1
After the brilliant pellucid sky that sheltered Siloam Springs, the yellow air of Los Angeles looked as oppressive as a shroud. I would not propose a flight west into Los Angeles as an advertisement for America. Meadows grow into spiny mountains, which flatten to desert. Finally, under an urban pall, the city appears.
Most of Wally Moon’s Golden Eagles see Siloam Springs as a pretty place. Yet most would give such things as they possess to drive to Tulsa and then fly into the smog of Southern California.
Professionally, their judgment is correct. They are ball players. Across the two decades since the Dodgers left Brooklyn, a new team, and indeed a new style, have been born at Los Angeles. Sandy Koufax would not agree. Andy Messersmith did not agree. Johnny Bench might or might not argue. But for most athletes, Los Angeles is the place to play ball.
Dodger Stadium is a triumph of baseball design. The grass is real. The shape proclaims baseball. Dodger Stadium is not a multipurpose arena. It is a ball park. The Dodgers train in luxury at Vero Beach, Florida, and then repair by the team’s private Boeing 720 to a California season in the sun. Then they are coached, urged, paid, cajoled, demanded, begged to finish ahead of the Cincinnati Reds.
As a business, the Dodgers need to draw 2,100,000 admissions per season to break even. Running a team that grandly is a naked arrogance in baseball. Many owners have to attract only one million fans. But night after night the Dodgers draw their big crowds. Year after year the ledgers smile in black. If one had limitless capital, perfect investment advice and, implausibly, caught the Dodger management evaluating its franchise at a figure lower than the national debt, the Los Angeles Dodgers would be the best of teams to buy.
Driving east from Beverly Hills down Sunset Boulevard one sees decline. The mansions fade. The Strip appears. Clubs like The Body Shop advertise naked dancers. The street narrows. Laundromats alternate with small, sad bars. Mercedeses no longer clog the lanes. Then following a too-small sign, one turns left, toward 1000 Elysian Park Avenue. Elysium. The fields of praise. You drive past batteries of toll-takers, closed because it is twelve hours before game time, and the Dodger parking lots appear, multileveled parking so that, in the California manner, you expend minimal leather and effort to reach your seat. Traffic lights direct you in the lot. The private lot of the Los Angeles Dodgers has its own traffic lights, even as Times Square.
When you park at the so-called “office level,” you notice that, unlike Times Square, the lot is clean. Wandering the Schlossgarten in Stuttgart once I noticed similar cleanliness. “Of course,” my companion said. “In Germany the penalty for littering is execution.” In Los Angeles the Dodgers have to hire platoons of sanitation men to work this Württemberg-Baden effect. It is a matter of both style and extravagance that they do.
Troughs of flowers near the entrance suggest gaiety. A Baseballfest. Do people go to Dodger Stadium to behold flowers? Not primarily, but people have stayed away from other ball parks because of ambient filth.
The man who owns the Dodgers did not like The Boys of Summer, a book I wrote celebrating baseball, life, the courage to be new and certain men who spent a decade winning pennants for the Dodgers. A Los Angeles morning had broken summery and dense, light smog hovering under a mustard sky, after a night when the Dodgers defeated the Cincinnati Reds, 5 to 0. Walter Francis O’Malley, a compelling seventy-three-year-old paterfamilias who mixes Quaker parsimony, pagan ferocity and Irish-Catholic charm, looked up darkly from sheaves of correspondence. He did not say, “Hello.” He did not say, “How are you?” Instead, he growled in a Tammany bass, “This time are you going to write something positive?”
At such moments, I long to utter an infinite retort, at once deflating the critic and placing my published work beyond criticism lower than Ruskin’s. But I am not any good at that. I am good at making a plodding response and, later, getting angry.
“It sold some copies,” I said.
O’Malley waved his cigar as though it were a scepter. “Several stories involving Fresco Thompson and Buzzy Bavasi were unfortunate.”
“They came off tape. I still have the tape. There aren’t any eighteen-minute gaps.”
“They were so unfortunate,” O’Malley said, “that I asked my son Peter what in the world has gotten into our Brooklyn friend.”
Ah, but we argued long ago in Brooklyn, too. O’Malley is a consistent man and he has consistently believed that the first function of the sporting press is to sell tickets to Dodger games. I looked out a window. O’Malley reigns in an office far down the left-field line. Unlike the couple in Pine Bluff, he does not have to hurry out to guard his windows. Jimmie Foxx, mightiest of righthanded sluggers, could not have driven a ball within thirty yards of Walter’s windows.
The stadium seats are color-keyed. That means your ticket comes in the same shade as your seat. Blue is fair and green is good and red is splendid and yellow suggests not cowardice, but fame. The movie people vie for yellow tickets. Beyond all that lies Elysium, for the honored few: box seats, closed-in with Herculite, surrounding home plate just below field level.
One evening Elizabeth Taylor sat behind home plate. Décolletage cut deeply. “Wow,” said John Roseboro, the catcher, in an earnest pre-game conference at the mound.
“I’ll take care of you, buddy,” said Don Drysdale, the pitcher.
Drysdale’s first pitch that night was a medium-speed fast ball, thrown fifteen feet above Roseboro’s head. The catcher sighed and trotted toward the backstop. Ms. Taylor sat perhaps a foot beneath him. John Roseboro had an extraordinary amount of difficulty picking up the ball. According to current baseball lore, Ms. Taylor is a true brunette.
