The Los Angeles Dodgers were one of the golden franchises in Major League Baseball during the 1970s. They played in three World Series (1974, 1977, 1978), though they lost all of them.
Those Dodger teams were led by players such as Steve Garvey, Ron Cey and Davey Lopes, many of whom made their final minor league stop in Spokane.
Author Eric Vickrey writes about the 1970 Spokane Indian team that featured many of those future Dodgers and won a Pacific Coast League championship.
His book focuses on the 1968 Dodger draft class. Some of those players were on that 1970 Spokane team.
It’s Vickrey’s second book about Spokane minor league baseball. He also wrote about a bus crash that killed eight Spokane Indians ballplayers in 1946.
This interview is lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Doug Nadvornick: Why don't you give me kind of a quick synopsis of what your book is all about?
Eric Vickrey: It was really during my research and writing of my previous book about the ‘46 Spokane Indians that I learned about the 1970 team, which was really one of the great all-time minor league teams in terms of talent of all time. The team was managed by Tommy Lasorda and featured a roster of a laundry list of future big leaguers who had, many of whom became well known with the Dodgers and others the Dodgers used as sort of trade ships to build their next great era.
DN: How did you go about compiling all the information that ended up in the book?
EV: I set out by really digging into that 1970 season. I went kind of game by game and just wanted to really familiarize myself with that season. It was a very memorable season for Spokane. The team won 94 games. They were in first place from the first day of the season to the last day of the season and then swept the Hawaii Islanders in the Pacific Coast League Championship.
I went through all the newspaper archives through that season and then I set out to interview as many people as I could associated with that team. I interviewed 11 players from the team, the bat boy, clubhouse boy, concession manager, and even a few fans who watched games in that era.
DN: It was 55 years ago. How well did they remember things?
EV: Certainly varying degrees of memories, but guys like Bobby Valentine and Tom Paciorek really look back on that season in particular as the most fun that they had in their professional baseball careers.
This was, of course, playing under the very enthusiastic and effervescent Tommy Lasorda. He kind of made things fun for the team, took them out to dinner, they went bowling after games, and of course the rest of their free time was spent baseball, you know, morning baseball, batting practice, and then of course games. They had very few off days and a lot of doubleheaders.
DN: This was a group that spent a lot of time not only in Spokane but working their way up through the minors. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
EV: Lasorda got his start managing in the Rookie Leagues first in Pocatello, Idaho and then Ogden, Utah. So he spent four years managing in the Rookie Leagues, which is players just coming out of high school or college.
In 1968, he actually managed Bobby Valentine, Bill Buckner, Steve Garvey, and Tom Paciorek in Ogden. And then two years later, in 1970, by then Lasorda had been promoted to Spokane and all these players were coming up through the system along with some other prominent players such as Charlie Hough and Bill Russell. Davey Lopes had joined the team by then. They kind of sort of formed this super team in AAA in 70.
DN: Why do you think they were so good?
EV: Well, most of these players came out of this historic ‘68 draft class and the Dodgers really went all in on offense that year. They drafted very few pitchers. It was almost all position players and they drafted some really, really good athletes.
Bobby Valentine was their first overall pick and was all set to take over for OJ Simpson at USC at running back. But the Dodgers drafted him and convinced him to sign and then they drafted Bill Buckner in the second round and Tom Paciorek, who was an excellent college football player, was actually drafted by the Miami Dolphins. And then Steve Garvey was also a two-sport athlete at Michigan State. Davey Lopes was a two-sport athlete in college. So all these guys were just really athletic and Lasorda had a knack for really putting his players in a position to win.
He converted Bobby Valentine from an outfielder to shortstop and then later did the same with Davey Lopes, converting him to second base. So those were just really good athletes and then kind of all coming together under Lasorda.
DN: Ron Cey was a third baseman on that team. He was known for coming from the Washington State baseball program, which was really good at that time, too. So a lot of these guys then followed up and they ended up going to the Los Angeles Dodgers and playing on some pretty darn good in the 1970s, especially.
EV: Cey, Lopes, Garvey and Russell. They formed this four-man infield that played together for eight seasons in Los Angeles and formed the foundation really of that next great era.
A few of the other players from that 1970 Spokane team, guys like Charlie Hough and Tom Paciorek, were parts of those pennant-winning teams. Other guys they used sort of as trade chips. The Dodgers traded Bill Buckner to the Cubs for Rick Monday. They traded Bobby Valentine to the Angels for Andy Messersmith, who was the ace of the ‘74 pennant-winning team. So a number of those guys, if they weren't part of the Dodgers pennant-winning teams of the 70s, were sort of used as trade chips to build that next great era.
DN: Valentine sort of had his career derailed. He was hit in the face by a pitch and it seems like from then on it sort of derailed his momentum. And he, as you say, he was traded to other teams and didn't have quite the career that I think the Dodgers envisioned him having. But he went on to be a great manager.
EV: He was really considered the best prospect and some even remarked that he had, you know, the potential of being a Hall of Fame player.
But yeah, you mentioned getting hit in the face in the playoffs in ‘70 and then really it was a leg injury four years later with the Angels. He was trying to catch a ball and crashed against the wall and broke his leg and it never really healed correctly and kind of turned him into a fringe utility player. Later he became a really good and successful manager with the Rangers and Mets.
DN: This 1970 team, as historians like to look back, I've heard it viewed as one of the great minor league teams of all time. What do you think about that?
EV: I certainly have to put it up there with amongst the best. Just in terms of the success that the roster ended up having in the big leagues, so many of those guys spent a decade or more in the major leagues.
There were no Hall of Fame players per se on that team, but guys like Buckner and Russell and Garvey and Doyle Alexander, Geoff Zahn, Charlie Hough, these are guys who spent years and years in the major leagues.
It's difficult to compare the 1970 team to teams from like the 1930s and ‘40s because the structure of minor league baseball was a bit different then. But I think any list of the top teams ever has to include the 1970 Spokane team.
DN: What did you really like about writing this book?
EV: I think the most fun was just talking to the people involved in the story and kind of gathering their memories. I talked to about 70 different people, as I mentioned, even like the bat boy and the clubhouse boy. I just had some really fond memories of those days. And of course, a lot of the stories they told involved Lasorda. So just kind of learning about that era.
The 1970 season was nine years before I was born. So I kind of grew up collecting baseball cards of these guys in the ‘80s, but didn't really think of them as you know, a Dodgers prospect. So just going back and learning about them and interviewing a number of these guys was for me a lot of fun and rewarding.
