HEMORRHAGING DODGER BLUE

New Dodger chief Robert Daly squints into the glare above Chavez Ravine, looking through the glass walls of his office, just a pop fly from the foul pole marking left field. “This is my field of dreams,” he says.

Some field of dreams. On this day, Dodger Stadium is a field of dirt. Lots of it, thanks to a $50-million make-over that must be finished before the Cincinnati Reds show up on April 14 for the home opener. No green anywhere, just rolled sod and dirt excavated from the hill where Walter O’Malley 40 years ago carved out what today is baseball’s fifth oldest stadium. Where 56,000 voices once cheered Sandy Koufax’s no-hitters, Fernando Valenzuela’s shutouts and Kirk Gibson’s miracle home run. Now there echoes the drone from two bulldozers and a tractor and an annoying high-pitched beep warning people to move. One bulldozer scrapes infield dirt from second base to third, moving so slowly that a one-armed catcher could throw it out.

The renovation at field level is much like the one taking place three sections up in the office Daly has occupied since late October. For nearly two decades, Daly was at the pinnacle of Hollywood power as head of the giant Warner Bros. studio. Now he’s abruptly thrown himself into repairing the city’s storied baseball franchise. How hard will that be? The Dodgers haven’t earned a World Series trophy since Ronald Reagan was president. Last year’s losses: $22 million. Despite pricey new seats behind home plate and a new row of luxury boxes, soaring player salaries mean that ending up in the black this year will be harder than winning all 162 games.

Daly also inherits a team that alienated fans the moment it passed from the familial stewardship of the O’Malleys two years ago into subsidiaryhood, becoming a tiny speck in Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire, aimed at enhancing his cable TV operations. Now Daly is chief executive officer of the team, and plenty of fans believe it’s not a moment too soon for a change. Last year, Murdoch’s News Corp. and its Fox unit outspent nearly every other team owner, yet the Dodgers still lost more games than they won, finishing an embarrassing 23 games out of first place. If that wasn’t enough, fans suffered through watching Mike Piazza--one of the most popular Dodgers in recent times until he was unceremoniously traded--in the playoffs wearing a New York Mets uniform.

Daly’s coming summer couldn’t be more different from the ones he spent on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, where he and his inseparable co-chief Terry Semel reigned for nearly 20 years. Theirs was the world of “Batman,” “Lethal Weapon,” “The Matrix,” TV shows like “Friends” and “ER” and music from Madonna, Alanis Morissette and Metallica. Daly and Semel were on a first-name basis with Clint, Julia, Mel, two Toms, Jodie, Arnold, Steven, Sly, Barbra and any other star or director worthy of a private trailer on a movie set.

Stars loved doing movies for “Bob and Terry.” The two execs could be taken at their word and the talent could count on being pampered with things like free Range Rovers or being chauffeured in Warner’s Gulfstream IV jet. After the two shocked Hollywood by announcing that they were leaving, the stars crowded the courtyard at Mann’s Chinese so Daly and Semel could cement not only their handprints on Hollywood Boulevard but also their place in Hollywood history.

All the more puzzling why someone like Daly at age 63 has answered Murdoch’s siren call. He doesn’t need the job. The millions he earned over the years are measured in triple digits. The old Warner Gulfstream IV? He and Semel bought it. Daly could just as easily be raising horses, chickens and pigeons on the $6.4-million, 17-acre ranch he and his wife, songwriter Carole Bayer Sager, bought last year in Malibu.

Yet here he is, spending up to $36 million of his own money to buy 10% of the team so he can become chairman of a business 1% the size of the one he ran before. He’s an autonomous managing partner, but every fan he encounters won’t hesitate to tell him what to do. Outside of the entertainment business, virtually no one knew or cared that Daly ran Warner Bros. Now, to the opinionated Dodger fan, he’s both the genius who traded for emerging superstar outfielder Shawn Green and the idiot who got rid of pitcher Ismael Valdes and second baseman Eric Young. Some of the 30 or so letters he gets a week even complain about things like the Dodger Dogs mustard.

“What do I worry about? I worry about letting people down,” Daly says. “I really feel an obligation here not to let people down.”

* It’s Oct. 3, 1951. at James Madison High School in Brooklyn, Daly, age 14, and his classmates are transfixed, hanging on every word from the radio their teacher has allowed in the classroom. The Dodgers are on the verge of the World Series. They’re leading the rival New York Giants 4-2 with two on and two out in the last of the ninth. The final Giant hitter, Bobby Thomson, is the last hurdle. “All the kids were listening,” Daly recalls. “We were all Dodger fans.” To understand Daly’s love for the team, you first must understand how utterly devastated he was to hear what happened next. “Thomson hit the home run and the room was silent.” The famous homer sent the Giants to the Series instead. “It was crushing.”

