What if we told you the history of Southern California sports can be explained by 101 numbers that have been worn on the front, back, or elsewhere on a jersey or uniform by some of the most influential athletes over the last, say, 101 years?
If that’s a bit too dramatic, we’ll dial it back.
In telling the story of how Southern California sports has come into existence and continues to dominate much of our attention, adoration and advertising dollars, we’ve found a common denominator.
From 00 to 0 to 50 to 99, and everything digit in between, it can be examined, appreciated and played forward.
Unlock the combinations and see where we get.
There are a couple of layers on this wedding cake to cut through. Knives out.
One approach: Call out a jersey number, and then link to it the first name you think about in Southern California sports history.
If it’s 22, 13 and 44, it’s Elgin Baylor, Wilt Chamberlain and Jerry West. Laker royalty.
Unless it’s Clayton Kershaw, Caleb Williams and Darryl Strawberry. Then we have to have a discussion. Let the superlatives commence.
What number represents the greatest collection of athletes in L.A.-O.C. history?
It’s likely No. 32 – Magic Johnson, Sandy Koufax, Bill Walton, Marcus Allen, Orenthal James Simpson, Jonathan Quick … that’s just the top layer of cheese in the French Onion soup bowl. So who owned it best?
There’s no wrong answer. Unless you follow the logic we lay out at a future date.
Fifteen years after it came out, the documentary “Bluetopia: The L.A. Dodgers Movie” found its way to our BluRay machine for a trip down memory lane recently.
Released in 2009 as a way to celebrate the franchise’s 50th year in Southern California, chapters and vignettes are weaved together to convey explanations as to why so many are connected to the team’s existence — journalists and broadcasters, tattoo artists and attorneys, cancer patients and celebrities, former gang inmates involved in Homeboy Industries as well as the founding spiritual leader, Fr. Greg Boyle.
It also covers the 2008 season in full: Manager Joe Torre’s team running toward the NL West title, the acquisition of Manny Ramirez, the McCourts influence, Ned Colletti’s roster built around Russell Martin, Matt Kemp, Andre Ethier, Chad Billingsley and Jonathan Broxton.
And there’s also the debut of a 20-year-old rookie named Clayton Kershaw.
The segment on Kershaw’s first game on May 25 on a Sunday afternoon at Dodger Stadium against the St. Louis Cardinals leans heavily into Vin Scully’s description and how the moment was met.
“Fastball, got him swinging!” Scully says when Kershaw fans leadoff man Skip Shoemaker (a future Dodger teammate), “and down below (in the stands) we watch his mom applauding.”
Now, all things considered, so very sweet to see.
When the Cards’ No. 3 hitter (another future Dodger teammate) lines a double down the left field line, Scully admits: “Kershaw is baptized by Albert Pujols, and that figures.”
Kershaw ends the inning with a very slow curveball to record a strikeout, and after the game, the cameras capture Kershaw with his family members — his future wife Ellen leaps into his arms, his mother holds up a plastic bag with the first strike-out ball, and his friends laugh at the fact he’s carrying extra baggage onto the team readiest for the airport and a road trip. “A rookie thing,” Kershaw explains. “Gotta carry water onto the bus.”
The intro to the scene also shows Kershaw in full screen overwhelmed by the pre-game experience, sitting by his locker, mouth agape. A number 54 jersey hangs in his stall. He would go six innings, give up two runs, and strike out seven. He had a 32-pitch first inning and logged 102 for his outing as the Dodgers eventually won the game, 4-3, in 10 innings. It’s also mind-numbing to see the horrid Dodgers’ starting infield for this one: Aside from James Loney at first, there’s someone named Luis Maza at second, Chin lung-Hu at short and Blake DeWitt at third, and a guy named Terry Tiffee later came up to get a pinch-hit single later in the game — his only hit in six games as a Dodger. Mark Sweeney, wearing No. 22, struck out in that game as a pinch hitter and then gave his number to Kersshaw, who grew up idolizing Giant-turned-Ranger All Star Will Clark.
Kershaw’s 5-5 record and 4.26 ERA in 22 starts in ’08, interrupted by a couple of trips down to the minors to overcorrect some roster moves, now feels like a lifetime ago. But there’s an emotional connection that allows fans to today say: I remember when …
And these days, as Kershaw fidget spins on the 60-day IL with a surgically repaired shoulder, hoping to return in July or August, he will put on the headset and talk to the team broadcasters during a telecast, staying loose and conversational. It’s part of the personality transformation of a three-time Cy Young winner, 10-time NL All Star and an NL MVP who already has the Dodgers’ career leadership in strikeouts and just 66 away from 3,000.
He could call it a day and retire to his home outside of Dallas with his wife and four kids. But he persists.
A career regular-season mark of 210-92, punctuated by marks of 21-5 (just two years after the doc’s release, in ’11), 21-3 (’14), 18-4 (’17) and 16-5 (’19), plus a combined 25-8 in his last two seasons (’22 and ’23) is often misaligned with a 13-13 mark with a 4.49 era in 32 starts during the post season. He is 3-6 in seven NL Championship Series.
His supposedly redemptive moment was the wonky 2020 playoffs — it started with throwing eight innings of three-hit shutout ball against Milwaukee in the wild-card clincher that included waving off the bench when it looked like he was going to be taken out in the pandemic-empty park. Then winning Game 2 of the NLDS against San Diego with six effective innings at Globe Life Field in Texas, but then coming back on eight days rest to lose Game 4 of the NLCS against Atlanta (5 IP, 4 ER). In the World Series, Kershaw registered wins in Games 1 and 5, staying at Globe Life Field — twice outdueling Tampa Bay’s Tyler Glasnow with 6 IP, 2 H, 1 ER and 8 Ks in the opener, and five days later, going 5 2/3 IP, 5 H, 2 ER and 6Ks, both times facing 21 batters. Julio Urias was essentially the pitcher who pulled the Dodgers out of any troubled times en route to that COVID title.
The last time we saw Kershaw in playoff mode was Oct. 7, 2023 in NLDS Game 1 at Dodger Stadium against Arizona, when he gave up six hits with eight batters faced and six earned runs in one-third an inning. His ERA was 162.0 for that series. The top-seeded Dodgers were swept away, scoring two runs each game and giving up 19 total.
Kershaw is hoping to write a different ending. A book like this helps direct that narrative — or at least explain what’s happened so far.
Not that he’s carrying the water this time, but McCullough, the former Los Angeles Times’ Dodgers beat writer who now covers the team for The Athletic, is among the few qualified to create a document of this nature at this tipping point in Kershaw’s professional existence. It comes at a pause before the baseball world may see his final act in the 2024 regular season leading into another toss-up postseason.
While Kershaw’s Hall of Fame plaque is pretty well set, even if he never puts on a pair of spikes again, the questions remain in the author’s pursuit of a story: Is Kershaw reinventing himself again in a game that keeps changing on him, or will he fight to the end? Is he ever satisfied with this blessing/curse of a starting pitcher’s existence in the 21st Century, working around pain, discomfort, stress and front-office meddling? A series of personal interviews that haven’t been published yet shed so much light on this.
Kershaw’s challenge is convincing Dodgers’ fans he’s still worthy of their adulation. This provides an emotional support manuscript.
But the game is changing, and his changeup may be his only out pitch left for the Last Great Starting Pitcher who won’t go gently into this night game that they’re trying to speed up.
From his Highland Park home in Texas, to Studio City in L.A., Kershaw is old-school mashup with listening to those trying to help him stay around to fulfill his agenda.
The 2018 book by Jon Weisman about the Dodgers’ history of pitching greats, which we reviewed at this link.
It’s trying to remind him he’s not like his brother in arms, like Sandy Koufax, who went every fourth day, and even now, he’s not doing the every fifth-day thing any more. As McCullough says in the intro, Kershaw in his pre-fatherhood days was one with “outdated flip-down sunglasses … played cards on the team plane and unleashed righteous flatulence.”
He’s grown up. He loves Hollywood-obsessed ping pong and his part in that. From the buzz cut to the long wild hair and beard. Now he’s all sorts of things — but as he said, he’s not there to teach the game to younger pitchers on the Dodgers staff. Not yet, anyway. He’s there to keep competing, loyal to a franchise who helped create his one-team legacy despite temptations to jump to the Texas Rangers, with one of his good friends, Chris Young, as the GM of the current World Series champs.
