THEY BLED BLUE: Fernandomania, Strike-Season Mayhem, and the Weirdest Championship Baseball Had Ever Seen THE 1981 LOS ANGELES DODGERS by Jason Turbow. Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020

Why do we read books about baseball seasons of long ago? I love them, probably more than I enjoy reading about seasons not so long ago. Most of the information about this season and last season and the one before was effectively gathered in daily and weekly journalism accounts, and not that much more emerges immediately afterwards, probably because the information that sources wanted to keep to themselves in October still remains tightly hidden there in November.

Years and decades after the facts, though, some of it inevitably bleeds out. Don Sutton wasn’t telling anyone about the tricks he used to doctor baseballs while he was still pitching, but by 2020, he’s a little bit free-er with his secrets. In THEY BLED BLUE, a new account of the 1981 Dodgers by Jason Turbow, details about Sutton’s trickery emerge. Sutton had left the Dodgers to become a free agent just before the 1981 season, with a huge, steaming pile of ill-will between him and the team he’d labored for over the previous fifteen years, particularly between him and Tommy Lasorda, the loquacious manager of the team whose constant barrage of optimistic BS Sutton couldn’t abide.

Turbow begins his examination of the 1981 season with some long prefatory chapters, the first of which is devoted to the one play that motivated the team to buy into Lasorda’s line of motivational pep-talks: the moment during the 1978 World Series when Reggie Jackson stole a Game Four victory from Lasorda’s team by placing a strategic hip in the way of a Bill Russell throw, turning a potential 3-1 Dodgers lead in the Series into a 2-2 tie.  For years afterwards, the Dodgers’ players felt cheated by Jackson’s smart/lucky/clever/underhanded move, and Lasorda stoked the flames of their resentment. It might seem peculiar for a ballclub to dwell on one play for years afterward. After all, there are thousands of breaks over the course of a season, some of which favor one team, others favoring another. It’s hard to imagine that a professional ballclub could stick their heads so far up Lasorda’s capacious hindquarters that they lose sight of this axiomatic truth, "the breaks all even out," but that was Lasorda’s quintessential skill, to make his gigantic ass a warm and welcoming place for his players to gather themselves in.

Turbow traces out Lasorda’s twisted path to the Dodgers’ leadership that he held for over twenty years, much of that path built out of falsehoods, bombast, distortions of the truth, and an almost clinically insane belligerence towards any person, team, or other entity that stood between the Dodgers and success. Lasorda would literally start fights on a regular schedule when he was a player, a coach, and a manager, and it didn’t matter much who fought, as long as he could throw punches at someone and thereby motivate his own team into an oppositional frame of mind. Some of this pugnaciousness might simply be natural to Lasorda, of course, but much of it seems cunningly manipulative of players who might otherwise have taken a less belligerent stance towards their opponents.

That’s how Turbow’s book begins, with a prologue about what got under the Dodgers’ skin in the seasons leading up to 1981, and with a first chapter describing the devious aims behind Lasorda’s rah-rah, Us vs. Them motivational persona. In other words, THEY BLED BLUE isn’t so much a daily log of a long-past season but Turbow’s attempt to put that season into perspective, trace out where it and the players on that team fit into baseball history. Lasorda’s hands-on managerial style, for example, simply would not fly with today’s players, today’s reporters, today’s umpires, but it worked in the 1980s, using techniques that went back to the 1950s, when Lasorda’s career as a marginal player in the Dodgers’ organization began, with some participation by one of his stars, Steve Garvey, who’d worked in the Brooklyn Dodgers’ training camp as a young batboy.

It was in that training camp that Branch Rickey’s far-seeing education of hundreds of Dodger farmhands took place, and Turbow acknowledges the part that "the Dodger Way" played in these players’ mindset. The Yankees, the Cardinals, the Orioles, and several other teams I can think also have their own organizational "way" of playing baseball, and I’m sure that less successful franchises have an absence of a "way" that leads to their lack of success—the specifics of each successful tradition would be a fascinating subject for an in-depth study: does each successful team merely preach a daily sermon on sound fundamental play, and then practice the particulars it preaches, or do teams vary widely in their emphases? Do teams recruit their leaders to enforce an already existing set of principles, or do individuals impose their own meaningful variations on the organizations that they join?

