Nice Guys Always Finish . . . ?

A dash of polar opposites in the '77 Series

This year's World Series could not have pitted against each other two teams, the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees, that were more disparate. The Dodgers represent old-style baseball under a California sun. Nurtured on the Dodger farm system to live by simple virtues, they respect their owner, love their manager and hit home runs. The Yankees reflect the clamor and chaos of New York City. High-powered and high-salaried, they are as disputatious, selfish and disdainful of each other as they are talented--a galaxy of stars, singularly burning with a hard, cold light. The following stories probe beyond the line scores into the contrasting characters of the two teams. The story on the fractious Yankees was reported and written by Senior Correspondent Robert Ajemian. That on the ever-lovin' Dodgers was written by Associate Editor B.J. Phillips with reports from John Quirt and Jack Tobin in Los Angeles.

The Yankees

It was a September night in the last days of a frantic pennant race and Yankee Manager Billy Martin tossed in his bed, looking for ways to get even with his boss. For a moment, still thinking like the street fighter he used to be, he had a drastic idea. He would walk right up to Owner George Steinbrenner, insult him and goad the boss into striking him. Too wild, he decided. If only Steinbrenner would stop sending those foolish statistics down to the dugout during the game, stop pushing him so hard to discipline the players. Discipline, Martin thought as he lay awake, actually longing for a physical confrontation. That's all Steinbrenner ever thought about.

For his part Steinbrenner, a barrel-chested former athlete and coach who became head of a shipbuilding company, considered himself a man who knew how to handle street fighters. Before he hired Martin--who had been dumped from his past three managing jobs--Steinbrenner closely questioned the other owners. The pattern, as he saw it, was clear: Martin each time--in Minnesota, Detroit and Texas--had shrewdly turned the players against management to his own advantage. "These other guys didn't choose to take Billy on," said Steinbrenner. "I felt I could change him." As a start, he got Martin to accept a conditional contract stating that if the manager caused any dissension, his salary could be withheld, a contract Martin soon sharply resented. From the very beginning of the year, Steinbrenner hovered over his manager, offering unwanted advice, badgering him. Their confrontations were often stormy. One night after a difficult Yankee loss, Steinbrenner called the locker room to pass on some advice to his smoldering manager, and Martin--while the owner was still speaking--ripped the phone out of the wall.

"Trouble follows me," said Billy Martin, and the quarrel between these two perverse and powerful men often distracted people from a team that was full of fascinating conflicts. It was a sullen, gifted and divided ball club. Watching the owner and manager clash, the players eventually came to distrust them both. Stars such as Catcher Thurman Munson and Outfielder Mickey Rivers asked to be traded. The pitchers were often in revolt against the manager and each other. But the Yankees somehow were too talented not to endure. At season's end Martin, for all his sleepless nights, looked like a managing genius. And Steinbrenner, for all the ridicule he took from his manager and the press about his Prussian discipline, had boldly lifted the Yankee franchise back to solid profits and even some renewed glory.

Martin, the man of high emotions, saw the championship--as he saw everything--in personal terms. "This was a goddam tough team to manage. I held this club together. That man," he said, referring to Steinbrenner, "almost cost us the pennant." Steinbrenner saw it more coldly. "We put this team together without Billy; we got him the best players money could buy. He's crazy to take the credit for our success."

The biggest name money could buy was Outfielder Reggie Jackson, whom Steinbrenner, over Martin's strong objections, signed last winter to a $2.9 million five-year contract. From the day Jackson stepped into the clubhouse, the Yankees, already out of sorts, were never out of trouble. Jackson's huge salary was highly resented and even more so was his erratic play. The players treated him like an outcast. But for Martin, Jackson always posed a different kind of threat: the big slugger, he feared, might come between him and control of his players. By the middle of June what Martin had worried about had happened: the Yankee clubhouse was a shambles. Brooding and set to explode, Martin decided he must have a public showdown with Jackson to preserve his authority. "All the players were waiting for it," he said later. When Jackson loafed fielding a hit in Boston, Martin yanked him off the field. The dugout brawl that followed--Martin tried to attack Jackson--was seen on national television. Steinbrenner, astonished by the outburst, was set to fire Martin, then decided against it. He felt it would destroy both Jackson and the team. As for Martin, he viewed the incident as the turning point of the Yankee season. "I won my locker room back," he said. "Jackson cost this club a lot of games this year. He's a decent, smart man, but he's baseball dumb."