It’s Oct. 16, 1985. Daly is sitting in the Warner seats behind the first-base dugout watching the Dodgers in the playoffs against St. Louis. No sooner has he finished telling another Warner executive that he may attend the Series than Cardinal first baseman Jack Clark hits a home run and, in Warner Bros. lingo, that’s all, folks. Daly spends an hour sitting in a car in the stadium parking lot, as depressed as he’s ever felt.

Baseball fans come in many shapes. There are those who enjoy an occasional game, especially if the locals are having a good year. There are those so devoted that they can’t sleep at night without knowing how the boys did. And there are those who are obsessed with every detail about every player, every game, and whose own self-images are so tied up in the fortunes of the team that friends occasionally wonder about them. Brooklyn had a lot of that third type, Daly among them.

He first saw the Dodgers play at Ebbets Field in the summer of 1943, when he was 6. From that day on, he has loved the team--save for an estrangement after they broke the heart of every Brooklynite by moving to Los Angeles in 1958. Daly marks his life chronologically in Dodger moments, like the no-hitter he saw Kevin Gross pitch in 1992 or the home run he saw the injured Gibson hit after hobbling to the plate to end Game 1 of the 1988 Series. Great moments. But what scorches his memory are the near misses. “You ruined an entire winter for me,” he told Clark recently when the Dodgers hired him as a batting instructor.

Gerald M. Levin, chief executive of Warner Bros. parent Time Warner Inc., recalls visiting Daly for dinner and planning to talk about key company issues only to discover that a Dodger game was being televised. “If the game was on,” says Levin, “you could forget about Warner Bros. movies.”

When traveling overseas for Warner, Daly would call in to listen to games on a phone hook-up. These days, he carries a pager-like device to get Dodger updates. “He lives it,” says actor and close friend Henry Winkler. “He eats around it. He schedules around it and he carries it around in his pocket.”

It’s an affection for the team, and for the game of baseball, that borders on the spiritual. It’s also what News Corp. executives lacked. If you don’t love the team, you don’t understand the bond Piazza had with Dodger fans. Murdoch once referred to Piazza in this magazine as “that guy who asked for 20 million bucks a year.” An inflated reference to the catcher’s demands, it spoke volumes about how Murdoch views baseball talent. Piazza was just another player seeking lots of money.

A big part of Daly’s job now is putting a new face on the team. Fans saw the new owners as insensitive and monolithic. Just try getting them to spend a minute thinking about the Dodger Dog mustard, let alone answering somebody’s letter about it.

“Bob was the answer to all of the prayers,” says Dodger announcer Vin Scully. “That’s no knock on News Corp., but we were one ornament on their tree. With Bob, who has put up some of his own money, you have a person who’s really interested.”

Daly’s style at Warner Bros. was demanding, sometimes hot-tempered, yet paternalistic. With the Dodgers, each player who signed with the team in the off-season met with Daly so he could divine if the player was in it for the money or really wanted to be a Dodger. “You want to have personal contact with the person who is going to sign the checks,” says Dodger pitcher Orel Hershiser.

It’s more than just a feel-good management style. Daly says you can never negotiate a decent contract with a player who’d rather be on another team, just as the movie business taught him that you always overpay for stars who would rather make another film.

So how does being an obsessed fan qualify Daly--whose own sports experience came mostly as a kid playing stickball on Brooklyn’s streets with sewer covers as bases? He had tried unsuccessfully for a dozen years to buy into the team. Over that time, he schooled himself in the business aspects of the Dodgers in case the opportunity came his way. “Someone might question a business person being hired to run a team because you wonder how much detailed knowledge he has about the sport or the team,” says Semel. “But the Dodgers were more than a hobby for Bob.”

For the past seven years, Daly has visited the Dodgers’ spring training camp in Vero Beach, Fla. Scully says it was a highlight of spring training for him because Daly would offer Scully a ride back home on the Warner jet. The only condition: Scully had to let Daly pump him for information about the team. “He wanted to talk baseball the whole flight,” Scully says. “Meanwhile, I’d be trying to ask him business questions.”

Former Dodger owner and Daly friend Peter O’Malley says Daly frequently made trade and player suggestions, often by fax. Daly and former Dodger manager Tom Lasorda lunched an estimated 50 or more times over the past decade so Daly could pick his brain. “This guy knows what he’s talking about,” Lasorda says. “We would talk trades. We should do this, we should do that. He’s had his heart and soul in this team.”