It’s dicey to state formulaically what exactly the "Dodger way" entails. Its roots go back at least as far as post-war Brooklyn, where Lasorda’s career began, and the Boys of Summer integrating baseball under Branch Rickey’s patient leadership, but even going that far back, the principles of Dodgerhood are hazy. Is it a generous spirit, as Turbow says here, citing the extensive training every Dodger got at the eight batting cages in spring training when other teams were willing to spring for only one? Or was it a spirit of parsimony, as typified by Rickey’s tightfisted policy against paying his players a fair living wage? Was it founded on unusual camaraderie, as seen in the close bonds formed between Dodgers of all races and religions on those early integrated teams, or more accurately reflected in the squabbling and personal resentments that Turbow details here between longtime Dodger stars Garvey and Sutton, among many others who openly loathed each other? Is Dodger leadership more in the tradition of profane vulgarians like Leo Durocher and Tommy Lasorda or in the straitlaced, soft-spoken style of Burt Shotton and Walter Alston? Is the Dodger way of winning games built on the raw power of Snider-Hodges-Campanella-Furillo and Baker-Smith-Garvey-Cey or on the speed and pitching of Wills-Lopes-Koufax-Drysdale-Sutton-Valenzuela?

Obviously the answer here is "Yes." All of the above, which leaves wide-open what exactly the Dodger way might be.  THEY BLED BLUE seeks to characterize one team at the height of their success by citing all the diverse influences that brought twenty-five players and their manager to the World’s Championship, which means at least twenty-six different paths must be traced out in some detail.

There are a lot of great reasons to choose this team’s story to tell, none of them personal to Jason Turbow. He’s not a Dodger fan, for one thing, by his own rooting interests or by his inclination—he grew up a San Francisco Giant fan, which makes curious his choice of subjects for this book or his previous book on the crosstown Oakland A’s (which I reviewed here last month), the two natural rivals of his hometown Giants. But a writer goes where his story lies, not necessarily where his own interests take him, and both those A’s and these Dodgers have their own stories to tell. The Dodgers’ 1981 season was strikingly peculiar, not least because of the long strike that interrupted their pennant race. It also had the breaking up of a persistent core of teammates, most famously MLB’s longest-ever four-man infield whose final inning of their eight-year run together was the final inning of the 1981 World Series, and perhaps the single most unusual and dominating rookie in a franchise famous for its Rookies-of-the-Year, Fernando Valenzuela, who singlehandedly can claim responsibility for drawing decades of LA’s Mexican-American community into Dodger Stadium.

Turbow tells those many strands of the Dodgers’ 1981 season in an unusual and at first fragmented structure and in his own quirky style. The structure of THEY BLED BLUE delays the accounts of the actual baseball games for almost half the book: after opening with close portraits of the 1978 team’s mentality forming via Reggie Jackson’s hip-thrust and Tommy Lasorda’s personality forming through various fist-fights, Turbow devotes a chapter to the Dodger franchise’s most singular trait, one that Branch Rickey referred to as "Coconut Snatching," from a tall tale the Mahatma would spin about noticing how a pair of tropical coconut pickers would switch their jobs: when one native got tired climbing trees to shake the coconuts down to his partner, who would catch them, he would descend and become the catcher and his partner would becomes the tree-climber.  The Dodgers would switch young players freely to positions they had never attempted before, and this trait was especially pronounced with the 1981 squad: Garvey came up to the majors as a third-baseman but became a first-baseman, both the second baseman, Davey Lopes, and the shortstop, Bill Russell, played the outfield in the high minors, and so on. In the course of explaining how extensive the team’s Coconut Snatching was, Turbow introduces all of these players’ backgrounds, their signings, and their personalities.

The Davey Lopes passage has a relevance for long-time readers of Bill James, who once used Lopes’ background growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, to explain how lazy journalists had stereotyped Lopes into a ghetto kid, when actually (I vaguely remember that Bill’s assistant Paul Izzo provided this information) Lopes had grown up in a stable, comfortable middle-class household, had never wanted for anything growing up, and all that ghetto stuff was just the reporters’ assumptions based on Lopes’ swarthy coloring. But Turbow interviewed many Dodgers, and researched the interviews others had done with them, including Lopes, whom he quotes early in chapter 2 on his upbringing: "the usual ghetto thing, the typical environment -- roaches, rats, poor living conditions, drugs as prevalent as candy, tenement houses with six to a room, welfare, food stamps," adding that Lopes’ "mother was a housekeeper, his father absent…..Crime was prevalent in Lopes’s neighborhood, and Davey was no exception when it came to perpetrators."

