10/12/99

The Los Angeles Codgers

Sam Orbaum bumps a few tender elbows, rubs a few famous shoulders, and lives a legendary week at the Dodgers' baseball fantasy camp.

Put the most beautiful woman on one side, and draw a thick line of chalk on the other side. OK guys - pick your fantasy.
    The magic that materializes beyond that chalk stripe is baseball. Anyone who has ever tried to pinpoint exactly why this game so bewitchingly captivates its lovers has failed, for the intrigue of baseball is a complex of intangibles - not unlike beauty itself.
    I don't know, perhaps if I had been offered six days with Miss Universe it might have been a greater thrill, but when the invitation arrived from the Los Angeles Dodgers to join their baseball fantasy camp in Florida, I was not about to hold out for anything better.
    That chalk line, which demarcates the playing area of a baseball field, is the symbolic, boldly defined limit of a self-contained proto-civilization.
    In the film Field of Dreams, the player-ghosts could not step across that white swath, beyond which lay the real world. Many real-life players will not step on the line, out of superstition. In our showcase game at Holman Stadium in Vero Beach, Florida, we stood along the chalk after being introduced by the PA announcer, restrained from running onto the field until the national anthem had been played - as if we had to be reminded where in the real world we were.
    I couldn't sleep my first night there. Just after sunrise, I crossed the Dodgertown compound to Field No. 1. I touched down on home plate, climbed the pitcher's mound, scuffled across the smooth red dirt of the base path, and ran across the velvety green outfield. Elated, I hurried along a footbridge over a brook to Holman Stadium, but the gates were locked. Like an eager boy, I craned my neck to peer in; soon I would be a baseball player, playing there.
    At breakfast, I found that others, too, had awoken too early and performed the same haj.
    'Are you a rookie or veteran?' I asked an arrival, a common question, inquiring if this was his first baseball camp. The question amused him.
    'I'm Carl Erskine.' A storied pitcher with the old Brooklyn Dodgers, Erskine is a fixture at baseball camp, having attended all but one of the 35 camps since 1983.
    The major fulfillment of fantasy here is spending a week at close quarters with legends of the game - sometimes, in the dressing room, with stark-naked legends, though I wouldn't call that a fantasy fulfilled.
    I had learned to love and understand baseball from the voice of Duke Snider, a Hall of Famer who later did color commentary on the radio broadcasts of my Montreal Expos. What a thrill, then, to hear that familiar, honeyed voice wafting out at me while I was batting: 'C'mon, Sam, follow through on your swing.' The Duke was talking to me.
    'Duke Snider was my idol,' said Wayne Canastra of South Orange, New Jersey, in his 10th camp. 'My first time, I walked in, and there was Duke reading a newspaper. I just stopped in my tracks and said, 'Hi Wayne, I'm Duke.' I was so nervous, so embarrassed!'
    I didn't do much better when I first met him. Smiling at my tongue-tied bafflegab, he said, most kindly, 'Maybe we can talk over dinner tonight.'
    'My heroes were Ron Cey and Steve Garvey,' said Scott Woodburn, 41, a Baltimore podiatrist. 'I look up on the board, I'm on their team! My week is made, right there!' But his week would only get better: At the closing ceremonies, Cey would present him with a Gold Glove Award.
    Garvey, Cey, Steve Yeager. Legendary prankster Jay Johnstone was there.
Reggie Smith, Mickey Hatcher, Rick Monday. The blustery, colorful umpire Bruce Froemming. And the Brooklyn-era Dodgers: Ralph Branca, Clem Labine, Johnny Podres, Erskine, the Duke. For decades they created our legends, for six days they were our buddies. Some have become close friends with veteran campers.
    There are other adult baseball camps around the US, but this is by far the best. At other camps, participants stay at a hotel and bus back and forth to a field. The Dodgers use their spring training facility, where they've been since 1948, with first-class accommodations right on location. The environment, down to the finest detail, is major league: the four immaculately groomed ball fields plus 6,500-seat Holman Stadium; the dressing room, fully equipped trainer's room (including whirlpool baths, Nautilus equipment and the team's own staff); a cozy lounge, haute-cuisine dining room, barbecue area, two sport shops and the friendliest personnel devoted to every whim.
    It's a full-fledged convention center and sports haven, with an Olympic-sized pool and facilities for tennis, golf, volleyball and basketball - all this in close proximity to the 'villas,' with a little lake in the middle of it all. Baseball and Dodger motifs are everywhere: even the street lights are glowing baseballs.
    The Dodgers are renowned as a classy organization, and here at Dodgertown, it shows.
    A card on the night table noted: 'In years gone by, it was customary for the innkeeper to turn back the bed linen and fluff the pillows before his guests retired. In this same tradition we have prepared your room for the evening.' That's service.
    If you weren't a Dodger fan before coming here, you quickly become one.
