Feeling the Burn

Kevin Malone hates to lose. The new general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers will put up with just about anything: insults from sports-talk radio loudmouths, a toilet-bashing spree from new star pitcher Kevin Brown, sniping from fellow baseball executives about his free-spending ways. Finishing second? Forget it.

“Everybody wants to win,” says Ed Creech, Malone’s new hire to oversee the Dodgers’ amateur scouting operations. “Kevin’s just more open about it than most people.”

At laid-back spring training in Vero Beach, Malone barked at umpires over bad calls and exulted when his team won a meaningless exhibition game. Up in the press box, his baseball buddies were full of stories about Malone’s competitive fire: One favorite tale has him shutting down a towering rival player in a rec-league basketball game, then taunting him with the playground boast, “Face!” after sinking a jump shot.

“If you look in the AMA manual under ‘Type-A personality plus,’ you’ll see a picture of Kevin,” says Florida Marlins Manager John Boles, who coached Malone at the University of Louisville. “As much as anyone I’ve ever met, he hated to lose.”

Perhaps that’s why the 41-year-old former scout and seminary student eagerly sought the Herculean job of reviving the flagging fortunes of the Dodgers, the once-proud baseball institution that hasn’t won a postseason game since the ragtag 1988 team upset the Oakland A’s to win the World Series.

When Malone was a college ballplayer, he always got his uniform dirty.

When he was a scout, he barely made it home for the birth of his kids, so determined was he to find the next phenom. When he was negotiating with sports attorney Scott Boras to sign Brown, the two men would jog together each morning, with Malone running farther every day, challenging Boras to keep up with him.

“There are times where Kevin is so intense and focused that it’s really hard to get his attention,” says his wife, Marilyn, who met him when he was at divinity school, coaching the seminary college’s baseball team.

Until now, Malone has had a low profile outside the insular world of baseball. But you can’t keep a low profile working for Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox Group bought the Dodgers for $311 million in 1997. Malone’s shoot-from-the-hip manner, coupled with the Fox Group’s open-checkbook approach to rebuilding the Dodgers, has put him in the hot seat. In some ways, Malone lighted the fire himself. As soon as he arrived in Los Angeles after being hired away from the Baltimore Orioles with a four-year deal worth about $2 million, he proclaimed himself the new sheriff in town. Convinced the Dodgers needed a team leader, he signed Brown, a 34-year-old former San Diego Padre, to a seven-year, $105-million contract, which included 12 free rides a season for Brown’s family on a corporate jet plus a unique Fox perk: a “Star Wars” poster autographed by George Lucas.

Malone immediately began dismantling the Dodgers’ creaky farm system, bringing in Creech and Bill Geivett to supervise scouting and minor league operations. He also hired former Orioles Manager Davey Johnson, another fierce competitor who has the best winning percentage of any active major-league manager. For the team lineup, Malone acquired a new center fielder, free agent Devon White, and traded for Todd Hundley, even though the power-hitting catcher had missed most of last season after elbow surgery.

Thanks to Fox’s deep pockets, the Dodgers are going all out to win. The team now has a payroll of roughly $80 million, second-highest after the New York Yankees. But while Malone’s free-agent signings have gotten the lion’s share of attention, his minor-league rebuilding efforts are the key to the franchise’s long-term health. In many ways, he’s doing with the Dodgers what Fox has done with its movie studio and television network; he’s creating a valuable franchise.

“There are a lot of similarities between baseball and entertainment,” says Fox Group chairman Peter Chernin. “When we rebuilt our movie company, we went after the best scripts, the best up-’n’-coming talent--you’ve got to get the fundamentals right. What impressed me about Kevin was that he spent the most time talking about the farm system, player development and scouting. He knows we’re trying to build [a team] that will be a contender year after year.”

The days of colorful wheeler-dealers like Buzzy Bavasi are long gone. Fans are far more familiar with the field manager, the in-uniform leader who makes out the batting order and plots strategy from the dugout. General managers, usually tucked away out of sight in a club box, supervise the club’s off-the-field affairs: payroll, trades, free-agent signings and farm-system maintenance. Traditionally, they walk softly and carry a big stick, fearing that any idle swagger will stir up the competition. But not Kevin Malone, who has a plaque on his desk that reads: “No one has ever achieved greatness by playing it safe.” At the beginning of spring training, he was feeling so confident that he told reporters they could expect to see the Dodgers playing the New York Yankees in the World Series, saying, “It’ll be nice to see Kevin Brown and Roger Clemens matched up in October.”

