Eric Karros: Thinking Man’s Hitter : Dodger First Baseman’s Smarts Not Limited to Field, Though Strike Views Scorned

The letters to the editor jammed the office mailboxes. Angry phone calls flooded the radio stations. Debates raged in bars.

Dodger first baseman Eric Karros, along with several of his veteran teammates, had the audacity during the off-season to chastise baseball management, ridicule replacement players and question whether owners were even trying to end the baseball strike.

Karros carefully collected his thoughts before speaking and acknowledged his comments had been “politically incorrect.”

Karros was stunned by the public’s reaction. The more he talked, the more he tried to explain the players’ views, the more irate fans became listening to him.

Finally, Karros had no choice.

He shut up.

“I remember saying some things about the strike on the radio, and I got emotional,” Karros said. “I found out real quick I was fighting a losing battle. I got an earful. I had nothing to gain, and the public didn’t care what I had to say.

“I wanted the information to get out because I thought there were some fans expressing a feeling based entirely on emotion and not information. I found out that nobody cared about who was right or who was wrong, or whether it was our fault or the owners’ fault, they just wanted their game back.

“I don’t know to this day if anything was gained, but everyone involved in the game should be disgusted with what happened, and if you’re not, you’re an idiot.”

Karros worried that he would be booed when baseball was resumed but discovered that all has been forgiven.

“Hey, how could anyone ever boo Eric?” teammate Billy Ashley asked. “He’s Mr. Dodger. If you’re ever going to define a Dodger, it’s Eric Karros, through and through.”

A .385 batting average doesn’t hurt the image, either.

*

Angel scout Dave Garcia watched Karros in high school, saw a few of his UCLA games and after his first season in Class A decided to offer him a piece of advice.

“I told him, ‘Hey, what are you bothering with this baseball stuff for?’ ” Garcia said. “ ‘You should be in Hollywood. You’re too good-looking for this sport.’

“I meant it. He was the best-looking player I’ve ever seen come up, and I mean that literally, good-looking.”

But baseball can use Eric Karros. Besides being a player, he’s intelligent, charismatic and amusing.

“He’s also the king of grammar,” Ashley said. “It’s like he picks apart my sentences as we’re talking.

“He’s so good with the media that he’s already thinking of answers before the questions come out.”

Said his closest friend, catcher Mike Piazza, “You can’t get away with anything around him. You don’t dare just shoot from the hip, because if it comes out wrong, he’ll tear it apart.

“He helped me a lot when I first came up. He told me if you go through life saying cliches, then people are going to think you’re not very bright.

“With Eric, he’s so articulate and analytical and funny, he’s starting to discover that people want to hear what he says. And he’s so well educated and well versed, there are few subjects he won’t talk about. The ones he can’t, he’ll actually research before commenting.”

Karros, who graduated from UCLA with an economics degree, can be overbearing at times, his teammates say, especially when it comes to UCLA. Karros and Ashley left for spring training on a red-eye flight so Karros wouldn’t miss any of the NCAA basketball championship game.

“It would have been nice to catch some sleep,” Ashley said. “But Eric had to keep humming the UCLA fight song the whole way down.”

It’s those rare moments, Karros’ friends says, that he allows himself to act like, well, a 26-year-old bachelor.

Karros makes sure he’s in control. He surveys any nightspot before entering to ensure that he doesn’t tarnish his image, or the Dodgers’.

“I’m not a spontaneous person,” Karros said. “When I go out, I’m cognizant of the fact that what I do reflects upon the entire Dodger organization.

“Is your reputation and job worth a drink? If you say it is, you’re an idiot. If you want to risk it, go for it, but don’t go whining and crying if you don’t like the repercussions.”

That kind of maturity helps prevent Karros from doing things he might regret.

This is a guy who walked on at UCLA without a scholarship, then after becoming a professional success donated a $100,000 baseball scholarship. He wanted to go back to his hotel room after a 15-inning loss to the San Francisco Giants early in the season but, instead, drove 40 minutes to East Palo Alto to attend a banquet for needy youngsters. He has become a regular at the St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, donating $350 for each home run he hits.

Considering he only recently quit driving his ’82 Honda Civic, how can anyone be surprised that his impulsive streak consists of putting on a pair of in-line skates and cruising down the boardwalk?

“For him,” Ashley said, “that’s as wild as it gets.”

Said Jeff Moorad, Karros’ attorney, “If he wasn’t playing baseball, I could easily see him slipping in as a CEO for a major firm, practicing law or being a professor at UCLA. Leigh Steinberg and I treat him like another lawyer in our firm when we’re talking issues.

“He has an incredibly gifted mind, and by coincidence, he has an athletic body.”

*

George Karros, 56, sat on the Dodger bench during batting practice, still wondering if this is all a dream.

He was an orphan in Utica, N.Y., living in the Masonic Home for children. He grew up with little more than his dreams. He listened to Brooklyn Dodger games each night, debating with his friends who was a better broadcaster, Mel Allen, who did the Yankees, or Vin Scully.

The Dodgers were his team, and the day after he was married in 1965, he took his bride, Karen, to Dodger Stadium. Sandy Koufax was pitching.

“I wanted her to see the best,” said the elder Karros, who moved to San Diego 25 years ago. “I’ll always live and die with the Dodgers, although I died in ’51 when [Bobby] Thomson hit that homer.”

Never in his wildest dreams could George Karros have imagined that his oldest son would be playing first base for the Dodgers.

“I look at him today, and I still can’t get over it,” he said. “My son, my oldest son, is playing first base for the Los Angeles Dodgers.”

It’s funny how life works. Eric Karros barely made his high school team at San Diego Patrick Henry and didn’t even meet with the coaches on visits to a few colleges.

And he wonders if he would be a Dodger today, had it not been for his pinch-hit on May 20, 1992.

Karros, who made the team in 1992 only because Eddie Murray was not re-signed and Todd Benzinger had strained a calf muscle the final week of spring training, figured he was on his way back to triple-A Albuquerque. He was on a two-for-23 slide and had decided not to send out his laundry for fear of being demoted.

He was sent up to pinch-hit with two out in the third inning against the Chicago Cubs’ Danny Jackson. He hit a dribbler up the middle and the Dodgers went on to score four runs and win, 5-3.

Two nights later, he hit a pinch-double against Randy Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

The next night, with no one else available to pinch-hit--”I think even Orel [Hershiser] had been used,” Karros said--he hit a three-run, one-out homer in the ninth inning against Stan Belinda for a 5-4 victory.

The next day, Karros was in the starting lineup, and he has stayed there. He was voted National League rookie of the year in ’92.

“You know something, if it wasn’t for that 50-hopper up the middle against Jackson, I could still be in Albuquerque, or not even in baseball at all,” Karros said. “None of this right now would be happening.

“This is a game of survival, more mentally than physically. The way I was raised, you’ve got to think of all the consequences before you act. You don’t just make emotional decisions and have emotional reactions that’ll hurt you in the long run.”

It’s the doctrine that was so closely followed by his predecessor, Steve Garvey, until the waning days of his career. Garvey was Mr. Dodger.

“There’s been a lot of talk of who will be the next Steve Garvey, but he’s his own man,” Garvey said. “He’s everything you’d want out of a ballplayer. What he’s done makes all of us former Dodgers proud.

“Baseball has got that charm, and Eric brings it out.”