I apologize to those who follow me for missing a story that needed to be told. Damaso Garcia died recently and I failed to write about it. Perhas it was because I was not a real big fan of Damaso that I let this one slip by me, perhaps it was becuase he alledgedly burnt his jersey up. I am weraling my blue jays cap as I write this blog, this extra long blog, as a pennace for not reporting it when it happened.
Sorry Damo, I will write a what I have found out about this special man.
García was a complicated man whose headlines often did not do him justice.
Writers loved him early and panned him late, especially after that infamous uniform-burning incident in 1986. Some writers never much liked him. Others found him a convivial conversationalist.
In the clubhouse, beyond prying eyes, Garth Iorg treasured him.
“I can never, ever think of one time where we had a disagreement or a cross word with one another,” said Iorg, another reliable contributor to those early Jays teams. “He was a great friend.”
García was a proud man. He was particularly proud of his two All-Star Game selections, said Buck Martinez, another teammate.
“And we were proud to have him represent us, for sure, because he represented the character we all had, and the fight we all had, and the pride we all had playing for the Blue Jays. He epitomized that.”
In 1991, just two years after his career ended, García underwent surgery to remove a malignant brain tumour. He was 34. Doctors gave him six months to live.
His life was hard after that. For close to half his years, his quality of life suffered. There were hospitalizations, a stroke and breathing issues. Still, for many years he attended to charitable work and kept up his sense of humour. He came back to Toronto and threw out a first pitch.
In recent years, each time his prospects looked grim, he rallied.
Until Wednesday morning, when he died in San Pedro de Macoris.
Gord Ash got the news in a call from a contact in the Dominican Republic. Shortly thereafter, the former Blue Jays’ general manager, who works for the Milwaukee Brewers now, was asked to share his memories of García.
“He was a tremendous athlete with a fiery personality, which served him positively because I think it drove him,” Ash said. “But it also got him in trouble from time to time.”
And now, Tony Fernández and Dámaso García are both gone, almost exactly a month apart. They had formed a marvellous double-play tandem back in the 1980s, when the Blue Jays soared for the first time.
“Tony was 57 and Damo was 63,” said Pat Gillick, the man who brought them both to Toronto. “It’s kind of early to go, you know.”
Dámaso García’s baseball story is closely aligned with the origin story of the Blue Jays. He was not a shining prospect when he started. When he came to Toronto, nobody knew who he was.
Well, Pat Gillick knew who he was. So did super scout Epy Guerrero. Both had worked for the Yankees before joining Toronto’s new franchise.
Gillick was the Yankees’ farm director. He had worked closely with Guerrero for more than a decade. So when Guerrero said he wanted to sign a kid who had played for the Dominican national soccer team, Gillick said fine.
“Dámaso was a very talented soccer player,” Gillick said in a telephone interview. “Guerrero saw a lot of athleticism in him and really took him in and developed him as a ballplayer.”
García had played very little baseball when Guerrero signed him. But the Dominican was a hothouse for nascent infielders, and Guerrero, better than most, knew an infield prospect when he saw one.
“If you’re playing the infield, you look at hands and look at arm,” Gillick said. “But the other thing is quick feet. You’ve got to have quick feet in soccer too. Quick feet allow you get in position to throw the ball. (García) was a quick-footed guy.”
The signing was low-risk. Guerrero’s success rate was high. Over his career, he signed 54 players who reached the big leagues, including Carlos Delgado, Tony Fernández, Alfredo Griffin and Cesar Cedeño. Gillick had no qualms about taking a flyer on a soccer star.
To illustrate, he told this story.
Thirty-five years ago, Gillick and scout Wayne Morgan flew to Saskatoon for a fast-pitch softball tournament. They had their eye on an Australian who was playing for a team out of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. They offered him a contract.
He said no. The summer wages were better where he was.
“He’d never played baseball before,” Gillick said. “He could catch, had a great arm and looked like he was going to hit. We offered him 25 grand to sign. He said, ‘I’d like to come, but I’ve got a job here for the summer and I’m making $50,000 playing for these guys.’