Malone claims these cocksure comments, especially the “new sheriff” proclamation, were made tongue in cheek, but Dodger rivals have responded in deadly earnest. San Diego Padres General Manager Kevin Towers, who now jokingly calls himself “the deputy,” says he’s weary of Malone’s boasts. “The sheriff’s gone Hollywood, hasn’t he? He’s already on the cover of the media guide. I’m waiting to see Kevin court-side at the Lakers game, sitting next to Jack Nicholson.”

Sandy Alderson, baseball’s executive vice president and a former general manager himself, called the record-setting Brown signing “an affront and an insult to the commissioner of baseball.” San Francisco Giants General Manager Brian Sabean joked that Malone offered Brown “the 49ers and the Golden Gate Bridge.” Baseball writers had a field day, jeeringly describing Brown’s plane-ride package as a “frequent flyer plan on Homer Simpson Airlines,” a reference to Fox’s hit TV show. Towers ridiculed Malone’s World Series prediction, saying, “I’ll go on record right now that either the Giants or Padres will finish ahead of the Dodgers.”

Even though Malone is a devout Christian who listens to gospel tapes and believes it was the “sovereignty of God” that brought him to the Dodgers, he is not someone who turns the other cheek. He dismisses his critics as Dodger haters gorged on sour grapes. Noting that the Padres allowed country singer Garth Brooks to play in spring training games even though he was clearly overmatched against real big leaguers, Malone said mockingly: “We had a tough choice to make. Kevin Brown or Garth Brooks? We went with Kevin and the Padres went with Garth Brooks.”

He is still on the subject of Dodger detractors when he arrives at Winter Haven outside Orlando one afternoon for a game against the Cleveland Indians. At the gate, Malone tells the parking attendant he’s with the Dodgers. The man coolly surveys the car’s occupants and says, “Well then, I’m going to have to charge you double.”

*

It’s no wonder Malone feels a little besieged. he’s the new sheriff of the team everyone wants to beat, whether they’re New Yorkers who blame the Dodgers for leaving Brooklyn 41 years ago, San Franciscans who view the Dodgers as symbols for everything wrong with Los Angeles, or San Diegans who see the Dodgers as pampered Hollywood brats. And you know where the parking attendant in Winter Haven stands.

Judging from the derisive hoots of callers on sports-talk radio, many local fans are skeptical of Malone, suspicious that his spending spree represents precipitous change for a sport already buffeted by wrenching economic turbulence. For decades, the Dodgers have been an oasis of stability and tradition in a city that has obliterated most of its links to the past. Under the ownership of the O’Malley family, the Dodgers were a quaint mom-and-pop operation in a city of Hollywood glitz. Talk about continuity: Until Tommy Lasorda retired in 1996, the team had had only two managers since 1954: Lasorda and Walter Alston. The incomparable Vin Scully has been a Dodgers broadcaster since 1950. Jaime Jarrin, the team’s Spanish-language broadcaster, has been on board since 1959. Marketing chief Barry Stockhamer has been with the organization for 31 years; coach Manny Mota for 30; Latin America scouting chief Ralph Avila for 29; trainer Charlie Strasser for 24.

But who’ll still be around five years from now? This year’s opening lineup had only two players--first baseman Eric Karros and right fielder Raul Mondesi--who had opened the 1997 season. The Dodgers have had as many managers in the past two years as they had in the three decades before Lasorda’s retirement. With the Fox Group raising season-ticket prices, putting ads on Dodger Stadium’s outfield walls and considering abandoning its 51-year-old Vero Beach spring training complex for a proposed $50-million facility outside Phoenix, many longtime Dodger fans fear that their team’s cozy sense of tradition has been replaced by the aggressive bottom-line mentality that has marked many Fox business ventures.

“A lot of people have been putting us under a microscope, as if Homer Simpson is going to be coming out on the field at the next game,” says Fox’s Chernin. “We understand what the Dodgers mean to people. We want to build a winner, yet we’re trying to maintain the tradition of the Dodger experience.” But with Fox already weighing the possibility of building a new ballpark at Exposition Park, the Dodger experience may no longer include seeing a game in Chavez Ravine.

Say goodbye to the days when baseball was played by the boys of summer. It’s become an “Upstairs, Downstairs” game, split between big-market, media-based conglomerates with $80-million payrolls and a small-market underclass forced to trade away its young stars because it can’t afford to keep them.