'I grew up in the '40s and '50s, rooting for the Yankees and hating the Dodgers,' said Alan Schachman, of New Jersey. 'I had to be convinced to come here the first time, in 1987, but I've come back every year since, and I've never been to a Yankees camp. Here, you immerse yourself in the experience of being a baseball player.' He admits it wasn't easy to get used to wearing a Dodgers uniform.
    This year, Schachman came with his son. 'Oh, I waited for this day, when I could bring David here. It's great to watch him play.'
    As the first Israeli in the history of LADABC (Los Angeles Dodgers Adult Baseball Camp), I was an item of curiosity, but not the only foreigner: Katsumi Takahashi came from Japan. Several Japanese have come to the camp in the past, as well as an Italian, Koreans and several Americans based in Saudi Arabia.
    Some campers were surprised I spoke English so well, assuming I was a Sabra; fellow Jews dropped hints that they were Of The Tribe; some gentiles - abiding political correctness, of course - revealed their kinship or connections to Jews, Judaism and Israel; and by necessity in such a fraternal environment, I endured needling ordained by my identity: lack of prowess earned me the nickname 'the Oy Vey Kid,' a take on 'the Say Hey Kid,' Willie Mays. Hobbled by injury, I was heckled with: 'I thought you Israelis were supposed to be tough!' ('You only use baseballs,' I retorted. 'We use grenades.')
    'This has got to be the largest collection of Jewish ballplayers in the world,' one camper enthused. We estimated that about 20 of the 77 campers were Jews. Why so many? In part because the cost of the camp, $4,000, is affordable to the upper economic classes, and because the Dodgers have always been a favorite team of American Jews. The greatest Jewish player of all time, Sandy Koufax, was a Dodger, and the greatest since, Shawn Green, has just become one, after indicating that he preferred to play for a team with a sizable Jewish fan base.
    Ethnicity is irrelevant between the white lines, but whenever we got together to shoot the breeze and share a few laughs, it was perfectly kosher.
    Sandy Silberstein of Los Angeles was buying a jersey in the camp shop, and asked how much it would cost to add the letters of his surname. Including sewing, he was told, $6 per letter. 'Six bucks!' he howled, 'Christ, my name is Silberstein! You guys got it in for the Jews, we always have long names, why do we gotta pay more?!'
    I sparred a lot with Charlie Strasser, the obstreperous Dodgers trainer. This is not a medic you go to for sympathy. 'You want sympathy?! Call your wife!' I nicked his armor with one shot that got a few laughs: 'It's because of people like you that everyone goes to Jewish doctors!' All in good fun, to be sure.
    'If you can't take the needling, you don't belong here,' said Mandy Worley. As the lone woman in camp, she took a lot, but dished it out too.
    The fellow who probably absorbed the most razzing felt one jibe went too far. Hopping mad, he claimed he was victimized by an antisemitic slur. This was funny, because he is Italian. Anthony Martorana, a high-intensity New Jersey lumber merchant, made certain I was aware of his love and respect for the Jews. 'You know the hassidic Jews of Lakewood, New Jersey? I sell 'em lumber. They're wonderful people, they treat me like their own. They're the most loyal people I ever met in my life.' Steve Francis, a California restaurant manager, relived a memorable trip he made to Israel to visit his brother Jeff, who married a kibbutznik from Ma'agan Michael and settled in Tel Aviv.
    Eager to share their Israel connections, campers told me about a cousin who's a caterer in Tel Aviv, or a diamond-dealer friend in Ramat Gan, hoping I might know them. I didn't. But the small-world syndrome did arise: Dick Pomerantz moved in similar social circles as I did in Montreal; Jay Epstein, of Phoenix, mentioned the name of a close colleague at the Post; and Bart Kaufman of Indianapolis lived four doors down from the publisher of this newspaper.
    'My wife was there a few weeks ago, she met Barak and Arafat,' said one fellow. Another, Al Diamond of Milford, Connecticut, vividly recalled when he came to volunteer during the Gulf War, regaling his experiences in the Negev, on the Golan, in hard-hit Ramat Gan.
    Even some of the big names got into it. Cey made a point of mentioning that his wife is Jewish; Froemming inquired about coming here on a speaking engagement; and the wife of umpire Dutch Rennert was enthralled to meet an Israeli: she's been here three times for the Feast of Tabernacles.
    Henry Cook, who lived in Saudi Arabia for 30 years, described the war years from the other side: 1967, 1973, 1991.
    Many asked about the state of baseball in the Jewish State, but when Herb Lewis asked, 'How's the situation over there?' he meant the front-page stuff. Having been immersed in this intense baseball environment for a couple of days at that point, I could hardly remember.
