The Old Ball Game

ur beloved Los Angeles Dodgers began their celebration of 50 glorious years in California by abandoning their longtime spring-training home in Florida in favor of a glitzy new complex in Arizona, traversing a geographical labyrinth that’s as confusing as everything else surrounding the team. Yes, Dodgertown had developed a sort of ghost-town pallor, and, yes, most of the East Coast fan base is either dead or unable to travel

outside more than a 50-mile radius. I, like many fans, have already blocked off 10 Arizona days in March so I can attend my first spring wearing the blue; I won’t miss Dodgertown very much, especially because I never got to go there. Still, this typically hazy bait-and-switch gave an ignominious send-off to our team’s very own field of dreams: A classy Vin Scully speech, a little Tommy Lasorda shuck-and-jive, some platitudes from management, and then Joe Torre was off to China with the B-list players while the A-listers went to play the Milwaukee Brewers in Maryvale.

Then came a late-spring exhibition against the Red Sox in the Coliseum, the Dodgers’ first L.A. home, where the home-run alleys were something like 75 feet away from home plate. Vinnie told a lot of stories about the old days, while over on the radio, Charlie Steiner and Rick Monday blathered on about whether or not players still get Opening Day butterflies. Meanwhile, fights broke out in the stands and fans waited for hours for team-operated free buses to take them back to the Dodger Stadium parking lot. At last, Opening Day arrived. Scully unleashed another beautiful torrent of his seemingly inexhaustible supply of golden words, and then former Dodgers old and middle-aged came trotting out of all corners of the Stadium. This ceremony, all the team’s paid cheerleaders agreed, was classy beyond measure, even if it did involve Eric Karros. Year 50 was upon us. And Dodger management won’t let us forget it.

Every televised game, we have to watch Lasorda and the Blue Man Group blow noisemakers during commercials. We have to see pasty dudes recount their memories of going to the ballpark with their dads, and we have to continually hear the “when did you fall in love with baseball?” jingle, which isn’t good enough for an Inland Empire car dealership, much less for one of professional sports’ most venerated franchises. All professional baseball is built on a multi-billion-dollar foundation of half-remembered childhood memories, but even given that reality, the Dodgers have crafted a silly, if not repulsive, carnival of gauzy manufactured nostalgia. I’ll say it if no one else will. The Dodgers’ 50th anniversary in Los Angeles celebration is irretrievably lame.

Though I’ve spent half of my adult life, it seems, at Dodger Stadium, when I was a kid, I saw the Padres play live more often than the Dodgers. But the Blue was always first in my thoughts, and I treasure the Dodgers more than most things in the world. Pretty much my entire childhood involved floating on a raft in my parents’ pool in Phoenix, listening to Vinnie, Ross Porter, and Jerry Doggett narrate one of the team’s most glorious eras. Because of their announcers’ Iliad-like efforts, the Dodgers existed almost purely in my imagination.

My bedroom walls were dominated by two things: a huge poster of Heather Thomas with shaving cream over her nipples, and a framed LeRoy Neiman print of my favorite player, Steve Garvey. My taste in celebrity women was as bad as my taste in ballplayers. At the time, Garvey, a durable lineup-filler with better-than-average power, was considered one of the best first basemen who ever put on a uniform, a Hall of Fame lock. Now, he’s mostly remembered as a serial philanderer who drew more palimony suits than he did walks. My phony hero, a quintessential Dodger of his time, had big fat feet of clay, so I’m very skeptical of any invocation of “Dodger tradition.” I always wonder: What are they trying to sell us this time?

Really, the 50th anniversary celebration isn’t celebrating all the team’s five decades in L.A. It mostly celebrates the Dodgers first 30 years, you know, when they won all those championships, the years of Sandy Koufax, the epic battles against Reggie Jackson and the forces of evil, Fernandomania, Orel Hershiser’s shutout-inning streak, and the single greatest moment in baseball history, Kirk Gibson’s game-winning home run in Game One of the 1988 World Series. After that, the highlight reels mostly go dark. Rent-a-player Steve Finley cracks a grand slam to launch the Dodgers into the 2004 playoffs, where they lose in the first round to the Cardinals. In 2006, the team hits four miraculous homers in a row to catch the Padres, and then Nomar wins it in extra innings. This again inspires the team toward the playoffs, where they’re swept by the Mets.

