I got to thinking about this when Albert joined the Dodgers. Just how many HOFer’s have spent time with the Dodgers in Brooklyn or LA. The answer right now is 46. Also 7 managers and coaches, 3 executives, and 4 broadcasters. The broadcasters are Scully, Red Barber, Jaime Jarrin, and Ernie Harwell, who did most of his work in Detroit. But he worked with Barber for a while. The execs are Larry McPhail, Walter O’Malley, and Branch Rickey.
Managers and coaches were Lasorda, Alston, Ned Hanlon, Ted Lyons, George Sisler, Wilbert Robinson, and Babe Ruth. Pretty heady company. Players include the likes of Jim Bunning, Gary Carter, Ricky Henderson, Billy Herman, Waite Hoyt, Greg Maddux, Juan Marichal, Frank Robinson, Joe Medwick, Eddie Murray, Piazza, Lloyd and Paul Waner, Hoyt Wilhelm, Ernie Lombardi, who was originally a Dodger and was traded after his rookie year, and Hack Wilson.
Some of those guys only spent one season with the Dodgers. Maddux spent parts of two seasons with LA as Ned Colletti traded for him twice. Some were only there for a few games, like Marichal. The ones who spent a majority or all of their careers with the Dodgers are Campy, Reese, Robinson, Drysdale, Koufax, Snider, Sutton, Dazzy Vance, Zack Wheat. Leo Durocher spent time as a player and a manager. Max Carey, Casey Stengel, Burleigh Grimes, John Montgomery Ward, also played and managed.
Names you might not know, Ki Ki Cuyler, Dan Brouthers, Billy Herman, who was also a coach, Rube Marquard, Hughie Jennings, Wee Willie Keeler, Joe Kelley, George Kelly, Tony Lazzeri, Fred Lindstrom, Al Lopez, who managed against the Dodgers in the 1959 World Series, Heinie Manush, Rabbit Maranville, don’t you just love these names?? And Arky Vaughan. Lots of history there. Some good, some bad. Lindstrom was with the Giants when a ball kangarooed over his head and they lost a critical game.
Lazzeri’s nickname with the Yankees was Poosh ’em up. He is famous for being struck out by Grover Alexander when the Cards beat the Yanks in the 1926 World Series. Arky Vaughn was a career .318 hitter and spent 4 years with Brooklyn. Robinson, Frank that is, the only players to win an MVP in both leagues. Campy won 3 as a Dodger. You wonder sometimes how good Campy would have been had he come into the league sooner, and not had some nagging injuries during his outstanding career.
For me, it has always been what if, what if they had never traded Piazza. I will always blame FOX for that. There have been some borderline HOF players come through LA. Garvey, as good as he was, his numbers still fall short. Hodges belongs, pure and simple. This time the voters got it wrong. His numbers compare with Tony Perez except for the RBI’s, but Perez played longer. However, he is only a few HRs ahead of Hodges. Many say Fernando belongs. As a Cultural icon, and for what he did bringing the Latino community to games in droves, maybe. But his career stats are too weak to garner entry. I think he may get in as a broadcaster someday, or if they decide players who made contributions outside of their stats.
Albert is a lock. He will go in 5 years after he retires and there will be a StL on his cap. Some think Hershiser belongs. Again I think his career stats are just a little shy of election. But he might get in if the Veteran’s committee thinks he is good enough. Another player I think needs a look-see again is Maury Wills. Maury changed the game when he arrived and brought back the stolen base. He also was the first to break Cobb’s record of 96.
I think CK will get in. Most likely a first-ballot guy. The rest of today’s Dodgers, well, I think that only time will tell. But it is fun to look back on those who came before. Guys like Boog Powell and Rocky Colovito. Close, but just a little shy of being hall-worthy.
Only Dodger Minor League Game: OKC BOX – Kaybear with his 7th HR. LHP Justin Bruihl was promoted to OKC from Tulsa after 15 innings (1.20 ERA/0.67 WHIP). He now has 3.1 scoreless innings at OKC with 6 K’s. Watch this guy!
Discussion (35)
Disagree, not disagreeable
I was wrong, they had a 4 man bench. I forgot there were only 8 position players in the lineup. Pujols has been pretty good as a Dodger. Watching him interact with the rest of the team when he gets on is very fun to do.
Great win.
Treinen has some absolutely filthy pitches in his arsenal.
Mookie looking a lot more like it.
So much better watching baseball with a sell out crowd, although it was a strange end to the game.
Oh yeah, two hits off rightes
BIG AL !!!!
Come on, Give me a reason to like you Bickford,, please just slow it down a little bit
Put Bickford on the bus with Raley!
