Sky's the Limit

By TIM KAWAKAMI

Dec. 11, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

INTER PARK, Fla. —

Davey Johnson just wants a backyard, a barbecue and 25 players who understand the way he wants to play baseball.

Here, in the house he built on the plot he bought with the money from his first professional contract, Johnson jumps out of his chair to show off his backyard, dominated by a beautiful swimming pool and a quiet stream that, eventually, winds its way to a lake he fished as a child.

He is beaming. The dog sleeps at the sliding door. The December sun is baking and the phone is quiet, for once.

“Can I get this in L.A.? Now, can I just get this? This might not be Southern California, but it’s pretty good,” Johnson says, seriously. “That’s all I need, you know what I’m saying? Just a backyard to go to after games, that’s quiet, and a barbecue. I think I can find that.”

Dodger President Bob Graziano lives in Manhattan Beach, but Johnson--hired as the Dodgers’ manager in October--simply shakes his head when he’s told that the only real backyard there is the Pacific Ocean.

Johnson is wondering about the Pasadena area, probably in the hills of La Canada, where he hopes he can get a piece of land that pokes out above the smog. Where he can barbecue and think and plan and rest.

Where he can feel as if he’s in his Winter Park sun room again, sorting out his ideas and scribbling out the Dodger future.

Since his hiring, Johnson purposely has been in the background, as new General Manager Kevin Malone has bargained with free agents and pulled off one major trade.

“This is kind of his time,” Johnson says of Malone.

But with pitchers and catchers set to arrive at Dodgertown in Vero Beach less than two months from now, Johnson’s time is coming too. Fast.

“I find scraps of paper around the house that have lineups,” says his wife, Susan. “I think he spends a lot of time. . . . I know he’s talking to all the players, talking about their strengths.

“I think he knows how to make a team. But he’s always seemed to be able to tweak the team to win. He’s very good at it.”

The Dodgers, Johnson knows, haven’t been very good for the last 10 years, producing a stream of talent but zero postseason victories.

He is being brought in, he acknowledges, to shock the system a little, to shake up any complacency with his blunt style and winning touch.

“They needed a mental change,” Johnson says. “I don’t want to appear cocky, but I think I’m the right guy for it.”

Johnson’s first, symbolic move was to ban goatees, long sideburns and jewelry. And not one player, he says, has objected.

“I am opinionated about how the game should be played,” Johnson says. “But I’m no dictator, I’m no tyrant. I don’t want you just listening to me. I want you to believe this is what we need to do.

“It’ll take them a while to get to know me where they have some trust to me, that the decisions I make are in the best interests of the club and that I’m not going to make a lot of bad decisions. I’m going to make good decisions.”

Hardly anyone disputes that Johnson usually makes good baseball decisions, and his record is proof of it: He averaged 96 victories in six full seasons as manager of the New York Mets, including their 1986 World Series championship; his Cincinnati Red teams had a .542 winning mark in three seasons; and his Baltimore Oriole teams made the playoffs in 1996 and ’97.

Overall, Johnson has a .575 winning mark in 12 seasons as a major league manager.

“It’s a wonderful thing when 25 guys get on the same page and they know me and they know how I’m going to manage a game,” Johnson says. “When that happens, it’s almost like you’re sitting over there like the pitching coach for the Atlanta Braves, I could be over there rocking. . . .

“It happened that way in Baltimore the last part of my first year. We weren’t on the first page the first part of the year, and I fought tooth and nail with a lot of guys on that club.

“Maybe the way I did it. . . . A guy I admire a great deal is Cal Ripken. I mean, he felt I betrayed him, stepped all over his shoes. But what I was trying to do is, I don’t care if you’re Cal Ripken or Jesus Christ Superstar, we’re all on this team. . . .

“And it’s nothing to do with you individually or whatever, because I need you individually to be happy. But I’m the one who’s got to figure out how this is going to fit so we can win.”

Then, Johnson pauses for a moment, stops his monologue and laughs.

On another point, he agrees, the record speaks loudly for Johnson: Neither the Mets, the Reds nor the Orioles have reached the playoffs since Johnson left.

“Have I gotten excited? You pressed a button of mine,” Johnson says. “I mean, when everybody starts being on the same page and everybody has put aside all their egos and all this, that and the other and has got one goal, they are happier, the team is happier, it’s more productive and we all feel at some point that we’re invincible.

