Dodger Victory Is Your Typical Walk in the Park

They were Dodgers, but they weren’t. They were part of the club, but not really.

They were like, well, like you and me and anyone else who long ago fell in love with the hometown team and couldn’t shake it.

The only difference was, they pitched batting practice. That was their job. Although small and insignificant, that was their link.

It was usually only for home games. It was usually only 15 minutes of pitching, per day, per man, about 125 fastballs down the middle so the Dodger hitters could get loose.

Mike McDermott. Juarez Orman. Tom Aloi.

You’ve never heard of them. You’d have no reason to hear of them.

In real life, two of them were delivery truck drivers, the other operated heavy equipment. During the summers they were human pitching machines. It’s not a big deal.

Until they looked up this season, and it sort of was a big deal. They realized, combined, they had been with the Dodgers for 73 years. Between them they had World Series rings and historic baseballs and memories of every great moment from Koufax to Gibson.

The smallest and most insignificant of links had become, in their minds, a strong one.

“This was not our main job or anything, but it was our family,” McDermott said.

Then it wasn’t.

Last month, a businesswoman with the new Fox Dodgers summoned them to her office, where an assistant general manager with the new Fox Dodgers fired them on the spot.

Nothing personal, he told them. Your work was fine. It’s your salary we can no longer afford.

The three batting practice pitchers each made about $45 a day. Or about $4,000 a year. Or about what Kevin Brown makes for one pitch.

They were fired in the middle of the season because they were making too much money in a job that, after a combined 73 years, they would have done for free.

They walked away from the suits in shock. They couldn’t sleep. They had trouble facing their friends.

Aloi’s wife and children wept. It took McDermott two weeks before he could even tell anybody.

They know they were lucky to even be associated with the team. They know that in the scheme of things, they really didn’t matter.

But when you fall in love with something far bigger than yourself, you never realize just how much you don’t matter until it’s much too late.

It wasn’t as if the Fox Dodgers fired three important employees.

It was as if they fired three fans.

A metaphor for us all.

*

Mike McDermott remembers the 1977 World Series, standing on the pitching mound at Yankee Stadium, a former neighborhood batboy now throwing batting practice to the National League champions.

“Looking around at all the tradition, thinking that this was really me in the middle of it all . . .” he said. “It was a feeling I’ll never forget.”

Juarez Orman remembers the time Bob Welch gave him his first taste of chewing tobacco.

“I’m chewing it on the mound, and I get real dizzy, and Steve Yeager is yelling at me to throw it over the plate,” he recalled. “So I yell back, ‘I’ll throw it over, you just hit the damn ball!’ Everybody got real quiet. That tobacco had made me crazy.”

They have dusty duffel bags filled with stories like this, of laughter and competition and bonding with what they considered the greatest family on earth.

“When Peter O’Malley owned the team, no matter how small you were, you felt like a part of it,” McDermott said. “You were included.”

McDermott, 49, known by every Dodger for the last three decades as “Mac,” had been here 31 years.

Orman, also 49, had been here 24 years.

Aloi, 43, who also had the thankless job of catching batting practice, had been with them for 18 years.

As the years progressed, their arms grew more weary, their fastballs slowed, but this was only batting practice, and this was a place where loyalty mattered, where Fred Claire once treated them as if they were Orel Hershiser.

And they never took this good fortune for granted.

Even though they wore Dodger jerseys with their names on the back, they never signed an autograph without explaining to the fan that they were “only” batting practice pitchers.

They shagged flies in the late-afternoon heat, played monotonous games of pepper with the likes of Maury Wills and Willie Davis, hustled from the field before the first pitch and dressed in a vacant back room so they could stay out of the way.

“They were great guys, they loved the game, they were fun to be around,” Steve Garvey recalled this week, after expressing shock that they had been fired. “Those poor guys’ arms have to be hanging after all these years. . . . Did they at least give them a watch?”

Not exactly.

McDermott did receive a 30-year pin during a ceremony this winter. Only four other people--Vin Scully and Tom Lasorda are two of them--had been with the company longer.

“While there had been a lot of changes, I thought, this was so nice, some things have stayed the same,” McDermott said.

When he showed up this season, he realized he was wrong.

The new, younger coaching staff was pitching most of the batting practice. A left-hander--an important pregame asset--had been hired to pitch batting practice and work in the video room.

“We were reacting to the needs of the staff,” General Manager Kevin Malone said. “While we really appreciate what these three men did for all these years, there was just no longer a need.”

Understandable, all of it.

What confused the three men was the reason given to them in that upstairs office after batting practice on April 25.

Said Aloi: “When they told us we were being fired because we made too much money, our mouths dropped open.”

Countered Malone, “Contrary to popular belief, we do have a budget. We took the money those three guys made and put it into one guy who could also work video and travel.”

But do these cost-cutting measures include treating longtime employees like strangers?

None of the coaches said anything to them on the field before they were summoned upstairs.

Since they have been fired, they have not received one call from anyone in the organization.

They were given 10 games’ worth of severance pay, they said Gina Galasso from human resources told them they would continue receiving their employee allotment of free tickets whenever they desired.

But McDermott has since learned that his name was taken off the master ticket list. And he says that “seven or eight” phone calls to the human resources office for clarification have gone unreturned.

“You tell them, if they have problems with tickets, anything like that, call my office, we’ll take care of them,” said Bill Geivett, the assistant general manager who delivered the bad news. “Those guys have put in a lot of years, and they deserve to be taken care of.”

That part is probably a moot point. None of the three will be going to games for a while. They never thought losing a part-time job would hurt so bad.

“We all knew our time would come,” McDermott said. “But nobody thought it would happen like this. In the middle of the season? Being told like we were told?”

McDermott was so embarrassed, when a longtime friend asked him for some free tickets, instead of telling the friend he had been fired, he quietly arranged for the tickets to be purchased and left at the window like freebies.

When another friend asked McDermott to get a souvenir signed by Raul Mondesi--usually a slam dunk--McDermott said fine.

He still has the souvenir. He doesn’t know what he will do with it, or when he will tell his friend.

“It’s weird, I used to know everybody there, everybody,” McDermott said. “But now, I feel like an outsider.”

Don’t we all.

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