100 Things Dodgers Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die (29 page)

85. The O'Malleys Sell

You don't surrender a half-century of investment in a baseball team lightly, and Peter O'Malley didn't. His decision to sell the Dodgers reflected a confluence of hard realities.

The first was personal—or familial. Between the two of them, O'Malley and his sister Terry O'Malley Seidler had 13 children. Approaching retirement age, the O'Malleys considered what the future held for their descendants. A baseball franchise does not divide easily into a baker's dozen—especially when estate taxes could carve up roughly half the value. The sale parlayed the team into a more fluid, manageable asset.

Though the O'Malleys could have talked themselves into continuing as owners, the changing face of baseball began sapping them of incentive. By 1997, the O'Malleys were the one of a few remaining family owners of a major league baseball team. With salaries rising, they had to compete with corporations for whom baseball was only a part of the whole—teams could be used as loss leaders. Further, baseball's contract with the players' union, following the 1994–95 labor dispute that had shut down the game, called for more extensive revenue sharing, which meant the Dodgers would be further subsidizing other teams. Under Bud Selig, the then-Milwaukee Brewers owner who became acting baseball commissioner in 1992, small-market teams were gaining more power over large-market teams like the Dodgers.

However, even the shifting economic playing field was not a sole determining factor. It took another dose of cold water to push O'Malley into the sale. Los Angeles found itself without a National Football League franchise after the Raiders moved back to Oakland in 1995. That August, Mayor Richard Riordan asked O'Malley to lead the effort to bring the NFL back to the city, and O'Malley was happy to oblige. A football stadium built on the land surrounding Dodger Stadium emerged as a viable possibility to draw a team, diversify the family business and attract new business partners for the O'Malleys.

A year later, after vigorous investment in research, the city asked O'Malley to abandon his efforts and support the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum's bid to be the home of the team. O'Malley assented reluctantly, but his disappointment by his own admission was palpable. (In a well-researched piece, T.J. Simers of the
Los Angeles Times
wrote that power brokers in Los Angeles had contrived a quid pro quo deal in which they exchanged support for the Coliseum and the proposed downtown basketball arena that would become Staples Center, and O'Malley had been “caught in the middle.”)

With the signs discouraging on multiple fronts, O'Malley decided it was time to sell.

There were no illusions about the suitor O'Malley settled on: Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. would use the Dodgers as a means to an end, as a flagship team whose games would be televised by a sports network intended to rival ESPN and boost the Murdoch media empire. Sallie Hofmeister of the
Times
noted that the $311 million outlay “says more about Hollywood than about baseball.... The purchase price, about double the going rate in major league baseball, is so far out of the ballpark that it's highly unlikely the team will make money.” That did not suggest a brighter immediate future for the talent on the field at Dodger Stadium.

Of course, when the sale was announced, attention focused not on who was coming in, but who was going out.

“There's a very empty feeling in my house tonight,” Vin Scully told Mike DiGiovanna of the
Times,
“and there will be for a long time to come. There's a feeling of a definite loss, almost like a death in the family.”

Such harsh realities had entered the lives of every Dodgers player, employee, and fan. Wrote Ross Newhan and Michael Hiltzik of the
Times
: “The vote puts one of baseball's most storied ballclubs in the hands of one of the world's most unsentimental and pragmatic businessmen.” Within months, Mike Piazza was traded, and the O'Malley era was long gone.

Years later, there would be a postscript. As the turmoil-filled McCourt ownership neared an end in 2012, O'Malley reentered the fray as a partner in a bid to acquire the team. While that bid didn't reach fruition, his sons Kevin and Brian and nephews Peter and Tom Seidler formed a group that successfully purchased the San Diego Padres, bringing the family back into the ownership game.

 

 

 

86. In the Booth: Solo Farewell

On the October night the Dodgers lost the National League Championship Series in 2004, the team's No. 2 announcer, Ross Porter, bid an otherwise uneventful good-bye to his radio audience. Bob Keisser of the
Long Beach Press-Telegram
reported a week earlier that the Dodgers had decided not to renew Porter's contract, but team executive Lon Rosen, hired earlier that year, 28 seasons after Porter joined the Dodgers, denied the report.

Two weeks later, the team issued a press release: “The English-language broadcast booth for the National League West champion Los Angeles Dodgers will get a makeover for 2005. Announcers Vin Scully and Rick Monday will return, along with a new play-by-play announcer and a baseball analyst, the Dodgers announced today. The Dodgers also announced that Ross Porter will not rejoin the broadcast team next season.”