The economics are so haywire that even media giants such as Disney and Fox see their teams essentially as loss leaders whose real value is as entertainment programming. Michael Eisner of Disney, which owns the Anaheim Angels, acknowledges that his team will lose money for the foreseeable future. Chernin doesn’t disagree: “We’d be happy to break even or make a few bucks. The real value in owning a team is the enormous ancillary benefits for our entertainment areas.”

For Fox Group media baron Rupert Murdoch, baseball players are, in the strict business sense, as valuable an entertainment commodity as any TV or movie star on the Fox lot. In an era where network television has suffered steadily declining ratings, the live, unscripted nature of sports delivers hard-to-attract young male viewers. As New York magazine sports columnist Chris Smith put it recently, the Kevin Brown signing is “widely interpreted as a move by Rupert Murdoch to deliver a sexier TV show for his Fox network, at least every fifth night, and propel the team into the revenue-rich promised land of the playoffs.”

With major league baseball so eager for new revenue that it is considering selling advertising patches on player uniforms, it seems clear baseball has become a checkbook sport. The Dodgers are still the best sports buy in town, although Fox has increased by 33% the price of the best available season-ticket seats ($30 seats are now $40). If you add parking and concessions, baseball is becoming a pretty expensive night out for a family of four wanting to sit somewhere close to the action.

So where does Malone fit in? Will he be a hero if he brings fans a World Series winner? Or will he be remembered as the man who turned Los Angeles’ favorite mom-and-pop store into Wal-Mart?

“This is more than just a game. It’s big-time entertainment business now,” Malone says as he sits outside the Dodgers dugout with ESPN sports analyst Peter Gammons, autographing baseballs for fans as they kibbitz before a spring training game. “Why do you think everyone’s building all these new ballparks? Not so you can see the game better. It’s about the competition for the dollar, it’s about entertaining people.”

But having been the general manager of a small-market team, the Montreal Expos, which couldn’t afford to keep its players once they became stars, Malone appreciates working for a team with deep pockets. “I’m a baseball guy. But to be a general manager, you have to understand marketing and sales and public relations and accounting. The player’s baseball card ought to have his economic background--his salary history, signing bonus--on the back, because that’s as big a part of his career as his baseball statistics. Every decision I make, economics is a factor. So I’ve learned the other things so I can do the fun thing, which is baseball.”

Malone falls silent, watching the players take their batting-practice cuts. The stadium is empty except for a handful of fans. Basking in the warm Florida sun, hearing the sharp thwack of the bat and soft thud of the ball hitting someone’s mitt, it’s easy to understand the pure, boyish delight that brings men like Malone to the game.

Behind the batting cage, Dodger Manager Davey Johnson tosses a ball with Dwight Gooden’s son, who’s enveloped in an Indians jersey with his father’s No. 16 on the back. When Karros jogs by, Malone teases the UCLA grad about his alma mater’s early exit from the NCAA basketball tournament.

But Malone can’t escape being envied for long. As soon as he settles into his seat behind home plate, Indians General Manager John Hart appears, motioning to a more distant seat. “I’ll be sitting farther back,” he says with a devilish grin. “They don’t pay me as well as they do you!”

All spring, Malone has seemed unusually thin-skinned when taken to task for his free-spending ways. Hart’s gentle gibe revs him up again. Malone says when he was in Montreal, “I never criticized an individual club, I criticized the overall problem. Nobody was complimenting me when I had to trade all my best players. But now that I’m with a club that’s got money, I’m getting criticized for signing guys.”

He watches the players take infield practice, repeating the same time-honored drills that Malone executed when he was a minor-leaguer. “In baseball,” he wonders aloud, “they say we’re a family of 30 teams, that as an industry we’re concerned about the economics of our business. And then on the field, we’re asked to beat the other team’s brains out. So what are we supposed to do--not try too hard to win? Not beat each other too badly?”

*

Malone is sitting in a golf cart at the edge of a practice field at Dodgertown, balancing a cup of coffee on his knee, watching a B-game between the Dodger scrubs and their St. Louis Cardinals counterparts. In the corner of his eye, he spots Brown with Darren Dreifort, another Dodger pitcher, walking toward Holman Stadium.

Flashing a grin, Malone wags his finger at Brown, then gestures to Dreifort. “Darren, you tell him to keep away from the toilets today!”

The teasing remark is a reference to a Brown temper tantrum from the day before. Angry at being scalded in the shower after someone flushed a nearby clubhouse toilet, Brown had grabbed a baseball bat and demolished the offending commode. Although Brown wasn’t injured, news of his blow-up made the papers and was a prime topic of discussion on sports-talk radio.