With that, here are 22 things (it could be 54) we think we learned, or re-remembered, from reading through this:
22: While in the minor leagues in February, 2007, Kershaw once rolled his “dream car,” a black Ford F-150 King Ranch truck with leather interior, as he was driving overnight to see his then-girlfriend Ellen at Texas A&M. The truck flipped twice. Kershaw emerged with a single scratch, then called Logan White, the Dodgers’ farm director, to explain what happened.
21: Remember when Vin Scully blurted out — “Ohhh, what a curveball! Holy mackerel! He just broke off Public Enemy No. 1” — during a Dodgers’ March 9, 2008 spring training game against the Boston at Holman Stadium on a Sunday afternoon televised back to L.A.? It was against the Red Sox’s up-and-coming first baseman Sean Casey.
20: During Kershaw’s 2014 no-hitter at Dodger Stadium against Colorado, Charlie Culberson made the second out of the ninth inning with a fly ball to right field. “If you watch the tape, it’s the only two-handed catch of Yasiel Puig’s career,” said catcher A.J. Ellis.
19: Ellis explains “Playoff Clayton” this way in Chapter 14: “I don’t know how much Clayton will like this. My theory … I’m hesitant to even share it. I’ve never been around somebody who could get themselves to the maximum level on a Wednesday getaway day in Cincinnati at 12:10 p.m. When there’s 1,800 people in the stands, we’re trying to wake up as a team. But he would still max out. And he did it 34 times a year. He’s always here,” he says as he raised his right hand above his head. “He’s always here.” Then he raised his left hand to the same level. “In the playoffs, everyone gets here. And I think he got the sense of it. And so he would try to go (higher) and there was nowhere to go.”
18: Kershaw’s five-day cycle ritual, as explained on pages 173-174: “On the day after his start, he lifted, ran and played catch. On the second day, he threw his 34 pitch bullpen session. On the third day, he lifted and played long toss. On the fourth day, he climbed the bullpen mound for the visualization techniques he had cribbed from Derek Lowe. And on the fifth day, he muscled down his turkey sandwich and tossed the baseball against clubhouse walls, then took the field and dominated.”
17: Kershaw vowed to get to the big leagues before his 21st birthday. He beat that by 298 days.
16: McCullough dutifully describes Kershaw winding up to pitch in his first big-league game: “His legs and hands rose in concert. Up. Down. Break. One. Two. Three.”
15: Enjoyed all we could about Mike Borzello, “Zelig in a chest protector,” who was the first to properly assess Kershaw’s slider.
14: Enjoyed finding out about Dave Preziosi, who played with Kershaw for one summer in the Gulf Coast League. “You signed for $2.3 million, and I didn’t sign for anything,” Preziosi tells him, “and I have a better ERA than you.”
13: Far too many reference to Molly Knight’s 2015 tripe “The Best Team Money Can Buy” (maybe one is OK, two is too many) and not enough references to Pedro Mora’s 2022 book, “How to Beat a Broken Game: The Rise of the Dodgers In A League on the Brink.” Here’s more assessing the value of the later.
12: Kershaw aligned himself with Sketchers after Under Armor stopped making his cleats in 2018. He was never aware that the brand was not considered hip. “They’re super generous with Kershaw’s Challenge,” he says. McCullough adds: “That was how he became the face of septuagenarian footwear.”
11: Kershaw is “just a curmudgeon about certain things,” says his sister in law, Ann Higginbottom, who also runs his charity. “It’s almost like helping a toddler get dressed.” Page 337. Later, McCullough describes Kershaw’s “affable grumpiness.” Page 344
10: After Kershaw’s implosion against Arizona in the ’23 NLDS, he approached his wife. “I’m done,” he told her. Ellen adds: “He was at the height of emotions. I mean, this is exactly what insanity is: You keep doing it expecting different results, and ‘How am I back here?'”
9: If you need a real list of his real best baseball friends: A.J. Ellis, Brett Anderson, Brandon McCarthy, Zack Greinke, Rich Hill, Jamey Wright, Josh Lindblom, Joc Pederson, Justin Turner, Corey Seager, Tyler Anderson, Kenley Jansen, and, as a coach, Rick Honecutt.
8: Kershaw is always weary of what manager Dave Roberts may say about him.
Clayton Kershaw Perfect game 80 pitches, take him OUT !!!!! WHAT THE! what’s the game coming to?1 of the era’s best, and you take him out with a perfect game in the 7th, 7-0 Dodgers winning. Take him OUT! THIS IS BASEBALL PLEASE PEOPLE THAT HAVE NEVER PLAYED GET OUT OF ITS WAY
In the press, Kershaw said he agreed with Roberts’ decision to take him out — as Roberts did with other pitchers in recent history. Kershaw had a short springing training because of the labor issues. It was 38 degrees at Target Field. Ellis later yelled at him for not trying to stay in the game.
“I probably regret it now,” Kershaw says in the book to McCullough. “I think throwing a perfect game would have been cool. Doc, he wanted to take me out. Mark (Prior, the pitching coach) wanted to take me out so bad. I could really do what I usually do and make it super hard for them and stress them out. Or I just take it. So I just took this one. Looking back, I regret it. I should have at least tried.”
The 2012 Christian-based book: “Arise” for Baker Publishing. Vin Scully wrote the blurb: “Clayton and Ellen Kershaw are the kind of young people that our world needs to see. This book gives unique insight into their lives of baseball and impact in Africa. It invites the readers into their world through stories of growing up and finding satisfaction in the things they love the most. The greatest contribution a ballplayer can make isn’t on the field; it’s in the lives of those he meets–although it does add to his appeal if he also leads the league in strikeouts. That kind of performance allows me the best seat in the house.”
6: The whole Pride Night fiasco of 2023, when Kershaw asked the team to reactivate Christian Faith and Family Day: “The Dodgers really put us in a horrible position,” Kershaw told McCullough. “It’s not an LGBT issue. It’s just, like, that group (the Sisters of Perpetual Sorrows) is pretty rough. And I’m all for funny and satire, but that goes way beyond it. So I did feel I needed to stay something.”
5: From October, 2023: “I’ll get a little honest with you — Faith-wise, the last year has been harder for me … You’re supposed to feel the presence of the Holy Spirit when you pray. And my prayer life sucks. I can’t pray well. I have a tough time voicing how I feel.” Page 339.
4: The first of his four kids, Cali, was born just before he was to receive his first Cy Young Award at a New York ceremony. Was given that name to reflect the Texas family’s new homestead in California? It’s no where in the book that we could find, so we went to look it up. From a 2015 Father’s Day story on ESPN.com, Kershaw says: “Cali was a name I’ve always loved. My teammate Brandon League has a daughter named Callie, and she’s the cutest thing ever. So that might’ve helped. Ellen said, ‘OK, you can name her. But I get to name the next one.’ Ann is a family name; Ellen’s grandmother and sister are both Ann.”
3: After the Dodgers won the 2020 World Series, Kershaw “blasted Queen’s ‘We Are the Champions’ loud enough that his neighbors could hear it when they strolled by, often enough that his kids grew sick of the song.” It says on page 323.
As complete a game as one can record these days. More that just a quality start to a story that will be updated once the retirement papers are signed and life begins as a full-time dad. Kershaw seems to feel a burden has been lifted, and now he’s able to share, in the newspaper, and in this book. It’s worth everyone’s attention.
In total, the book provides clever clues and contemplative conversations that fill gaps. It has nuance and context that bridge straight reporting of the past.
Also, the cover shot taken by Abbie Parr for Getty Images is also so dazzling, we couldn’t help but blow it up bigger than usual for these reviews. Signed poster, anyone?
You can look it up: More to ponder
It will easy to track down all sorts of reviews and media done on this book. That’s built-in for this type of tome on a current, popular athlete.