That was the 1960s. This morning, of the ’70s, Dodger Stadium lay empty. The aisles and seats had been swept clear of litter and gum, deposited by 52,469 customers the night before. Toward the right lay the ball field, green and white and a reddish tan. To the left, from O’Malley’s office, lay hills that had been barren. They are irrigated and showed the green of watered pines.
“What a pleasant office you have,” I said.
“Not so pleasant,” O’Malley said. “Outside my window there’s a grounds keeper standing in center field with a hose, and I wonder, if he’s going to use a hose, why the hell did I put $600,000 into an underground sprinkler system?”
“Why does he use a hose?”
“Because we brought him out from Brooklyn and he used a hose there,” the owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers announced, impatiently.
O’Malley and I go back four decades, not only to a single borough, but to a single neighborhood and to a single private school, long since destroyed by urban blight. “You know,” O’Malley said, mingling sentiment and blarney, “I take pride in being the man who handed you a diploma when you graduated from Froebel Academy. You certainly looked at things more positively then.”
Like Joseph Kennedy, or FDR, he is an indefatigable one-upman. Like them he is a master of his trade. That trade is major league baseball.
“You want to know about our success out here,” O’Malley said. “Able to afford a private plane; our training complex at Vero doing so well. First, we’re not a syndicate. The Dodgers are a family corporation. Second, we don’t have absentee ownership. Third, the chairman of the board, with whom you’re sitting and who isn’t getting any younger, comes to work at 8:30 on the morning after a night game. When the board chairman shows up that early, the rest of the staff tends to do the same.”
O’Malley approaches me with suspicion because I write, as I approach him carefully because he criticizes. Still, Fred Claire, the Dodger Vice President for Public Relations, set up a schedule of interviews which taxed my ability to assimilate and caused one cassette recorder to expire.
Like the International Business Machines corporation, the Los Angeles Dodgers are a cohesive organization, and like IBM people, Dodger officials follow a company line. Across a May week in Los Angeles, the line went like this:
We’ve been the best organization in baseball. (Probably.)
We’re good because we work harder than anybody else. (Perhaps.)
We lost the 1975 pennant to Cincinnati because of injuries. (Nonsense. The Dodgers had no Johnny Bench, no Joe Morgan, no Pete Rose.)
“We just ran into some bad breaks,” said Al Campanis, the general manager, a bulky, black-haired man of forty-nine. “And what the hell are you doing wearing a beard?” Campanis was born in Kos, Greece. I wanted to ask him what the hell Socrates was doing wearing a beard. But baseball people needle quite impersonally. Manners exist, but do not dominate. Pee Wee Reese, a paragon of geniality, sometimes greeted acquaintances, “Hello, Horse Shit.”
I heard Al Campanis out on Dodger injuries, a courtesy that may have gone unnoticed. Or maybe not. For suddenly, with a Byzantine flourish, Campanis showed me his private treasury. Fourteen tapes of Branch Rickey lecturing on baseball. “Nobody else has this stuff,” he said.
I remembered Alexander Sebastian Campanis as an ambitious man who worked with minor league players in 1952. He had earned a master’s degree from New York University, and you could not know Al Campanis for ten minutes without hearing about it. (I knew Wally Moon for twenty years before he mentioned his M.S.) Campanis played seven games for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1943 and hit two singles in twenty times at bat. During our first encounter, he confided that he had taught Jackie Robinson how to make the double play.
“Is that what he says?” Robinson asked one afternoon. “Well, tell him I guess I could have worked out the pivot by myself.” Laughter shone in Robinson’s eyes. He had been something more than a .100 hitter himself. “No. Don’t tell him. Al Campanis is a good guy. He was very good on integration when it counted.”
In his large, amorphous office, Campanis offered me excerpts from the Rickey tapes.
“Thou shalt not steal,” Rickey said. “I mean defensively. On offense, indeed thou shall steal and thou must.”
Amid such platitudes lies baseball gold. According to Rickey, the change of pace is a magnificent pitch. Instruct young pitchers in the art of changing speeds. But first let them master a fast ball and control. Teach changing speeds in Double A, or Triple A. On tape Rickey suggests that pitchers will have gained confidence and sophistication at that level. Look for ball players who run and hit with power. Neither speed nor distance hitting can be taught. Consider the present and simultaneously plan for the future. Luck is the residue of design. Once Rickey assembled his ruling staff and cried out in the voice of Job, “I stand on a cliff. On the edge of an abyss. I lose my footing. I stumble toward the yawning gates of hell. One man can save me. Only one. I ask each of you, who is that man?” This meant the Dodger bullpen was uncertain. Rickey wanted a consensus on the best minor league reliever to recall. The name was Phil Haugstad, who won none and lost one.
Working with the Rickey legacy, but not the Rickey flair, Campanis is constantly fractioning baseball into component parts. Then he discourses in general terms on teaching incentive.
“History,” he says, “is full of people who accomplished their goals after having had failures. A negative attitude slows reflexes and dulls perception. With a positive attitude you can find some good in failure. Thomas Edison was looking for a substitute for lead in storage batteries and his first twenty thousand experiments were unsuccessful. Somebody asked if he felt discouraged. Edison said nothing had been wasted. He’d found twenty thousand things that didn’t work.”
