October 6, 1982
Los Angeles
"They would not let go of it, they refused to let it end, and they even persuaded the reluctant...television network that this was the thing to do, this was the place to be, that this was no time to go quietly into the dark of winter."
David Israel, Los Angeles Herald Examiner
Cover Image (and a fine one it is) by Jagne Parks
Report from the Editor
There were four of us here when it happened: the staff of Baseball Diary and Mr. Greg Faulds, who has recently opened his doors to allow us to type, paste-up, etc. each issue in his well-equipped domicile. We yelled a lot during the course of the game, expletives flying, cheers at the top of our lungs. But I remember one moment in particular, a moment of silence. It occurred when the Giants had achieved a debilitating blow against LA. No one cheered and no one cursed. We all seemed lost in our own thoughts, and yet there was a collective sadness. Greg stared at the TV; he's not a particularly avid baseball fan, but he seemed to sense the despair that was developing. Maria had not even liked the Dodgers in years gone by, but through her association with BD had grown to appreciate the team and now seemed stunned. Donna looked at the TV screen and I could see her pretty eyes glaze over and take on a red, shiny appearance. I looked at the people around me and I looked at what was going on in Candlestick Park and I thought about the last six months, every day since April 10 watching and listening and reading about a group of men involved in what we call a "sport". We died with them in July and we rose with them in August and we laughed when they won and frowned when they lost and now it was about to be over.
We don't imagine it means all that much in the overall scheme of things, and BD will continue to cover the baseball scene through its conclusion this season, but perhaps the spirit won't be quite the same. Baseball is an everyday experience for six months and illusory, imaginary friendships are a part of it. One person feels this player is almost like a brother, another person feels the player should be traded, another player is playing what may be his last year with a particular team. The eternal confrontation between two people trying to outdo each other (pitcher/batter) is given rules and a code of ethics. I remember as a child telling a young friend that my sister could beat him up. He said she couldn't and so they had a little fight. As he relentlessly pummeled her, I remember the agony I felt. When I broke the fight up, I'm sure I felt far worse than she. It's horrid seeing friends and relatives physically or emotionally beaten, and yet we hear of the plight of strangers every day and hardly think twice. Why add on other devotions to groups of people we don't really know called "athletes"? For most, it's a childhood inculturation we can't fight. For some of us it's something else; perhaps we should know better. I suppose that right now, there are people making music, people making love, people at movie houses laughing, people enjoying good food, fine wine, people getting married and people enjoying their newborn child. But folks, there ain't no joy in Mudville - my sister's out for the count.
Lament
by Faithful but Despondent Dodger Fan
We watched
We hoped
We prayed
We cursed
We held our magic charms and our breath
Our boys in Blue went down and with them
The man of iron
Mr. Clean
Mr. Baseball
GAR-VEY
So the year's at an end
They came in second
We had all the chances and dropped them
All hope shattered, our team out
I can hear the relentless
"I told you so's" now -
Fairweather fans -
Competitors -
Bleechk!
So much for World Series Tickets and Blue in '82
Emotional fall Sunday
Tears on parade
Be a hero Garv
Be a hero, yeah?
On some other team in '83
We'll be there waiting in '83
Report from Chavez Ravine, Interrupted Part II
by Jack Hastings
(Note: A couple of weeks ago, we had asked Jack Hastings to cover the second game in the San Francisco/Los Angeles series concluding the teams' 1982 season at Chavez Ravine. He said he would. A few days after the game, we received a memorandum from him. The first half was printed in the last issue of Baseball Diary. The conclusion follows. It finds Jack, cover artist Jagne Parks, and cunning capitalist Tommy DiMarco driving on a "...full tank of gas, ice chest full of Seagrams and Bud..." towards what they think is San Francisco to rescue some friends from despair and surrender.)
Chief, baby, it was hard for us to believe we'd been on the road for six or seven hours when we topped a rise and looked out over a hazy sea of lights, rolling up to a row of toll booths shortly thereafter. The Golden Gate Bridge was weirder than I remembered it. There were two sets of booths, one after the other, and at the second one this oily, moustachioed type only charged us 29 cents to pass. There was a lot more chain link and barbed wire around than the last time I'd been across but we were too busy celebrating our arrival to give it much thought.
A niggling suspicion hatched into a full-fledged paranoia as we drove on and on into an increasing murk and a deteriorating highway that soon faded to two lanes with no sign of bridge or bay. Even the road sighs, which had not exactly been what you could call legible to our glazed eyes, looked very strange. Maybe the Big One had finally hit and rearranged the geography some or, more likely, we had done a woojie and slipped into the wrong slot on one of those incomprehensible interchanges back in LA.