There’s a reason that Dodger Blues, the funniest baseball website in existence, hasn’t yet reset its “Last Great Dodger Moment” clock, which starts after Gibson’s homer. For the last 20 years, we’ve had little to commemorate. We don’t hear a lot of talk on the commercials about the darkness of the 1990s, when Fox owned our souls and our team, when management shipped Mike Piazza to the Marlins for no good reason, when we were forced to root for surly, overpaid jerks like Gary Sheffield, Raul Mondesi, and Kevin Brown. In the world of sports, the Dodgers became a petty afterthought, a faceless corporate tool of a team, a pale simulacrum of what they’d once represented.

Then again, some of us realized, what they’d “once represented” was a bit of a snow job itself. A recent HBO documentary details how the team abandoned Brooklyn when Robert Moses wouldn’t give Walter O’Malley a prime piece of real estate, and about how there are still thousands if not millions of graying East Coast men with thick accents who still weep at the loss of their beloved bums. The movie also reminds us that O’Malley, a lifelong racist, sold Jackie Robinson to the Giants, for pity’s sake, because Jackie, no longer content to just endure the foul taunts of Cincinnati hicks, had started to race-agitate by daring to talk the talk of the civil-rights movement.

That little detail also calls to mind the specter of Ted Koppel’s 1987 Nightline

interview with Dodger GM Al Campanis. Koppel asked why there weren’t any African-American managers or general managers. Campanis responded that they lacked certain “necessities.” He continued: “They are outstanding athletes, very God-gifted and wonderful people … . They are gifted with great musculature and various other things. They are very fleet-of-foot, and this is why there are a number of black ballplayers in the major leagues.” You’re not seeing that replayed in this year’s highlight reels.

Even the Dodgers’ magnificent Chavez Ravine temple is built on cruel, faulty

history. When the city gave the O’Malleys a sweetheart deal, it also doomed a

bucolic community of thousands, forcing the cops to drag old Mexican ladies out of their homes and jailing them so their shantytown could get sold to the Dodgers. The creation of Dodger Stadium is one of American history’s great tragedies of urban renewal, sad enough to inspire a book of photographs, a PBS documentary, an endlessly pretentious Heather Woodbury one-woman show, and a Ry Cooder album, in which Cooder condemns the Dodgers for helping to create “a town that’s flat ... a street that’s tame.”

Speaking of real estate, because when you speak honestly about the Dodgers, you always must, it’s time to discuss the team’s current owner, Frank McCourt, a New England-based Trump manqué, referred to by the L.A. Times’ always-bilious T.J. Simers as the “Boston Parking-Lot Attendant.” When McCourt bought the team in 2004, many suspected he didn’t have the credit to support his ownership beyond two or three years. He got this blistering welcome from Simers: “Few in this town have talked the talk more and walked the walk less. McCourt is strong on vision. Doing is his problem. Cooperative is not a word often associated with the man. For years he has presented countless slide shows with his vision of the New Boston on the other side of the Fort Point Channel. No other plan was ever grand enough for McCourt. He was going to buy the Red Sox. He was going to build a new Fenway on the waterfront. Instead, 25 years after McCourt bought his South Boston land from a bankrupt Penn Central, what we have down there is acres of parking lots.”

McCourt arrived and immediately began praising the team’s loyal fan base and telling them that he’d arrived to restore the Dodgers to their former glory. It hasn’t quite worked yet. McCourt’s tenure has been largely distinguished by the continual dismissal of long-serving front-office executives, by the trendy hiring and speedy firing of hotshot young general manager Paul DePodesta, and by the ludicrously wasteful free-agent signings perpetrated by Ned Colletti, DePodesta’s incompetent successor. On the field, McCourt’s team has alternated catching moderate lightning in a bottle and staging complete clusterfuck meltdowns. The team made the playoffs in 2004 despite manager Jim Tracy’s arrogant intransigence, and then completely tanked in 2005 because of it; in 2006 Grady Little chewed his cud while his team squeaked into a Wild Card slot, and in 2007, he wandered the dugout cluelessly while his team faded in August and washed-up old grouch outfielder Luis Gonzalez waged a public media war with Matt Kemp, one of the team’s most exciting prospects in decades.

Of course, all baseball teams have a history of bad trades – though few as bad as the 1993 swap of Pedro Martinez for Delino DeShields – and in the age of 24-hour-a-day blog-based sabermetric lineup analysis, perhaps we know more about management vagaries than is healthy for us. We may not like the fact that the Dodgers have only won one playoff contest (a complete game thrown by a journeyman pitcher with syphilis) in the last 20 years, but them’s the breaks. Who knows if an owner besides McCourt would have done it better?

