Customer Reviews

Once a Bum, Always a Dodger: My Life in Baseball from Brooklyn to Los Angeles

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As a 1960s era Dodger and Drysdale fan, I found this book very interesting and entertaining. You follow Drysdale's career from a boy to becoming one of the most successful and aggressive pitchers of all time.

The 1960 era Dodgers were a very special team. They won by every player giving over 100 percent. Drysdale was no exception, throwing hard and doing everything to win. The Koufax / Drysdale pitching combo was death to batting averages.

Drysdale shares many of his experiences with Dodger management and players. I often found myself laughing as he related humorous events. It was a grand time in baseball. It was a time when players roomed together and socialized together. They lived baseball in way that is foreign to the players of today. It was also nice to find out the inside on many events that I had been curious about.

I with a book like this you hope to read about many of the Dodger players. However, Drysdale's stories involve only his closest friends on the club and management. Even with that limitation, it was wonderful to read the stories about Gill Hodges, Duke Snider and others.

He did waste a chapter on Howard Cosell at the end of the book. He and Howard were friends and I think he wanted to present the other side of Cosell. Although Howard may have been a cool guy, he was never a good sports announcer.

If you liked Don Drysdale you should enjoy this book. After reading it, I wish I could have met him. This was a perfect title. Once a Bum (Brooklyn Dodger) Always a Dodger - and that he was for his whole career.

Back in my teenage years, and mainly from 1962-67, I was a huge Los Angeles Dodgers fan, listening to every game that I could on my transistor radio. My chief heroes were hurlers Sandy Koufax and Don "The Big D" Drysdale, in that order. The most highly anticipated game day was one featuring a double-header in which both pitchers started. The ultimate delight was hearing both record a victory. Drysdale died in 1993 at age 56. His book, ONCE A BUM, ALWAYS A DODGER had been published 3 years before. For me, reading it only now, it represents The Big D's last walk to the mound.

This volume is Don's memoir of his time as a (Brooklyn) Dodger beginning in 1956 to his retirement from the (Los Angeles) Dodgers in 1969 and his subsequent career as a sportscaster.

Though California born and raised, Drysdale's biggest thrill in life was putting on the Brooklyn uniform, and that New York borough remained his sentimental professional home for the rest of his career. He remembers with fondness the Brooklyn greats with whom he first played, some of whom made the move to Los Angeles: Pee Wee Reese, Gil Hodges, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Sal Maglie, Carl Furillo, Don Newcombe, and Duke Snider. Oddly, he has relatively little or nothing to say about the next generation of players whom I followed over the airwaves in Chavez Ravine: Maury Wills, Tommy and Willie Davis, Ron Fairly, Jim Brewer, Ron Perranoski, Claude Osteen, Johnny Roseboro, Jeff Torborg, Jim Lefebvre, Wes Parker, Dick Tracewski, and Lou Johnson. Sandy Koufax, of course, gets big mention inasmuch as it was Sandy and Don that joined forces for the infamous Great Holdout before the 1966 season. But, even then, I didn't sense that The Big D and Dandy Sandy were that close, not because either was overtly unfriendly, but because Koufax was (and is) a supremely private person. At one point Drysdale writes:

"I don't know if Sandy enjoyed watching me pitch, but I sure as hell enjoyed watching him do his thing. He was something."

The most useful personal insights, such as they are, are pretty much limited to Manager Walter Alston, General Manager Buzzie Bavasi, and Dodger owner Walter O'Malley during Drysdale's playing era, and to Vin Scully and Howard Cosell during his broadcasting years. But, even here, there's not much meat.

The book includes a 16-page section of photographs, but it lacks even a rudimentary section on Don's throwing statistics covering his 13-year major league career, though there is an entire chapter - "The Scoreless Streak" - dedicated to his most memorable achievement, the 58 2/3 innings of scoreless ball pitched in 1968.

The reader might be left with the impression that The Big D's life was without bumps. Therefore, I found refreshing his last chapter admission to and brief discussion about the failure of his 24-year marriage to his first wife Ginger. Indeed, it was only at this late point that I discovered the man to be human and his story retrospectively engaging. Nevertheless, Drysdale remains a larger-than-life figure in the endless summer of my adolescence.

DON DRYSDALE DOES A NICE JOB OF TELLING HIS LIFE AND CAREER. HE REALLY DOESN'T GO INTO GREAT DEAL ABOUT HIS PRIVATE LIFE BUT THAT IS HIS RIGHT OF PRIVACY. HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH SAL MAGLIE, SANDY KOUFAX, AND WALTER ALSTON ARE SOME OF THE HIGHLIGHTS OF THIS BOOK. I WISH HE WOULD HAVE GONE INTO MORE DETAIL ABOUT HIS CAREER AND GAME SITUATIONS HE WAS IN. BUT OVERALL A GOOD READ FOR DODGER AND FANS OF THE TWIN D'S.