The Athletic was gracious enough to run another excerpt. This is basically the first chapter of the book. Give it a chance, man! https://t.co/MyewLXoz7S
And if you’ve still got a beef with Kershaw after all this …
Country roots, family and great food. This has been a fun project and I’m excited to share about it. Our family has enjoyed ranch pastures for generations — Kershaw Beef was born out of that love. This is a limited offer — https://t.co/5g3Jp6QcPY and we want to hear what you… pic.twitter.com/Cr5Gvxz8oT
In addition to reviews we’ve done in ’24 on baseball player books by/about Waite Hoyt, Mike Donlin and another (yawn) look at Pete Rose, we will use this post as a roundup of all the others we’ve come across, wanted to do a deeper dive, but have run out of bandwidth — also noting an odd similarity in the lack of imagination on how they are titled:
Twenty seasons in San Diego — eight batting titles, including .370 in 1987, 15-time All Star, five Gold Gloves, seven Silver Sluggers, 3,141 hits and a .338 lifetime average in more than 10,000 plate appearances. Tony Gwynn, born in L.A. and growing up in Long Beach to take advantage of the plentiful ballfields near Silverado Park, finally gets a complete bio treatment here that’s long overdue, by someone in Indiana who once got to see him play there in a Padres exhibition game. “I began this project believing Tony’s life offers a message worth savoring,” Kingdon writes. “Nothing I discovered changed my mind.” Maybe his lasting impact: The Major League Collective Bargaining Agreement was amended in 2016 to bar the use of smokeless at games or team functions by players who entered the major leagues.
Meow. Long before Tony Goslin made cats somewhat cool, this cool cat Johnny Mize put of Cooperstown-quality numbers, but couldn’t claw his way in until the Veterans Committee stamped his passport in 1981, eight years after his 14-year ballot search expired in ’73 (and topped out at just 43.6 percent of the vote in ’71). A 10-time All Star, a .312 career batting average (a batting champ with .394 for St. Louis in ’39), four-time NL home run leader with 359 total in 15 seasons, and three time NL RBI champ — despite missing 1943 to ’45 for military service. He hit for power and average like Albert Pujols, a line-drive hitter who rarely struck out. This is the first real bio on him.
Complicated? How so? Oh, right. The spitting things. And more allegations. Roberto Alomar came from a baseball family: His father Sandy played for the Angels. His brother Sandy Jr. played for the Dodgers. Roberto, who retired in 2005 after 17 seasons with San Diego, Toronto, Baltimore, Cleveland, the New York Mets, Chicago White Sox and Arizona — none of them more than five seasons — was inducted into Cooperstown in 2011 on his second try with a career .300 average, 210 home runs (16th all time by a second baseman), a 12-time All Star and 10-time Gold Glove winner.
Knuckling it up for more than 1,000 games — 52 starts, 20 complete games, and 651 finished for 228 saves in more than 2,200 innings — Hoyt Wilhelm once led both leagues in ERA (2.43 as a 29-year-old New York Giants rookie in 1952; 2.19 as a 36-year-old Baltimore Orioles All-Star in ’59). He spent his last two seasons with the Dodgers in ’71 and ’72, retiring at age 49. He also spent part of a season with the California Angels in ’69.
Robert Lee Caruthers was a 40-game winner as a 21-year-old for the St. Louis Browns of the American Association in 1885, also winning the ERA title at 2.17, and won 40 more with the Brooklyn Bridegrooms in the National League in 1889. He somehow posted 218 wins in just nine seasons, then discontinued the throwing part in 1892. As a right fielder/hitter from 1885 to 1893, he had a .282 career batting average and retired as the game’s leader in stolen bases with 152, with a high of 49 in ’87. Coming from a wealthy family, Caruthers had leverage when it came to contracts, so he could hold out, even play in Europe. A fascinating profile.
John R. Husman’s "Roger Bresnahan: A Baseball Life" will soon be published by McFarland Books. This is my foreword to his book. https://t.co/JDkjqtUsRX
== “Roger Bresnahan: A Baseball Life,” by John R. Husman (forward by John Thorn, McFarland, $39.95, 291 pages, released May 8, 2024):
The first bio done about Roger Bresnahan, who started as an 18 year old with the 1897 Washington Senators of the National League and spent seven strong seasons with the New York Giants (1903 to 1908) as a .279 career hitter. His pitching: The 1987 with Washington, going 4-0 with a 3.95 ERA in six games. He finished his career as a catcher, introducing shin guards to the game. Here’s a true utility player — including coaching and managing. He was later principal owner and president of the Toledo American Association franchise for eight years.
The live and times of a one-time Brooklyn Dodgers minor league pitcher known as “Needle Nose” more famous for his days in the Negro Leagues with the Newark Eagles, Toledo Crawfords and Homestead Grays, and on the 1943 Negro League champions, is conveyed in a book targeting young adult readers. Wright was with the 1946 Montreal Royals Triple-A team with Jackie Robinson by orders of Branch Rickey. Was Wright there to be a companion on Robinson’s journey or could he have been the one picked to break the color barrier? Wright only lasted a couple of games in Montreal and was demoted to Class-C, and another Black pitcher, Roy Partlow, was brought up to Montreal. As Wright’s daughter explains: “My Dad was moved to the background so that the main character in his story, Jackie Robinson, would have all of the focus and the headlines. I understand that and am not trying to downplay what Mr. Robinson accomplished in any way. However, it is now time for Johnny Wright to have his full story told.”
Gotta dig the clear-framed large glasses worn by Octavio “Cookie” Rojas, who put in a 16-year career mostly split between the Phillies and Royals, and then managed the California Angels in 1988 during his a 50-year career in the game that included time as a coach, scout and broadcaster. The Cuban native left his country following the revolution and just wanted to play baseball.
But to us it also begs the question: Is this a photo illustration of him from the All Star Baseball Game with the spinner we used to play almost daily as a kid?
Once upon a time, this contract that Nolan Ryan signed to join the Angels, and also signed by GM Harry Dalton, was offered at auction.
Thirteen members make up the league of unfortunate gentlemen who agreed to serve as general manager for the historically cursed Los Angeles/California/Anaheim/Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, including prior to the franchise’s birth in 1961.
Which one generally managed to make the greatest impact?
Bill Stoneman, if only because of the fact he was in the chair during the Angels wild-winding wild-card run to the 2002 World Series title, is the quick-wit choice. He arrived three seasons before that improbable title scramble. He lasted five more afterward before he pooped out at age 63. Between his term of 1999 and 2007, the Angels also made the playoffs as the AL West champs in ’04, ’05 and ’07. It was Stoneman who hired Mike Scioscia as the team’s 20th manager in 2000, and the former Dodgers catcher lasted more than 3,000 games, and was the ’02 and ’09 AL Manager of the year. In creating the 2002 roster, Stoneman pulled the trigger on the trade of Jim Edmonds to St. Louis for Adam Kennedy and Ken Bottenfield, and it worked. Stoneman signed Scott Spiezio, David Eckstein and Brendan Donnelly. Two years after the championship, he landed future Hall of Famer Vladimir Guerrero. He drafted Jered Weaver, Ervin Santana, Howie Kendrick and Casey Kotchman. Stoneman, a former big-league pitcher himself, rarely messed around with in-season trades.
Even then, he wasn’t done. Stoneman made a comeback as the interim GM in the middle of the 2015 season after Jerry Dipoto’s rocky data-driven three-and-a-half-season time ended, following the heralded signings of Albert Pujols and Josh Hamilton between 2011 and ’15.
Tony Reagins, Stoneman’s immediate successor after the 2007 season, was the franchise’s first and only Black GM. He may have only lasted four seasons, but included in that was drafting Mike Trout in 2009, at No. 25 overall, an outfielder from Millville High in New Jersey. (For what it’s worth, the pick came after Reagins took another outfielder, Randal Grichuk at No. 24 from Lamar High in Texas). Reagins also signed Torii Hunter and traded for Mark Teixeira and Dan Haren. He didn’t wear well the signings Vernon Wells and Scott Kazmir.
Fred Haney, the former Hollywood Stars and Los Angeles Angels broadcaster in the Pacific Coast League, and the GM for the 1957 World Series champion Milwaukee Braves, was the Angels’ first deal maker. He first had to navigate the dispersal draft logistics and then find a roster that could perform in the old Wrigley Field, then Dodger Stadium, then the new Angel Stadium. Somehow they had a 70-win season in ’61, still a record for expansion teams. Aside from shaping the first rosters, Haney’s success was relevant in finding Jim Fregosi, Dean Chance, Leon Wagner and Lee Thomas.
December 8, 1960: Fred Haney, left, named General Manager of the new American League Los Angeles Angels, checks the warm-up jacket worn by Angels’ Board Chairman Gene Autry as the club’s President Bob Reynolds (center) looks on. Autry and Reynolds returned from St. Louis the day before after they were granted the new franchise. Haney was named as General Manager at a press conference in the Sheraton-West hotel.(Not sure who the gentleman is on the far right, but he looks pleased).
