Interview: They Bleed Blue Author Jason Turbow
Interview: They Bleed Blue Author Jason Turbow
By Scott Bolohan
Promoting a book is never an easy task. Promoting a book about baseball when the season is postponed and everyone has to stay inside is unprecedented. With live events canceled, Jason Turbow, author of They Bleed Blue: Fernandomania, Strike-Season Mayhem, and the Weirdest Championship Baseball Had Ever Seen, began doing Q&As with other baseball writers over Zoom. He created a website and the Pandemic Baseball Book Club was born.
“We built a community where none existed,” Turbow said. “I’ve worked on newspapers and there are communities within the staff, but as a baseball author, you really are on your own little island. I spent 18 months researching and writing my books more or less alone in my office, which is not so good for community building. So this is a way for us to support each other, read each other’s books, talk about each other’s books, and talk to each other.”
In September, the Pandemic Baseball Book Club joined SABR and now count over 25 authors among its ranks. “We have a bunch of stuff in the works,” Turbow said. “Hopefully this thing has legs.”
We chatted with Turbow about the 1981 Dodgers team that won the World Series in a strike-shortened season. Although there are certainly similarities between the current Dodgers team and their ’81 counterparts, we talked about the uniqueness of the ’81 squad.
When I think of Dodgers championships, I go to Gibson in ’88 and then right to The Boys of Summer, what drew you to the ’81 team?
I’ve got a number of criteria that I run through when trying to identify a project. One is a great storyline, and the Dodgers winning the World Series is good, but there’s so much more to it than that. With the strike, and the durability of the infield that lasted twice as long as any other infield in history and this was their last season, to Tommy Lasorda’s first championship, to Fernandomania, and on and on. The other is there are great characters—Fernando and Tommy Lasorda and all these Dodgers players that have been together for so many years. And third, and probably most important criteria, is it can’t have been examined before in a meaningful way, or at least in a way similar to how I would approach it. The absence of 1981 Dodgers in baseball lore was kind of glaring to me. In addition to that, I was 11-years old in 1981, and I was a die-hard San Francisco Giants fan in the Bay Area. I got to see this team up-close a lot and built a lot of opinions as an 11-year old whose favorite team was constantly getting its teeth kicked in. It was nice to approach very familiar terrain from a different perspective.
There were a lot of guys in the Hall of Very Good, but no Hall of Famers. They seemed like an aging group of guys who like didn’t really even like each other that much. What made this team work?
They didn’t like each other very much, for the most part. It was a group of disparate personalities that were not exactly thrown together. They started playing together in the low minor leagues, at least the core of this team. The way I saw it, the clubhouse is broken out in kind of a unique way, which wasn’t really across racial lines or even parts of the country they’re from, as is the case in many clubhouses, or even pitchers and position players. It was when they joined the team. There was the core group that came up with Tommy Lasorda as minor leaguers, which was primarily the infielders. There were the longtime players who had been acquired somewhere along the line, like Jerry Reuss and Dusty Baker, and then there were the young guys who come up either in 1981 or just prior to it, like Mike Scioscia and Steve Sax. Those were definitive distinctions within the clubhouse hierarchy, and the guys who come up together really had enough of each other by that time. Ron Cey is a prickly character, Davey Lopes is a prickly character, Steve Garvey is primarily about the caring and feeding of Steve Garvey, and there was resentment bubbling all around. By the time they hit 1981, they’d been together a long time. That infield had been together for eight-and-a-half seasons. That also explains why they were so good. They knew every facet of each other’s games and had been through three World Series by that point and lost all three—’74, ’77, ‘78—and over the course of that run, came to understand what it takes to win a championship. The guys in 1981 told me it wasn’t their best team, they were better in 1977, but they understood more in 1981 and got it done.
I thought there was something so fitting when they win the championship they had a food fight.
Absolutely, and that shows the importance of someone like Jerry Reuss or Jay Johnstone who’s primary mark in baseball history is as a prankster. Johnstone wrote three books about all the pranks he pulled and all the pranks everyone else pulled. For as serious as a group as that was, integrating a couple knuckleheads really served to loosen them up enough to keep things moving apace.