“When that happens, everybody says, ‘Man, I could manage this team.’ It’s kind of like the restaurant business, I think, managing. If you manage a restaurant really well, it makes a lot of money and everybody wants to go there. And everybody wants to manage a restaurant or own one, and that’s why 80% of them fail.

“Because it isn’t as easy as it looks, you see what I’m saying?”

A Winner With a Past

So if he wins, why is Johnson heading to his fourth team in seven seasons?

Why did Johnson, who won’t turn 56 until January, sit around last season here in Winter Park, without a job, wondering if he had seen his managing future fade away?

“I think people definitely perceive him completely different than who he really is,” Susan says. “When you spend time one on one with him you know that he’s like a gentle soul that’s as easy to live with as a cat.

“But we’ve had some bad owners. And then somehow it gets that he’s this mean, gruff guy.”

In New York, Johnson actually wore fairly well, lasting into his seventh season as manager, amid a turbulent time of front-office restructuring, winning, superstars and a hungry New York media.

In Cincinnati, owner Marge Schott did not approve of his living with Susan before they were married and handpicked Ray Knight to be his assistant manager in 1995, then replace him in 1996 (and quickly get fired).

In Baltimore, high-strung owner Peter Angelos and Ripken were bothered by Johnson’s relative lack of obsequiousness, and Angelos dumped Johnson the day he was named the American League manager of the year.

Put together, the three strange endings have cemented Johnson’s reputation as a headstrong maverick, who always seems to win and confound management as he does so.

It’s a reputation Johnson does not hesitate to protest.

“You know, I take offense to that,” Johnson says. “And it upsets me.”

In New York, Johnson says he was caught in the turbulence of President Frank Cashen’s trying to sort out general manager candidates, eventually deciding on his own to hire Bud Harrelson to replace Johnson 42 games into the 1990 season.

“I knew in 1990 when I started the season, at the banquet, when I looked down I saw Buddy sitting next to Frank and they both had bow ties on--I said, ‘Oh boy, we better play hard,’ ” Johnson said.

Cincinnati, he says, was simply Schott being Schott, and anyone can understand that, can’t they?

“We beat Houston 11 games in a row [in 1995], walked away with our division . . . and when it was over, Ray was the manager,” Johnson said. “I mean, he’d already signed the contract.

“If that’s being anti-management, all I did was cooperate with whatever they wanted to do and had a great relationship with [General Manager Jim] Bowden. Just like I had a great relationship in New York with Cashen, and [owners] Nelson Doubleday and Fred Wilpon. . . . Nelson was the greatest, he loved golf and hunting. He kept asking me to Augusta, during the season or spring training. I wanted to, but I didn’t think it’d be too good.”

In Baltimore, Angelos ran the fiefdom, and you served at his whim. Angelos hired Johnson on a whim, and he fired him quickly too.

But with the Orioles, Johnson hooked up with then-assistant general manager Malone and helped fashion a slow-footed long-ball team into a serious threat to the Yankees in 1996, coming perhaps within a kid’s out-stealing catch over the Yankee Stadium wall from going to the World Series.

During the 1997 season, there were constant rumblings that Angelos was unhappy with Johnson. Then it came to light that, as part of Johnson’s punishment of Roberto Alomar for a missed exhibition game, he arranged for Alomar to donate money to a charity supported by Susan Johnson.

“I was prepared to sign a statement apologizing for my handling of the Alomar thing,” Johnson says. “And I thought we were going to do that. Weeks went by and it didn’t happen. Talking to Pat [Gillick, general manager] and Kevin I said I’m the problem here, and I don’t want to be the problem, I want to be the solution. So I handed in my resignation.

“Now if that qualifies me as being obstinate, you tell me. I don’t know anybody that I’m associated with that’s got me as some sort of maverick or whatever. I don’t know how I got that label--because nobody that I know or have worked for considers me such.

“I don’t get it. But that’s . . . I try not to worry about things like that. I don’t think I have any baggage.”

Says Susan Johnson: “I think the whole thing with Mr. Angelos, there’s nothing we could have done about that. I mean, look at Mr. Angelos’ history, he’s a histrionic guy.