In fact, the sports pages that day were full of bad news about the Dodgers. Gary Sheffield, the team’s moody young outfielder, who’s in the second year of a six-year, $61-million contract, had told reporters he was considering retirement. Meanwhile, newly acquired catcher Todd Hundley, coming off of elbow surgery, had missed another start because of arm stiffness.

A month into the season, things weren’t quite as gloomy. After a sluggish start, the team was in contention for first place. Brown hardly looked like a Cy Young Award winner, but he had a respectable 3.32 ERA--and hadn’t demolished any Dodger Stadium toilets. Hundley was having trouble throwing out base stealers, but he was playing regularly without any arm problems. Sheffield had quit talking about early retirement. Any complaints from restive Dodger fans were met by this no-nonsense response from Malone: Judge the team at midseason, not after the first month of games.

Still, Malone sometimes takes bad news hard. After reading about Sheffield’s sudden retirement plans during spring training, the brash general manager seemed unusually subdued. “Sobering is a beautiful word for it,” he says quietly. “The only way I deal with adversity is by focusing on God. If I concentrated on every potential problem, I’d go insane.”

How Malone dealt with Brown’s toilet trashing reveals a general manager’s complex role. With players making as much money as movie stars, Malone is often called upon to act as a preschool monitor and a financial analyst as much as a judge of athletic ability. So the morning after the incident, when Malone sought out his $105-million pitching ace in the team clubhouse, their low-key talk focused on a ‘90s buzzword that probably never surfaced when Casey Stengel huddled in the locker room with Mickey Mantle.

“This job is all about relationships,” Malone says after the brief meeting. “It’s got to be a partnership between the management and the players. I was a minor-league player and I know that you’re dealing with very competitive, intense guys. I asked Kevin if we could channel that energy in a more positive direction. I said, ‘Kevin, I’m more concerned with you hurting yourself than hurting the toilet.’ ”

Baseball people often talk about Malone’s “get your uniform dirty” perspective--he thinks more like a player than a front-office guy. Scott Boras, who represents Brown, says Malone didn’t woo the free-agent pitcher like the other general managers did last winter. “It wasn’t a cold and dry negotiation,” Boras recalls. “When he met Kevin, he said, ‘My palms are sweaty, I’m going to fight for you. I want you bad! You’re who we want on our team.’ Kevin Brown came away, saying, ‘This guy doesn’t talk like a general manager--he talks like a player.’ ”

*

If malone has a fa-vorite Dodger, it’s Tripp Cromer, the slender, 165-pound utility infielder who usually warms the bench. One day at Holman Stadium, a game between the Dodgers and the St. Louis Cardinals went into the ninth inning tied 8-8 despite two titanic home runs by Cardinal slugger Mark McGwire. Cromer steps up to the plate, gets a fastball down the middle and rips it over the right-field fence.

“Way to go, Tripp!” Malone exults, leaping out of his seat. As he gets up to leave, he spots Cardinals General Manager Walt Jocketty. “Hey, you want to make a trade?” he says exuberantly. “Cromer for McGwire. He could hit 70 this year!”

In Cromer, Malone sees a younger version of himself, a scrappy overachiever. “Kevin had marginal tools,” says John Boles, Malone’s college coach. “But he was an aggressive, workaholic guy, always motivating our players.”

Malone was born in San Diego, where his father was stationed in the Navy, but grew up in Louisville, Ky., where his grandfather was chief of detectives for the local police. An uncle was a judge and his mother worked as a clerk at the local courthouse. Malone wanted to join the FBI or Secret Service, but baseball soon captured his attention. He was captain of his team at the University of Louisville and spent a year in the minors with the Cleveland Indians before giving up his playing career.

Malone, who first embraced Christianity while he was in college, spent a year at the Tennessee Temple Theological Seminary, where he coached the college’s baseball team--and met his future wife, Marilyn. In 1985, he joined the Angels as a scout, supplementing his $12,000 annual salary by refereeing high school basketball games. For a five-year stretch, he spent roughly 250 days a year on the road, staying in touch with his family by telephone.

“There were years where I didn’t see him,” says Marilyn, who lives in Santa Clarita with Malone and their two children, Shannon, 12, and Shawn, 9. “Basically, I raised a couple of kids without him. I knew that if I really needed him, he’d drop everything to be with me. But otherwise, I was a single mother who couldn’t date. He’d be gone for three weeks, home for a night, then gone for two weeks. He was around when Shannon was born, but with Shawn, he didn’t even take me home from the hospital. He was off scouting somewhere.”