After those three, we’ve got, in no particularly effective order:
Buzzie Bavasi (1977 to 1984) and his son, Bill Bavasi (1994 to 1999), both something of a buzz kill. The elder Bavasi’s time with the team as it went to two post-season appearances under his watch. It wasn’t really because of him, but in spite …
Billy Eppler (’15 to ’20) may have overseen five losing seasons and had another year on his contract when he was let go, and he was in change when Scioscia left and decided Brad Ausmus could handle the spot as the manager. Yet, Eppler did a lot of groundwork recruiting of Shohei Ohtani, and was in the team’s toll booth when the Japanese star arrived, helping keep Trout at bay.
No-Frills Mike Port (1984 to 1991) was really just an extension of the first Bavasi regime and relied on a farm stocked with Mike Witt, Chuck Finley, Wally Joyner, Devon White and Gary Pettis, and then drafted Edmonds, Tim Salmon, Garret Anderson, Troy Percival and Jim Abbott.
Whitey Herzog (1993 to ’94) was thought to bring some name value but was otherwise a white-hot mess, loading up the team with former Cardinals has-beens. Lump him in with Dick Walsh (’68 to ’71), Dan O’Brien (’91 to ’93) and the current Perry Minasian (since 2020), who may be on borrowed time as well.
Then there was Harry Inglis Dalton.
The Associated Press photo sent out when the Angels signed Harry Dalton. On Ebay.com
Dalton agreed to come to Southern California in October of 1971 as the hand-picked choice of owner Gene Autry, basically lured away as a free agent from the then-successful Baltimore Orioles, a place he thrived from 1966 to ’71.
Within weeks, Dalton had the gumption to trade Fregosi to New York for Nolan Ryan. It still haunts Mets fans.
When Dalton was let go by October of 1977 in favor of Bavasi Sr., Ryan would also eventually leave as well. It was no coincidence.
Dalton and Ryan were linked. Gentlemen who had respect for each other, from start to finish.
Now connect the dots: If Autry wasn’t so impatient in thinking “The Dodger Way” was going to be his template for winning with the Angels, convincing himself to add on former Dodger thinkers, Buzzie Bavasi wouldn’t have been brought into second-guess Dalton, and Ryan wouldn’t have been forced to go to free agency because of Bavasi’s subsequent faulty financial planning.
And without Dalton dialed in with his his effective free-agent deals –from Joe Rudi to Don Baylor to Bobby Grich — the Angels would have completely disappeared in the Dodgers’ shadow in the 1970s. The Dodgers may have succeeded in winning the NL titles in ‘74, ‘77 and ‘78 with their home-grown talent, but they couldn’t pull off the big-name acquisitions that Dalton did in Anaheim (and they lost to the free-agent-loaded New York Yankees in the final two runs, finally beating them in ’81). Yet Autry still believed in the Dodgers’ mystique, scooped up ex-employees for the front office and crushed Dalton’s work. So he went to Milwaukee and Bud Selig and helped the Brewers eliminate the Angels in the ‘82 ALCS. Dalton swapped out Buck Rodgers for Harvey Kuenn as the manager two months in, the “Wall Bangers” outlasted Baltimore for the AL East title by one game and, even thought the Angels won the first two games of the ALCS, Gene Mauch’s team squandered the last three, as Don Sutton, who Dalton got at the trade deadline from Houston, throttled them in Game 3. Fred Lynn of the Angels, who Buzzie Bavasi got in a ‘80 trade, was the series MVP. But it didn’t matter.
That, at the very least, is how we get a better read on things after enjoying a trip through this well-researched, well-developed bio about a baseball man who, all things considered, could have his Baseball Hall of Fame resume re-examined.
Dalton’s 40-plus years as a general manager that started in Baltimore and would wind up polishing up Milwaukee’s Brewers between ‘78 and ‘91, but the sweet spot of the book for Angels’ historians will be between Chapters 8 and 12, which span Dalton’s impact on the team during the impactful free-agent flurry.
The 70 pages are enough to document what Dalton did in the new era of players going here, there and everywhere — a reflection on how Dalton came to the Angels in the first place.
A 1971 Associated Press photo of Harry Dalton, left, and new Angels manager Del Rice. On Ebay.com
The bottom line was that Dalton kept positive relationships and diffused tepid situations, especially late in his tenure with Autry. Some of the revelations here include the rumor that Dalton was going to bring Earl Weaver with him to manage the Angels in ’71, but ended up going through a series of trial-and-error skippers that seemed more to define his place in the media chronicling the team.
In ’71, the Angels managers had only numbered two — Bill Rigney (’61 to ’69) and Lefty Phillips (’69 to ’71). Dalton took a chance on Del Rice for one year, extracted Bobby Winkles from the college game (’73-’74), passed on Herzog as a temp in ’74 in favor of the available Dick Williams (through ’76) and then tried Norm Sherry and Dave Garcia. Five managers didn’t really manage much stable or stellar, but in effect, they were also trying to find their place in the game amidst big-name player movement. Patience wasn’t what it used to be.
Dalton understood the essence of what free agency could bring and how it could be integrated in a roster with a team improving by being prudent with spending and negotiations.
Plus, Dalton liked the idea of where the Angels were going a decade into their existence, and the idea of moving his family to California as he was always a family-first individual. That’s also illustrated in the photo section that shows him as a tireless worker who never let himself get too far from a payphone, even on a family trip. It’s incredible to think he got all this accomplished in a pre-cell phone/Internet period.
Harry Dalton made it happen: Joe Rudi, Don Baylor and Bobby Grich came to Anaheim for the 1977 season.
Dalton’s influence on the franchise was unimpeachable (and yes, he was friends with local OC resident Richard Nixon) and makes you wonder what would happened if Autry hadn’t been so quick to let him move on. The team’s win-loss record over Dalton’s tenure isn’t dazzling, nor is it his fault (as also documented in Dalton’s SABR bio). It actually could have been much worse.
But here, Dalton, who died nearly 20 years ago at age 77 from Lewy body disease, gets his due. A career in full with some time and history to ponder makes it that much easier to understand what Kluck has done here there a myriad of research, family interviews and talking to those — his “gang” — who went through it all with Dalton.
We are grateful to have this correspondence with Lee Kluck, who presented the groundwork for this book at the 2023 NINE convention in Scottsdale, Ariz., attended by some of the Dalton family:
Q: How did Harry Dalton, of all the baseball people available, ignite your desire to do a book? His Wisconsin connection?
A: I grew up a fan of the Milwaukee Brewers of the mid-1980s. They were still really competitive in the decade after their appearance in the World Series in 1982. I knew I wanted to write a book, but I was unsure of the topic. However, when I thought about the teams I watched as a kid and applied the lens of a professional historian with over thirty years’ distance, I wondered how the Brewers could stay good despite impending financial difficulties that would hit the team beginning in 1993. What I came up with was that Harry Dalton and the scouts and advisors around him were really good at their jobs. The original period of my book was going to be 1983-1992. The scope of my book changed when I realized that Harry’s decisions in Milwaukee were shaped by his time in Baltimore and California, and you needed to tell the whole story to understand Milwaukee.
From the website: CooperstownExpert.com: Dalton is asking in this letter for an update on Dave Leonhard, who Dalton says the Angels are looking at bringing up from the minors to the big club. The GM was familiar with Leonhard whose time in the majors coincided with Dalton’s tenure in Baltimore. Leonhard won 16 games and saved five more for the Orioles from 1966-1972. Dalton never did promote Leonhard to the Angels that season. Leonhard was through as a big leaguer after the 1972 season.
Q: The Dalton who we often read about in Southern California might have been framed more as the GM who couldn’t pick a manager that fit well more than the roster he constructed. He was thinking outside the box with Bobby Winkles, but it kept cycling through others, unknown and well known. Do you think the criticism was fair?
A: I think the press characterization of Harry as “Hangman Harry,” who went through managers, is accurate but simplistic. Part of his inability to find a manager who fit with the roster was because ownership could not understand that it would take years to build what Dalton oversaw at the end in Baltimore. Autry was so concerned with competing with the Dodgers (and emulating them) that it forced Dalton to win before they were probably capable. Still Harry tried to win while building, and when it came to managers, he couldn’t find someone who would be accepted by the veterans and patient enough to work with the kids that Harry was drafting.
Q: What’s your take on how Nolan Ryan got along with him, in relation for what also seemed to be his intent to please owner Gene Autry?