I moved to the dugout, where Walter Alston was waiting. Alston started managing the Dodgers in 1954 and that year brought a championship team home second. But a year later the Brooklyn Dodgers won the World Series. If you want to find someone with a lower lifetime batting average than Al Campanis, Smokey Alston, of Darrtown, Ohio, is your man. He came to bat once for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1936 and struck out. He never batted in a major league game again.
When Alston took over the old Brooklyn Dodgers, he was inward, suspicious and uncertain. He made mistakes. That spring the Dodgers were a set team, with veteran stars. Emphasizing, indeed overemphasizing, the function of manager, Alston insisted every position was open.
“I got a hunch I might just start at shortstop,” Pee Wee Reese said with soft, angry sarcasm.
“Does he think now, after all these years, I’m gonna have to fight my way into the line-up?” Robinson said. “Son of a bitch.”
At press conferences, Alston insisted that his line-up would not be determined until opening day and at length I telephoned Charlie Dressen, who had managed the Dodgers to a pennant the year before. “I’ll give ya the opening line-up,” Dressen said. I then wrote a deadpan story beginning:
“Charlie Dressen today announced the Dodgers’ opening day line-up. Jim Gilliam at second will lead off. . . .”
The story exacerbated Alston’s insecurity and for many years this large, stolid middle-American greeted me with a glower. But at sixty-five, as the oldest manager in baseball, he was mellowing. He offered a shy smile, called me by name and said that the old Brooklyn Dodgers had been generous. “They didn’t know who I was and they could have made things tougher for me than they did.” He had some pictures of his farm to show me and photos of his grandchildren. An elegiac quality ran through his talk.
“Are ball players very different today?” I said.
“I don’t think so,” Alston said. “I honestly don’t. If I’ve changed my managing techniques much, I’m not aware of it. Hit and run. Cut-off play. The game’s the same.”
Someone was warming up without his baseball cap.
“Now that,” Alston said, “would never have happened at Ebbets Field. I guess there’re outward changes, facial hair and cassette players, but if you don’t like some of these surface differences, you simply have to learn to look away. Below the surface ball players are ball players in the thirties and in the fifties and now. We’ve had three eras out west. Carl Furillo, Duke Snider and the rest were past their prime when they got to Los Angeles. Wally Moon helped the club. Next, a fast team, fine pitching, with Sandy Koufax, whose perfectionism I admire. Now this good team, Steve Garvey, Ron Cey and Davey Lopes. How long will I keep managing? It’s always been a one-year contract. I wouldn’t stay anyplace I wasn’t wanted. I can teach school, you know. Used to do that in Ohio. But I’ll make my decision next October. I make it every October. Meanwhile, I have a delightful job.”
At the batting cage, Dixie Walker instructed Steve Yeager, a good young catcher, with side comments to Mike Marshall and me. As a batting-practice pitcher threw, Walker chattered caressingly, “Think opposite field, Steve. Think other way. They’re going to give you outside sliders, Steve. No one can pull them. Don’t worry about the other, the inside stuff. Your hands are so quick you’ll pull everything there, the way Babe Ruth did. I played with Ruth.”
Yeager popped three outside fast balls to right. Walker winced. Then he said, “I can’t push him more. Ball players have changed. On the old Tigers, nobody told you anything. Only Charlie Gehringer—he wasn’t a coach, but a player—said I should go the other way.”
“You think this guy is working?” Mike Marshall said.
“I think so,” Walker said. “But if I push him too hard— it’s this new generation—he’ll work against me. Against you.”
Dixie Walker—Fred Walker from Villa Rica, Georgia— is a tall, courtly man who speaks with a soft high-pitched drawl. Working with Yeager, who is white, and with a black outfielder named Dusty Baker, he seemed first gentle and then extremely wise.
He talked about control, a pitcher’s control, and how most of us say that a pitcher is wild when he throws a curve that bounces in the dirt. “But there’s another kind of wildness,” Walker said. “The pitcher wants to throw a curve down low and away. That’s the good pitch. He throws it belt-high over the center of the plate. That’s the home run. Visualize and you’ll see that both pitches were just about as wild. They’re equally off target. The difference is only in direction. But the second one, the home-run ball, is not the kind of wildness everyone picks up. People don’t realize a man can be wild and throwing strikes.”
I nod, amazed that I had never viewed control that way. It becomes obvious after Walker says it, just as it became obvious to use tungsten as a filament after Al Campanis’ man Edison had lit his lamp. But Walker did say it. The applicable noun is “professionalism.”
Long ago, when the Dodgers slouched toward the first division to be born, Dixie Walker appeared in Brooklyn as a hero. The year was 1940, and a generation of Dodger fans lusted for an outfielder, for anyone, who could hit. Dixie could hit. He drove in runs. The Dodgers won a pennant in 1941. Sportswriters from Manhattan, making one more patronizing Brooklyn joke, described Dixie Walker as “The People’s Cherce.” Cherce? Choice. The Dodgers had a star.
After World War II Branch Rickey hired Jackie Robinson and, unthinkable as it was in the liberal Democratic borough of Brooklyn, Walker asked Rickey to trade him, rather than make him play beside a fellow Georgia native who was black. Walker went. Robinson stayed. A year later, now hitting well for Pittsburgh, Dixie Walker retired.
