He's Not to Blame

By BILL PLASCHKE

Aug. 17, 1999 12 AM PT

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Another cobwebbed morning after another Dodger loss. Susan Johnson pads into the kitchen to make the coffee, looks down, sighs.

They’re back.

Tiny Dodgers.

Players’ names are scattered across the kitchen table, scrawled in different combinations on newspapers, napkins, the backs of envelopes.

“You know times are tough when David is up in the middle of the night, scribbling lineups,” she says later.

Another cool Friday night before another Dodger loss. An hour before a game with the Atlanta Braves, and Davey Johnson is in a position shared by no other Dodger manager in recent history.

He is alone.

He sits behind a desk in an office that felt like a closet when inhabited by Tom Lasorda, but now looks like a warehouse.

The couch for cronies is empty. The chairs for aging movie stars are deserted.

There’s just Johnson, facing a stack of scouting reports, wearing a hint of gray beard stubble, and 15 pounds lighter than when he started the season.

“My worst year as manager?” he says quietly. “Well, yeah.”

The world record for tongue biting is now at four consecutive months and counting, and it’s a wonder Davey Johnson can still talk at all.

“If we just keep grinding . . . “ he says of his failing team. “We just have to keep grinding.”

About the only one consistently grinding, of course, is Johnson, putting a strong countenance on an organization whose knees are knocking.

Raul Mondesi rips him obscenely, and he says he will get over it.

Gary Sheffield rips his team, and he says he can’t blame a guy for wanting to win.

Players are lining up, demanding to be traded, or started, or loved--virtual strangers, some of these guys--and Johnson shrugs and says he understands.

Amid the longest summer of his managerial career, Davey Johnson actually understands only one thing.

“You have to have emotion, but it’s unfortunate when emotion overrules reason,” he says.

And reason tells him that, goodness, at some point, somebody has to gulp down a little pride and climb up on that rickety ladder and plug the leaking roof.

And since nobody else is volunteering. . . .

Throughout his career, Johnson has won championships by persuading players to sacrifice for the good of the team.

Now, he figures, it is his turn.

“All this has nothing to do with one person,” he says, pointing toward the clubhouse. “This has to do with 25.”

That number has been Johnson’s sole navigating tool while trying to manage this team from between the rock of General Manager Kevin Malone’s decisions, and the hard place of past organizational sins.

Has he done a good job? The record says no.

If he were Glenn Hoffman or Bill Russell, would fans and media be begging for Fox to ship him out on the same bus as Mondesi? Absolutely.

But is it too early to pass judgment on a man who has coaxed championships in similar circumstances? The record says yes.

And, given the situation, has he done as well as could be expected? Absolutely.

Sources say high-ranking Dodger officials do not blame Johnson for this mess. Officials know he is a “matchups” manager without the diversity of players who can match up with opponents, a problem they hope to fix.

Good idea.

Johnson is on a pace to finish with the worst record in his 13 seasons as a major league manager, and lower than second place for the first time in 11 full seasons.

But while trying to control a club in a dizzying decline that realistically began before he ever showed up, he has hung on with uncanny grace.

“If we didn’t have somebody as strong as him, this team would have been completely under now--far under,” coach Rick Dempsey says. “There’s going to have to be a lot of changes around here, so there’s going to have to be a lot of pushing and shoving, but Davey has been handling it.”

Start with the premise--unimagined by many of us before the season, but obvious in the first few weeks--that this is a team with serious roster problems.

The lineup is unbalanced. The bench is thin. The bullpen is thinner. The farm system is drained, so it is difficult to upgrade in any of those other areas.

Then add a mysterious bug that has caused some starting pitchers--the team’s best assets--to forget how to pitch.

By May, the new manager feels like a guy who drove out of the showroom in a Mercedes, and pulled into his driveway in a Pinto.

“He has really questioned himself at times,” says Susan, his wife. “He has come home and said, ‘I don’t know why I can’t get my hands around this team.’ ”

Some fans have been equally impatient. Susan once left her seat at Dodger Stadium a couple of innings early because she could no longer bear to listen to a fan who was criticizing her husband.