A: I once asked Harry’s daughters and his late wife Pat who Harry’s favorite players were to work with and who their favorite players were to interact with. They all listed Nolan Ryan right at the top of the list. Nolan and Ruth are revered and loved by the whole family. Harry and Nolan fostered a good relationship on and off the field because of a shared understanding of loyalty. Harry loved players who gave him everything they had, and players loved Harry because they knew he appreciated their efforts and that he would treat them as people. When I talked to Nolan — which he did because he and Ruth liked Harry and Pat as people — he quickly told me that he would not have become the pitcher he became if Harry Dalton had not allowed him to grow into his talent. He also said he left California because Buzzie Bavasi was not Harry Dalton. That is to say, while Buzzie wanted to tell people how bad they were even when they weren’t, Harry would never denigrate someone to save a dollar and Nolan appreciated that. Finally, I think it is important to remember both men were family-forward. First and foremost, they were parents who would do anything for their kids and their wives. This provided a huge common ground.
Q: What was your most surprising revelations about his time with the Angels? Some trades not made? Rumors of him maybe bringing Earl Weaver with him?
A: I think my biggest surprise vis-à-vis Harry and the Angels was that before you even looked at the moves Dalton made or didn’t make, you had to understand that the Dodgers were Gene Autry’s white whale. He wanted to be them, and he was willing to hire anyone he felt could reproduce what Walter O’Malley had and acquire any player that would bring a modicum of that success. This phenomenon became so pervasive that it ultimately forced Harry to leave his job when Buzzie Bavasi convinced Gene that he needed minding. On some level, I don’t think Harry ever understood the hold the Dodgers had on the Angels staff and fans. He even replied to a reporter who asked him how his move might affect the Dodgers; Harry asked if he knew they were in the other league. Still, even with that as the background, I think it’s important to remember that people around during his tenure believed that Harry was part of why the Angels had so much success in 1978. This included Gene Autry and Nolan Ryan. Ryan went as far as to say that the Angels were successful later because of Harry’s work. As for Autry, in 1978, when the Angels finally won, Gene sent Harry a letter thanking him for doing the things that got them over the top. They always had a good relationship.
Q: You got such great access to his notes and documentation of things. Was he planning to do his own memoir?
A: I got extremely lucky with this book in terms of sources. If it were up to Harry, he would have never said a word about his career or legacy in public, and he hardly ever did so in private. He just didn’t see what he did that was so special. As I put it, he didn’t care about being Harry Dalton. That being said, he saved everything, and his family, with the help of Dan Duquette, who worked for Harry in Milwaukee, did the same. They then donated everything to the Giamatti Research Center in Cooperstown. This information was invaluable because it gave me a framework for each phase of Harry’s career. From there, I lucked out again because Harry’s family provided me any assistance they could generate. This generosity was born out of their love for their father and husband, the importance of Harry’s career in their mind, and my diligence in getting things right. Finally, people talked to me because Harry Dalton was good to them, and they wanted to return the favor. It did not matter if it was a Hall of Famer — I talked to four players, two execs, and five media members — people who enjoyed their privacy, or those in baseball with busy schedules; they wanted to help Harry by helping me. That is the kind of person Harry was.
Q: All in all do, you believe you made a Hall of Fame case for him? What other GMs maybe does he compare best to?
Although his career in California was not successful on the field, I believe that the totality of the winning he did, the mentorship he provided to successful young executives like John Schuerholz, Dan Duquette, Bruce Manno, Pat Gillick, his association with great managers like Earl Weaver, and the work he did to make the game a better place, makes him a Hall of Famer and those who knew him in the game agree. I will share two examples. Bud Selig called Harry the best baseball mind of their generation. Any time the owners had an existential question on how to make the game better, they asked Harry. Finally, Earl Weaver said in a letter read at Harry’s celebration of life that he couldn’t understand why Harry wasn’t there when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. Because without Harry Dalton, there was no Earl Weaver. As for what GMs he compares to, in terms of winning, he was Pat Gillick or John Schuerholz before they were. His teams won a lot, and people wanted to run their offices like his. Winning was only part of it, however. Harry was smart. If he came along today he would be Theo Epstein or Billy Beane. He would be a celebrity because no one thought about baseball like he did and paired it with winning baseball and a willingness to teach others. Finally, I think Harry would be appreciated because, for all his skills, he was well-liked and thought about the larger world. He is a great ambassador for the game in every regard.
Q: Once again, where did the title come from?
I asked the girls and Pat if Harry had a favorite saying. They all agreed that Leave While the Party’s good was it. He always believed that it was a good philosophy to get out early before it was too late. It didn’t matter if the girls were going out or he was making a trade.
How it goes in the scorebook
Party hearty, Daltons. A Cooperstown soiree may be in the works.
This Harry was not a spare. He’s worthy of a baseball coronation.
A Harry Dalton signed baseball. Just $1,500 at this site.
As bios can be done these days to shine a new light on those overlooked or under appreciated in the game — mostly players or managers or owners — this can refocus on the execs and GMs who used the resources of the time to make decisions as well as trusting their instincts. It was important in Dalton‘s day to do that with personal contacts and establishing trust and so reliant on new data. Being honest and fair. His background as a journalist long ago gave him that perspective and ethical foundation.
His eyeballs were plenty sharp to not only create the great teams of Baltimore and later in Milwaukee, but also shape the Angels at a time when they needed different managers and have the blessing of Autry’s wallet to pursue things.
The Angels should consider putting him first into their own Hall of Fame — with Stoneman, for sure, and even Haney. But if the only thing it says on Dalton’s plaque was that he was the one who gave up Fregosi for Ryan, it’s now shortsighted and incomplete. This book completes any debate over Dalton’s due diligence and links him more to the groundwork he laid.
More to ponder:
== The site’s official Facebook page at this link.
== A review by Charlie Bevis at Bevis Baseball Research linked here.
Artificial Intelligence and Sports Illustrated got together for a discrete hook up recently, and the tabloids had a field day.
So did the moral arbiters at our non-profit member station Public Broadcasting Service team.
“Sports Illustrated is the latest media company to see its reputation damaged by being less than forthcoming — if not outright dishonest — about who or what is writing its stories at the dawn of the artificial intelligence age,” PBS reported on Nov. 29, 2023.
“The once-powerful publication said it was firing a company that produced articles for its website written under the byline of authors who apparently don’t exist. But it denied a published report that stories themselves were written by an artificial intelligence tool.”
The truth is, SI’s reputation has been damaged for several years, and this particular misstep had nothing to do with AI converging with Synthetic Intelligence. We were a bit sympathetic to what was really happening.
Since 2018, SI’s content has been leased by the Arena Group, and it was responsible for these third-party product review AI “stories” way down at the bottom of the website. The crime really is that it was ad material disguised as content. The stuff was summarily taken down and perhaps the brand’s reputation was harmed.
It’s not like they were channeling Frank Deford beyond the grave to rewrite some of his most popular Ted Williams pieces. That would be a grave misstep on so many levels.
This was really some superfluous stuff in question.
The humans still left at the Sports Illustrated Union was mortified, and it was a moment to suggest that there’s a chilling effect on all major news corps that had been dabbling in AI software as a way to make up for lost employees. Still, this much ruckus wasn’t really pushed out when The Associated Press started using techbots to assist in its articles about financial earnings reports since 2014, and had also been used to aggregate short sports game stories. Usually there was a tag at the end that explained how that story was produced with a data-driven technology and readers were not in the “Twilight Zone” of their existence.
Our response to today’s story from @futurism reporting that The Arena Group has published AI-written stories by fake people under the Sports Illustrated name: pic.twitter.com/QcR4iGOi5w
The fall guy for all this was CEO Ross Levinsohn, and it’s just as well. Levinsohn, a former HBO exec who also worked at Fox Sports, Yahoo and then a crazy time as publisher of the Los Angeles Times despite its internal union outcry of his incompetency, had latched onto SI’s parent company, then known as Maven, Inc., which then sold off its soul to Authentic Brands Group and became part of a NIL scam to make people believe it was worthy of its name. Like, Chuck Taylor Converse. SI still had a magazine, cut back to once a month, and this suspect website with just a small portion of what used to be on the staff.
For those who remember, SI, which launched 70 years ago in August of 1954 as the first magazine to have more than one million subscribers, and in 1983 was the first full-color news weekly magazine highlighting fantastic photography — aside from its Swimsuit issue — has been though all sorts of self-inflicted wounding for a few decades.