About 1955, Walker explained painfully and unconvincingly that he owned a hardware business in Alabama and that having a black teammate could drive him to bankruptcy. Now in 1976 at Dodger Stadium, other players, some black, some white, appeared before him for instruction. Walker’s paternal teaching tones reached out equally to everyone. Knowledge of pitching and hitting and teaching was not, I suspect, the highest mountain Walker had to climb. Rather it was achieving, as he had this day in his sixty-fifth year, absolute color-blindness on the ball field.
Chunky, ebullient Tom Lasorda said he wanted to manage the Dodgers. Lasorda was Walt Alston’s third-base coach, and in the politics of baseball third-base coaches are supposed to pretend that they have found nirvana waving runners home. But Lasorda’s enthusiasm exceeded his prudence.
We sat by a locker. “Sure I want to manage,” Lasorda said, “but here, not somewhere else. I’ve had offers, three I guess. I had fifteen of these kids when I managed in the minors. Now I want to manage them right where they are.”
“Do you have any commitment from the team?”
Lasorda’s face, pudgier than when he failed to make the Dodgers twenty years before, screwed into a wince. “No,” he said. “None. But listen to me, to how I feel.
“This is my twenty-eighth year with the Dodgers, the greatest organization in baseball. Cut my veins and Dodger blue will flow. When I die, I want it on my tombstone: ‘Dodger Stadium was his address, but every ball park was his home.’
“Mr. O’Malley, the boss, heard that and once he called me into the press room in spring training. He had a whole bunch of the press in there. And he presented me with a marble tombstone and on it was my name and a heart and a drop of blood painted Dodger blue.
“I was elated. Here was the president of the ball club presenting me with a marble tombstone, and I told him I was so grateful I wanted to go on working for the Dodgers when I was dead. Mr. O’Malley looked at me quite puzzled, and I explained. Beside the tombstone, when I die, they can hang out the Dodgers’ home schedule. Then when people are in the cemetery visiting loved ones, they can say, ‘Let’s go to Lasorda’s grave and see if the Dodgers are at home or away.’ ”
He rose, a stocky man of forty-eight. He was not smiling. In a way Ring Lardner would have understood, Lasorda was telling me exactly how much he wanted to manage the Dodgers.
Steve Garvey, the Dodgers’ best ball player, is intelligent, handsome and so accommodating that I later asked Vin Scully, the broadcaster, if he could be as nice as he appeared.
“He is truly exactly that nice,” Scully said. “And he hits and he has a beautiful wife and lovely kids. In fact he’s so nice some people who aren’t so nice resent him for it.”
Garvey sat in the dugout, fresh-faced and strong, and he asked if he could help me out. “I have a theory about the crowds,” he said. “It’s interesting to see the type of crowds we get.” Garvey did not pause. He spoke without arrogance, but as one accustomed to attention.
“Now the Friday night crowd is the one that has anxiety built up. They’ve been working hard for a whole week. They’re coming to get out. They’ve been caught on the freeways. If you have a good Friday night, the cheers are a few decibels louder. If you have a bad Friday night, the people are rougher.” A quick warm smile. “Friday is no night to play badly. The fans will crucify you.
“Saturday. Date night. That’s just about what it sounds. Medium. If the guy and the girl are getting along, they’re with you. If he spills mustard on her skirt, it’s something else.
“Sunday we play in the afternoon. The Sunday crowd comes out to take their kids and see the stadium and the mountains in the background and the palm trees. This place is gorgeous. On Sunday afternoons the people are positive. You really have to be cheating them out of their entertainment to hear a boo.
“Monday and Tuesday nights you get the fans who really know baseball.”
“When do you like to play most, Steve?” I said.
He touched his chin. “Fridays,” he said. “The Friday crowd is the best challenge.”
The Los Angeles Dodgers win games. They make money. They are a rousing team to watch, and that leads back to one seventy-three-year-old man, in a glass-walled office, glowering at a distant figure costing him money behind a hose.
I don’t think the Brooklyn Dodgers, a glorious and profitable franchise, should have been moved twenty seasons ago. A strong Commissioner would have vetoed the transmigration, as contrary to the best interests of baseball. The West then could have opened logically, with nascent franchises wriggling toward victory in San Francisco and L.A. I don’t blame O’Malley, a graduate of Culver Military Academy, the University of Pennsylvania and once a hustling lawyer, for trying to move above the American middle class. Ford Frick, the reigning Commissioner in 1957, was all elocution and putty. Frick is a pleasant, pensioned fellow who these days likes to discuss the sport of curling. Sweep, sweep, Ford Frick. Walter O’Malley, conniving, serious baseball man, one word is owed to you and your Los Angeles success. Congratulations.
“We have been fortunate, obviously so,” O’Malley said in his office. “We hoped we knew what fans wanted in a stadium. Good parking. We could still have done more there. Reasonable prices. We held the line, not increasing prices at all, for eighteen seasons. Last year, because of the free agency potential and this endless inflation, our top seat went from $3.50 to $4.00. We try to keep within the image of baseball as a daily event, so a feller can come home and afford to bring his wife or kids or grandparents. Our demographic image is the best in sport. I see them coming in with canes, walking sticks and wheelchairs, and I see the middle generation and I see the kids. Everybody’s getting a reasonably priced evening’s entertainment. The kids mean that we’re building future fans.
