’88 Keys
TURN BACK THE CLOCK
The other night, while watching the Los Angeles Dodgers celebrate their first world championship in 32 years, I naturally flashed back to 1988, when I was writing for SI. This is the first sentence of the lead paragraph that I wrote: “How in the world did it happen?” That certainly holds up in 2020.
The rest of what I typed makes me cringe a little at the cutsiness of it all:
“How did a team with a lineup resembling that of the Albuquerque Dukes trounce a team reminiscent of the 1927 Yankees? How did the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Oakland Athletics like a drum, four games to one, in the 1988 World Series? How come manager Tommy Lasorda and the rest of his Dodger Glue team get to go to the White House this week to shake hands and schmooze with the Prez, while Tony La Russa and his Abashed Brothers have gone home, shaking their heads?”
I settled down for the rest of the story, using Lasorda’s comparison of the matchup to David vs. Goliath to cite the Bible verse (I Samuel 17:40) in which David “chose him five smooth stones out of the brook.” I then rattled off the five stones that brought the Dodgers victory: Orel Hershiser, who won two games; Kirk Gibson, whose dramatic, fist-pumping, limp-around-the-bases homer off Dennis Eckersley in Game 1 got the whole thing started; Lasorda, who could manage a team as well as he could bullshit reporters; the scouts who found the Athletics’ heel; and Fred Claire, the GM who stitched the team together.
I ended the piece with a brief post-game conversation in the winning clubhouse between A’s coach Rene Lachemann and Dodgers shortstop Alfredo Griffin, who had spent the three previous years with Oakland. “I’m happy for you,” Lachemann told him. “I’m not happy for me, but I’m happy for you.”
Griffin shrugged his shoulders as if to apologize and said, “Crazy game.”
To which Lachemann replied, “Not so crazy, my friend.”
Right after the crazy, not-so-crazy game the other night, my sister Karen texted me this over the phone:
Me and the Babe
The article is what we used to call a Pub Memo at SI, and it was in the issue celebrating Orel Hershiser as the Sportsman of the Year. I hadn’t read it in years, and suddenly, thanks to Mookie Betts, Clayton Kershaw, Julio Urias and Dave Roberts, as well as Karen, memories started going off like the fireworks in center field.
Orel had signed the page at SI’s Sportsman presentation. He addressed it to my mother Sandy because she was battling cancer, and I still can’t thank him enough for his kindness in the weeks following the Series. I was assigned to do a deep profile on Hershiser for the issue, and I pestered him and his family in Los Angeles, Florida and Japan, where he played on the MLB All-Star team. Among his many honors was an invitation to a State Dinner at the White House for British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Hershiser told this story about the Marine who held the door for him as he got into his limo after the dinner:
“Now this marine is just like me, about my age. But he’s standing there, staunch and upright, his chin out like I’m some head of state. So I decided to make a little joke, and I put my hand in my pocket, pull it out and say, ‘Gol’, I’m sorry but I don’t have any singles.’
“The guy never cracks a smile. He just says, ‘That’ll be all, Cy Young.”
In case you’ve forgotten, Hershiser had an extraordinary year and story. Here was this bookish, thin man who had been cut from his high school team, was drafted in the 17th round out of Bowling Green —a college not normally associated with baseball—and almost quit in the minors. But through grit and gift, he ended the 1988 regular season with a major league record 59 scoreless innings. The night he set the record, he was photographed trading smiles with the man whose record he broke, Don Drysdale.
The story also gave me an opportunity to talk to my own hero, Sandy Koufax. He was not only Drysdale’s teammate, but also one of Hershiser’s minor league instructors. Talking about the record, Koufax said, “I was proud of Orel but a little sad for Don. It’s an amazing record, when you think about it. I can believe most anything that happens in a single game, but such sustained excellence over such a long period of time, with no margin for error, is unbelievable.”
The Pub Memo itself was written not by the publisher Donald K. Barr, but by Bob Sullivan, the best man at our wedding and the godfather of our first child, Bo. (If you thought publishers actually penned those things, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.) Sully, which is what all his friends call him, mentioned in the piece that I owned a bathtub that once belonged to Babe Ruth, who had a house in Sudbury, Mass. Years later, I decided that I should give the tub to his daughter, so I delivered it to her home in Connecticut. She was very grateful, but a few days later, she called to say that the date stamped on the tub was after he had moved out of the house, which means that he never really owned it. Could I come get it?
Which is why Not Babe Ruth’s Bathtub is now a planter in our front yard.
The part that really got to me, though, was the sentence about Bambi and I teaching baseball to Bo, then 2½ years old. “He already has a swing I want,” I was quoted as saying.
Bo and Rachel are now teaching their own 2½-year-old son how to play baseball. Sigh. Six months before Casey was born, Bambi passed away after her battle with cancer. But she did get to name her first grandchild. In one of her old baby books, Bo found her list of possible names for him—Robert, his given name, was the first choice. Casey was the second.
The memories kept going off. It was Bo’s very first T-ball game on an asphalt playground on Carmine Street in Greenwich Village. I was the coach of his Aphrodisia Royals—I know, not a great name for 5-year-olds, but hey, this was the Village. I stationed him where the pitcher would be had we actually used pitchers. We were the home team, and the first batter of the game grounded the ball back to Bo, who ran to first base to get the force because he couldn’t trust the first baseman to catch his throw. At which point, Bo started running around the bases with a slight limp, pumping his right arm just like Kirk Gibson had after homering off Eckersley in Game 1 of the ’88 Series.
When Bo finished his trip around the bases, I gently explained that he couldn’t do that for every out, and that he might want to wait for a more appropriate time to pull out the celebration he had come to know after countless viewings. He seemed disappointed, but he understood.
Indeed, after we moved to the suburbs and he became a damn good ballplayer, he never showboated again. Cut to Bo’s senior year in high school, when he was the captain of the team. He also got the start in the opening game of the postseason playoffs against their archrivals. It went into extra innings, and in the bottom of the first extra frame, he led off with a drive over the head of right fielder. After he slid head-first into third—safe!—he brushed himself off, then glanced over to me in the stands. Ever so slightly, he pumped his right arm and smiled.
He scored the winning run when the next batter singled, and then joined his teammates in the same dance of ecstasy we saw the other night. I might get old, but it never does.
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