Malone Out on Force Play

The immediate response to the departure of Kevin Malone as Dodger general manager is to suggest that this ends the most controversial era since the club announced it was leaving Brooklyn.

Certainly, today’s appointment of the respected Dave Wallace as Malone’s interim successor should restore a measure of dignity and stability to that office, and the expected pursuit of Cleveland Indian General Manager John Hart as the permanent successor seems to indicate that Chairman Bob Daly recognizes the need for a proven architect and winner.

At the same time, the chaos of the last several seasons has bred considerable cynicism and doubt.

It is difficult to say the controversy is definitely over when the club is still owned by a company that traded Mike Piazza behind the back of general manager Fred Claire, showed little class in summoning Claire and then manager Bill Russell to a midnight massacre at Dodger Stadium and has approved a series of stunning--and sometimes suspect--signings, rocketing the payroll to an industry-high $110 million.

It is difficult to say the controversy is definitely over when the club remains under the direction of a former movie mogul who allowed Gary Sheffield to ridicule him without consequences, is still adjusting to the fact that the baseball asylum is often run by the inmates and doesn’t always have the control he did when telling agents what they could do with their stars and scripts, and still has to prove he can master a complex business and restore the organization’s respectability and success.

No, it is impossible to say the controversy is definitely over and the turmoil will be replaced by tranquillity, but expelling “Dodger Boy” was a move long overdue.

If Malone wasn’t embarrassing the organization with his comments and behavior, he was doing it with his trades and signings. If he had survived the verbal skirmish with a fan in San Diego, Daly and club President Bob Graziano would have been delaying the inevitable again, merely waiting for the next crisis. It was as if the often engaging and articulate Malone couldn’t help himself, saying and doing the wrong thing at the wrong time despite the frequent warnings by Daly and other club officials, the attempts at times to isolate him, make him inaccessible to the media.

From his introductory boast that there was a new sheriff in town to his failure to walk away from the San Diego incident instead of inviting the fan to fight, the Dodgers simply couldn’t trust Malone in public, where a general manager’s behavior and the way he is perceived are as important as how he operates and what he does behind the closed door of his office.

In Malone’s case, there was no salvation in either role. The errors he made in public were compounded by those he made behind closed doors. Make no mistake: It wasn’t Malone who traded Piazza, triggering many of the club’s ongoing problems. Nor was it Malone’s fault for inheriting a bankrupt farm system, forcing him to pay retail prices whenever he needed a player and to begin a rebuilding project that couldn’t be finished in one or two years.

However, the litany of his roster transgressions and signings, starting with the trading of Charles Johnson for the physically ailing Todd Hundley and including the mind-boggling contracts for Devon White and Carlos Perez, is much too long to chronicle again, but his shadow will continue to haunt the Dodgers since the controversial and industry-infuriating signings of Kevin Brown, Shawn Green and Darren Dreifort have years to play out and are as much his legacy as the ownership that approved them.

In addition, of course, Malone added to the combustion of the 2000 season by his public criticism and second-guessing of manager Davey Johnson and open courting of Kevin Kennedy as a possible replacement despite Daly’s order to desist and the club’s pronouncement that no decision would be made on the manager until the season ended.

It was also Malone who fired Mike Scioscia as a triple-A manager only to have Scioscia emerge so impressively as the Angel manager, and it was Malone’s appointment of a militaristic corps of minor league instructors that contributed to the severing of long associations in Albuquerque, San Antonio and San Bernardino.

If Daly hadn’t been reluctant to fire both his manager and general manager at the end of last season, starting over with no baseball people to advise him on the hirings, Malone probably would have been removed then. The industry buzz throughout his tenure credited him for being a respected scout who was simply overmatched as general manager of one of baseball’s most glamorous organizations.

That glamour, of course, has been severely marred, and now Wallace, a pitching authority who has the respect Malone had lost among Dodger players and whose long-term goal is to live in Vero Beach and supervise the minor leagues, the position for which he returned to the Dodgers after three years with the New York Mets, will join with Graziano in the search for a permanent GM, starting with Hart.

Whether the man who has lifted the Indians from doormat to dominance and announced he is turning over the general manager reins to assistant Mark Shapiro at the end of the season while open to new challenges himself, can be talked into making the transition during the season is uncertain. However, the Dodgers certainly represent a challenge and have the financial resources to make it attractive.

In the meantime, Malone’s departure becomes official today.

It may not mean the end of controversy, but isn’t the end of the sheriff’s term enough for one day?