Rick Dempsey was part of the Dodgers team that won the 1988 World Series, but his boyhood friend and former high school teammate was meant for glory. Read our Column One about two friends who walked the same path but landed in different places.
Why is it some athletes rise to the challenge while others don’t? A baseball historian says simply, “Baseball is an eternal mystery.”night in 1988. About the friend you leave behind on the way to the top.was awed by them both. I’d like to sing of the man who was unsung.
But not yet. In football, he played every minute of every game on three units: offense, defense and special teams as a kicker. In a city-wide all-star game, Jim stole the show as a quarterback and defensive lineman as West beat East 7-0.As for baseball, Jim was fearsome, adding to his two Camino Real League batting titles a 0.98 earned-run average as a pitcher. Two photos in the 1967 Crespi yearbook capture his intensity.
The Dodgers tried again a year later, taking Jim in the eighth round of the secondary phase of the January 1968 draft out of Los Angeles Pierce Junior College. But once again Jim did not sign, though a fellow from Rhode Island named Davey Lopes did. Jim now suffered a huge rupture whose significance neither he nor his father would realize until it was too late.
“The window of opportunity is so short,” Dodgers historian Mark Langill said about players mustering out of the minors. “They’re like soldiers coming back from the war. There’s a loss of identity.” After Dempsey dropped with one punch the third-string catcher who had baited him into a fight, the skinny catcher got more attention from the Yankees. In 1974, Dempsey threw out runners 73% of the time, 16 out of 22. Where was Jim Loll? As Dempsey put it, by the time he was traded to the Baltimore Orioles in 1976 and got his chance to shine as a starter, Loll “had just disappeared.
So much in baseball, in all sports, is just there beyond the peg, above the vault, behind the throw in the dirt. For all of Dempsey’s best years in baseball, he and Loll had no conversations. Dempsey tried to reach him at times but didn’t get through. Joe Loll opines that perhaps his brother was homeless for a time, but he isn’t sure as he couldn’t reach him either.
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