    Herbie was a camp phenomenon. 'When I was 40, I had a severe heart attack playing baseball in Atlanta. Since then, I had a hernia, high blood pressure, kidney stones, thyroidectomy, and a quadruple bypass.' Six years after his heart surgery, he attended his first camp - at age 72. Now 84, he's still at it; he's a Hall of Famer at Cooperstown as the world's oldest active baseball player. 'I've already made my arrangements; I told my rabbi I want to be buried in my Dodgers uniform.' Herbie's age was a popular theme at camp, and he was happy to perpetuate it. He handed Rick Monday a ball and said, 'Son, can I have your autograph?' On talent night, Branca introduced him with these words: 'We're ending the millennium with the guy who began it, Herb Lewis.'
    The lower limit was 30 years old, with the average age about 50. Not everyone was fit: there were some outstanding potbellies, numerous gray-haired codgers and some distinctly unathletic types. On the other hand, there were plenty of impressive talents too.
On the field of play, the competitive juices pushed us to our limits. The 77 campers were distributed onto six teams (coached and managed by our heroes) for a six-round tournament, plus a campers-instructors game.
    'Fantasy' was the operative word: for some, it meant playing the game in a real stadium, or hanging out with the big-name players; for others, learning to hit or pitch from the stars, or putting on a real Dodgers uniform with your name on the back. Campers get videotaped highlights of the week, and even a stack of baseball cards - with our own names and pictures.
    Fantasy was running out to our positions in the field in the campers-instructors game, pitting our talents against the major leaguers, in a stadium with a real PA announcer. It was deftly catching a hard hit and jogging back to the dugout to applause from 493 real fans.
    Francis, 52, hadn't played in 10 years since he blew out his knee playing softball. 'I can't play on a regular basis anymore; this is just a one-week fantasy. Meeting the players is a big part of it, but the fantasy is putting on the uniform and walking out between the [chalk] stripes again. By now, I must admit, the knee is barking a bit.'
    For one fan, four-year-old Mason Smith, fantasy was mistaking us for the real thing. The tyke watched us nobodies milling about, and his face could have lit up Holman Stadium. 'Daddy, look!' he exclaimed breathlessly, 'the Dodgers are here!' I must say, we took the hero-worship quite well, even when a pretty blonde in the crowd asked for our autographs.
    For the veteran campers, it wasn't fantasy that brought them back as much as the camaraderie, the fraternal intimacy. 'The common denominator is the love of the game,' said Neil Adams, a Dodgertown doyen in his 25th camp.
    'We have 77 people who are mostly professionals, entrepreneurs, that category. If you put these same 77 guys together into a different situation, could they get along as well? Not a chance.'
    For some, the highlight was the oral history: stories, anecdotes, jokes, recollections and quips that kept us in side-splitting laughter from the first moment to the last.
    Following dinner each evening, the microphone was turned on and a rich program commenced. Games were reviewed, taped highlights shown, the best plays and players rewarded, and wonderful tales told. One-liners shot around the dining room like pinballs. Items were auctioned and mock-infraction fines were levied for charity. Even after all this, we moseyed over to the lounge for more, dulling our physical aches with alcohol and jocularity.
    Ah, yes. The aches and pains.
    It is such a pastoral game, this baseball, but we learned to respect its physical demands. Strasser's training room was always packed with 'wusses and pussies' (sometimes it was better to live with the pain than subject yourself to Strasser's sharp tongue).
    I arrived at camp with an inflamed Achilles tendon. 'JEEZUS!' he roared. 'You're hurt already?!'
    On the first day's workout, the first time I hit a ball, I ruptured the blood vessels at the bottom of my thumb. He thought it was delightful the way my hand swelled up and turned purple. I returned regularly with a hip flexor, strained groins, you name it. I was hit by a pitch twice, and even hurt my ear putting on a protective batting helmet.
    All this gave Strasser great pleasure. Worst were the two strained hamstrings. 'Holy mackerel, look at the discoloration! It's purple, yellow, blue; man, it's beautiful!' I played anyway, and at the closing ceremonies, Strasser presented me with the Purple Heart Award. He was magnanimous: 'What some of you campers have played with this week, a professional athlete would not play with. We would usually shut a guy down for a few days. But you guys paid big bucks, and you like the pain, because you don't get the pain in your professions. You guys are sadistic.'
    Some of pro baseball's funniest characters were on the camp roster, and for six days we had a riot. Jay Johnstone killed us with recollections of his practical jokes; Ralph Branca and Bruce Froemming dueled wittily with campers and each other; Podres, Cey and Hatcher told luridly naughty stories that scuttled the Dodgers' wholesome image; Reggie Smith, the only black player (there was just one black camper as well), had us rollicking with his persecution-complex shtick; everyone got into the act, nothing was sacred, and no one was immune. To wit:
* During a rain delay, camp director Guy Wellman assured us that the fields were protected. 'Holman Stadium is covered with --'  '-- Bruce's shirt!' someone yelled. (Froemming takes a lot of ribbing for his girth: he's 5-foot-8, 245 pounds.)