How loud was the fan? For relief, she retreated to the chaos of the Dodgers’ family lounge.

“It has been so tough to see them struggle,” she says. “It absolutely wrenches my heart out.”

But, contrary to the image some frustrated Lasorda lovers have of a bored guy staring passively into space, Johnson has tried.

“Believe it or not, a lot of things go by very quietly here,” Dempsey says.

Johnson has not ripped his players in public, but there have been several “rap” sessions in his office.

“I do it right here, you bet, man to man, face to face, and this is where it stays,” Johnson says.

He has rarely come storming off the bench, but he has been unafraid to put a player making $9.5 million, like Gary Sheffield, or a fan favorite, like Eric Karros, on that bench.

He has taken the ball from the $15-million hand of Kevin Brown in the middle of the game, and salary from Mondesi after a mistake, and starting jobs from Todd Hundley and Eric Young when they didn’t produce.

He has made mistakes--failing to push for Hundley to return to the minor leagues for rehabilitation early in the season is a big one--but he has also made up for others’ mistakes.

Fox should have videotaped Friday’s press conference for an instructional guide to damage control.

Squeezed between player revolt and management inaction, Johnson stood behind his desk with drooping eyes and a drawn face. But his resolve was firm.

“Lemme say this,” he announced sharply. “This is not a clubhouse in turmoil.”

Of course it was, and has been, but you would never have known it from the next 30 minutes, during which Johnson scolded and embraced and explained his team while trying to make sure everyone understood that nobody was giving up on anything or anybody.

He delivered the same sort of address in Cincinnati in 1993, after taking over for the popular Tony Perez in May. His team was a mess, his owner was Marge Schott, and the Reds went 53-65 under him for the rest of that season.

But they improved their matchups with trades, followed his steady example, and won the division title in each of the next two years.

Johnson endured similar situations in New York, where he clashed with Darryl Strawberry, and Baltimore, where he clashed with Bobby Bonilla and Cal Ripken Jr.

The only things Johnson has experienced more than championship clubhouses, it seems, are players wanting to burn down those clubhouses.

Maybe Dodger fans aren’t used to these recent events, but he is.

“That is why Davey has learned, you never get too high or low, and you never show anybody if you are,” says hitting coach Rick Down, who was with Johnson in Baltimore. “What has happened this year is a shock, a disappointment--it has left us speechless--but you can’t show that.

“Because in tough times, you don’t want your players to show that. All that he’s doing now, I’m just hoping it rubs off.”

Johnson has been so businesslike about it. Susan accompanied him on the last trip but he never bothered to tell her that Raul Mondesi had cussed him out.

“I called home to Los Angeles to check on things, and my son told me what Raul had said about David in the newspaper, and I said, ‘Oh my goodness,’ ” Susan says. “But the way David thinks about it is, it’s just baseball.

“Raul is not in our family. He’s not our social friend. It’s just business, something you have to deal with. I’ve heard other people fuss about David before.”

As a typical evening at his office reveals, the only thing different in Los Angeles is, he’s doing it alone.

He hasn’t been here long enough to make any good friends, the casual friends only come around when you’re winning, and most people just don’t know what to make of him.

He has been so absorbed in his job, he and his wife have not gone out to dinner here, even once.

Not that there haven’t been a few interesting lunches.

On the Monday of the All-Star break, a man at a nearby table recognized Johnson. But instead of addressing him, the man looked across his table at his own lunch partner and spent nearly an hour loudly explaining how he would run the Dodgers.

“After we finished, David said, ‘Can we just stay home the rest of the break?’ ” recalls Susan.

Three days later, you should have seen all those little lineups.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: [email protected].

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

BY THE NUMBERS

The Dodgers have spent:

4 days in first place

41 days in last place

67 days under .500

JOHNSON’S IMPACT

Mets’ record before Johnson took over (1983): 68-94, .420

Mets’ record in first season under Johnson: 92-70, .556 Improvement: .136