Time Inc., sold off SI as part of its assets to Meredith Corporation, which then sold SI to ABG, and the Arena Group got a 10-year license agreement for SI “branded editorial” content, while ABG could license the SI name to other things (such as Super Bowl parties). Or, as the Washington Post noted: “As Sports Illustrated sputters, its owners throw a party for ‘the brand’” sponsored by Captain Morgan.
Arrrrggggggg.
The latest in January of 2024 is The Arena Group missed a $3.75 million licensing payment to ABG, so ABG then created a partnership last March with something called Minute Media to keep fooling everyone.
In the last few years, Triumph Books, a publishing house based in Chicago, has been repurposing “The Best of” Sports Illustrated work — using the power of nostalgia to draw in those of us who’ve longed for the value of long-form sports reporting. On the title page of this book, it lists that all the content is used under license from ABG-SI LLC. And “The Baseball Vault” is the latest in a series of Truimph products, coming after “The World Series” (Oct., ’23) and a history of the New York Mets (April, ’23). SI seems to have actually published “The Story of Baseball In 100 Photographs” back in November, ’18.
With the “Baseball Vault” — a book-form extension of the website we’ve often frequented called SIVault.com — the implication is there’s value here. A saved up treasure now opened for us to re-admired. It’s why we bought gold bars long ago instead of cryptocurrency. You can’t make jewelry out of a blockchain.
We see the names again of some literary heroes, and those we wish we knew better. Even the ones our dad once paid a full quarter of a dollar to read.
Those who’ve managed to stay on staff in 2024 — Tom Verducci, Steve Rushin, Pat Forde, even Jon Wertheim and Jack McCallum — are included.
So are William Nack, Rich Hoffer, Joe Posnanski, Shelley Smith, Steve Wulf, Mark Kram, Rick Reilly, Peter Gammons, Alexander Wolff, Jeff Pearlman, S.L. Price, Leigh Montville, Tim Layden, Emma Baccellieri, Ben Reiter, Ron Fimrite, Robert Creamer and Phil Taylor.
(Nothing, apparently, worthy of George Plimpton, Jim Murray, Pat Jordan, Selena Roberts, Grant Wahl, Ralph Wiley … or Kurt Vonnegut?)
This group comes out of the cornfield, not so much for the full take-out features they once did, but many in the short-blast, two-to-four page updates they did for the magazine.
Of the 46 stories, the earliest is from 1956 — Creamer writes the magazine’s first Sportsman of the Year piece called “The Year, the Moment and Johnny Podres,” focused on the previous season that the Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher had getting the team to the first World Series title.
There’s also one from 1959, Herbert Warren Wind’s “From the Hill to the Hall,” about Yogi Berra. Most are from the 1990s and 2000-to-present era.
From the more contemporary lot, Verducci’s piece from 1999 on Sandy Koufax titled “The Left Arm of God” is there. It’s brilliant. And it takes up several pages.
There’s also Verducci’s “The Ohtani Rules” from 2021 — the book jacket includes Ohtani in new Dodgers’ duds to help bring the shelf value up.
Verducci’s sweet Vin Scully tribute piece from his 2016 retirement season is also there. It’s lodged in with a Reilly piece on the St. Louis Cardinals’ Jack Buck from 2001 (to go along with a chapter on “The Storytellers,” that also includes a Steve Rushin story on the joy of baseball on the radio, and Luke Winn’s 2013 piece on Bob Uecker).
More stories are grouped together in the game’s history, legends of the sport, The Negro Leagues, colorful characters, poignant moments, writers reflecting on baseball and what’s to make of the “modern age.”
The newest entry is the last of a Stephanie Apstein piece from 2023 called “Playing for the Yankees Has Its Perks. In-Fight Internet is Not One of Them.” It ends with the last graph talking about how Yankees manager Aaron Boone pays for his own Gogo account and wasn’t aware many other team owners covered the Wi-Fi expenses on team flights.
“He wondered gravely whether the Yankees’ policy might cost them free agents. ‘We’re gonna have to get on that,’ he said. Journalism changes lives.”
The last line if fitting, isn’t it? And human generated. We can tell.
How it goes in the scorebook
All In.
So, what seems to be missing?
Lots, actually.
Creamer’s fantastic May 1964 piece on Scully, which in the SI vault is labeled: “How Vin Scully became part of the California freeways.” That came at a key moment in Scully’s career as he had been courted by the New York Yankees to return to the Bronx, just after the Dodgers’ sweep of the Yankees in the ’63 World Series. Scully thankfully stayed in Southern California. And was, as the story said, a key ingredient in the culture.
That story, by the way, elicited quite a bit of mail to the SI editors, some of which they published in a subsequent issue. One of them was this a couple weeks after the initial story, in the “19th Hole” section of the magazine:
Sirs: Two things happened when I was trying to play ball at Fordham that have always left me leary of the printed word. One concerned the only home run I ever hit—which was in truth a misjudged fly ball. It was in a college game, and a photographer for the Bronx Home News was present. I gave it the real home run trot and even tried to hang in midair over the home plate so that he could take the proper picture. The next day I went out eager to buy every paper I could get my hands on. The first one I bought featured a picture on the sports page which showed a blurred figure who could not possibly have been recognized by blood relatives, and the caption: “JIM TULLY scoring on his home run.”
The other shock to my system was administered by Lou Effrat of The New York Times. He covered a game that was probably the only one in my career in which I got three hits in four times at bat. The other time I had struck out. We won the game and, since I had contributed to the victory, I eagerly purchased the Times the following morning to read Effrat’s glowing report of my contribution. The only time my name was mentioned was at the head of the third paragraph, which began, “After Scully fanned…”
This is a long preamble to tell you all that has been washed away. Everyone connected with the Scully family wishes to thank you and Robert Creamer for as nice a write-up as a man could ever wish to have. VIN SCULLY Houston
That could have been a chapter unto itself.
Also missing: George Plimpton’s tome about the “curious case” of the legendary Sidd Finch (from April 1, 1985), which has its own Wikipedia entry. William Leggett’s story of the Impossible Dream Red Sox from 1967. Rushin’s piece from 1992 about how the Dodgers and Giants transferred the game “Into a Golden State.” Myron Cope’s 1966 profile on Roberto Clemente.
Here’s a likely answer to that: In 1993, Time Inc., which then owned the whole shebang, did its own best of SI baseball writing, with Oxmore House Inc., and Bishop Books. The best stuff may be here in “Baseball: Four Decades of Sports Illustrated’s Finest Writing on America’s Favorite Pastime (Sports Illustrated Collector’s Library). Track it down. Here, we found one on eBay.com for less than $6. Also on Abebooks.com. The authors included here: Deford, Blout, Gammons, Cope, Montville, Nack, Telander, Pat Jordan … plus Robert Frost and Red Smith. This book also has an introduction from then-managing editor Mark Muvoy.
Which leads us to the one thing really missing from this new edition: Some kind of explainer on how these stories were picked, who did the picking, and where more of the gems may be mined online at the SIvault.com. It needs context. That’s lacking here, unfortunately. Maybe because it couldn’t take the 30-plus already picked for this ’93 edition.
Still, nostalgia still sells. And editors’ note: None of this review was generated from an outside source. It’s an internal combustion engine known as mind and heart. And that’s what makes these SI piece true. All their words could be dumped into a software system and perhaps regenerated years from now into some worthy prose. But it misses so much. We appreciate the effort to bring that reminder back.
It’s not a perfect synergy these with all the SI dispersal of valued pieces. But at least this came out of it. Along with a sweet modified cover shot by Hy Peskin of Mickey Mantle that makes some of us recall when that was the actual cover of the SI issue from June 18, 1956, and these days can sell for as much as $300,000.
Someone can buy that issue, and put it back in the vault. For safe keeping.
More to ponder:
Wonder why we post these reviews for no charge on this website? So do I.
A six-part series airing on Turner Classic Movies channel rolled out earlier this year called “The Power of Film,” and it led off with an episode that explained the dynamics of what makes a movie both popular and memorable. They are definitely not the same.
Howard Suber, an esteemed UCLA film professor who wrote a book about this topic with the same title in 2006 after teaching this course in Westwood for many years to thousands of students, agreed to do this series. It not only is trying to enlighten those aspiring to be directors, producers or screen writers, but it is really for movie lovers — like TMC viewers — to better understand why they’ve had these connections to certain films over the years, how it is they’re able to watch them over and over again, and what leads them back for reinforcement.