Either way we weren't where we were supposed to be and getting there now would probably be a lot less than half the fun. We had to unwind the string all the way to the end of the spool. A Newtonian physics of the mind had us in its grasp. We'd stopped caring about destinations somewhere around about 30,000 of those little, white dots ago and whether we were in San Francisco or, as you may have guessed, Mexico, didn't make much difference to us anymore as long as that gray snake kept uncoiling into the night. We drove on and hoped the chums could find some other way out of their dire straits.
A long time on, as a matter of fact, Chief, into a moist darkness that smelled like old oil and a dead sea until at last we coasted into a medium-sized city that looked like Modesto on a bad night. We had reached the end of the line.
To tell you the truth, Boss, I don't really remember that much of Ensenada. I got a few patches here and there but nothing with any real continuity. Like I remember punching out a parking meter because Hussong Cantina (and all the other bars) was closed. And seeing a machine gun-toting Federale patrolling the street that sent me spinning into a Costa-Gavras fantasy dark plots and bloody coups. And eating some really good machaca burritos in a little restaurant that could've been on Broadway or Pico except for the incredibly cheap price and that the ceiling in the men's room was only about four foot from the floor which called for some rather strange contortions on my part. And these three enormous stone heads perched along the sea wall like a cross between Magritte and Rameses II.
And worst of all I remember waking up. With the flies buzzing and the Mexican sun pouring hard, white heat through the windshield and my head as swollen as one of those huge busts.
I'm tellin' you, Chief, Mexico in the light of day is enough like a bad hangover in itself to make a real megaton mind-melt feel like the kind of hell George Steinbrenner deserves to go to in the hereafter.
Somehow, after we had struggled painfully back to something approaching consciousness, Tommy DiMarco (that man of steel) got us the hell out of there. Wound us all the way back along the narrow coast road (where we wondered how close we'd come to the edge of the now visible and rather dizzying cliffs on some of those pee-stops the night before) to Tijuana and back across the Border into the land of Safeway and through San Diego (where we stopped for a breakfast that made me sicker than anything I'd eaten in Mexico) and finally right up to the very portals of Dodger Stadium with five minutes to spare before game-time.
I crawled out of the car I'd made my home for the past 16 hours and lurched across the parking lot, headed for the press gate. Then, borne by an ill wind from the nosebleed section, my nostrils were assailed by the unmistakable fragrance of a Dodger Dog and everything went black.
I woke up two days later in my apartment and immediately began this memo to you so's you'd know the how and why and everything in between. I just want you to remember, Chief, what those bum Giants did to the Dodgers right there in Chavez Ravine and that if it hand't been for a phone call from SAN FRANCISCO (!), none of this would've happened.
By the way, Thom-with-an-H and Matt made out okay after all, stuck it out in San Francisco and are now fabulously wealthy and leading fully rounded and richly rewarding lives.
Maybe you should shred this after reading. You know how sensitive the toes of some of our Northern California readers and correspondents are.
Year End Rap Up
by The Fearless Forecaster
(Note: Have no doubt about it, the following was written before the Playoffs began.)
Sometime last April, I submitted to Baseball Diary my fearless forecasts for the 1982 baseball season. In case some of you may have missed them, I picked LA and Montreal to win in the NL, and New York and Chicago in the AL. (By the way, I have an early issue of BD here dated 5 April picking the Dodgers and Expos in the NL and - hey, pretty good - Milwaukee and California in the AL). I really don't know WHAT I was thinking back then. It was Spring, I guess, and maybe my head was ll stuffed with pollen, but I looked down the rosters of all 26 teams and it seemed logical somehow that the best team (sure, on paper) in each division would win the title. (By the way, I looked down those rosters in my STREET AND SMITH'S, who are in their 42nd year, and who also selected LA, Montreal, New York, and the ChiSox to go all the way.)
The NL West is, of course, far and away the biggest surprise. The Dodgers are clearly the best team in that division, especially with the decline of Cincinnati and Houston. I picked Atlanta to finish 4th, and I felt at the time I was being generous. How did the braves do it? Easy: the Dodgers said, "Here, take it." In the NL East, I thought Montreal had a slight edge over St. Louis, who I picked for 2nd, and Philadelphia, who I put in the 3rd slot. What can I say? The Expos have speed, power, defense, and pitching. When thy picked up Al Oliver for a song from Texas, I figured that would put them over the hump. What happened here? Heck, don't awsk me, I've been too busy cleaning the pollen off my brain to pay attention. I would, however, like to predict here and now that Jim Fanning will not be managing in Montreal in 1983. (Ed Note: FF's right on that one.)