“We’ve stayed in contention. That’s all anyone can do. Injuries. We had a lot of injuries in 1975. Suppose the Reds lost Bench and Morgan? We stay in contention and we’re the only team that ever has or ever will fly the World Series pennant on the Atlantic and the Pacific Coast.”
He looks very much as he did twenty years ago. Round face, round spectacles. Dark hair. The same incredible alternation in expression between paterfamilias and trial lawyer.
“If they had built you a ball park in Brooklyn, would you have stayed?”
“I’ve got to correct you there. You’re falling into the same trap the others have. A boy from Froebel Academy should know better than that.” The cigar waves. Walter O’Malley shakes his head.
“I never asked them to build me a new ball park in Brooklyn. I said we would build it on taxable land with our own money. We had a site at Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues, where the subways intersected. There’s no place back there big enough for many lots, so in those days I thought you could park your car at any subway station and come to the ball park for a dime.
“Now there was a thing in New York. Bobby Wagner was the mayor. A nice man, not very strong. I knew his father, the Senator. Robert Moses was the real power in New York.
“We had a site and a sports authority was set up to condemn the land we needed, but Bob Moses blocked us. He had a site of his own, bounded on one side by water, another by a cemetery, a third by slum and on the fourth by a parkway, which meant that everyone going to our games was going to have to pay out to Bob Moses’ toll booths. I couldn’t see us drawing much from the water or the cemetery. I was afraid there might not be too much enthusiasm for paying tolls to Moses. I saw a future of empty seats. We had to come out here. We had ambitious plans for Brooklyn. We were toying with a domed stadium. We were looking ahead to pay television and hoping to get some financing that way, but they wouldn’t give us the land we needed.
“The writers have been snowed under by a theory that this L.A. thing was a big giveaway. This park was built for $22 million and it didn’t cost the taxpayers a dime. If you want to consider the difference between private enterprise and socialism, look at our park here and the one the City of San Francisco built. Public monies wasted out there in the cold and wind of Candlestick Point.
“We pay the City of Los Angeles more than a million dollars in real estate taxes. They write we’ve got the oil and mineral rights to our land, and that’s so much bunk also. If someone struck oil back of second base, the oil would belong to the City of Los Angeles.”
He turned and gestured toward the hills behind center field. Chavez Ravine, once arid, had bloomed into a wonder of evergreens and desert plants. “Buzzy Bavasi, when he was working, asked me why I was spending all that money landscaping when we play six nights a week and nobody can see the hills after the sun sets. I told him I was doing it for our Sunday afternoon customers. You won’t believe it, but growing things are important to me.” Outside, beyond the man with the hose, 55,000 seats looked clean and beckoning for the crowds that would start driving up Elysian Park Avenue, after the sun had burned away the smog.
“We took a chance. They told us Los Angeles was not a baseball town. We had a short lease on the Coliseum and then we were at the mercy of the City Council. I think we won out there by a single vote. Otherwise we might have been playing in the street.”
O’Malley glanced through the window again, sighed slightly and beamed.
“Even my son asked me why I was risking, by putting so much money into the ball park. I told him, ‘Peter, after I’m gone and maybe after you are too, this ball park will remain and it will be a monument to the O’Malleys.’ ”
He turned back to his correspondence. “Is there anything else for now? Otherwise I’ll see you at lunch.”
Outside in a corridor I passed Peter O’Malley, a six-foot-three-inch graduate of the Wharton School, who has run franchises at Spokane and Albuquerque and now is president of the Dodgers, under the chairman of the board.
“How’d it go with Dad?”
“He doesn’t know how to be dull.”
“Where are you heading?”
“Houston.”
Peter O’Malley shook his head. “That’s scary, what’s happened down there. Is it true the Astro operation is $33 million in debt?”
2
The Houston Astros, formerly the Houston Colt .45s, have played under six managers and four general managers since they were organized in 1962. That was the year the Mets lost 120 games for Casey Stengel.
In 1963, the Astros had a promising first baseman named Rusty Staub and a good-looking outfielder called Jim Wynn. They traded both. In 1964, as the Mets lost only 109, the Astros found an aggressive young catcher from San Antonio, Jerry Grote. He went to New York. In 1965, the Astros started a swift second baseman named Joe Morgan and employed Dave Giusti, a dogged relief pitcher with a palm ball. Giusti has since become a star at Pittsburgh. Morgan has twice won the Most Valuable Player award. He was playing for the Reds. The Astros have traded Cesar Geronimo and Jack Billingham to Cincinnati, John Mayberry to Kansas City and Mike Cuellar to Baltimore, where Cuellar won the Cy Young award, as the best pitcher in baseball.
Beyond such deals lies an eerie death book. Jay Dahl, a Houston pitching prospect of great promise, died in an auto wreck twelve years ago. Jim Umbricht, another pitcher, died of cancer at the age of thirty-three. Don Wilson, who had pitched two no-hitters, was found dead in a car beside his home in Houston in the wretched morning hours of January 5, 1975.