Despite its awkward title, Drysdale's autobiography is an enjoyable read, but even the first-person narrative doesn't save this memoir from blandness. Although Drysdale was both a fireballer and something of a fireball in personality (at least on the field), he comes across here pretty much as a generic athlete. Unlike Jim Bouton's "Ball Four," this book doesn't project a distinctive, personal voice. The memoir rambles along entertainingly enough, but there's not much that's particularly memorable about it.

An interesting aspect of the work is Drysdale's description of his close relationship with Sal Maglie, who came to the Dodgers in 1956. Drysdale, who seems to have been a very naive kid when he joined the Dodgers that same year (he was only 19), reports that he learned "a lot about pitching, a lot about baseball, a lot about life" from the "great and grizzled veteran" Maglie (who was all of 39 at that point!) His hero worship of Maglie when the latter was in the twilight of his career was touching, all the more so as it seems that Maglie didn't make many friends during his brief tenure with Brooklyn.

In the last chapter Drysdale sums up some relatively recent events in his personal life, including a nasty divorce, followed by a late remarriage to a much younger woman and the birth of two children when he was in his early 50s. He goes on about how happy he is, how great his health is, despite a "meat and potatoes" diet and a fair amount of drinking, and how he expects to live a good, long life, etc., but readers today know that this didn't happen. In 1990, when the book was published, Drysdale wasn't in the middle of his life--he was near the end of it. He died of a heart attack in 1993 at the age of 56.

For died-in-the-wool Dodger fans, the book is worth a trip to the library, but not to the used book store.

When I was growing up, the pitcher that we all idolized was Sandy Koufax, which often relegated Don Drysdale to the role of a sidekick. Yet, he was a great pitcher in his own right and when he retired in 1969, he was the last Dodger player that had played in Ebbets field in Brooklyn. The list of his teammates is a significant segment of the all-time greats. Players such as Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Duke Snider, Sandy Koufax, John Roseboro, Pee Wee Reese, Don Newcombe and Gil Hodges all took the field beside him.

However, his consorting with greatness was not limited to his teammates on the baseball diamond, Drysdale was also teamed with broadcast greats such as Keith Jackson, Vin Scully, Howard Cosell and Dick Enberg. Finally, Drysdale also observed the changes in the players, where teams went from a group that hung out and traveled together to a group of men that got together to play baseball and then went their separate ways. He was also present when the reserve clause was finally overthrown. Ironically, it was his joint holdout with Sandy Koufax that was the first real crack in that armor of defense around the owners.

Drysdale is honest in the descriptions of his actions on the field, including his occasional throwing of a spitball and at batters when he felt it necessary. His harshest criticism is for the modern players and umpires that refuse to consider a close pitch to be a part of the game. Somewhat surprising is his comments about broadcaster Howard Cosell, which are very complimentary, a rare thing when Cosell is the topic.

Drysdale's candid expression of his opinions presents a unique view of baseball and how it changed over the years. Despite the fact that he retired before the big money contracts arrived, Drysdale expresses no frustration or bitterness over that fact. Like most old-timers, he laments what baseball has lost rather than what he missed.

Despite its awkward title, Don Drysdale's autobiography is an enjoyable read, but even the first-person narrative doesn't save this memoir from blandness. Although Drysdale was both a fireballer and something of a fireball in personality (at least on the field), he comes across here pretty much as a generic athlete. Unlike Jim Bouton's "Ball Four," this book doesn't project a distinctive, personal voice. The memoir rambles along entertainingly enough, but there's not much that's particularly memorable about it.

An interesting aspect of the work is Drysdale's description of his close relationship with Sal Maglie, who came to the Dodgers in 1956. Drysdale, who seems to have been a very naive kid when he joined the Dodgers that same year (he was only 19), reports that he learned "a lot about pitching, a lot about baseball, a lot about life" from the "great and grizzled veteran" Maglie (who was all of 39 at that point!) His hero worship of Maglie when the latter was in the twilight of his career was touching, all the more so as it seems that Maglie didn't make many friends during his brief tenure with Brooklyn.

In the last chapter Drysdale sums up some relatively recent events in his personal life, including a nasty divorce, followed by a late remarriage to a much younger woman and the birth of two children when he was in his early 50s. He goes on about how happy he is, how great his health is, despite a "meat and potatoes" diet and a fair amount of drinking, and how he expects to live a good, long life, etc., but readers today know that this didn't happen. In 1990, when the book was published, Drysdale wasn't in the middle of his life--he was near the end of it. He died of a heart attack in 1993 at the age of 56.

For dyed-in-the-wool Dodger fans, the book is worth a trip to the library, but not to the used book store.