I don’t want anybody on this site calling him Fat Albert anymore
Oh yeah way to go MOOKIE
So all Mookie needed was 56,000!
I don’t want to hear anybody on the site calling him Fat Albert anymore.
Oh yeah way to go mookie
Kelly 1,2,3 inning wth
I’m sorry but Luke Raley is not a major league hitter!
Wow! UGLY! Is Julio supposed to field as well as hit and pitch? Tho it was a horrible 0-2 pitch to Herrera
Urias should b a 2way player or mb just bat for Betts. What has happened here he seems to b more than lucky. Doc has found his xtra inning pinch hitter. Sorry kershaw
Julio Ohtani!!!!! Why isn’t he batting cleanup?
There u go Phil. Roberts must be reading your comments. He had Lux running on 3-2 count to get to third and scores on the ground out. Manufactured run for Dodgers! I love it!
I have said this over and over u cannot trust anything doc says about injuries. He will say oh he is day to day and they will be out for a month. I don’t know how this lineup scores but mb somebody will get hot. 3 hits last night but 2 for homers so mb we can just get lucky.
Back to the IL for Bell-il. Mitch White recalled right after Doc said 13 pitchers is enough. lol I don’t think he’s the great communicator everyone thinks he is.
Will be interesting to see how the Dodgers play against these weak teams. Elfin is an ex Dodger. Traded in the Rollins deal if I remember right. They need to beat up on these kinds of guys.
Cool technology Mark. My wife saw it and she wants to get a sensor placed at my local bar so it can detect when I’m drinking too much and can cut me off!
Opening Night
Mookie CF
Gavin SS
JT 3b
Will C
Matt LF
CT3 2b
Albert 1b
Zach RF
Julio P
More prominent players hitting the IL today as Tyler Glasnow of the Rays, and Max Scherzer are headed that way. Glasnow’s injury is the more serious of the two. We might lose Bellinger if he is not better by tomorrow.
Sometimes I need to get in a shameless plug… especially with technology this awesome.
Anybody really believe the Giants are going to win62 per cent of their games for the full season. No way that would b around 100 wins. The Giants have not had a bad slide but they will as all teams do.
The Dodgers just need to get healthy and perform to capabilities. But they may not get healthy which might end their chances. Would we have won a World Series without this one or that one? No we we needed most everybody except mb pollock.
To win a World Series u need somebody to play over their head(Seager) a hot pitcher(Buehler Urias) somebody who makes memorable plays(Betts Bellinger) and others who keep the line moving(Muncy Smith Barnes Turner) with occasional game winning plays. So most everybody makes contributions.
Fun post Bear. Great research on a topic I would have never thought to write about. Good idea. And well executed. I love your stroll down baseball HOF history with the great photos.
* Great job by the bullpen throwing up a shutout after the 1st. The situational pitcher was excellent especially in the 3 innings where there was traffic. Holding the Phillies to 1 for 11 w/ RISP was huge. The back end looked awesome with Treinen, Nelson and KJ. You don’t win many with 3 hits without an extraordinary bullpen.
* I’m going to knit-pick again about the lack off aggressive moves by Doc in-game, that go completely unnoticed. But over the long haul they can be opportunities lost. Botton 4, Phillies up 1 – zip. Mookie walks. And I keep waiting for Doc to run early to get him to 2nd with Lux batting. It never happened. Finally at 2 & 2, I figured he has to be going to stay out of the double play, right? It’s called a “hit & run” or “ run and hit”. Dodger fans are unfamiliar with the play but other teams almost always run in that situation. Lux grounded into a force at 2nd which would have moved Mookie to 2nd had he been running on the play, and the out would have been at 1st. Mookie at 2nd with 1 out is a good thing. Lux at 1st, less good.
And it didn’t matter because Smith goes yard for a 2 run homer and all is forgotten. But to me it’s a missed opportunity to manage the game and putting more pressure on the defense. I believe that stuff pays off in the long haul.
Now I plan to get a comment from Cassidy who commented the last time I bitched about Mookie not running. He very correctly pointed out that I lacked inside information and maybe Mookie wasn’t entirely healthy and able to steal. That can certainly be true. But I’m going to assume that if he’s out there, he’s capable of running to 2nd on a hit and run. Maybe I’m wrong.
We could use some innings out of Urias tonight.
Well it sure seems like Bauer hasn’t been using the last 3-4 outings and the results speak for themselves!
Well it sure seems that Bauer hasn’t been using the last 3-4 outings and the results show it!
