* Author Profile: Steve Garvey

Steve Garvey is making the rounds with his new book My Bat Boy Days: Lessons I Learned from the Boys of Summer (Scribner). From Jackie Robinson, he learned about passion; from Gil Hodges, dignity

He learned about faith from Sandy Koufax.

“I’m Catholic but anyone who knew about Sandy his connection to his religion would clearly understand and we all respected and admired him for it,” he said in a telephone interview, referring to the Hall of Fame pitcher’s refusal to pitch in a World Series game that fell on Yom Kippur.

“When I listed him under “faith,” that was part of it. He [also] had faith in himself.”

Koufax made his debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1955. Because of the large bonus he received, he had to be kept on the major league roster.

“He sat there when he could have been pitching every fourth day in the minors and that probably slowed down his progress,” Garvey said. “By the time ‘57, ‘58 comes along, he strikes out 14 guys one time and walks seven the next, he was erratic. He was never consistent enough to impress [manager Walt] Alston to make him part of the rotation.”

Koufax struggled for several years and even entertained thoughts about quitting and going back to school.

He received some welcome inspiration — in the form of a figurative kick in the pants — from teammate Norm Sherry

“When all the pressure was on him and building and the press and the fans and the front office,…Sherry says to him ‘Just let it go, forget everything, you’re holding yourself up,” Garvey said. “And from that point on, for six-seven years, he becomes arguably the best pitcher in baseball and the greatest left-hander of all time.”

Although Koufax retired by the time Garvey joined the Dodgers in late 1969, the two icons took the field together on April 1 against their long-time rivals, the San Francisco (ne New York) Giants. They joined about 50 Dodger alumni to mark the 50th anniversary of the teams’ move to California. In the pre-game festivities, the old players donned their uniforms and took the field at their former positions to the adulation of a packed house.

“The last player announced was, of course, Sandy…who got the biggest ovation” who threw out the ceremonial first pitch. There’s always been a little mystique about him.”

Garvey laments that today’s generation of athletes don’t have enough appreciation for their predecessors. Vince Coleman, then with the St. Louis Cardinals, caused a lot of head-shaking when he said he didn’t know anything about Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball’s color line in 1947.

“If you were to ask a player nowadays about a good player form the 1970s or early ‘80s, I think it would be a toss-up, number one, if they cared, or number two if they had heard of him at all. They just don’t have a sense of history.”Garvey said he was “blessed” to have that connection with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Even collecting baseball cards has become a lost hobby. Garvey himself was a big collector as a kid and still has several thousand cards. “Those cards havea little history on the back, stats, where the player was from…. Every kid should get back to that.”

Garvey recalled a 1975 visit home on Thanksgiving, going through cigar boxes full of cards and a Beckett’s magazine and estimating the collection at $4,000. Now it’s worth a lot more, he said.

Garvey, a consultant with the Dodgers and spending time with the young ballplayers like Loney, Kemp, Martin, Billingsley, and “trying to get them to understand they’re such a part of history now. Don’t let this career, however long it is, go by without understanding what you’re representing, the torch you’ve been given and don’t think it doesn’t matter, because it does.”

Garvey’s book has the misfortune of coming out at the same time as Vindicated, Jose Canseco’s second expose on performance enhancing drugs and baseball. Garvey’s book extols positive values, while Canseco’s lurid tell-all exposes a dark side of the game.

Garvey spoke of a first book-signing at a Borders in Chicago. He arrived early and was browsing through the store and came across a table of dozens of copies of Vindicated, “and I look to the left and there’s a little table with probably 20 of my books.” Garvey stood nearby, hiding his face with a book, to see the customers’ reactions. “Some people would stop and look at Vindicated [on the table] but they would go over and pick up my book and they would leaf through it and go on and by it, which I thought was pretty doggoen interesting. I’m flattered, but it was almost a statement that we’re tired of all this sensationalism, tried about steroids. Yeah, it’s America and everybody deserves to make a living, but we’ve seen and heard of [Canseco’s first book]; what else is he going to say? Is it more innuendo? Maybe I want to read about a simpler time, when these guys were a band of brothers who played the game the right way and lived in the same neighborhood , they all got on the train and go to Ebbets Field and when they got there taking battign practice, they greeted fans by their first name.

“We’ll never be able to return to that, but we can learn from it,” Garvey said. The players are isolated these days. You can’t get near them. They have security guards, they go to a private lot, a private elevator. You can’t touch them and talk to them like you used to and that’s the sadness of Dodgertown, in its last year, That was the one place you could walk up to the players at Holman Stadium before an exhibition game, talk to them. The players would kiss the babies (and the moms) and sign the old Dodgers T-shirts….It’s not going to happen when they move to Arizona. “

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