After this mix of error and disaster, the Astros went bankrupt. When I reached Houston in May of 1976, the team was controlled by the General Electric Credit Corporation, the Ford Motor Credit Corporation and a finance company. “I’d like to own a ball club,” I told Sidney Shlenker, a thirty-seven-year-old Houston banker and promoter, who was caretaker president of the team. “Thing is my check would bounce.”
Shlenker, a large, soft-voiced, putatively amiable man, smiled. “The way things have been going,” he said, “a bad check would be better than none at all.”
To most of America, Houston symbolizes what remains of Lyndon Johnson’s war-bought prosperity. Johnson looked on Texas as John Kennedy is said to have looked on each especially favored mistress. He took care of her.
Austin grew and Dallas grew and Midlands grew and Odessa grew and the Pedernales River became, if not the Hudson or the Nile, then at the least a Southwestern Potomac. Contracts, for war material and for spacecraft and computers, flowed into Texas. Everywhere jobs sprang up and bankers smiled. The hub was Houston, a boundless sprawl of a city, set on flatland and marsh, fifty miles northwest of Galveston, at the head of Buffalo Bayou, a tributary of Galveston Bay. Once the marshes were malarial. As late as 1961, when Houston entered the National League, visiting ball players complained about mosquitoes as big as vampires. “Some of the bugs there are twin-engine jobs,” insisted Sandy Koufax of the Dodgers.
But with the coming of Lyndon Johnson and air conditioning Houston triumphed over its environment. The people had money. The area had seven decades of rich baseball history. Clark Nealon, a journalist and baseball historian, combines Houston boom and Texas baseball tradition into a paragraph:
“When Buff Stadium opened here in 1928,” Nealon writes, “it was freely described as the country’s finest minor league ball park. But Branch Rickey, who supervised the construction, was concerned that Buff Stadium was too far out of town. Today the stadium is gone and a huge furniture store occupies the site. And where is that furniture store now? Pretty much in the center of downtown Houston.”
My own arrival at once suggested growing pains and imperfections. Houston Airport lies twenty miles north of the city limits and nobody seemed able to suggest a direct route to my hotel. It was night and I felt somewhat worn from my laborings among the Dodgers.
“All right,” I told the woman at the auto-rental desk. “Just give me a Houston road map and I’ll find my own way.”
She showed a metallic smile that would have done credit to an airline hostess. “We don’t have any maps of Houston, sir.”
“What do you have a map of? Milwaukee?”
“I’ll check with my supervisor,” she said. I let it go. There was no map of Milwaukee, either.
The clerk at the Astroworld Hotel had no record of a reservation. “The ball club made it,” I said.
“We’re almost full up,” he said. “We have a convention of high school bands, but I’ll find something.”
The room was small and overlooked a neon sign, which blinked on-off, on-off through the drapes. On the wall facing the bed a painter had gone to great pains to make a tree, with branches blossoming into bats, baseballs and ball players. I turned out the light. The neon sign blinked on and off. I wondered when the high school bandsman in the next room would begin tuba practice. He never did, but a schoolboy above forgot to turn off a faucet. By morning my bathroom lay two inches deep in rusty water. “A splendid breeding ground,” I told the room clerk, “for anopheles mosquitoes.”
He growled an unrepentant growl.
“And now, I suppose, you’re going to tell me that New York City is uninhabitable.”
A year before, the Houston Astros had finished 43½ games behind the Reds, drawn 850,000 people and lost money. “When you get to Texas,” suggested Wally Moon in Siloam Springs, “look up a fan called Herschel Maltz. He played ball with me at Texas A&M. A nonhitting Jewish first baseman.”
We met at a pleasant restaurant, with dark oak tables and walls, off an enormous shopping plaza that was glassed in and air-conditioned and reminiscent of a comic book vision of the future. Buck Rogers would have been comfortable jetting around that shopping center under the repeating glass arches, breathing air that had been precooled and predried.
Maltz, now president of Century Papers, Inc., confirmed that he was a first baseman, nonhitting and Jewish. “But I had a good glove,” he said. “Real good. Did Wally happen to mention that?” Then Maltz talked about Houston’s boom, with a quiet, drawling pride.
“About the ball club,” I said.
“I’m turned off,” Maltz said. “I used to go to forty games a year. I’d take customers. This year I haven’t been to the Dome once. You know, I’ve been thinking that maybe they ought to change the rules of baseball. Give it a quicker pace, make it more lively, like football.”
Make it more lively is a euphemism for win the pennant. There were no yawns last October in New York or Cincinnati. Bringing a contender into Houston is the weighty charge of Talbot Smith, an intense, precise bespectacled man of forty-three, who had resigned as executive vice president of the Yankees to become general manager of the Astros in August of 1975.
“I come from New England and I don’t dislike the East or even New York City,” Tal Smith says. “We had a comfortable place out on Long Island. I certainly wouldn’t have left that, and the Yankees, if I didn’t think there was a challenge here and one that I could meet in the foreseeable future.”
When, then, will the Astros bring a pennant race to their Dome?
Bill Virdon, the field manager, speaks. “It doesn’t just depend on us. We’re in the same division as the Dodgers and the Reds. How fast we can be competitive depends on what they do as well as what we do.”
“We aren’t trading away any more young talent,” Smith said.
