Q: What ultimately drew you to this subject matter — your grandfather, your following the team — and particularly the ’77 and ’78 Dodgers? A: All of these factors you mentioned played a role, of course, in my interest in the subject of “Dodgerland,” and I tried to portray how my grandfather gently passed on his love of baseball and of the team to my dad and to me, but there was more to it as well. I grew up with the Dodgers of the late 1970s as a constant presence in my private life, my family life, and my social life around the neighborhood. We all were — all of us kids on my side of the metro area — Dodger fans in the 1970s. At certain times of the year it was almost all we cared about. In driveway pickup games of wiffle ball, in sandlot pickup games of tennis ball baseball, and in little league practices we pretended we were our favorite Dodger players and tried to mimic their style and well-practiced technique. We copied batting stances... ; we argued who was the more deserving All Star; we boasted about whose fan club we belonged to, compared and traded the Topps cards of our favorite players, and marveled the few enterprising among us who’d actually gotten an autograph from one Dodger or another. We listened to the baseball games on the radio as often as we could, and we mimicked (as best we could) the intonations of Vin Scully. We also constantly mused about the team’s chances of making it to the Series. And we cursed the Reds for being so damn good and constantly killing our chances. With all this circling around us, there was almost no chance that a kid in L.A. those days wouldn’t become a Dodger fan, and I fell right in line....
(Excerpt from Tom Hoffarth’s feature on Dodgerland: Decadent Los Angeles and the 1977-78 Dodgers for his 30 Baseball Books for April (2016) series on www.insidesocal.com.)