Daly says he knew more about the business of baseball before taking the Dodger job than he did about movies when he was hired to run Warner Bros. in 1980 after 25 years at CBS. Actually, few owners or partners in baseball franchises are genuine baseball people. Yankee owner George Steinbrenner built ships and the Reds’ Carl Lindner owns Chiquita Bananas. Owners rely on baseball people, as Daly plans to with Dodger President Bob Graziano, General Manager Kevin Malone and manager Davey Johnson.

So what does a modern baseball owner do? Deal with agents, high-priced talent and television stations and work to get people’s rear ends into seats so they can be entertained. Daly spent the winter talking “ER” star Anthony Edwards into a season ticket package and persuading Creative Artists Agency and his former colleagues at Warner Bros. and nearly every lawyer, banker and financier he encountered to spring for luxury boxes (Daly dropped the top price from $390,000 to $300,000 a year.)

He even sat in on a marketing meeting to taste three competing brands of ice cream sandwich.

* Near the end of the Kevin Costner baseball movie “Field of Dreams,” Costner’s long-dead father reappears magically to play catch with his son. It’s a fantasy Daly says he would give anything to live. He has few memories of his father, James, who ran a billboard company and died of complications from Parkinson’s disease when Daly was 5. The loss remains a difficult subject. When he saw the movie, Daly cried.

Daly worked in a hardware store at 14 to support his mother. His uncle, a police captain whom his family expected he’d follow into the academy, became his father figure. But Daly was only 5 feet, 8 inches tall. So he ventured into Manhattan to apply for jobs. He started his entertainment career on Feb. 15, 1955, as an office boy at CBS at $41 a week, $20 of which he gave his mother.

As a Brooklyn College dropout and an Irish Catholic from Brooklyn, he had a lot going against him at CBS, where the upper ranks were dominated by trim Ivy Leaguers. “The 40 Longs” is what he and his friends dubbed them, after their typical suit coat size. “I never thought I had a future at CBS when I was growing up there because I wasn’t a 40 Long. I was totally different.”

But he came to the attention of legendary CBS founder William S. Paley, and by the 1970s Daly was one of the top business executives at the network. As CBS’ dominance of the ratings waned in the late ‘70s, he was dispatched to Los Angeles to head the network’s entertainment division. Shows like “MASH” and “Dallas” put CBS back on top. Nothing makes you hotter in Hollywood than turning around a disaster, so everyone took notice of Daly, and he was offered the Warner Bros. job.

The only hurdle was a stubborn Paley, who refused to let Daly out of his contract early and used every tactic he could to keep him. At one meeting, Daly noticed a framed picture of himself and Paley unaccountably sitting behind Paley’s desk amid family photographs. But finally, after six weeks, Paley gave in. (Later, Daly ran into mogul Marvin Davis, who said he’d just seen the picture of Daly and Paley hanging in Paley’s private restroom.)

Daly’s new boss was Steven J. Ross, a charismatic executive who loved to shower stars and executives with attention and generosity, even on the smallest of levels. Every time Daly would visit New York, Ross would send him home with a bag full of Entenmann’s crumb coffee cake, Ross’ favorite. A lot of Ross rubbed off on Daly. When “Lethal Weapon 3” opened in 1992, Daly and Semel, during a celebratory lunch, surprised the stars, writer, producer and director with new Range Rovers.

At Warner, Daly bonded with Semel to form something rare in Hollywood: an ego-free working relationship. The two lived near each other in Bel-Air and would often carpool. They still speak several times a week.

“It sounds incredible but we were partners for 20 years and we never, ever had an argument either behind closed doors or in front of anybody,” Semel says. “If Bob was really excited about something I might have been hesitant about, I would see myself as his sounding board. And if I was passionate about something, he would never say, ‘Let’s not do it.’ He’d be my sounding board.”

The Warner years were not without their skirmishes. There were internal battles with rivals such as Time Warner’s former HBO chief Michael Fuchs and more recently with Vice Chairman Ted Turner, who lobbied furiously but unsuccessfully to kill the WB network, one of Daly’s pet projects. Daly says he has an “Irish temper” but tries to display it discreetly. “If I needed to rip into someone, it was behind closed doors. The biggest thing I could never accept is disloyalty or lying.”

It was a good life at Warner, documented by photos on his office bookshelves. He’s shaking hands with Pope John Paul II and with Muhammad Ali. He’s chatting with President Clinton and Barbra Streisand over dinner in Daly’s home during a fund-raiser. He’s laughing at one of Reagan’s jokes in the Oval Office and bantering with Michael Jordan at court side.

During off-hours, Daly usually shuns Hollywood social events to stay home with his family and to care for his beloved pigeons, not the messy ones most people know but fancy, multicolored nuns and Helmet pigeons. He took up the hobby in his Brooklyn backyard at age 13.