“Right now we’re trying to get them to play hard, exciting baseball,” Virdon says. “Frankly, I don’t see us competitive with the Dodgers and the Reds until the latter part of next season at the earliest. But that’s possible. I’m shooting for it. And we’re not finishing any 43½ games out this year.”
Texas was a promising land for major league baseball when the Houston franchise was first organized. The state was the birthplace of men who rose to baseball’s pantheon, among them Rogers Hornsby and Tris Speaker. All by itself, Texas once supported a Double-A minor league. (Well, almost. Shreveport played in the Texas League, too.) The old Houston Buffs were a top Cardinal farm. Dizzy Dean began building his legend there.
“The Buffs were good and sometimes very funny,” says Clark Nealon. “They once had a right-fielder named Nick Cullop, who played beside a fine center-fielder, Hal Epps, who had one problem. Going for a fly Epps never shouted, ‘I got it’ or ‘You take it.’ He said he couldn’t run and holler at the same time. One night after a rainstorm Cullop and Epps collided under a fly. Cullop ended on top with Epps lying face down in a mud puddle. ‘Now we’re going to find something out,’ Cullop said. ‘You can’t say I got it. You can’t say You take it. Now we’ll see if you know how to say Help. ’ ”
Texas baseball stories spring from seventy-five years of tradition and Texas League anecdotes proceed at least from June 15, 1902. That afternoon Corsicana defeated Texarkana, 51 to 3. Old newspapers indicate that Texarkana used only one pitcher, a young man named DeWitt. All by himself, DeWitt pitched a fifty-three-hitter. The late J. Walter Morris, who had played shortstop for Texarkana, told why. The man who owned the Texarkana franchise, C. B. DeWitt, insisted to the manager, Cy Mulkey, that his own son be given a chance to pitch.
June 15, 1902, was the date on which Cy Mulkey yielded and started the boss’ son. After young DeWitt had given up thirty-five or forty runs, someone suggested, “Why don’t you take the kid out?”
“His old man said he wanted the kid to pitch and that’s what the kid is gonna do. Pitch.” Walter Morris used to muse that “On that day for that kid, giving up a double was a moral victory.”
It was a Texas League manager who first devised an effective antidote to a spitball. The pitcher here, one Snipe Conley, was no DeWitt. He played briefly in the majors and once won nineteen consecutive complete games for Dallas. Late of a Texas summer sixty years ago Conley started an important game against the Wichita Falls Spudders. He began beautifully, the spitball dropping and lurching about home plate. In the third inning, Conley’s tongue began to sting. An inning later the inside of his mouth burned and his tongue was swelling. He had to quit in the fifth.
A Dallas protest led into the Chemistry Department of Texas A&M. There technicians discovered that the baseballs had been coated with a clear derivative of creosote. Every time Snipe Conley put his fingers to his mouth to collect saliva, he was also applying an irritant. Nobody remembers whether the game was protested because nobody remembers whether creosote was illegal in Texas baseball sixty years ago.
Judge Roy Hofheinz, a bulky, aggressive Texas politician, won a major league franchise for Houston in 1961 with a few warm Texas baseball stories, a cold reference to a Texas economic boom and a promise that he would build a dome. “Considering Houston’s heat, humidity and rain,” he said, “our best chance of success is with a weatherproof all-purpose stadium.” The idea traces not merely to Walter O’Malley’s imagined pleasure dome for Brooklyn, but clear back to the Roman Colosseum. When it rained in Rome two thousand years ago, slaves worked a series of winches that drew the velarium, an awning probably woven from heavy Egyptian cotton, over the top of the Colosseum. At the center, a hole, twenty yards across, allowed for air flow. Since warm air rises, little rain fell on the gladiators.
Hofheinz’s dome, which opened in 1965, is described in a brochure as the Eighth Wonder of the World. The Astrodome has almost three times as much space on the arena floor as the Colosseum. It includes eating places called The Countdown Cafeteria, The Trailblazer Restaurant and The Domeskeller. Skyboxes, available for about $15,000 a year, adjoin club rooms, with telephones, radios, bars and furniture ranging from French Provincial to Texas Gauche. In the VIP suite, five levels high, the visitor can find an imitation medieval chapel, an imitation sidewalk café and “the romantic Astrodome gazebo,” while his children amuse themselves at the Astrotot Theater. The temperature under the dome is always 72 degrees, and paved parking areas surrounding the arena provide space for more than thirty thousand cars.
As you walk toward the Dome in bad times for the Astros, the parking lot stretches white and hot and barren of automobiles. Inside, the skyboxes are underoccupied. Within them, upholstery on both French and Texas furniture is wearing thin. Even the playing surface itself has become frayed.
But this is truly the original domed ball park, and if it is no longer what the brochure claims—“Space City’s sparkling jewel”—it is still, in brochure English, a triumph of construction, engineering and electronic skills, all of which has nothing to do with winning a pennant.
Some sense of Roy Hofheinz’s early business acuity came out of an Astroturf controversy. Originally, the field was sodded, under 4,596 transluscent plastic skylights, planned to let in enough sunlight to keep the grass growing. Unfortunately, all that translucence created a creamy backdrop against which it was impossible to follow a fly ball.
Hofheinz had the lucite darkened and began negotiating with representatives from the Monsanto Company to install artificial grass.