* Snider brought on mass apoplexy when, at the microphone, he mistakenly called Reggie Smith 'Reggie Jackson' (another famed black player). There was a borderline racial undertone to the gaffe.
    Immediately following 'the hazards of Duke,' Smith came up to the mike and rubbed it in to poor Duke. And when Smith, in turn, mistakenly referred to one camp team instead of another, he added: 'Yeah, well, you guys all look alike to me.'

* Branca, after a dismal loss: 'The trouble with our team today is, they didn't listen to Jay Johnstone. He preached them about overconfidence. It didn't set in.'

* During one evening program, I put Branca on the spot by asking that he tell us about his moment in baseball infamy, the pitch he threw in '51 that became known as 'The Shot Heard 'Round the World' - Bobby Thomson's playoff-winning home run. The next day my team played Branca's, and I took a pitch on the elbow.

    Was that revenge? 'Did you call that pitch?' I challenged him. 'Nah. If I'd a called that pitch, you'd a been hit in the head.'

* At Awards Night, when Takahashi came up to accept his Best Pitcher trophy, he took the mike shyly. 'I am,' he said haltingly, 'Reggie Jackson.'

* Reggie Smith, glaring in feigned indignation: 'Here I am, doing my job as an instructor. All of a sudden, this guy yells 'heads up!' He starts moving people around by the half a dozen. Guess who's left? I cover my head, and I get hit in the back. And I look around, and I'm the only black guy there! I ask, what is wrong with this picture?!'

* Rick Monday, recalling asking for an autograph when he was a kid: 'I asked one of the players, would you sign my baseball? He said, 'Son, I'm sorry, I'm really busy right now.' I was crushed. I get a little older, and I become a professional. I go into Tiger Stadium, the Tigers need to win, but I happen to get a base hit and the tying run scores. I go to first base, I look to the mound, and I see Johnny Podres (who is listening to this) - the same gentleman who told me 'son, I'm really busy right now.' And I'm jumping up and down and screaming 'That's for not signing my ball!!' And he's looking at me like I just fell out of a tree.

    'In fact, Dave Stewart (a former ballplayer) told me, he was a kid, went to the stadium and asked a player to sign a baseball; he was told, 'Son, I'm sorry, I have to go.' He got a little older, and became my teammate in LA, and told me: 'Rick, thanks for not signing my ball.' So you never know.'

* After introducing Father Nugent one evening, Wellman told this one: 'Monsignor was playing in a golf tournament, he didn't have his collar on, and he cut in front of the senior umpire [Froemming]. And the senior umpire cursed him out! But tonight they met. Is it all settled now?' Froemming, responding to the hoots and jeers: 'I had the wrong monsignor!'

* During one game, a camper bunted (tapped the ball lightly). Smith shouted: 'You paid four thousand bucks to bunt?!'

* 'I used to go visit Al in camp when he was 10 years old,' said the mother of camper Al Diamond. 'Now, 50 years later, I'm still visiting my boy in camp.'

* 'How would you describe Mickey Hatcher intellectually?' 'Ran into too many walls.'

The pros spent a lot of time teaching us the tricks of the trade. Erskine gave a seminar on pitching, Duke was on hand to provide batting tips, and Smith won many new fans with his patient, illuminating, but not always fruitful, instruction.
    'It was wonderful to have the opportunity to coach you,' he deadpanned to Worley during one evening's program, 'but the truth is, stop by the office and they'll be happy to refund your money.'
