Sutton Blasts Fox Dodgers for Ignoring History

The $50-million renovation of Dodger Stadium isn’t enough, suggests Don Sutton, the former Dodger pitcher and member of the Hall of Fame. The foundation needs to be repaired.

In a biting interview with Hank Bauer and Randy Jones on their KFMB (760) talk show in San Diego, Sutton said the Dodgers have lost the “charm, class and elegance” of the O’Malley operation.

Now a member of the Atlanta Brave broadcasting team, Sutton said he was “shocked and disappointed” by what the Dodgers had become, labeling the Fox organization another cold extension of “corporate America.”

“It hurts,” he said Wednesday. “I contributed a lot of blood, sweat and tears there. I was part of the history, but you wonder if they even remember. You wonder if they even have a history book.

“I was talking to a veteran player there and he said he had never seen so many cellular phones and so many players so quick to leave after a game. It’s like a covey of quail scattering.”

Sutton, who spent 15 years with the Dodgers, said, “We didn’t always win and agree, except when we crossed the white lines. There was a common sense of purpose and a pride in the . . . uniform. I don’t sense that now.

“There’s no unity [among the players] and no sense of the history and class” of the O’Malley era.

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National League President Leonard Coleman, a candidate for commissioner before Bud Selig’s appointment, made his resignation official Wednesday when the owners, meeting in Cooperstown, N.Y., approved Selig’s plan to eliminate the league presidents and centralize their duties in the commissioner’s office.

The leagues will maintain separate identities, Selig insisted, but separate functions encumbered “timely decisions.”

Coleman voted against centralization in Wednesday’s executive council meeting but had no support and said he had no interest in being a figurehead. He had opposed the ouster of 13 NL umpires as baseball’s response to the their resignation strategy but said by phone that the “move to centralization had been evident long before that. It was like being president of Studebaker. It was a great ride, but you could see it coming to an end.”

Coleman, paid $650,000 in his sixth year as NL president, will seek other employment while remaining with baseball as a senior advisor.

An African American who was baseball’s highest-ranking minority, Coleman said he would “continue to trumpet a number of causes,” including minority hiring. “For baseball to achieve its full potential, it has to achieve full inclusion, and that hasn’t happened. The playing field still isn’t even.”

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Brave executive Hank Aaron, traveling with the team to San Diego for a series that ended Wednesday, blasted the minority approach.

“Bud is trying, but what happens is the people who run these teams will tell you one thing and then they’ll head back to their country clubs, laugh to all their buddies while getting a back rub and say, ‘Nobody is going to tell us what to do,’ ” Aaron said. “People in baseball say they’re going to do this and that, but when will they actually do it?”

Will Selig’s Brewers do it? Wendy Selig-Prieb, the commissioner’s daughter, has interviewed Dave Stewart of the Toronto Blue Jays and Omar Minaya of the New York Mets for the team’s general manager vacancy, but the front-runners are believed to be two non-minority candidates: Chicago White Sox executive Dan Evans and former Cleveland Indian executive Dan O’Dowd, although O’Dowd was emerging Saturday as a leading candidate for the Colorado Rockies’ vacancy.