Chavez Ravine: Land of the Lost

Fifty years in baseball, passed along a few words at a time.

“I was just a little thing around there,” Joe Amalfitano says.

Nearly two decades of Dodger Stadium, shared in corner conversations and dugout nudges.

“A fly on the wall,” Amalfitano says.

He was listed as a senior advisor, but he was really a safety net, and every successful baseball team has someone like him.

Amalfitano was the old-timer who studied batting practice on the field, watched from the press box during the game, walked quietly downstairs afterward to dissect plays, debated strategies, congratulated a jittery kid on drawing a walk.

“What I did, you couldn’t find on a box score,” Amalfitano says.

That was his beauty. Yet, in the new Dodger administration, that was also his problem.

A guy like Joe Amalfitano can’t be quantified or clarified or diagramed.

So he was forgotten.

One month after he helped the Dodgers to a division championship, after his 19th season as a Dodger coach or advisor, his contract expired.

General Manager Paul DePodesta phoned him while he was out.

Amalfitano called back later that day, but his call was not returned.

A couple of weeks later, a second phone call to DePodesta was not returned.

A few weeks after that, a third phone call to DePodesta was not returned.

By now, it was the holidays, and Amalfitano, who thought he had seen everything while playing for Leo Durocher and coaching for Tom Lasorda, had never seen this.

“I knew my contract had expired, but I figured that either way, somebody would tell me something,” he says. “Maybe they didn’t have to say anything, but I wasn’t brought up that way.”

In early January, Amalfitano finally received a call from assistant Kim Ng, who wondered if he had heard from her boss. He had not. But it gave him hope.

He figured, finally, the word of his limbo could get back to DePodesta and the young boss would hurry to tell him of his status.

He waited all that day by his phone, figuring he would know by the end of the day if he was still a Dodger.

DePodesta still didn’t call back.

“Hey, I know I was inherited by a previous administration, I understand change as much as anybody, you do what you have to do,” Amalfitano says. “But I wish somebody could have just told me what was going on.”

That January night, after 16 years as their third base coach and three later years in the front office, Amalfitano decided he could no longer be a Dodger

“I finally figured, well, that was it,” he said. “They didn’t want me, and that’s fine, I can’t stay where I’m not wanted.”

What the Dodgers wouldn’t do in three months, the San Francisco Giants did in two days.

When they heard of his situation, they hired Amalfitano as one of their senior advisors.

Soon afterward, Amalfitano received a letter.

It was from DePodesta, saying it was a shame he went to the Giants, because he would have been rehired.

“I’ve been around a long time, and, well, it sure didn’t seem like they meant it,” Amalfitano says.

This story, incidentally didn’t come from the old coach. Amalfitano has never publicly criticized the Dodgers. Not when I was chasing him around 15 years ago, and not now.

Even during last season’s pennant stretch, when I pinned him against a press box wall wailing about some on-field craziness, he refused to say anything bad about an organization he loved.

The story came from old-timers in spring training, several of them, several times. In fact, you can hardly run into a former Dodger employee who isn’t talking about it.

“You hear how they forgot about Joey?” everyone says.

*

Give Paul DePodesta credit for this much:

When told of this story, he called us back on the first try.

“Joey is obviously a valued member of the Dodger family and I never considered not bringing him back,” DePodesta says, later adding, “I definitely did not fire Joey.”

Nothing like a cold shoulder to warm a guy up, I always say.

“I placed the first call to him and ... we didn’t have a very active communication after that,” DePodesta says.

Yeah, and Penn doesn’t have a very active communication with Teller.

“I thought he knew he would be back,” DePodesta says. “I thought it was just business as usual.”

Yeah, shame on this 71-year-old man with no contract and no paycheck and no phone call for three months for thinking he didn’t have a job.

“I’m disappointed,” DePodesta says. “I can see from his viewpoint where he would want to see what else was out there.”

As odd as it all sounds, one part of DePodesta’s comment is beyond debate.

This was, indeed, Dodger business as usual.

From their abrupt severing of Ross Porter to their slow burn with Adrian Beltre, the Dodgers under Frank McCourt have had huge communication problems that have made San Gabriels out of molehills.

And, finally, perhaps, DePodesta realizes it.

He’s the guy with the class to drive to San Diego to personally tell Paul Lo Duca and Guillermo Mota that they had been traded.

But he needed to be the guy who called Alex Cora to tell him he had been fired (he didn’t), the guy who called Beltre during free agency (he didn’t) and the guy who told Joe Amalfitano something, anything.

DePodesta reminds you that he joined the Dodgers alone, with no trusted aides, and that it has taken time to develop relationships.

“There were definitely times last year that I felt I was on an island,” he said. “We’ve definitely not been perfect.... But now that my team is in place, going forward, I hope communication will be a real strength.... It’s important that nobody falls through the cracks.”

Or, even worse, to San Francisco.

There being no goodbye parties for old-timers who are never really told goodbye, Amalfitano wants to express his thanks to the O’Malley family, the Dodger fans, the Dodger players and coaches who treated him so kindly for so many years.

“All these years, this game I love has basically stayed the same,” he says, softly as always. “It’s the people wearing street clothes who have changed.”

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.