In 1994, Malone was hired as general manager of the Montreal Expos. “I wanted to be a field manager,” he says. “But God kept opening doors for me on the management side.” From the Expos, he moved to the Orioles, where he worked three years for General Manager Pat Gillick and team owner Peter Angelos as assistant general manager. During Malone’s first year, the Orioles made it to the playoffs as a wild-card team, then won their division title the next. Baseball insiders assumed Gillick was grooming Malone as his successor, but Angelos never offered Malone the job. Gillick chalks it up to back-room intrigue and says it was a “mistake” to let Malone go to the Dodgers.

Malone insists he has no regrets about leaving Baltimore: “I believe God was orchestrating the whole thing and wanted me to come to Los Angeles.” After his first meeting with the Fox Group brass, he told his wife, “I feel like I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

Malone is not reticent about the pivotal role religion plays in his life. As a teen, he says he was a thrill-seeker, drinking and womanizing to excess, although he won’t offer any incriminating details. “I lived the party lifestyle,” he admits. “I was a wild man, looking for gratification. I tried to top everybody else. Some of my friends are dead, some are in the penitentiary, but God opened the doors of opportunity for me. Alcohol and sex didn’t fill the void in my life. The only truth I’ve found is in my relationship with Jesus Christ.”

Malone acknowledges that it wasn’t until the beginning of 1993 that “I really made the commitment, without compromising, to live the right way.” In the 1980s, Malone says he wasn’t always “living the truth.” He went out drinking with the guys at places that “put me into a compromising position. I was too involved in making a name for myself. I was more focused on getting to the top for selfish reasons.”

Malone no longer drinks and is careful about where he goes with the guys. “I’ll go into a sports bar, but only to eat and watch something on Fox Sports,” he says, adding with an impish grin, “not ESPN,” Fox’s arch-rival. He’s even given up his longtime vice of chewing tobacco, although the credit may go as much to Marilyn as to God, since she was the one who kept showing her husband pictures of hideously deformed victims of mouth cancer.

Each morning, Malone spends half an hour in prayer and Bible study. On his commute to Dodger Stadium in his new Toyota Land Cruiser, Malone listens to gospel messages by his favorite ministers, including the Rev. John MacArthur of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, which the Malones attend.

Although Malone has an evangelical fervor about his convictions--he volunteers one day that he is praying daily for me, saying, “God’s going to influence the way you write this,” he is open-minded about his children experiencing a sometimes R-rated pop culture. The family regularly watches movies; Malone says his son wants to be a film critic. “There’s a lot of family interaction,” he says. “We let our children watch the movies they want to see, but we talk about the content afterward, the sex, violence or language.”

A recent favorite was “Bulworth.” “I liked a lot of it, even if you could’ve made the point without the obscene language,” he says. “But I liked the theme of the movie, that this man took a stand and stood up for the truth.”

In many ways, it’s exactly how Malone sees himself. When his rivals have attacked him, he has spoken the truth. “If you study the life of Christ, there’s a time for righteous anger, there’s a time to stand up for yourself,” he says. “People misunderstand my passion for the game. I think people see it as an arrogance, maybe because people don’t understand their own passions, they’re not sure of their feelings. People are looking for hope, looking for answers. And I’m here to be a light and an example, and, hopefully, people will say, ‘Here’s a guy who’s a little bit different, and everything about him points to God.’ ”

Malone’s family is full of police officers and judges, but if he is following in anyone’s footsteps, it’s those of his father, a gambler who loved to go to the track and play the ponies. When you spend $105 million on a 34-year-old pitcher or trade for a catcher coming off of elbow surgery, you’re rolling the dice at a high-stakes craps table.

“I was always attracted to my father’s passion for gambling, and I’ve wondered about the impact it had on me,” says Malone as he stares at the outfield, emerald green like a spring pasture. “I battle the different parts of me, my grandfather who plays it safe, staying away from the edge, and my father, who lives on the edge, taking risks and grasping at the golden ring.”

If Malone’s gambles pay off, the Dodgers could be in the World Series. If they backfire, an angry posse could run the new sheriff out of town. “It’s euphoric and exciting to take risks, because there’s always the chance of failing,” Malone says. “To me, it’s all worth it. To be the best, you have to live on the edge. It’s all a big risk. It’s just that, in this day and age, it seems like the risk always involves dollars, doesn’t it?”