He also hosts biweekly poker games that include his wife, DreamWorks SKG partner Jeffrey Katzenberg, Warner movie chief Alan Horn, actors Dustin Hoffman and James Woods, music mogul Jerry Moss, playwright Neil Simon, director James L. Brooks, and Jerry Perenchio, the billionaire Spanish-language broadcasting mogul. Daly’s favorite game: “7-card high-low, roll your own and buy a card at the end.”

*

After a life of relentless success, the 1990s were a decade of enormous change in Daly’s life. Ending nearly 30 years of marriage, Daly was divorced in 1990 from his first wife, Nancy, who is now married to Mayor Richard Riordan. Daly remarried as well, in 1996 to Sager, a prolific pop songwriter whose hits include “A Groovy Kind of Love,” “When I Need You” and the Oscar-winning “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do).” She bought him President John F. Kennedy’s rocking chair as a wedding present.

At the studio, Ross’ death from cancer in 1992 hit Daly hard. He was offered a chance to run ABC but passed when he grew to like Ross’ successor, Levin. Still, Daly and Semel were always under pressure to deliver numbers that were better than before. In later years, he was bruised by criticism that he and Semel had taken on too big an empire, were overly dependent on expensive formulaic movies with aging stars and spent too much on perks and pampering. When Daly and Semel finally walked off the Warner lot last October, after the main administrative building was named for them, Hollywood saw it as a symbol of a change to a new era in which making stars happy counts less than making the numbers.

The 1990s also brought one other major disappointment: For the first decade since he bcame a fan, the Dodgers failed to make it to the World Series. It gnawed at him.

Twelve years ago, Daly had persuaded Ross to buy the Dodgers but O’Malley wouldn’t sell. When O’Malley finally put the team on the block in 1998, Daly and billionaire financier Ron Burkle teamed up to make an offer. Warner Bros. was now a sister company to the Atlanta Braves, with Time Warner having acquired the team when it bought Turner’s empire, but Levin gave Daly permission to consider buying the Dodgers personally. “I agreed that he could explore it,” Levin says, “but I didn’t think there was a prayer’s chance in hell that it would happen.”

Eventually, Daly’s efforts were moot when Murdoch offered a staggering $311 million. Murdoch proposed to Daly that the two do the deal together, but Daly declined, citing his Time Warner conflicts as a competitor with Murdoch. But Daly kept the offer tucked away in the back of his mind. Indeed, if he had a plan to eventually end up at the Dodgers, he didn’t show it. “This is a man who lives by the phrase ‘close to the vest,’ ” Winkler says. “I think his vest is sewn to his body.”

But he wasn’t above dropping hints. He would attend baseball games with Peter Chernin, Murdoch’s second-in-command at News Corp., and casually mention that he might not renew his contract with Warner. Chernin would tell Daly to let him know. It seemed inconceivable that Daly would leave, but, Chernin says, “I wanted to make it clear to him it was something we’d be interested in.”

After Daly and Semel announced their decision, Chernin took Daly to another game. Sitting behind home plate, the two discussed Daly’s taking over the team. Daly then breakfasted with Murdoch, telling him there was only one condition that wasn’t negotiable: At his age, he didn’t want to work for anybody again. Playing matchmaker through all of it was former junk bond financier Michael Milken, a mutual friend. Daly agreed to buy up to 10% of the ballclub at the same rate Murdoch’s Fox Entertainment Group paid: $36 million, based on the $311 million price and the $50 million for renovations. More importantly, Daly would operate the team at arm’s length from News Corp. and Fox.

So Robert Anthony Daly finally is living his boyhood dream. He’s a Dodger. Which means that seven months from now, he’s either a hero or goat, his fate decided by whether a 27-year-old right fielder can hit enough home runs, the team’s catcher can regain his form, the manager and general manager can get along and a $15 million-a-year pitcher can continue to deliver.

Daly says he knows he’s still in a honeymoon period with fans, which could change quickly once the season starts. He wonders how he’ll take the losses, since he took them hard enough as a fan. And he says that just getting the club to break even, let alone make a profit, is challenge enough.

Nonetheless, while watching the Yankees celebrate their World Series victory last fall, Daly had an epiphany. He saw himself with Malone, Johnson and all the players celebrating a Dodgers World Series win. The vision felt better than finishing at the top of the box office, better than having an Oscar-winning movie.

“My biggest desire is to be there and have that champagne poured over my head for winning a World Series,” he says. “When I watched it on television, I could just see myself there. It would be the nicest thing to have the champagne poured all over my suit and have to worry about my suit later. I really believe we will be there. I don’t know when, but in my tenure here, I will be very disappointed if I leave and we don’t end up being there.”