“So what I’m saying is, we looked everywhere for players,” Gillick said. “We drafted Danny Ainge, a basketball player. We drafted a football player, Jay Schroeder. We drafted Chris Weinke, who played with us for a while and then he went on to be a Heisman Trophy winner. We were looking for athletes wherever they were.
“So when Guerrero mentioned a soccer player, it didn’t bother me at all. We were looking under every rock.”
In August of 1976, Gillick was hired as the Blue Jays’ first GM. He brought Epy Guerrero with him. Iorg, a Yankees’ farmhand, was among the players they picked in the expansion draft. But they knew most of the expansion draft castoffs would not survive for long. They needed fresh blood.
Gillick launched a flurry of trades. García arrived in November of 1979. The deal sent three players to the Yankees for Chris Chambliss, a name player, and two obscurities, García and Paul Mirabella. Chambliss didn’t want to play in Toronto, so Gillick flipped him to Atlanta for three more players.
“When we made the deal with the Yankees, they threw (García) in,” Gillick said. “He was an important guy to us when we made the deal. He wasn’t a particularly important guy to the press when we made the deal.”
A year later, García was Toronto’s everyday second baseman. He hit .278 and finished fourth in the voting for rookie of the year.
In 1980, Iorg was also a Jays’ rookie. He had grown close to García when they played in the Yankees’ organization, once occupying adjacent lockers in Florida. Another mutual friend in that clubhouse was Domingo Ramos, who also became a Blue Jay, thanks to Gillick’s intimate knowledge of the Yankees’ farm system. The GM would later gobble up Willie Upshaw, Fred McGriff and Dave Collins in trades with the Yanks.
“Pat just picked that organization clean,” Iorg said.
Iorg recognized García as a natural, notwithstanding his inexperience.
“Just a phenomenal athlete,” Iorg said. “Everything just kind of came naturally to him. It wasn’t like today when there’s so much coaching going on. We didn’t have a whole lot of coaching back then. And he never played at a young age.”
After five losing seasons, the Blue Jays
started to win. Bobby Cox took over as manager in 1982 and fans dared to
hope for the first time.
The Jays had flair. They ran and hit for
power. They had George Bell, Lloyd Moseby and Jesse Barfield in the
outfield, Upshaw at first, Fernández at short and Ernie Whitt behind the
plate. Iorg and Rance Mulliniks platooned at third. The rotation
featured the peerless Dave Stieb, backed by Doyle Alexander, Jim Clancy
and eventually a young Jimmy Key.
Atop the lineup, García provided the spark.Buck Martinez, currently the Jays’ TV play-by-play man, arrived in 1981 to back up Whitt. He vividly remembers his first impressions of García.
“Passion. Intensity. Fire,” Martinez said. “He loved to play. He had a big personality. He was a guy that always wanted to win. I think he really flourished when Bobby (Cox) came. Damo was given the opportunity to hit first in the lineup and I think that really sparked his career.”
Cox and his coaching staff took the Jays back to fundamentals, Iorg said. The manager retained pitching coach Al Widmar and third-base coach Jimy Williams and added hitting coach Cito Gaston, bullpen coach John Sullivan and later first-base coach Billy Smith.
“We had a lot of good, young, talented players,” Iorg said. “We needed leadership and really good coaching, and the staff that they put together was really, really good.
“I remember that first time in spring training when Bobby was there, it took me back to those Yankee days. We did all the fundamental stuff that ever since I was a Blue Jay we never really did. And we went right back to the fundamentals – learning how to play the game, become perfect on our bunt plays, our pickoff plays, our cutoffs – all the stuff that you’re supposed to do that we weren’t really good at, we became extremely good at. And that translated into a lot of one-run wins for us.”
In a lineup anchored by sluggers, García slapped grounders past defenders on the rock-hard Exhibition Stadium turf and found gaps with line drives. He also got his share of ground-rule singles.
“On that team, not a lot of us walked,” Iorg said. “We were up there hackin’. Damo would hit a high chopper off of home plate in Toronto and that was a hit. We used to call that a ground-rule single. He would head out to the batter’s box before the game and say, ‘I think I’m gonna hit a ground-rule single.’ It was hilarious.’”