After summarizing the early careers of infielders Lopes, Russell, Garvey, Ron Cey, and then the complicated etiology of the Dodgers’ catching staff of Steve Yeager, who split the job with Joe Ferguson and then Mike Scioscia, Turbow runs down Lasorda’s prime problem entering the 1981 campaign: star pitchers Don Sutton and Tommy John had left the team, mostly acrimoniously, especially Sutton whose tenure dated back to the Koufax-Drysdale days and who resented Lasorda’s use of his talents, so the manager was now struggling to find adequate starting pitching.

At this point, having introduced the team’s veteran stars, its manager, its "Way," and its current pitching staff, you might suppose the book’s introductory matter was concluded, and the description of their season was about to begin, but no.  Not hardly. The most fascinating chapter, "Mania," describes the instant promotion of Fernando Valenzuela from a chubby 19-year-old nobody who spoke not a syllable of English to Lasorda’s Opening Day starter and, suddenly, the fulfillment of his wildest fantasies.

Valenzuela’s first eight starts beat Roy Hobbs and Joe Hardy put together: eight games of nine innings apiece, all victories, five shutouts, an E.R.A. of 0.50—plus a batting average of .360 in those eight games. In the course of describing these games, "Mania" also delivers an account of Valenzuela’s origins in Etchohuaquila, Mexico, his signing, his minor league experience, and a thorough examination of his quirky personality, including his unusual confidence and his even more unusual screwball. But the most unusual aspect of the Valenzuela chapter is not what it contains, but what it leads up to: the solidification of the Dodgers’ fan base.

Ever since they arrived in California, the Dodgers had been wildly, phenomenally popular with the citizens of Los Angeles, setting attendance records that other teams could only aspire to, but they had never drawn fans from Los Angeles’ huge Mexican-American population. In fact, the team was distinctly unpopular with them, and for a very sound reason: Dodger Stadium was built on the site of a poor but vibrant Mexican neighborhood that was effectively wiped out to make way for a housing project that never got built and then for the Stadium itself. The details are told at length here, and at further length in Shameful Victory: The Los Angeles Dodgers, the Red Scare, and the Hidden History of Chavez Ravine by John H. M. Laslett, a book Turbow relied on heavily for his background on the Chavez Ravine neighborhood. (Even further length, I understand, is provided by the brand-new book on the subject, Stealing Home by Eric Nusbaum, which I haven’t read yet but which Rob Neyer and Turbow had each been reading--and admiring-- when they did a podcast last month.)  

THEY BLED BLUE raises all sorts of ideas that are outside of the purview of most baseball books, such as the whole concept of unknown players like Fernando Valenzuela stirring up crazes almost instantly. A city like Detroit every so often finds itself in the grips of Bird-mania, and I remember well how the blasé city of Denver was affected by Tebow-mania, and how Madison Square Garden shook in the throes of Lin-mania a few years ago. These stories of sudden, unexpected (and sometimes short-lived) success all involve a rookie, usually unknown or under-valued, blowing the doors off players far more celebrated and experienced. I remember wondering "Why didn’t the Mets bring up Jose Reyes sooner?", when Reyes broke in at the age of 19 and played like an All-Star from the start. The Dodgers’ GM, Al Campanis, reported a similar reaction to Valenzuela’s instant stardom: angry fans gave him sheer "hell for not bringing this kid up earlier." It’s a little reductive: when an unknown teenager succeeds, the team that gave him a break obviously brought him up at the precise moment he was ready, all appearances to the contrary, but it’s a legitimate question to ask if he might not have had the same success if he’d been brought up a day earlier, especially if his presence in the lineup, like Valenzuela’s, was mostly accidental. Logic then demands to know whether he could have succeeded if he’d been brought up a week sooner, or a month, or a full season? We’ll never know, but it’s tempting to understand the real question is not IF the teenager could have succeeded earlier but simply HOW MUCH earlier could he have played with the big boys.