“We’re thinking in terms of $375,000,” a man from Monsanto said.
“You must be clairvoyant,” Hofheinz said. “$375,000 was exactly what I had in mind to charge you for promotion for using your product in the dome. Take our name. Call it Astroturf if you like.” The compromise gave Hofheinz what he wanted. An Astroturf ball field for free.
Baseball, Bill Veeck says, is a marvelous arena for jugglers, clowns and hustlers. On the surface, Hofheinz hustled to a poker player’s taste. But behind the swagger, he lacked calculation, and, indeed, the caution that must come first. You will not win by calling with a ten-high hand unless you occasionally show your opponents a full house. You will not build the Dodgers or the Reds while concentrating on an Astrotot Theater.
Talking to a newspaperman, Hofheinz said that he personally possessed almost no money. “It just seems that way. I work with money that belongs to other people. That’s the trick.”
“You have more money than I do,” the newspaperman said.
“Not in my own name,” Hofheinz said. I cannot imagine Walter O’Malley operating with a bank account smaller than a newspaperman’s. O’Malley could not imagine that, either.
The Houston Astrodome cost $38 million, which Hofheinz financed largely through $31.5 million in bonds, issued by Harris County, Texas. The current lease costs the Astros $750,000 a year. Then he built four hotels near the Dome, and a convention center called Astrohall and an amusement park called Astroworld, U.S.A.
The hotels were empty too often. The amusement park lacked the sparkling Disney touch. People came from fifty states to see the Dome. They arrived as tourists and did not become ball fans. The team kept trading its young talent, attendance slumped and on the fringes of Hofheinz’s domain one heard the insistent whisperings of creditors.
In May, 1970, Hofheinz suffered a stroke. He now sits in a wheelchair, huge and bearded like Orson Welles, his empire suddenly revealed as a fiscal ruin. The four hotels and the convention center have been sold to Servico, a Memphis conglomerate whose executives talk of needing $2 million for renovations. Hofheinz’s four hotels were undercapitalized. The amusement park has been leased to Six Flags Over Texas, and Ned DeWitt, president of Six Flags, says he’ll have to invest $16 million to create a viable attraction. What I perceived of Hofheinz’s Texas dream, then, was a ball park owned by the county, a ball club with some potential and a debt that Sid Shlenker conceded was “more than $30 million.”
Along with empty seats, I saw good baseball at the Astrodome. The Astros played the Phillies tough in three fine games. Cesar Cedeno in center is a superb ball player. James Rodney Richard, the six-foot eight-inch right-hander, throws smoke. Roger Metzger, the shortstop, is fine. Greg Gross in left will get his hits. Virdon had his athletes working, and though they didn’t beat the Phillies, they played them, in Virdon’s term, competitively.
But it is premature to assert that the Astros’ luck has turned. Tal Smith has introduced a promotion called The Foamer. On Foamer nights, a large bulb near a digital clock behind right field lights each even-numbered minute. Should an Astro hit a home run when the light is on, management buys one free beer for every adult in the house. As a chaser Tal Smith threw in something else. If Mike Cosgrove, the Houston pitcher, struck out Mike Schmidt when the light was on, that would be free beer for everybody, too.
At 9:12 Cosgrove got two strikes on Schmidt. He gazed endlessly at catcher Cliff Johnson for a sign. The 17,338 fans made a rising inchoate noise. Finally, with the light still on, Cosgrove threw an inside fast ball. Mike Schmidt missed it. The crowd made an animal roar. Suddenly all over the Dome grown men sprinted up aisles. The place seemed to empty in seconds as the fans scampered toward refreshment stands.
In the sixth, with the Phillies leading 2 to 1, and men on first and third, Cosgrove walked the Philadelphia pitcher. Before the inning ended, the Phils had secured the game.
Talbot assumed a look of patient resignation. “With nobody on, he strikes out Schmidt and costs us $5,000 in beer. Then, with the game in the balance, he walks the pitcher.” Smith laughed to himself. “We’re turning a corner, but we haven’t turned it yet.”
Certain Houston business people assert that if Hofheinz had not been stricken, he might yet have rescued his empire. Interest on a $30-million debt demands respect, or rather awe, and I am less qualified even than the former comptroller of New York City to comment on multimillion-dollar juggling.
Houston’s baseball disaster is something else. Caught in his measureless Texas dreams, Roy Hofheinz didn’t pay enough attention to his franchise. Baseball is competitive on the field and baseball is competitive in the front office and perhaps, while Hofheinz mused about Astroworld, Bob Howsam of Cincinnati was talking to the scout who signed Johnny Bench.
No one has accused Walter O’Malley of dreaming small, but like every successful baseball executive, he keeps his focus: the diamond. The team has to win or come close.
Judged against an insurance company, a major league franchise is small business, and a big league franchise makes a weak base on which to build a financial empire. But looking after a franchise, with its farm teams, its scouts, its public relations, all the rest, is a full-time occupation for any executive.
The Dodgers are not for sale. “Does anybody ever try to buy them?” I asked O’Malley.
“About once a week,” he said.
Peter O’Malley elaborated. “I’d say we average at least two serious offers a year.”
Playing in the Eighth Wonder of the World, in air-conditioned Texas May, the Astros are for sale. As I flew out of Houston, the message from Texas was brief:
No takers.