    Smith, who learned to hit from one of the greatest, Ted Williams, tried valiantly to coax a bit of power from my anemic bat, but it was pretty hopeless (I had excuses, really I did, but I won't go into that). He explained the mechanics and physics, showed how every part of the body should respond at every moment while batting: where the toes should be, the back heel, the knees, hips, elbows and front shoulder - but then he blew it: 'Most important,' he stressed, 'when you're hitting, don't think.' From that point, every time I came to bat, I was thinking: 'Don't think.'
    He had better success with Andy Medler, an Air Force pilot. 'Reggie was outstanding. Even just positioning the bat in the hands, which I was doing incorrectly - if you can believe that somebody who followed baseball for 50 years was holding the bat wrong. I had seven or eight hits, which I attribute to Reggie.'
    'I was 1-for-7, then I went to Reggie,' said David Schachman. 'I asked what I was doing wrong, he said I wasn't pivoting my back foot; I went 8- for-10 after that.' At Canastra's first camp, 'Johnny Podres took me to the back of Holman Stadium to warm up, before I pitched my first game. This man taught me more in five minutes than I learned through all of my playing career. What a thrill.'
    Part of the beguiling spell of baseball is its inexorably bond to our youth, our history, and especially, to father-son relationships. But there are variations to the theme.
    'My mother wouldn't let me play baseball when I was a kid,' said Eugene Morong, 71, a psychiatrist. 'She said it's a sport for goyim, you'll get killed. My mother used to take me to Ebbet's Field [the Brooklyn Dodgers' home] on Ladies Day, but she detested baseball. So she would sit there and read Goethe.' If his mother knew he was at baseball fantasy camp, 'She would have said I'm very foolish and I'll get hurt.' So, did you get hurt?
    'Yeah.'
    Worley recalled her first camp as overwhelmingly sensitive for her dad. There she was, in a Dodgers uniform, playing ball with their favorite players. 'My father came to watch me play, and he was crying, bawling like a baby. I couldn't go over to him until he collected himself.'
    Carl Erskine was another proud dad when, after the game, his son Jimmy slowly ran around the basepaths and came home to a horde of hugging, backslapping men. Jimmy has Down's Syndrome. Such a male-bonding experience is a stupendous joy for him - and his father.
    Jimmy was born in 1960, just after Erskine retired. 'Handicapped folks like Jimmy were normally shut away, kept out of the mainstream. I realized, hey, this is kind of what Jackie Robinson faced.' Erskine and Robinson, the first black in the majors, were Brooklyn teammates. 'I see it as two major social changes in America, Jackie and then Jimmy. The parallel between their experiences is that Jackie set a momentum in place, and people began to look at others in a different way.
    'He demonstrated that the dignity of the individual is supreme. When Jimmy came along, there was a momentum in that direction. You could certainly say that Jackie's experience paved the way for Jimmy.'
    Bob Leavine was drawn back to when big-league baseball was not mere fantasy for him, but a dream-come-true on the verge. One of the nicest people at camp, Leavine, 55, from Tyler, Texas, was a nervous rookie. In his youth, he explained, he had shown exciting promise as a pitcher, but wrecked his arm in 1965 and retired from the game in bitterness, his life's ambition shattered.
    Speaking to me as camp opened, just before we would cross that white line in our Dodger uniforms, he was emotionally charged: it would be his first taste of the game in 34 years.
(Box)