That, in its entirety, constituted the Dodgers' farewell to Porter. The Oklahoma native debuted in 1977 as the No. 3 play-by-play man behind Scully and Jerry Doggett, and was soon branded as a good-natured announcer who nonetheless relied on arcane statistics as a crutch to get through a broadcast. The label was an exaggeration from the outset, but over time, Porter sincerely endeared himself to numerous fans with his easygoing enthusiasm and fundamentally sound call of the game. And just like that, the Dodgers cast him aside. He deserved a ceremony at Dodger Stadium, and he didn't even get to say good-bye on the air.

That wasn't the only news buried in Dodgers fine print. The team also announced that beginning in 2005, the backup announcers to Scully would work as a two-man team of play-by-play/analyst. Working solo in the booth had been a tradition ever since Red Barber came to Brooklyn in 1939. Barber, Scully, Connie Desmond, Jerry Doggett, Don Drysdale, Monday, and Porter had bonded with listeners by talking directly to them, one-on-one. That setup was going the way of the slide rule long before the Dodgers jettisoned it (with Scully grandfathered as a solo act), but it had lost none of its usefulness. Extra people in the booth have a way of distancing the audience from the game, and the insights of all but a few color commentators rarely amount to much.

Porter, interestingly, was open to sharing the mike. “Don Drysdale joined the Dodgers' broadcasting team in 1988,” Porter said in an interview. “Previously, he had announced for the Expos, Rangers, Angels, White Sox, and ABC. On the first day of the '88 exhibition season, Don joined me in the booth at Vero Beach, and shortly before the game began, he said, ‘I've not worked alone on the air. I would feel more comfortable if I could chat with you. Is that okay?'

“It was fine with me. I was used to working with an analyst on football and basketball broadcasts and telecasts, and frankly, liked chatting with someone who was knowledgeable about the sport and game. Don and I traded several comments on the air in the top of the first inning. When we went to commercial, the phone in our booth rang. Don was told to pick it up. It was Peter O'Malley. He told Don it was to be a one-voice broadcast. After the game, an irritated Drysdale went to Peter's office at Dodgertown. They were longtime friends so Don didn't hold back. He said, ‘Peter, are you telling me that everybody else in baseball is wrong, and you are right about having only one voice on the air at a time?' Peter said, ‘Don, that is the way we do it here.' Two Dodgers broadcasters speaking to each other on the air for the first time in 50 years lasted a grand total of...half an inning.”

The two-man booth brought the upbeat Charley Steiner in a pairing with either Monday or Steve Lyons on broadcasts, before Steiner and Monday moved to radio and Lyons joined newcomer Eric Collins on the televised games that Scully didn't handle. There's no doubt that plenty of fun is being had. But though nothing could ever compare to Scully's eventual departure, something special was lost in October 2004. A special man, and a special concept.

 

 

Jaime Jarrín

At the start of 1955, the Dodgers were in Brooklyn, and Jaime Jarrín was in Quito, covering the National Congress of Ecuador. Four years later, the Dodgers were in Los Angeles, and Jarrín was broadcasting their games on the radio.

Jarrín arrived in Los Angeles on a permanent resident visa that June, and worked in a factory until a part-time job opened up at the city's only Spanish radio station, KWKW. He made fast progress, and by the time the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958, Jarrín was KWKW's news and sports director.

They didn't play much baseball in Quito, but Jarrín had become a fan in California, going to see the minor league Hollywood Stars and Los Angeles Angels. Still, when KWKW's owner, William Beaton, announced that the L.A.-bound Dodgers had made a deal to broadcast their games in Spanish, Jarrín didn't consider himself an automatic choice.

“He said they needed two announcers,” Jarrín would later tell baseball writer Eric Enders, “and looking at me, he said, ‘I want you to be one of the announcers.' I said, ‘Mr. Beaton, thank you very much, but I think I'm not ready to be in front of the microphone and call a game.' I was already doing boxing every Thursday night, and I was very successful doing boxing.

“He said, ‘You know, you have talent for doing sports,' and I said, ‘Yes, I know, but give me some time.' He said, ‘Okay, but next year I want you to be with the Dodgers.' So he took me to meet Mr. Walter O'Malley, and by 1959 I was ready, and I was hired.”

Half a century later (including a streak of more than 4,000 consecutive games from 1962–1984), nearly two decades after a life-threatening car accident and 15 years after the Baseball Hall of Fame honored him with the Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasters, the beloved Jarrín was still broadcasting Dodgers baseball for his fans.

87. International Goodwill

On the first day of November in 1956, before the start of an exhibition game in Hiroshima, Japan, the visiting Dodgers joined in the commemoration of a plaque at the entrance of the city's baseball stadium. “We dedicate this visit in memory of those baseball fans and others who died by atomic action on August 6, 1945,” it read. “May their souls rest in peace and with God's help and man's resolution peace will prevail forever, amen.”