Steinbrenner felt it was Martin who was baseball dumb. In the middle of July an event took place that Steinbrenner insists was the true turning point. He had flown to Milwaukee for an evening meeting with Martin and then went to bed. Shortly after midnight, two key players, Munson and Lou Piniella, knocked on Steinbrenner's door. They were distraught about the chaos on the team and bluntly told Steinbrenner that the Yankees could not win with Martin as the manager. Was this the way the owner ran his other companies, they challenged him? Steinbrenner was somewhat startled to hear the two players say Martin had little support from the rest of the team. Suddenly Martin himself was banging on the door. He was enraged to find his players with the owner. Steinbrenner calmed the group down, and the four men argued until 6 in the morning. Several lineup changes were agreed to: Jackson henceforth would bat cleanup, certain pitchers would rotate every fourth day, Piniella would become the daily designated hitter. One other change: the no-pay salary clause in Martin's contract would be dropped.

Still, for the next month, Martin refused to adopt the changes. When he finally did, the Yankees began to roll; they won 40 of their next 50 games. Jackson, his spirit at last lifted by batting fourth, drove in 49 runs. But even that did not satisfy the outfielder of the powerful shoulders and the tender ego. At the end of the season Jackson stood in the corner of the locker room and said: "I wouldn't wish what happened to me here on anybody." He had already told Steinbrenner he would refuse to play another season for Martin, no small dilemma for the owner.

The day after the Yankees clinched the pennant, Martin sat alone in his office. At 49, his bony legs still showed the scars of his early playing days. He had lost his appetite during the season and now took pills to make himself eat. Steinbrenner was still on his mind. "I just can't be the kind of person George wants me to be," he said. "All those goddam meetings, stats, 40 laps in the outfield, discipline. Jesus Christ, discipline. He'd let Babe Ruth go for discipline."

Martin's emotions are never very far beneath the surface. Now his eyes began to glisten. "If he'd just show me a little personal touch," he said of Steinbrenner, "I'd go through the wall for him. He put the money up. I want to honor him. I really don't want to leave this job." Martin's obsession with his contract kept floating back. He leaned forward in his chair, and his face hardened. "Win or lose this Series," he said, "I'm going to demand a new contract that gives me some independence. If he fires me, he'll never live it down, with these fans." He sounded surer of himself now, more confident that he had an edge in the battle with the owner. "A little Dago like me fixed his ass. If I get fired, I've still got something inside of me that will beat him. I'll come back and haunt him."

On top of the stadium, sitting in his large, blue-carpeted office overlooking the field, George Steinbrenner saw the American League championship as vindication of his aggressive approach. "I kept the heat on," he said, "and Billy's changed more than he realizes. He listens more; he comes to the meetings more." But even so Steinbrenner was going to hang tough about the contract. General Manager Gabe Paul was opposed to extending it beyond the two years it still had to run, and Steinbrenner would support him. They would probably give Martin a bonus but if the manager wanted to look elsewhere for a job, Paul and Steinbrenner would authorize it. "Billy's a self-destruct individual," he said of his manager. "I want to make a better man out of him, but he'll never see it that way."

In the end, the owner sounded just as dissatisfied as his manager. The boss and the street fighter were so much alike. Both were domineering men, and neither would accept any authority but his own. They were stuck with each other. At least until the World Series was won--or lost.

The Dodgers

The scene was a familiar one--ballplayers crushed in an exultant circle in front of the dugout, celebrating a pennant victory. But this team was Tommy Lasorda's Los Angeles Dodgers, and as the cold rain of a Philadelphia night swept down on the new National League champions, there was a different quality to the gestures of triumph. Shunning the usual back pounding and fanny slapping, the Dodgers hugged. One by one, they embraced--as much in affection as in jubilation. At the center of it all--hugging hardest, cheering loudest, the master of the revels--was rookie Manager Lasorda. Said he: "I have to be the luckiest guy in the world. I'm thankful and grateful. Every time I hugged one of them it was to show them that. I feel like the father sitting at the dinner table, feeling the pride and love of his family."