There seems like every so often a pitcher pops up and has an amazing stretch. In my lifetime it’s been guys like Hideo Nomo or Dontrelle Willis. But Fernando seems like it was bigger than any of those. How do you explain to someone like me who didn’t live through Fernandomania?
I wouldn’t even compare him to someone like Dontrelle Willis. I would compare him to someone like Vida Blue, who in 1971 became the youngest player ever to win the Cy Young or the MVP Award, let alone both in the same season, that’s how good he was as a 21-year-old phenom. Fernandomania blew that out of the water. He came so out of nowhere that not only did most Los Angelenos not know who he was on Opening Day, but he had no clue he was going to pitch on Opening Day. Through a series of unfortunate circumstances for the Dodgers that turned out to be very fortunate in the long run—Jerry Reuss injured his calf a day or two before he was supposed to take the Opening Day start, Burt Hooton had an ingrown toenail, Bob Welch had bone spurs in his elbow, Rick Honeycutt and Dave Goltz had just closed out the spring training series against the Angels. Fernando was the only guy left and told that morning he was going to start. He had thrown batting practice the day before. He really had no idea.
So this unknown kid, he’s 20 years old, he is a physical curiosity straight off a truck farm in Mexico. He’s got this shaggy black hair spilling straight down from his cap, which in his village was not uncommon but in the major leagues was. He’s got a rotund belly flopping over his belt, he had this weird hitch in his delivery where he looks skyward in the middle of his windup, and he threw a screwball. And he goes and throws a shutout against the class of the National League, the Houston Astros. The first eight starts of his big league career culminated in an 8-0 record, he goes nine innings every single time and he allows four earned runs over 72 innings, a 0.50 ERA. In the fifth game he started, he was 3-4 and raised his batting average to .438.
Somewhere along that run, the grandstands started filling up with Hispanic fans. The Dodgers had never been able to achieve saturation within the Los Angeles County Hispanic community the way they wanted because of the way Dodger Stadium was built and the way the land was acquired. A vibrant Mexican community was excised to make way for what at the time was going to be a public housing complex that was subsequently scuttled. That left Los Angeles with a lot of empty land, and not a lot to do with it. Suddenly, Walter O’Malley wanted to move his team west and they plunked them down right there, and the local Mexican community did not forgive him for that. Even though O’Malley was not directly responsible, he benefited more than anybody. This is important to him because Los Angeles County had a higher concentration of Mexicans than anywhere in the world outside of Mexico City. He knew this was a huge fan base, and from day one he wanted to reach that community. The Dodgers Spanish-language broadcasts we’re always strong. They tried to bring in Mexican players with not great success, and when that didn’t work, they tried to bring other Hispanic players just because they spoke English, the best of those was Manny Mota, who was a very fine player, but not exactly someone to inspire the masses. So Fernando’s arrival really did something that nobody previous to him could do. In the words of Al Campanis, he wanted to find the Mexican Sandy Koufax. And with Fernando, he found him.
After winning the World Series, the team is dismantled. A lot of the guys who had been there for a long time were let go. It seemed like a lot of the guys you talked to had regrets about the way it ended.
Universally that was the feeling. Unlike a lot of teams that lose players to free agency, a lot of these guys were under control. First, they traded Davey Lopes under the auspices that he could no longer run. So what did he do? He went to Chicago and stole 40-odd bases. They could have locked up Steve Garvey to a team-friendly contract because he did not want to leave, and they just would not negotiate, so he ended up in San Diego. The breaking up of this team was intentional on pretty much every level. Dusty Baker, who had been the captain—they ran him out of town. Ron Cey joined Lopes in Chicago and won a division. The Dodgers ethos had been to get rid of the guys a year too early than a year too late and they put it into action. After a career together, finally achieved what they wanted and were hungry for more, but they didn’t get a chance.
Jason Turbow is the author of They Bled Blue about the ’81 Dodgers, Dynastic, Bombastic, Fantastic on the Charlie Finley A’s, and The Baseball Codes about the unwritten rules of baseball. He is the founder of the Pandemic Baseball Book Club. You can follow him on Twitter @BaseballCodes.