This sociological diversion, explaining how Valenzuela overcame that deep-seated prejudice and turned LA’s Mexican-American community into permanent Fernandomaniacs, takes us almost halfway through the book, and apart from the descriptions of his first eight starts, there is scarcely any mention of the season the book is ostensibly describing. And just when you expect it to take up that central subject—the 1981 baseball season suddenly shuts down, and for 35 pages THEY BLED BLUE turns into a dense, detail-packed account of the underlying labor and management issues, the key arguments of both sides, and the major personalities involved in the strike, few of whom have anything whatsoever to do with the story of the 1981 Dodgers. Like the other 25 teams, the Dodgers played minor parts in the strike saga (Steve Garvey’s contract, for example, called for him to continue getting his paycheck in the event of a strike, which caused some strife among his paycheck-deprived teammates, and Peter O’Malley was involved in negotiations, alongside other owners) but the story of the strike bears direct relevance to  the story of the Dodgers mainly through the fiery personality of Davey Lopes, who spoke out loudly in opposition to the owners and sometimes to his own union.

Again, this diversion from the pennant race is entertaining and intriguing. The resolution of the race, once the strike was settled, is telling of the disorganization and the improvisational nature of MLB’s leadership: a series of nutty and counter-productive schemes for resuming a pennant race in progress were proposed, with the one that was finally being no less nutty and counter-productive than any other. In essence, there were incentives for teams to improve their post-season chances by deliberately losing games, and the entire process seems as carefully thought out as your average cat-and-dog squabble. (The wrong turns of this loopy decision-making procedure might be looked at carefully as MLB attempts this year to resume—or to start—the 2020 season in a way that respects teams getting a fair shot at the post-season. We certainly can’t do worse than the process used in the chaotic split-season of 1981 that makes as clear a logical case as a bowl of split-pea soup.) Turbow illustrates the mis-steps MLB made, and the ones they considered making, and the puddles they stepped into and those they stepped over. It doesn’t really have all that much to do with the 1981 Dodgers, directly, except that resolving the split-season did get them into the post-season.

Following that diversionary section, THEY BLED BLUE describes thoroughly in its second half the actual game-by-game story of the resumed pennant race, and of the post-season. This story is well-told in fine detail, though the style of this part of the story is a bit anti-climactic after all the novel diversions and side-stories of the first half of the book. (I haven’t mentioned them all by any means—I omitted the weird tale of Tommy Lasorda’s gay son, and one of his gay players, and his hands-off, hands-on relationship with each of them, among numerous other omissions.) The structure is charmingly strange, but I promised a few pages back to discuss the strangeness of Turbow’s writing style as well: he has a few quirks I made notes of, one of which concerns what I think is his use of his own notes, and the effect that has on the book’s style.

Every writer I’ve ever known has a pile of notes (from interviews, from research, from false starts of his own work) that simply do not fit smoothly into the narrative of the manuscript he’s just written. "I could almost make a book out of all the stuff I DIDN’T use," is a writer’s complaint so common that they won’t actually utter it to another writer, at least not while sober, but sometimes they try to shoehorn some of it back into the manuscript, either for purposes of padding or just from an ecological sense of guilt about wasting their efforts if they were to relegate this stuff to the circular file. What Turbow did with some material he gathered but couldn’t find a place for in his book was to put into footnotes.

He averages well over a footnote per page. Often there are two footnotes on a typical page, sometimes three, rarely none. (Actual count: 337 total footnotes in 331 pages.*) Worse, numerous of these footnotes carry over to the next page, so that you grow accustomed to interrupting the paragraph you had been engrossed in to read some asterisked or daggered note that was often only marginally relevant to the point Turbow was making, then following up the interrupted footnote onto the next page, and then having to find your place all over again at the point where the asterisk or dagger (sometimes double-dagger) first appeared. It’s like reading two books at once, and often losing your place in each of them. Much of the time, the footnoted information is of dubious use to Turbow’s narrative.

*Of course I didn’t count the goddamned things. Are you crazy? But this sort of quibbling addendum to the statement in my text just shows you what it feels like having the text interrupted about once per page to learn nothing very useful.

When I reviewed Rob Neyer’s POWER BALL last year, I remember praising his quirky profusion of footnotes, so what’s the difference here? I don’t know, except that maybe the content of Neyer’s hilariously fragmented narrative that built diversion upon diversion was as entertaining in its footnotes as the main text was? Or maybe it’s just more amusing the first time around?