MLB just announced that they will begin issuing 10 day suspensions for using foreign substances on the baseball. How this will impact Bauer and others remains to be seen. Maybe Mark can post the entire release. This will begin on Monday.
Not gonna happen unless the offense starts giving us 5-6 runs a game consistently. That’s gonna be tough especially with Seager, Bellinger and Muncy out. Hopefully Belli’s is a short stint and he can start barreling up center cut fastballs.
The bullpen actually looked good last night. 4 hits, no walks, 5.1 innings.
The Dodgers need to sweep the Phillies and Diamondbacks, win 2 of 3 against the Padres and 3 of 4 against the Cubs. If that happens, there is no way the Giants are in first place when we face them on the 28th.
Julio needs to give us some innings tonight and the offense needs to wake up! It’s a thin pen for this game
Hall of FAME or Hall of all-time leaders at RBI, WINS, ETC?
Fame, it means famous, it means that what they did was famous, that what they did meant something, that what they did, a lot or a little, was well known by many fans, that should count and not just the numbers at the end of their career!
Also, who selects the journalists who vote to decide whether or not a player enters the Hall of Fame?
Fans should have a voice and vote, who are the ones who enjoyed watching their idols play, who are the ones who paid a ticket to go see a certain player, a certain team.
It seems stupid to me, but what can I do? Not only can a certain team full of stupid clowns annoy me, there are other things too!
By the way, a hug and wishing a happy birthday since yesterday to those who celebrated their day …
No question, Mike Piazza never should have never been traded. Clueless Fox execs.
But honestly, Piazza behaved badly during the process. Fox apparently offered him a pretty good deal, which he rejected. Interesting that the Dodgers could have signed him a year before the sale to what would have been a very team friendly deal. But Peter O’Malley didn’t want to stick a big contract with a new owner so they waited. As much as I like Peter and the O’Malley family, his thinking turned out to be more wrong than right, especially with regard to individual ownership vs. corporate ownership.
When you talk about Dodgers in the Hall of Fame, I’ve always thought Gil Hodges should be there. A great injustice.
Good write-up, Bear.
I’m not sure if it’s for health reasons, writer’s block, preoccupation with the more important things is life, or what, but it was good to read AC after a prolonged absence. No one anywhere combines as much inside knowledge of the team and the game, a deep understanding the the minor league system and can apply rational financial analysis. I learn something nearly every time I read one of his posts, and by contrast the rest of us are just a bunch of whining arm chair GMs who don’t know anything about anything.
The Dodgers have three MVPs, three Cy Young winners and two probably first ballot HOFers on the team and they’re still in 2nd place. Go figure. I think there is something to belief. The Giants seem to be on to something. They are just playing the game well without gaudy stats or big name players.
The Dodgers had that in 2017 and last year. It seems like nearly every other game the Dodgers had some sort of key walk-off hit or come-from-behind win in dramatic fashion. They were exciting to watch because you could never count them out. This year, they are more often than not on the losing end of those close games. They don’t have the key hit. Instead they have the key error or their reliever offers up a key hit to the other team. I think that effects a team’s morale. Walk-off celebrations beget confidence, which begets more walk-off celebrations – and the inverse is true as well. You can see it in their body language. Mookie is lacking swagger. Sabre nerds will never have a Swagger Index metric.
… but … they’re a game out of first place and 7-3 in their last 10 games, so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.
I really wish people would stop saying Trump incited an insurrection on Jan 6. Oh, he didn’t help by any means, and he just needs to go away because he’s part of the problem, but the series of events that led up to that incident at the Capital is long, and it was the end result of the current climate of extreme political polarization that is not healthy and may ultimately destroy our republic. If you really want to fix that problem, then you have to seriously take a step back and look for solutions objectively and not punitively. I can’t imagine a worse response than labeling half the country that didn’t vote a certain way as terrorists. What do we do to suspected terrorists? Night after night John Brennan would go on MSNBC and call Trump a “traitor.” You cannot keep saying these things and not expect something really bad to happen.
It was only about a year ago that a mob of people flooded LaFayette Park and tried to force their way unto the grounds of the White House. Upwards of fifty secret service agents were injured. The Secret Service ordered the President, the First Lady and his son into an underground bunker underneath the White House for their protection.
That actually happened. Think about that for a moment. How is that really different from Jan 6? In the meantime we were told that the park service and secret service cleared LaFayette the next day so Trump could pose for a photo op, which turned out to be another lie – among so many.