Common themes that resonate in our soul and we see that portrayed on the screen are often about family. Or power. Or the fragility of life. These themes go back 2,500 years in our course of historical storytelling.
Film clips come up during this hour-long series opener, and Suber shows the ties that bind “The Godfather,” “Casablanca,” “Citizen Kane,” “A Star is Born,” “Do The Right Thing” or “The Exorcist.”
At one point during a montage, there is a quick flash of a scene from the 1992 “A League of their Own” — Geena Davis, as Dottie Hinson, bare-hand catches a ball thrown at her without showing any emotion. Awe inspiring. And powerful.
But in this TCM series context, “A League of their Own” explained how this is about a family, of baseball players. It was about overcoming odds, from the perspective of women just looking for a chance. It involved power — empowering them to show their worth. It checked off so many boxes that baseball was just a convenient entry point to another version of storytelling as old as time.
Now, we can take that movie, and more, to the next level.
Noah Gittell, a writer and critic whose work has been in the L.A. Review of Books as well as Esquire and Washington City Paper, and currently on his own Substack platform, uses his experiences to crank out his first book on how baseball can be the centerpiece of film, and it has been for more more than 100 years. It’s a commonality that makes it resonate on many levels.
In 2023, Will Leitch did his list of the best baseball movies of all time for MLB.com. No. 1: Bull Durham.No.2: A League of Their Own.
In 2019, the Society of American Baseball Research, as part of its project to celebrate its 50th year, also did its own review of baseball films and what it has meant in popular culture: It posted its 50 of the most memorable baseball-related moments in films and television for the past half century, compiled by Mark Armour with Jim Baker, Michael Bates, Michael Bender, Emily Hawks, Jeff Katz, R. J. Lesch, Bruce Markusen, Justin McGuire, Rob Neyer, Steve Roney, Gabriel Schechter, Tom Shieber and Cary Smith.
What sets Gittell apart here is its personalized approach, much like how someone would describe their own baseball cards. To get the true effect, listen to him read it aloud on the audio versions made available.
As he writes in the intro, “Hollywood exists to provide the glorious catharsis life rarely does, but the baseball movie, a collision of two dreams, is a little different. It returns us to a heaven we’ve already glimpsed. … Baseball movies are important. They develop fans of the game by drawing out its drama and revealing its humanity. Let’s be honest: Baseball players aren’t always so forthcoming about their inner lives, their hopes, and their fears. The league doesn’t help us to get to know them; particularly in recent years, it has been terrible about marketing its stars. We need the movies to show us what it feels like to be on a hot streak or stuck in a slump … The cynics … shake their heads and say baseball movies are cheesy and unrealistic. … Pay them no mind. These people misunderstand baseball, as well as the baseball movie. The disappointment is real, but so is the magic. If we believe in Kirk Gibson, we must believe in Roy Hobbs.”
It would be easy to spoil the exploration and prose Gittell uses to reel us back into baseball reel-ism. The parallel histories of film and baseball don’t always connect well, but when they do, it’s magic. Like a Robert Redford home run. This is how film explains baseball, and vice versa, and how both explain our American experience.
Twenty four baseball-centic films are covered by name in 18 chapters, with the final chapter interestingly enough devoted to the burgeoning genre of faith-based movies that use baseball as a narrative. Quite inspiring.
“A League of Their Own,” of course, is included — as is a blurb from the previously referenced book. Erin Carlson writes: “Nostalgic, smart and entertaining all at once.”
As for the film, Gittell slots in Chapter 3 about “The Nostalgia Boom,” and pairs it will well with the 1988 “Bull Durham” as flicks that “tell stories about people who had long been relegated to the sidelines in baseball cinema — women and minor leaguers — with incredible craft, great humor and strong baseball accumen … (they are) ideal surrogates for 99 percent of viewers.”
Gittell also connects dots to “A League of Their Own” back to Tatum O’Neal’s 1976 role as Amanda Whurlitzer in “The Bad News Bears.” Furthermore, it’s likely no accident that the 1991 hit movie “Thelma and Louise” happened to also connect its two leads again — Davis in “A League of Their Own” and Susan Sarandon to “Bull Durham” as an extension of rebel friends and outlaws, showing women shine in a male-dominated world.
The scene where Davis, as Dottie Hanson, makes that bare-hand catch is about cool power amidst “effortless beauty of a supermodel,” Gittell writes. And the “endless debate” about the film’s climatic scene — did Dottie drop the ball after tagging her sister Kit trying to score the winning run? “(The debate) has helped keep ‘A League of Their Own’ alive in public discourse. For that reason, it matters. The truth, however, is there is no right answer because we’re asking the wrong question. It’s not important whether she intended to drop the ball. What matters is why the film needs her to. Throughout the film, Dottie is conflicted between being a housewife or a ballplayer. To some degree, it’s the conflict within all the players, and the film rightly passes no judgment either way. … Roger Ebert credits this nonjudgmental approach to its women’s director.”
That would be Penny Marshall, who “shows her women characters in a tug-of-war between new images and old values, and so her movie is about transition — about how it felt as a woman suddenly to have roles and freedom.”
Gittell concludes: “The commercial success and the enduring legacy of ‘A League of Their Own’ in a genre once defined solely by its maleness has permanently redefined what a movie — not just a sports movie, and certainly not only a baseball movie — can be.”
A synopsis that Howard Suber might consider pretty super.
In some ways, I wrote the book just so I could have conversations like this one. David, Michael, and I talked for two hours about baseball movies. https://t.co/OtzR3iVYYy
One of the sidebars to Gittell’s book is a list of famous baseball scenes that aren’t in “baseball” movies. No. 2 on his list — after all the baseball stuff that was in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” — are two movies by Buster Keaton, “College” and “The Cameraman.”
Gittell notes that Keaton adored baseball and at the Keaton Production Company, he would order his employees to play a game of baseball every time they were faced with a difficult problem on the set. “If a solution struck in the middle of the game, they’d throw down their mitts and resume shooting.”
In the 1927 “College,” Keaton tries to woo a co-ed by becoming an athlete, and makes a fool of himself trying to play baseball. Including getting his foot stuck on first base.
In 1928, “The Cameraman” is about Keaton assigned to photograph Babe Ruth, and the cameraman arrives at Yankee Stadium only to find out the Yankees are in St. Louis. So Keaton takes the field and mimes playing baseball to play out a childhood fantasy. His athleticism is on full display. It’s very real. He runs the bases “with wild abandon. It was easily the best baseball action every put on film at this point in history — all without a baseball.”
A photo from The Herald Examiner Collection at the Los Angeles Public Library, the caption on file from October 28, 1926 reads: “Remember when Frank ‘Cap’ Dillon cavorted around first base for the Angels, and handled the celestial job of managing them? Well, he’s a golfer now, and says the game is a ‘wow’ compared with baseball. In this picture ‘Cap’, at right, talks over his card with ‘Mike’ Donlin, famous veteran big leaguer.” The background: Frank “Pop” Dillon was a Major League Baseball first baseman with the Pittsburgh Pirates, Detroit Tigers, Baltimore Orioles and Brooklyn Superbas. He was popularly know as “Cap” Dillon. After his playing career ended, Dillon was a player and manager for many years with the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League. He died in 1931.
The theater lobbycard from “The General” includes a photo of, from left, Joe Keaton, Mike Donlan, Jim Farley, Glen Cavender and Tom Nawn, with Buster Keaton under the table.
In the heavy-duty bio of multi-faceted Donlin by esteemed SABR authors Steve Steinberg and Lyle Spatz, the tone is set right away with a Paul Gallico quote before the table of contents:
“You learn eventually that, while there are no villians, there are no heroes either. And until you make the final discovery that there are only human beings, who are there all the more fascinating, you are liable to miss something.”
After that, it’s gravy. Until you also come to the Dixon Weite quote on page 149 that adds: “Celebrity is paradoxically and pathetically the death warrant of a celebrity.”
Donlin was, believe it or not, the most popular ballplayer in New York at one point — that’s Chapter 21, focused on his time with the New York Giants, on John McGraw’s 1905 World Series title team, with a .333 career batting average. Overlapping, in 1908, he is doing a stage show called “Stealing Home,” for three years with his wife, vaudeville comedian Mable Hite.
On the Verdun2’s blog, it says: “I think this is an interesting picture because of the contrast between the two. Hite looks self-assured, Donlin doesn’t. Tells you which is used to being on stage, doesn’t it?”
Having made the switch from baseball to acting, he then goes from stage to the silver screen — including Paramount’s first sound feature, “Warming Up” in 1928.