García seldom walked and seldom struck out. Leading off in the Jays’ banner year of 1985, he had 15 walks and 41 strikeouts in 627 plate appearances.
According to a popular motto for Dominican players of that era, you didn’t walk off the island. You had to hit your way off the island. Martinez recalled that García could hit anything from the tip of his toes to the top of his head.
“Like a lot of young Dominican players, he was a free swinger,” echoed Ash, who was the Jays’ player personnel administrator in the mid-’80s. “At the time we didn’t pay as much attention to on-base percentage as is the case now. That was an area he struggled with. But he was a very, very aggressive player, and we had the type of team at the time he came along where his mistakes didn’t matter as much.”
And when he got on base, he ran. In 1982, he stole 54 bases. From 1982 through 1985, he averaged 40 steals.
In short, García fit the times, and he fit snugly into Cox’s offence.
The first zenith of the young franchise came on the afternoon of Oct. 5, 1985. Upshaw, Moseby and Whitt homered against the Yankees. García singled home Fernández with the final Jays’ run. Doyle Alexander pitched a complete game. And the Blue Jays’ clinched their first division championship.
Then they lost a heartbreaking playoff series to Kansas City.
Shortly thereafter, Bobby Cox left for Atlanta.
And Dámaso García’s decline began.
Next came the season when he lit up his uniform, tangled with a teammate, bickered with his manager and traded insults with an umpire during a rain delay.
Jimy Williams took over as manager in 1986 and immediately put Moseby in the leadoff spot and dropped García to ninth. García was unhappy. He scuffled at the plate through April. But even though he was hitting just .228 entering the game on May 14 in Oakland, Williams had re-installed him atop the lineup for the previous seven games.
That night, he went hitless and made a costly error. Afterward, he went back to the clubhouse, shed his uniform and cap, placed them in a pile in the shower, doused them with lighter fluid and set them on fire.
“His uniform really didn’t burn,” Iorg said. “It kind of just melted away.”
Williams was furious. He chewed out García in front of his teammates.
“I was just frustrated with myself, frustrated with the way I’ve been playing,” García told reporters.
His friend Fernández came to his defence.
“Damo is a very proud man,” Fernández said. “Latin players are very proud, and sometimes you are so frustrated you don’t know how to express that frustration, and the best way for him to express that was by burning.”
Well, perhaps not the best way. Williams certainly didn’t think so, nor did the media. But looking back, Ash takes a softer view.
“I think in a lot of ways that was misunderstood,” Ash said, “because of the whole superstition thing – ‘I’m not playing well so I’ve gotta change something. If I get a fresh uniform I’ll get a fresh start.’ So it wasn’t as negative as a lot of people made it out to be.”
When the team returned home, the fans rained boos on García. He promptly embarked on a seven-game hitting streak and batted .296 for the rest of the season. But after June 6, he never batted leadoff again.
Despite his offensive rebound, García continued to grab attention for negative reasons.
One day during batting practice, he yelled at teammate Cliff Johnson to get out of the cage. Johnson was on the disabled list with a sore wrist, and García thought he had no business hitting with the regulars.
Johnson, a gruff sort who outweighed García by 50 pounds, expressed his disagreement in profane terms. Briefly, the two went at it.
“Damo came back to the batting cage and said he wanted to fight Cliff again,” Martinez recalled with a chuckle. “It was intense.”
As the season wore on, the media criticism mounted. Stories said García clashed with Barfield and Whitt in the clubhouse. Writers said he was dogging it on defence. In July, he declared a moratorium on interviews. “I don’t talk baseball anymore. Politics maybe,” he told Allan Ryan of the Toronto Star.
Ash recalls a bizarre incident that season during one of Exhibition Stadium’s infamous rain delays when García exploded at an umpire who had come out to check on the field conditions.