A lot of people liked Chicago in the AL West in 1982. Why not? They had some speed, some pop, and what seemed like a million great young pitchers. I picked KC for second and the Angels for third (S&S had them 5th and so did the SPORTING NEWS who, by the way, picked CINCINNATI to win in the NL West.) The Angels just seemed to have too many question marks: Was Reggie washed up? Did Fred Lynn really, really, really want to be a baseball player? Could DeCinces bend over? Who was going to pitch? I would like to point out that i had Oakland 4th, while most everyone else had them one or two. Living as I do IN Oakland (yes, Gertrude, there IS a there there) I've had the chance to follow "Billy Ball": very closely. It was, as they say, a hype, which has really rankled me for the last two years. I hope to God (if there is one) that they try to promote the team some other way in 1983.
And finally, the AL East. I'm not sure I can go through with this. It's, it's just too painful and I - let me say this about the Yuckees: when they win, George is colorful and controversial, and when they lose, he's a jerk. Which is the more accurate picture? Guess. I had the feeling very early on (Bob Lemon was fired the second week of the season) that things were a little out of hand back in the Apple. I thought for awhile that George might just try to trade for or buy up the rest of the league, thus eliminating the competition and winning the pennant by default. For a Yankee fan, 1982 was like contracting some bad disease or breaking a let. Just in case you haven't noticed, this franchise is in Trouble with a capital tee, thanks to what only can be described as monumental greed on the part of its Owner. Unless something is done, and fast, 1983 will be a disaster for the Yankees on the order of 1965, and I don't think I can take another 1965 again. And what about the rest of the division? Who cares. I picked Milwaukee to finish second because they were the second-best team in the AL East, only nobody told them so and the suckers went out and played over their heads. Thank God Baltimore didn't win. Who the hell wants to turn on the World Series and watch John Lowenstein, Benny Ayala, and Len Sakata? For that matter who the hell wants to turn on the World Series when the Yankees aren't playing the Dodgers? Huh?
Letters to the Editor
Dear Baseball Diary:
This is the sixth letter I've attempted to write to you concerning Guera's comments in BD #14. Being the creator of those "deranged" and "gruesome" covers, I feel I must come to their defense. First, it was really nice to know that someone actually looks at the Baseball Diary covers! WOW! I know when I get my issue I always read the thank-you's first, then work my way to the KK Kwiz; in fact, sometimes I even go through the whole publication without even looking at the cover. Thank you, Guerra, for your observations and tough questions. Second, I liked her title "The Birth of Valenzuela" for the color Xerox cover #12, and don't worry about the figure's head; it wasn't a "malformed regurgitation of THE THING", merely a poorly reproduced daffodil. Third, while naming a BD cover is fine, please don't change my name; it took me a long time to get the spelling of this one correct, besides, the artist's name was BOTTICELLI not MEDICI (how could you get that wrong after Tommy DiMarco gave you all the facts?) Finally, yes, Guerra, I am totally Mad. Also, anytime you wish to design a BD cover PLEASE feel free or if in the future any covers I may design for BD still manage to offend you, drop me a line or better yet, just slap me in the face with a glove and we can duel at Griffith Park.
PS: Is "artsie-fartsie" another name for a cootie hole? And what the hell is a REAL Mr. Baseball? Anything like a Mr. Potatohead?
Jagne Parks
Los Angeles
Dear Editor:
I open my eyes upon a gray fog of despair. I drag myself over to the typewriter. Pressing each key takes an effort of will. All is meaningless in the wake of the Candlestick Disaster. I'm a Dodger fan, not a baseball fan. I don't want to see another pitch or hit or run or error until '83. I thought I could keep reading Baseball Diary purely for its artistic and literary merit until you butchered my story, you heartless assassin. You left out part of a sentence. It was a very funny part, too. Now the sentence is vague and not really funny at all. Ah, well - fuck it.
Nothing really matters anymore. Not now. Not after (sob) Black Sunday.
Jack Hastings
Los Angeles
Dear Jack:
We, too, are less than ecstatic these days. As far as your missing sentence goes, it WASN'T very funny. Not worth a giggle. Consider yourself lucky it was left out.
Baseball Diary is published and edited by William Fuller
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