The man who entered the Capital building and was photographed sitting with his feet propped up on Nancy Pelosi’s personal desk in her office has been held in solitary confinement, without charge, since being arrested following the incident. How is that possible in this country? I learned in grade school what Habeus Corpus means, and why it was considered central to our concept of due process before the law. How is it that this fundamental legal right is violated for political purposes? – and it’s done right in front of us. And no one seems bothered by it.
If our system of law enforcement is just weaponized against political opponents and this behavior becomes normalized, then it sparks retribution and we turn into a another banana republic. Someone please explain to me why an FBI swat team descended on Roger Stone’s home in the middle of the night (complete with live CNN cameras because they were tipped off) and arrests a 68 year old man accused of lying to Congress? – if not to send a message, create a photo op and punish political opponents?
How is it that an actual person who can easily document who he is and that he was a business partner of Hunter Biden can go on national TV and describe in minute detail the Biden’s business dealings with Chinese officials, yet the whole story is memory holed, called “Russian disinformation” and the NY Post, which broke the laptop story, is banned from Twitter?
I consider myself a reasonable person, and if someone can offer reasonable explanations for all of these things, then will consider them, but these are things that happened, and it is all just very wrong. … and I won’t even go into the Russian collusion …whatever that was.
People are willing to believe the election is stolen because, in a larger sense, they can feel there is something rotten in Denmark … and they are probably right.
Great article Bear. Scully and Barber were hard to beat. Same goes for Jaime Jarrin. The Dodgers are very fortunate to have such great broadcasters.
I’m not a huge fan of guys getting into the hall by way of the veterans committee. I once heard people say, if you think a player belongs in the Hall and you have to think about it for a while, he doesn’t belong there. I figure if a player was HOF worthy, they would have already been elected.
Clayton Kershaw should not have an “I think” attached to his name. Three Cy Young awards and an MVP makes it pretty automatic.
I’ve commented on the Hodges / Perez argument before. There’s a few magic numbers for hitters. 500 HR, 1500 RBI, 1500 Runs gets your ticket stamped. Perez has one of those numbers, Hodges does not. It’s that simple for me.
The Dodgers took care of business last night. The Phillies are a solid, but second tier team. It’s a pretty fair fight with so many of our guys out. Harper almost made it real interesting, but the ball died on the long flight towards center field. The damn Giants beat the D-Backs, as they should. But, the Padres fell to the Rox, so it was a pretty good night for the most part.
No lefties in sight for the next couple of days, I’m really looking forward to the Wheeler / Kershaw matchup on Wednesday. I sure hope Belli returns by then. I can’t believe how unfortunate we are with injuries this year. They really need to figure out how to keep guys healthy.
I guess you can call Gonsolin “effectively wild”. He was stretched out to 81 pitches, but couldn’t make it out of the 4th. I was surprised that they only gave Price 2/3 of an inning, but you know how Doc loves to get more commercials into our viewing experience. Seven pitchers later, we have a 3-1 win. At the end of the day, we had another bullpen game. On the bright side, a lot of scoreless innings by our horrible bullpen.
WIll Smith praises the team’s depth after the game…
“Injuries have definitely hurt us this year. It has not been ideal with everyone going down at some point,” Smith said. “But it speaks to the depth we have as a team, as an organization. … We’re still competitive, which is great. As an offense, everybody does their part and we score runs.”
I was disappointed to hear that Rangel Revelo was packing his bags for Japan. I really thought the deserved another shot at an MLB job. With Fat Albert doing his thing, it was hard to justify another right handed hitting first baseman on the team. Now I fantasize about Albert losing a few (30) lbs eating the healthy, organic Dodger’s clubhouse food and a return to his Cardinals like production. Right now he’s doing his best David Freese impression. This is his slash line against lefties…
.333/.364/.698/1.062
I think Mark can beat him in a foot race to 1B.
Nice walk down memory lane, Bear.
The Dodgers were opportunists last night, getting 3 runs from 3 hits and a walk.
If this were the playoffs, all seven pitches who pitched last night would be bullpen guys!
Great job on the HOF guys Bear. Lot of info I didn’t know, especially the number 46. One of my greatest disappointments ever was trading Mike Piazza. There were others like Pedro and Paul Konerko but Piazza’s stung the most. I think Don Sutton is the least appreciated, for some unknown reason,
I’ve been watching Justin Bruihl since 2018. I love it when undrafted free agents make a splash. In 2021 his K/BB ratio is 26/3. In 91 minor league innings he has given up two home runs.
As a left-hander he will make his debut with the Dodgers at some point this year. He looks like he could be a Victor Gonzalez type. That is, versatile, capable of an out, an inning, two innings.
https://ladodgertalk.com/?s=Justin+Bruihl&x=12&y=6