybody else had told him to fire somebody, he would have fought tooth and nail not to fire him.”

Al Campanis says that time has erased his bitterness. He said that upon reflection, O’Malley perhaps did the right thing.

“Actually, if some good has come out of it, I’m glad that it happened,” Campanis said. “I know I caused him a lot of a pressure, a lot of problems. I know now that it was probably for the good of the club. He didn’t have a choice.”

It is difficult today to find someone who will condemn Campanis.

“Sure, I feel sorry for Al Campanis. He’s a nice old man,” Koppel said. “His tragedy is a generational one. Men, and a certain number of women, were accustomed to talking that way among themselves. But then you put those words on nationwide TV, and they are just stupid.”

Don Newcombe, the Dodgers’ director of community relations, said of Campanis: “If his old friend Jackie Robinson were alive, he would say that Al didn’t mean anything by his words. He knew Al never felt that way and never treated him or anyone else that way.”

Which raises the question that Campanis asks himself nearly every day: why won’t anyone listen to him anymore?

“No other team will admit they won’t hire him because of what he said, but those are questions you have to ask,” Newcombe said. “Probably there isn’t any employer looking for a man of Al’s age, but if there is . . . have they closed the door on him because of that one act?”

For now, Campanis will continue taking his notes, folding them carefully, placing them into his pockets, waiting for somebody who can use them.

“Are you going to tell me that 46 years was nothing? That one night was everything? That one night was his life?” his son asked.

It is an early spring evening. The New York Mets and Yankees are playing on the television in Campanis’ family room. The yellow paper is out.

“I’ve noticed Bobby Bonilla moving his lips in right field,” Al Campanis says. “That means he is talking to himself. Something is wrong with him. He’s upset. Somebody better talk to him, see what’s going on. . . .”