Baseball general managers don’t write books, they write contracts, and former Los Angeles Dodger General Manager Ned Colletti includes every trade, free-agent signing and offseason acquisition in his memoir, “The Big Chair: The Smooth Hops and Bad Bounces from inside the World of the Acclaimed Los Angeles Dodgers General Manager” (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 438 pages, $28) with Joseph A. Reaves.
The book is required reading for sports management types who check each day’s transactions in the sports section. One thing it’s not is a tell-all. The 55-year-old Colletti didn’t jeopardize his job as a Dodgers senior adviser by burning bridges with behind-the-scenes stories about the front office.
For a good read about running a baseball team, get Bill Veeck’s 1962 memoir, “Veeck as in Wreck.” In 1951, Veeck owned the hapless St. Louis Browns, who were playing before pigeons and peanut shells at Sportsman’s Park. The team shared the 30,000-seat stadium with the Cardinals and the city had thrown its love behind Stan Musial, Red Schoendienst and Enos Slaughter.
A natural showman, Veeck used exploding scoreboards and lobster giveaways to get fans to the games. He put on his promoter’s cap and thought, “What can I do that no one had ever seen before? The answer was perfectly obvious: I would send a midget up to bat.”
In the second game of a doubleheader, 3-foot 7-inch Eddie Gaedel came up to pinch hit. The homeplate umpire turned, looked down at Gaedel and exclaimed, “What the hell?”
The stunt worked perfectly — Gaedel walked on four pitches and Veeck’s Browns made the national spotlight, albeit briefly.
The first hint that “The Big Chair” wouldn’t rival Veeck’s entertaining narrative was the author’s note: “I recreated dialogue to match my best recollections of exchanges.”
Punchless, bland and contrived conversations abound. “Ned, you are smart and experienced and you get along fine with many types of personalities,” said Commissioner Bud Selig.
When he’s not patting himself on the back, he’s proselytizing like baseball’s version Kahlil Gibran: “Live life to the fullest. Don’t live it recklessly. Live it to the fullest, with passion, pure effort and a heart that beats for others.”
Colletti simply doesn’t provide what the reader wants, which is to be behind closed doors with him at the winter meetings. “The storytelling could be robust” he writes, without telling stories.
Many times he tantalizes without following through. For example, when describing his angst about power hitter James Loney he writes, “Beside his crazy and still unexplained freeway episode in January, Loney wasn’t producing.”
Instead of filling us in, Colletti drops the subject. An internet search revealed that Loney had sideswiped three cars, pulled over and passed out.
Colletti grew up in Franklin Park near the Chicago freight yards and listened to Cubs games over the din of planes taking off and landing at O’Hare International Airport. His father took him to Wrigley for his 7th birthday, and during his adolescence he paid 75 cents to sit in the front row of the bleachers … “as far toward center field as possible (and) from there I taught myself the intricacies of the game and set myself on a life-changing path.”
He was covering the Philadelphia Flyers for the Philadelphia Journal when his father fell ill. He returned home, got a job with the Cubs, jumped to the Giants and landed in the Dodgers’ Big Chair in 2005.
The Dodgers were then owned by Frank McCourt, a Boston real estate developer who migrated west after he failed to buy the Red Sox. If McCourt had bought the team and built his stadium on the Boston waterfront, it likely would have been a disaster. McCourt’s lawyer said “not a penny” of the $430 million he spent buying the Dodgers came out of his own pocket.
Frank McCourt and his wife Jamie ran the team. “(They) had their offices in a locked area behind another locked section of the stadium — a few hundred feet and a hallway apart from the bulk of the staff. Rarely did the two worlds meet.”
When the McCourts parted ways, the divorce was “cover your eyes ugly” according to the LA Times. “She’s lucky to have been along for the ride,” McCourt uttered after his ex-wife complained about her $130 million settlement.
Despite the dysfunction, Colletti enjoyed being in the presence of Dodger icons Sandy Koufax, Tommy Lasorda and Vin Scully, and all the while he tried to restore the Dodgers to their glory years.
Baseball in the Colletti realm was a carousel of A.L. East retreads. Grady Little, Joe Torre, Nomar Garciaparra, and Manny Ramirez all wore Dodger blue during his tenure.
“Manny wanted to wear No. 24, but that was Walter Alston’s number,” Colletti writes. “Manny didn’t know who Walter Alston was.”
Nor would a lot of fans, and yet Colletti doesn’t mention Alston’s legacy of seven pennants and his penchant for signing one-year contracts for 23 consecutive years.
Colletti’s humor is drier than a rosin bag on a hot Arizona afternoon. He recounts Dick Tidrow visiting the Cubs clubhouse and walking past the reticent Greg Maddux playing solitaire in front of his locker. Months later, the same scene played out, except this time Maddux glanced up from his cards and asked, “You again?”
Colletti lasted 11 seasons — a good run by any measure — but never won a World Series. He was fired after the Dodgers lost to the Mets in the 2015 N.L. Division Series. LA Times sportswriter Bill Plashke broke the news: “I think you’re in trouble, I’m hearing it from people in the upper ranks.”
He was replaced by Andrew Friedman who came from the Tampa Bay Rays the same year the Cubs got Joe Maddon from Tampa Bay.
A friend commiserates, telling him,“Make another chapter for yourself.”
Another chapter, another book, whatever, but next time bring a tape recorder and take better notes.