Here’s an example, from page 289 of the paperback:

It  wasn’t  that  he  [Garvey] refused  to  curse,  but  that  he  made  known  his  disapproval of the practice.*

The footnote reads in full:

* Once leading Steve Yeager, out at a restaurant while the two were playing in the Dominican Winter League, to charge at him headlong.

This is material, no doubt gathered painstakingly, that belongs in the writer’s trash-bin. The text itself makes the point that Garvey’s disapproval of cursing pisses people off—we hardly need an example of pissed-off behavior in action to understand the concept, but the details—the nature of Yeager’s charge (headlong), the time of the incident (winter), the location (a restaurant in the Dominican Republic) etc.—seem more than superfluous, as does the odd construction of the footnoted sentence itself: did Garvey’s sanctimony really "lead" Yeager to attack him? Maybe "motivated"? "encouraged"?

Other footnotes follow similar patterns, so I ended up making a conscious decision whenever I encountered an asterisk partway through the text: "Do I want to bother following this one down to the bottom of the page and then finding my way back up to where I broke off reading? Or skip it?" Within the text itself, Turbow’s construction of sentences is also at times a little too convoluted for my taste (and, as a rule, I like long, complicated sentences).  He interrupts his own train of thought and then, after a long clause on a completely different subject (such as the clause that you are now reading, for example), returns to it.

This isn’t a terrible stylistic sin, but there were points I thought could have been presented more simply, for instance:

Then Gullickson made one of his only mistakes on the day, feeding Steve Garvey  --who on the bench only moments earlier had told Jay Johnstone, "If he throws me a slider on the first pitch, I'm going to drive it"--a slider.

Then Gullickson made one of his few mistakes on the day, feeding  a slider to Steve  Garvey, who on the bench only moments earlier had  told  Jay  Johnstone,  "If he throws me a slider on the first pitch , I’m going to drive it."

Or, if the writer wants to obey time-sequence and causality more closely:

Soon after telling Jay Johnstone on the bench, "If he throws me a slider on the first pitch, I’m going to drive it," Steve Garvey drove one of Gullickson’s few mistakes on the day, a slider, into centerfield.

The complication of such sentences strikes me as typical of Turbow’s syntactic sense and his larger, organizational one—he seems constantly to want to pack just a leeeetle bit extra into his sentences, his pages, his chapters than they absolutely need. One last example, from page 299 of the paperback, of needless sentence-stuffing:

In the dugout, a visibly uneasy Lemon began to relax when Davis put the next batter, Russell, into a 1-2 hole, but he tensed right back up when the shortstop slapped a single to left, scoring the jacket-clad Hooton.

Why is Bob Lemon, whom Turbow hadn’t written about in any of the preceding four sentences, the subject of this sentence at all, and why is it focused on his state of internal tension and relaxation, which Turbow could only be speculating about here? Or are we meant to believe that Turbow has closely scrutinized game film of the Yankee manager’s face as Russell stepped into the batter’s box, observing its wrinkles and furrows and correctly assessing them as unusually "uneasy" but then observed them beginning to unwrinkle and unfurrow as the first three pitches put Russell at a disadvantage, and finally, to seize up again in a riot of tension when Russell hit the fourth pitch?  I never thought of Bob Lemon’s face (nor Sir Laurence Olivier’s, for that matter) as being so emotionally expressive. It’s a far simpler sentence, if a slightly less dramatic one, if Lemon is removed from this largely fictional scenario in the first place: "With a 1-2 count, Davis got ahead of Russell, who then slapped a single to left, scoring the jacket-clad Hooton." We can safely assume that Bob Lemon responded emotionally at all points more or less exactly as a few million other Yankee rooters had.

Turbow messes up here and there with some imprecise wording, sometimes amusingly, as when he comments on Dusty Baker’s use of "sentence fragments" in describing a fistfight he got into with some Expos’ fans (on p. 225):

Baker limited his account of the fight to sentence fragments. How long did it last? he was asked. "It didn’t last very long." Who won? "We did."

Baker’s two responses quoted here are, of course, grammatically complete sentences, not fragments at all. (The fragmented versions would have been "Not long" and "Us"—for some reason, the more correct fragment, "We," doesn’t sound right, though it is.) But since I’ve now been reduced to finding small faults in a mostly admirable, well-written, thoroughly researched work of considerable artistry, I will leave the remainder of the task at hand here, namely finding similar faults in the structure and style of this review, to you, my faithful readers. Thanks, as always, for your time and attention.