The role of paterfamilias was bred into Lasorda during 27 years in the Dodger organization. After a total of only 13 innings on the mound, when the team was still in Brooklyn, and after ten years as a minor league pitcher, he started the slow climb to the head of the table. With Patriarch Owner Walter O'Malley stage-managing his career, Lasorda prepped for his job. First as a scout, then as manager of Dodger farm teams and, finally, during four years as Walter Alston's third-base coach, Lasorda steeped himself in Dodger lore. In the process, the ebullient Italian became the most dedicated Dodger of them all, a man given to boundless enthusiasm--and horrible cliches--about his team. "Cut me, and I bleed Dodger Blue," Lasorda intones. The medical report continues: "The doctor X-rayed my lungs and found a spot on them. When he looked closer, though, he saw it was the Dodger emblem." Against the day when he meets "the Great Dodger in the Sky," Lasorda has his tombstone, a gift from O'Malley, ready. Its inscription: TOMMY LASORDA, A DODGER. With the retirement of Walter Alston after the 1976 season, the job at last was his. Said Lasorda: "It's like inheriting the Hope diamond."

Lasorda was in a unique position to know just how good was the team he now led. Nine players on the Dodger roster played minor league ball under his tutelage. O'Malley, who tolerates clubhouse conflict only slightly less than free agents, had long assured an orderly transition. "We had Tommy in mind as a manager about ten years ago," O'Malley explained. "We deliberately took our best young prospects and put them on minor league teams that Tommy was managing. It's paid off. He knows the players."

Second Baseman Davey Lopes, whom Lasorda converted from an outfielder in the minors, credits the manager with creating a major league career for him. Says Lopes: "If someone takes an interest in me as a man as well as a player, our overall relationship will be improved. Of all Tommy's gifts, that's the greatest." Reggie Smith, the gifted, moody outfielder who bounced around the big leagues on a malcontent's reputation before finding a home with the Dodgers last season, was considered an acid test for Lasorda. Smith had a sterling year at the plate (.307 batting average, 32 HRs and 87 RBIs).

The Dodgers' fast start was a tribute to Lasorda's planning. Over the winter he met with every player and told him his role for the next year. In spring training, his lineup was set, and the starters played together from the first day of camp--honing teamwork, learning one another's strengths and weaknesses. A rigorous running regimen brought the Dodgers' pitchers into top shape and kept them well-tuned. Only two pitchers missed their regular turn in the starting rotation, and then just once. Lasorda, committed to his lineup, never bent, even in the face of the Yankees' slugging lefthanders. Against all the percentages and the prudent practice of every American League manager, he started two righthanders against the fearsome New York bats in Yankee Stadium--it was their turn to pitch.

Lasorda catered to the journeymen as much as he did to the regulars, lunching with the No. 7 outfielder, enveloping a utility infielder with praise. Injured players struggling to come back from surgery--Pitcher Tommy John, Outfielders Dusty Baker and Reggie Smith--were bombarded with encouragement by the chunky Dale Carnegie in Dodger Blue. Always, the message was the same: The Dodgers will win. Says Reggie Smith: "He allowed us to share. He gave us a greater sense of being part of something, and we had to believe in ourselves because he never doubted us. He preached to us from day one that we were going to win it. In all my 15 years, I had never heard a manager say it so emphatically." Adds John: "If this has been my best season, then Tommy deserves much of the credit because he's made me a more confident pitcher."

When the Dodgers went into the ninth inning of their third play-off game against Philadelphia trailing 4-3, the long season and all of Lasorda's rah-rah boosting of his team finally paid off. Vic Davalillo, fleet-footed salvage from the Mexican League, bunted safely. Manny Mota--told in the spring that his responsibility was pinch-hitting because "when you open your suitcase, four hits fall out"--doubled off the wall in left field. A flurry of Dodger hits and Los Angeles was one game away from the pennant. Asked what had been his instructions to his players in the frantic final minutes, Lasorda replied: "I didn't say anything to Davalillo. I didn't say anything to Mota. I didn't say anything to anybody. I was only talking to God." But when God is the Great Dodger in the Sky, that's all the talking Tommy Lasorda needs to do.

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