The Catch

    Perhaps I should have limited my baseball fantasy to being a sportswriter.
    My hitting was gawdawful - I batted .150 with three dinky hits in 20 at bats. Everything else I hit ended up in the third-baseman's glove.
    Everything.
    Camper Don Stearns asked me after a few games if I had made good contact yet. 'Only with my elbow,' I said. He winced: He was the pitcher who plunked me there.
    On the other hand, I can say proudly, I did not strike out, although this was the first time I ever played hardball, and I hadn't even played softball in 15 years.
    A place had to be found for me in the field, and with all things considered, including my hobbling leg injuries, right field was the place where I could do least damage to my team. Happily, I failed to disgrace myself: I didn't have much to do, but I didn't make any errors either.
    Ah, but there was one magical moment out there...
    We had lost our first game, then won the last five. I, personally, saved one of those wins.
    It was the final inning, bases loaded, two outs. Our 14-2 lead had been whittled to 14-9, and we were reeling.
    One of the biggest guys in camp, Mark Sullivan, was at bat against us. He hit a twisting, wind-blown shot, wa-a-a- ay out in right field, and ...
    Look, I can't be modest about this: it was the greatest catch in baseball history. Everyone said so.
    Opposing manager Reggie Smith: 'Who caught that sonofabitch?!' Teammate Al Diamond: 'Given your level, that was phenomenal, that was an unbelievable play for anyone. You'll probably never see that play again. That hit was a rocket!'
    Sullivan's teammate Sandy Silberstein: 'I don't even want to talk about it. Everybody's thinking 'grand slam,' then Sammy sticks his glove up, makes an incredible catch to win the game.'
    Dino Ebel, one of our coaches, at the microphone: 'Cey and I were talking and boom, we looked at each other and said 'grand slam,' and there was Sam the Man, stuck his glove out and the ball found it. It was a great play.'
    Charlie Strasser: 'Yeah, yeah, I heard, don't tell me about it, I heard.'
    I'm sure it was meant as a compliment when Steve Garvey commented: 'That was the greatest play I've ever seen by someone of such limited abilities.”