“Turkey Mike,” as he was called because of his unique way of strutting to the plate (which he hated), became a baseball idol that couldn’t quite measure up in other entertainment venues. “Flickers” were getting popular, and Donlin strutted to a new medium. He starred in a movie about his life in 1915, then, with side trip to teach baseball to recruits during World War I, he migrated to Hollywood, where he found regular employment for much of the silent pictures era. From there, a life as a drinking buddy with John Barrymore does more damage than good. Hite’s early death precipitated much of that lifestyle choice, as he worked his way to Hollywood to see what he could do. Until his 1933 death at 55. Still, Donlin was the most successful of the ballplayers in Hollywood with about 60 roles between 1917 and 1935, many uncredited.
To think it all started with hoping a train from Peoria to California and a stint with the Santa Cruz Sandcrabs in 1899. And it may go on today as the 1949 musical, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” written by Gene Kelly and co-starring Frank Sinatra, is said to be influenced by Donlin’s life story.
How they go in the scorebook
For every lights-camera- action, there is an equal and an opposite reaction, right?
If baseball’s history on film seems to be impactful in the past but lacking any recent traction, or attraction, as patrons are more used to seeing documentaries and less dramatic re-enactment, what can be done?
If possible, refer to how Ron Shelton wrote “The Church of Baseball: The Making of ‘Bull Durham’: Home Runs, Bad Calls, Crazy Fights, Big Swings and a Hit,” as we reviewed here, and see it as more of a cautionary tale about how to make a movie that happened to be about baseball.
As Gittell writes again: “Any institution that’s around for a century and a quarter will have to reinvent itself a few times to remain relevant. That’s the story of cinema and baseball. They’re not dying. They’re just in flux, as they always have been … The baseball film is uniquely positioned to explain America — but its popularity will depend on the mood of the nation. … As a film critic and a lifelong fan of the game, I wrote this book to spend time with my two great loves and deepen my understanding of their union. I wanted to share their secrets.”
Mission accomplished. With “Baseball: The Movie,” we get the personal connection. With “Mike Donlan,” we get more baseball and film, and this feels like the sweet spot for both to get their closeups.
You can look it up: More to ponder
= Referencing back to the April 1, 2024 review on Waite Hoyt’s autobiography, check out this post on his official X account — a story from his book:
One Sunday afternoon, during a minor league game, it was raining like sin. We were leading for once, but the umpires wouldn’t call the game. Mike Donlin, our manager, turned the full force of his invective on the umps, using obscenities I’d never heard before, and began to pitch. pic.twitter.com/iCS4yPwXyJ
== On the topic of “A League of Their Own,” there’s a new credit card commercial with Jennifer Garner bringing back a famous scene that uses nostalgia as a way not to connect with legal loan sharking. We’re not sure this is credible.
== Gittell wrote this story about the movie “Moneyball” for The Decider
== On his Substack account, Gittel has a post: How to write a book (based on the way he has done this).
George Steinbrenner got into a scuffle with the two Dodgers fans in an elevator at the Hyatt Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles during the 1981 World Series.
Broke his land. Left the two lads cowering and running away. The fans were razzing him because his Yankees, after winning the first two games of the series in New York, were just swept in three games at Dodger Stadium and heading back to the Bronx wounded.
At least that’s the story the late Yankees owner took to his grave.
So …….. Did it happen?
United Press International, a major wire service at the time, wrote it up, crediting a source for its information. (The source: Steinbrenner). The New York Times seemed a bit more skeptical when it reported that “cheerful” Steinbrenner “summoned a group of reporters to his hotel suite at 11:30 last night to explain what had happened and display his wounds — a bump on the head, a swollen lip, a right hand with a bandage over his cuts and an apparently broken left hand with a bandage over the cast.”
The news George Steinbrenner makes is only part of the fun. We get more laughs trying to figure out what really happened.
Hotel security and L.A. police said Steinbrenner made no report of the incident.
Maybe it happened exactly the way Steinbrenner told it.
Reporters went to other Yankee pugilists for comment yesterday. At the L.A. airport, Reggie Jackson said, “I don’t know anything about it. Don’t ask me.” Relief pitcher Rich Gossage, who sprained his thumb in a clubhouse scuffle two seasons ago, laughed and said of Steinbrenner’s broken hand in its cast, “George wouldn’t punch anyone . . . He must have caught it in an elevator.”
In 2004, the New York Times’ Murray Chass revisited it. Again with a lack of conviction, since there were no convictions:
Joe Louis? Rocky Marciano? Sugar Ray Robinson? They apparently had nothing on Steinbrenner.
Steinbrenner, 51 years old at the time, said that in rapid succession he threw three punches — two rights and a left. Down went the first miscreant; down went the second.
Muhammad Ali? He might have stung like a bee, but Steinbrenner said he swung a sledgehammer.
”I clocked them,” Steinbrenner told reporters just before midnight in a news conference he called in his hotel suite. ”There are two guys in this town looking for their teeth and two guys who will probably sue me.”
Bizarre as it might have been, the story of the fight remains part of the lore of the Steinbrenner years. What other owner could have engaged in such an episode? Peter O’Malley? Carl Pohlad? Bud Selig? Marge Schott?
No, this is one of those things that makes Steinbrenner special. He won’t be around forever, but this tale will be.
Steinbrenner died in 2010 at age 80. Still the undisputed champion of owner brawls during a World Series.
Crack open this collection of 18 stories that happened during baseball’s “glory” time of October, this would have been the time for a new revelation: The guys who did it have fessed up. The hotel security camera footage has been revealed. Hal Steinbrenner unsealed his father’s confessions that it was all a ruse — there was an elevator malfunction and he tried to punch himself out of the roof because he was claustrophobic but it just caused more damage.
Alas, this story isn’t included. A swing-and-a-missed opportunity.
But it’s not like it’s going away. During the 2023 World Series, a site called the BroBible in a piece by someone named deputy editor Connor Toole retooled it.
“If the entire thing was, in fact, an elaborate ruse, it didn’t have the intended effect, as the Yankees ended up losing the World Series by falling to the Dodgers in Game 6.”
The lede was buried. Down went Steinbrenner. Down went the Yankees. The Boss’ split lip didn’t help resolve this Split Season mess.
Nevertheless, there was some other things worth revisiting.
Mike Andrews, Oakland A’s reserve second baseman, 1973 World Series, when owner Charlie Finley tried to get his medical team to declare him unfit for duty (after he made a couple of costly errors during an extra-inning lost), and the team threatened to boycott the rest of the series against the Mets.
Rube Marquard, the Brooklyn Robins pitcher busted for trying to scalp tickets before Game 4 of the 1920 World Series. Then his wife divorced him. He still made it into Baseball’s Hall of Fame with a record of 201-177 and 3.08 ERA as “probably the worst starting pitcher” ever allowed into Cooperstown according to Bill James, most of his fame based on three very good years for the New York Giants from 1911 to ’13, and a 19-win season for Brooklyn.
Tom Browning, who disappeared during Game 2 of the 1990 World Series when Cincinnati Reds manager Lou Pinella went looking for him as a game was going into extra innings. Browning’s wife went into labor. He left the park without telling anyone. The team sent word through the TV broadcast that he was needed back as the game was going long.
Bill Bevens, the New York Yankees pitcher who was one out from a no-hitter in Game 4 of the 1947 World Series against the Brooklyn Dodgers, lost it, pitched 2 2/3 more inning of relief in Game 7 and never pitched another game again because of a bad arm.
Brian Doyle, not the Yankees’ 1978 World Series MVP in their win over the Dodgers, but he could have been based on his two three-hit games in Games 5 and 6, finishing the series with a .438 average, and never hit .200 in a season after that.
And on, and on …
How it goes in the scorebook
Lots of great topic ideas. Not a lot of fulfilling execution.Only seven people were interviewed for this … and a couple, it seems, just to get blurbs.
There’s also a lot of extraneous background material on the Series itself before we get to the prime suspect of the chapter. Some of it is great to know. But too many details muck things up. Publishers’ Weekly backs this up: “Though the anecdotes occasionally amuse, they’re bogged down by a surfeit of background. Only die-hard baseball fans need apply.”
Circle back in October and maybe this will feel more relevant.
For now, kinda trivial. Unless you got new info on Steinbrenner and the two dudes from L.A. …
Tom Hoffarth's The Drill: More Farther Off the Wall 