Days earlier on the Dodgers' Japanese voyage, 19-year-old Waseda University student Akihiro Ikuhara had seen the team when they passed through Tokyo. “Gil Hodges, Roy Campanella, Duke Snider—those were awfully big names,” he would tell Dwight Chapin of the
Los Angeles Times
. “I couldn't believe I was seeing them.”

Ten years later, in the fall of 1966, when the Dodgers returned to Japan for their second team trip, Ikuhara, known as “Ike,” was in their employ. Coach of the Asia University baseball team beginning at age 24, Ikuhara had cajoled leading Japanese sportswriter Sotaro Suzuki a couple years earlier into writing Walter O'Malley about the possibility of Ike going to the U.S. In the spring of 1965, Ikuhara found himself in Dodgertown, bereft of any knowledge of English but filled with interest in American baseball. He carved out a place for himself, and at the end of spring training, was invited to join the Dodgers' minor league team in Spokane.

 

 

Akihiro “Ike” Ikuhara served as assistant to Dodgers president Peter O'Malley and was actively involved in the Dodgers' numerous international, amateur, and professional baseball exchanges. Ikuhara was posthumously inducted into the Japan Baseball Hall of Fame in 2002. Photo courtesy of www.walteromalley.com. All rights reserved.

 

Ike started in the clubhouse but quickly moved up to the front office—after all, that's often the way in the minors, where it's all hands on deck. He worked closely alongside Peter O'Malley, who was Spokane's general manager at the time. After traveling back to Japan with the Dodgers, Ikuhara stayed with O'Malley, who was moving to Dodger Stadium as vice-president of operations, and served in almost every imaginable capacity: scouting, accounting, ticketing, minor league operations, concessions, and public relations. He served as a commentator for Fuji Television's broadcasts of the World Series from 1981–1986.

In the late '80s and early '90s, Ike traveled to Korea, Taiwan, Russia, and Nicaragua on Dodgers goodwill missions. That last phrase can be taken literally. The Dodgers certainly profited from their relationships with nations on every continent. Their actions paved the way for players like Hideo Nomo, Chan Ho Park, and Hong-Chih Kuo to represent their countries in Major League Baseball. The team's facilities in countries around the globe, particularly in Latin America, created an alternate farm system for young talent that directly fed the Dodgers' success. Dodger Stadium hosted baseball's modern-day entry into the Olympics, as a demonstration sport in 1984. And the team has certainly been known to sell a cap or two overseas with the “LA” insignia embossed in front.

All that being said, many different people outside the borders of the United States have testified to the personal delight and emotional rewards they shared with so many members of the Dodgers family (most notably the O'Malleys and Tommy Lasorda) throughout the decades, rewards that continued in 2008 with the Dodgers' trip to China. At some point, baseball does stop being a commercial or competitive enterprise and becomes...a meeting place, an international haven that encourages real friendship in an age that might seem too cynical for such possibilities. Goodwill, for sure.

Oh, and lots of people around the world just like the game.

Akihiro “Ike” Ikuhara died of cancer in 1992, having spent the final 25 years of his life living in Southern California and working for the Dodgers. Posthumously, he was inducted into the Japan Baseball Hall of Fame.

“No matter where I live or what I do, I want to work for the Dodgers,” he told Chapin in 1969. “The main people I have to thank are Mr. Suzuki and the O'Malleys. And as far as the O'Malleys go, I just can never repay them, except to do what I can in whatever way I can for the team.”

 

 

Campo Las Palmas

The Dodgers' relationship with the Dominican Republic dates back to 1948, when the team held spring training there. Numerous players, such as Manny Mota and Pedro Guerrero, later emigrated from the 18,000-square mile country, separated from South America by the Caribbean Sea.

In 1986, after team vice president Ralph Avila purchased 50 acres of land for the Dodgers in the small town of Guerra (east of the capital Santo Domingo) at Peter O'Malley's urging, the Dodgers began construction on Campo Las Palmas, which would open the following year and become one of the top baseball training facilities in the world, featuring multiple baseball fields, batting cages, weight training areas and on-campus dining and housing. As an international baseball academy, it was a pioneer.

Though baseball instruction is obviously a main part of the agenda, players at Campo Las Palmas are classroom students five days a week, studying academic subjects including English as well as how to prepare for cultural situations they might face in the United States. Much of the food they eat is grown on the idyllic property itself. It's not exactly freeway close to Los Angeles, but in many ways, a trip to check out Campo Las Palmas would be an unforgettable experience for a Dodgers fan.

 

 

 

 

Dodgers manager Leo Durocher and Dodgers president Branch Rickey don oversized hats at Hotel Jaragua in the Dominican Republic during spring training activities in Cuidad Trujillo, D.R. in 1948. Photo by Barney Stein. All rights reserved.