What we do know about McCourt is this: He replaced all the seats in Dodger Stadium, restoring the seating arrangement to its original early-’60s pastels. That’s good. He bumped back longtime season-ticket holders 10 rows, installing luxury premium field boxes with padded cushions for the really high rollers. That’s not so good. He brought Canter’s Deli in as a concessionaire on the field level, but the loge level has to suffer Carl’s Jr. and CPK cardboard. He’s raised ticket prices, and now parking costs $15 for the privilege of being waved around a maze by dazed-looking high-school dropouts. Some fans don’t feel quite so loved. Here’s Patty Hayes, quoted by T.J. Simers on Opening Day 2007: “I complained to a Dodger executive about increased prices and decreased benefits (a while back) and said the Dodgers appear to no longer appreciate season-ticket holders. He said, ‘Oh, we appreciate you, we just don’t show it.’ I had ample time to contemplate the truth of that statement during my 1 hour and 50 minute exit from preferred parking on opening day.”

A lot of Dodger fans still feel that way, even as the team relentlessly markets its legacy to us this year. On April 24, McCourt announced plans for the most significant real-estate development in the Ravine since the great bulldozing of 1959. The “new” Dodger Stadium will include, according to team propaganda, “Dodger Way,” a “dramatic, new tree-lined entrance” that “will lead to a beautifully landscaped grand plaza where fans can gather beyond center field. The plaza will connect to a modern, bustling promenade that features restaurants, shops and the Dodger Experience museum showcasing the history of the Dodgers in an interactive setting.” There’s also the “Green Necklace,” which is also the name of a less-well-known 1940s superhero.

Please don’t moan too loudly at the previous joke as I let the Dodgers’ always-busy PR department describe The Green Necklace: “The vibrant street setting of Dodger Way links to a beautiful perimeter around Dodger Stadium, enabling fans to walk around the park, outdoors yet inside the stadium gates. This Green Necklace will transform acres of parking lots into a landscaped outdoor walkway connecting the plaza and promenade to the rest of the ballpark.”

Part of me thinks, well, the Stadium is getting long in the tooth, and the scale drawings of the new park look really appealing. Another, somewhat larger part thinks, what the hell is McCourt trying to pull now? In the promotional video to promote the Stadium expansion, Vin Scully conveniently reminds us that the Dodgers have won more pennants and more championships than any other in the last 50 years, and that Dodger Stadium has remained “a house of excellence” and a “home filled with powerful personal memories.”

From there, it’s a quick transition to the sell-job. “The McCourts love Dodger Stadium,” the narration goes. “They care about it. They respect history and tradition.” The McCourts are making this rehab commitment, “this private investment,” to “preserve what we all love about Dodger Stadium while enhancing the fan experience.”

I’m sure that they’re in no way concerned about the yearlong environmental and public review process for the plan. There’s no possible way that the “50th anniversary celebration” that they’ve almost arbitrarily shoved down our throats is actually a PR cover for a big-league-sized real estate transaction. The Dodgers would never do that to their fans.

Amidst all my complaining about hypocrisy and artifice, I’ve neglected to mention that the Dodgers currently field an entertaining and exciting team. Even though fans still cheer loudest for Nomar, because that’s who’s been oversold to them on the rare days when he’s not on the DL, the team has rarely had a core of young players as talented and cool as Russell Martin, Matt Kemp, James Loney, and Andre Ethier, among others. They’re full of personality and are fun to watch.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to my first game of the season, a 6-4 loss against the Diamondbacks, an excellent team with no tradition whatsoever. My friend Jerod, an East Coaster who, for some reason, has suddenly become a huge Dodgers junkie, kept me company as we skipped around the one-third empty Loge section. I had a memorable time for a couple of reasons, none of which had to do with beach balls or The Wave. First, we sat in front of a fat, bearded guy who, while we watched, consumed an entire fennel bulb. It’s not a day at the old ballpark if you don’t hang out with an eccentric forebear. Second, late in the game, rookie pitcher Cory Wade, just called up from AA, plunked D’Backs shortstop Stephen Drew in the head. Drew jawed at Wade as he grumbled down the baseline. Wade turned toward Drew, grabbed his own crotch, and said, “Suck my dick.” This happened in the same inning that Joe Torre and Jeff Kent got tossed for arguing a bad umpire call from the previous inning. “Holy shit,” Jerod said. “This is awesome! The Dodgers are the Charlestown Chiefs!”

We want to see our team as the gritty, hilarious bad-asses from Slap Shot, not as some sepia-toned billboard for fading memories. As I write this, the Dodgers are just bidding farewell to an enjoyable eight-game winning streak. They did it without Nomar, without sentiment, without fake memories, and without a land grab. Despite their racist, eminent-domain-and-palimony strewn past, capped by 20 years of incessant choking, I love this team. If you can wade through the murk of endless anniversary B.S., the Dodgers are still playing baseball.