“And Mrs. Schott’s just flat Mrs. Schott. You’ve got to love her. She made a big deal that David and I lived together before we were married. We were such trendsetters. No one did it before that.”

Davey Johnson, however, does acknowledge that he has very strong ideas about how he wants things done--and will go about doing things as swiftly as he can.

That, he says, is how you win. There can’t be any diffuse noises from leadership or fracturing in the clubhouse.

“I think if there’s a problem on the ballclub, it’s my responsibility to rectify it, you know what I’m saying?” Johnson says.

“If you hire me to take care of your yard, I’m going to do it the best of my ability. I’m going to cut it, trim it, make sure that it’s watered and hope it looks great for you and hope you like it.

“But I’m going to have to please myself first, that it’s done the way I want it done, you know? Now if you don’t like what I’m doing, all you’ve got to do is tell me and I’ll do something else. I don’t have a problem with that.”

Now, a Dodger

So the Johnsons--who met in Winter Park, love Winter Park, and laughingly don’t even consider themselves residents of Orlando, which is 10 miles away--are getting ready to head over to Vero Beach, and then to Los Angeles.

“Yeah, we’re really happy here,” Susan says. “And we have a whole life.

“I know there’s a part of him that would like to go back. Because I think he’d like to get one more pennant. But there’s also really a part of us that would be happy to stay and be able to eat dinner together and play golf and tennis and have a regular life.

“But we’re happy to go to L.A., tickled to death.”

The same man who still mourns his Winter Park Little League team’s defeat 45 years ago--Johnson’s Giants lost because his father was transferred and the league wouldn’t let Johnson stay to play--the same man who was taught how to swim by jumping out of a boat in the middle of a lake, is ready to jump into the Dodgers now.

He says it’s his dream job, that if he can win as a Dodger, he won’t care what anybody says about him.

He wasn’t even worried about Bobby Bonilla, he says, even though he clashed with Bonilla when both were in Baltimore. Bonilla was recently traded to the Mets.

“Bobby was not going to be a problem,” Johnson says. “Bobby’s got a little different personality. You’ve got to be close to Bobby every day. . . . People think that because I was there he was going.

“Adrian Beltre’s the reason Bobby’s going, not me. You know what I mean? I was happy with Bobby. We’d have made it work.”

Johnson says he simply wants an opportunity with his players, and he received a luminous sign from potentially the team’s key player, Gary Sheffield.

Sheffield not only has worn a goatee and jewelry for years, but had been reportedly grumbling about a possible move to left field from right and the departure of his friend Bonilla.

“Sheffield’s a great guy,” Johnson says. “I’ve known Sheffield for a long time, before he was a professional. He was related to Dwight [Gooden] and he’d tag along to the ballpark. He probably knows me better than I know him.

“I was hearing all this stuff and I’m hearing from the newspapers that he said, you can’t do this. . . . I didn’t pay one bit of attention to what I was hearing about or reading about.

“And the first time I talked to Gary, he brought it up. He said, ‘The jewelry, the hair, moving to left field, if that’s what you want, none of that’s a problem with me, you know that, Skip.’

“I said, ‘No, Gary, I wasn’t worried at all.’ And then I had dinner with him and his agent and Kevin Malone. He drove two hours to Naples and he had short hair, sideburns were up to here, a little bit of a mustache, nothing down here [on his chin]. . . . I said, ‘Man, you’re looking good.’ He said, ‘I’m in good shape, Skip. My ankle’s not quite there yet, but I’ll be there for you.’

“I was not worried about it. You were worried about it.”

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Johnson’s Magic

Davey Johnson has had an immediate positive impact in the first full year he has managed a club, and all clubs he has managed have had worsse after he left. A look:

Managing Highlights

* One World Series championship (New York,1986)

* Four division titles (New York, 1986,1988; Cincinati, 1995; Baltimore, 1997)

* Career .575 winning percentage, 985-727 (ranks 11th among managers with at least 1,000 games.)

* Career .511 winning percentage, 24-33, in playoffs

New York Mets

Season before Johnson (1983): 68-94, .420

Johnson’s first full season (1984): 90-72, .556

Johnson’s last full season (1989): 87-75, .537

Season after (1990): 77-84, .478

Cincinnati Reds

Full season before Johnson (1992): 90-72, .556