From yet another letter that won’t make it into the Los Angeles Times.

To the Editor:

I grew up  in Arroyo Grande, in San Luis Obispo County, and  I remember going to the Coliseum in 1958, aged six, to see the Dodgers play the Cardinals, once upon a time the Gashouse Gang,  my father’s childhood team during the Great Depression.

My father and I were not close, but we were that day, and we were every time Vin Scully called a game.

We’d huddle close together as Dad barbecued a weekend dinner. For Koufax’s perfect game, we were inside the kitchen with a big shortwave radio atop the stove, and we weren’t breathing much.

I became a high school history teacher in part because Scully taught me how to tell stories. His only equal was my father. My mother, Irish American, loved Sandy Koufax because he wouldn’t pitch in the Series during High Holy Days. She admired integrity.

I admired everything about Koufax. 

But that was a long time ago. The Dodgers, after making meek discordant noises, visited with the crude and brutal man who claims to be Abraham Lincoln’s successor. Lincoln and Koufax and Jane Goodall  were my childhood heroes, and  so they remain. Those are not bad choices.

But the team I adore–a team of immigrants, Italian and Irish and Polish and, finally, African American, Dominican and Cuban and Mexican– the team I have adored since I was six, has let me down.

This is not a matter of “Republican” vs. “Democrat.” It is, more properly, a matter of truth vs. falsity, integrity vs. venality, patriotism vs. betrayal, of good vs. evil.

“Evil” can be registered in the decision to delete a Department of Defense web page about Jackie Robinson, a decision reversed only because of public outrage.

Robinson played with courage, both in his introduction to MLB, when he was forced to absorb the abuse, and in the ferocity with which he played after Branch Rickey removed the handcuffs. Scully spoke vividly, even worshipfully, about the player Robinson became when he was allowed to play with anger.

In their visit to the White House, the team I love so passionately abandoned Koufax’s integrity and Robinson’s courage. The man whom they surrounded, all of them grinning, is certainly no Lincoln.

Since my heart is seventy-three and therefore brittle, it can be broken as easily as it was when Sandy Koufax retired, when I was thirteen. I forgave Sandy because he did the right thing.

The Dodgers haven’t.

Jim Gregory
Arroyo Grande, CA