“I just happened to be standing there at the time,” Ash said. “He and Joe Brinkman got into one of the most vicious arguments I’d ever seen. It was really about nothing. (García) was frustrated that we were probably going into our second hour of rain delay, and you didn’t need much to trigger Joe at the time, so it became very nasty very quickly.”
García “wasn’t a guy you could sit down and have a reasoned conversation with,” Ash added. “There was no way of reasoning with him. If he had a point of view, that was his point of view and it wasn’t going to change.”
Beyond García’s tribulations, an uneasy feeling seized the whole team. After a franchise-best 99 wins in ’85, the Blue Jays did not reach .500 until mid-June in ‘86. Their final 86-76 record left them in fourth place.
“A lot of things had gone wrong in ’86,” Martinez said. “We were disappointed that Bobby Cox left, coming off the high of ’85. A lot of things changed. I think that was part of it. Everybody was a little bit disappointed. We had expectations of Bobby being there for a long time, and I know Damo loved playing for Bobby. I think we were all a little bit down in ’86 because of that.”
After the season, Gillick intimated that García’s days as a Blue Jay were numbered. The GM had better choices waiting in the wings.
“Damo’s just too up and down,” Gillick told The Toronto Star. “We need somebody we can depend on (at second base) and right now I like the other guys better.”
At the 1986 winter meetings in Hollywood, Fla., García and Williams sniped again at each other in the media over the uniform-burning incident. Two weeks before spring training opened, Gillick traded García and Luis Leal to Atlanta for pitcher Craig McMurtry, who would never appear in a game for Toronto.
Injuries all but grounded García for the next two years before he finished his career in 1989 with an 80-game turn for the Expos.
Two years later, after experiencing double vision, he underwent brain surgery to remove a tumour. He was never the same. His vision, speech and mobility were permanently impaired. Those who visited him in recent years said he sometimes did not recognize them.
He did recognize his former GM during Gillick’s scouting visits in the early years after his surgery.
“After he got out of the game, I stayed in touch with him from time to time over the years,” Gillick said. “When I went to the Dominican I’d always try to stop in and say hello. I don’t think there was ever any lasting grudge against the Blue Jays. He was a good person. Solid values.”
In 1992 García came back to Toronto and threw out the first pitch before a playoff game. Alfredo Griffin, his friend and a former double-play partner, served as ceremonial catcher.
García and his wife, Haydee, have a son, Dámaso Jr., who has hemophilia, a condition that inhibits normal blood-clotting. In the years following García’s surgery, they launched a charity to provide education and medical supplies to hemophiliac children in the Dominican, as well as an annual baseball camp for hemophiliac kids.
“His public life has been limited,” Haydee in 2002, “but this health condition has not kept him from working with those less fortunate.”
Whatever his ordeals as a player, García was a longtime friend and part of a special quartet of Latino Blue Jays, Iorg said, citing his fondness for Fernández, Griffin and Bell as well.
“Dámaso was incredibly liked by everybody,” Iorg said. “I was fortunate to play with four Latin players that were amazing teammates and liked by every group on the team.”
Added Martinez: “Damo and Alfredo Griffin and Tony Fernandez all had that same passion and had a lot to do with the personality of the Blue Jays during that time because of their joy and their love to play. They were all very close and very intense, and that helped us all stay very upbeat and continue to remind ourselves how fortunate we were to play this game.”
It was a special team that launched a streak of 11 straight winning seasons, capped by two World Series championships. García was the linchpin of those early ‘80s teams. As Gillick put it, “he was not a tremendous player but a very good player” for a while.
And like most people, he was a complex character – by turns fun-loving, thin-skinned, generous and intractably stubborn.
Gillick remembers him as “not only an emotional guy, but sensitive, sometimes too sensitive. Down deep, a good guy and a very intelligent guy.”
The record shows that García was a career .283 hitter with a .686 OPS and 203 stolen bases. It doesn’t begin to tell the whole story.
Iorg understands that. But when he thinks about the man, he also remembers the gift.
“I would look at his talent and go, ‘Oh my gosh, I wish I had that talent,’” Iorg said. “He was a special athlete.” He was a special athlete, and an even more special person.
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