Outside, a baseball Sunday at Dodger Stadium emerges in a delightful cliche. Ample sun lingers behind a thin veil of haze. The early arrivals hear Vin Scully’s dulcet tones rattling off ballpark regulations over speakers at the gates. It’s all so agreeably expected.
Ned Colletti, the Dodgers’ general manager, assembled and presides over the product all have come here to see. On this day he’s wearing a light-brownish short-sleeved collared shirt and black slacks. It’s an outfit for a luau, hardly standard executive fare.
“I’m a Tommy Bahama guy,” Colletti says, sitting down at a table in his office.
It’s sort of a cliche to say Ned Colletti is not a cliche, and in fact the roster of baseball executives isn’t navigable by one particular archetype. There are lifers, whiz kids, guys who played and guys who didn’t.
But 25 years ago, Colletti was a guy from Franklin Park and East Leyden High School who lost his job as a hockey beat writer when the Philadelphia Journal folded. Shortly thereafter, through circumstances both tragic and fortuitous, he was working media relations for the Cubs, the team he watched hundreds of times as a kid from the left-center-field bleachers at Wrigley Field, taking a train and two buses to get there.
Now Colletti holds one of baseball’s most coveted positions for one of its most venerated franchises. This journey jettisoned cliches a couple of decades back.
“I’ve stayed close with the guys I grew up with in Chicago, we talk all the time,” Colletti says. “And they’re always asking me, especially the first year — what’s it feel like? I really couldn’t describe it, because I really didn’t have time to think about it — to stop the day and look around. I still don’t do that.”
Tunnel vision can have its rewards. The Dodgers tied for first place in National League West and were the wild-card playoff team in 2006, Colletti’s first season as GM. They have lingered in third place for much of the current season, bothered by injuries and hamstrung by an inability to score consistently.
Team in transition
The roster is a baseball bridal ensemble: old, new and borrowed in Dodger blue. The tradition is transitioning slowly to younger players such as Russell Martin, Matt Kemp and James Loney, though when healthy, veterans such as Jeff Kent, Luis Gonzalez and Nomar Garciaparra remain everyday cogs that help ford choppy waters.
“I have a lot of respect for players who bust their tail every day, who at the end of the day, you know they’ve given everything they can give,” Colletti says. “That’s the kind of guys I want. I’ll take a team full of those, that’s a little less talented because they’ll win as many games, if not more, than the team that has the talent but not the heart.”
That philosophy is unsurprising. The Franklin Park in which Colletti spent his youth abided no lethargy because doing so might mean the table didn’t have food on it. For the first nine years of his parents’ marriage, and the first six years of Ned Colletti’s life, home was literally a garage that Colletti’s father rejiggered with walls and plumbing.
In 1960, the Collettis moved into a four-room house. A factory stood across the street. A freight yard was behind the factory. And, with the house hard by O’Hare Field, Colletti says you could make out the silhouettes of passengers in landing planes overhead. The small home, he recalls, shook every time a jet passed.
When he was young, Colletti would scramble to a friend’s garage in the morning to pore over newspaper box scores. He estimates he attended 300 to 400 Cubs games in his youth and young adulthood. Sometimes friends came along. Most of the time he went alone. Colletti would sit in the bleachers and watch the pitching, the defense, the sun and the game.
Crush of calamities
By 1980 Colletti was covering the Philadelphia Flyers, something entirely apart from baseball. Then the calamities began to roll in like a weather front. In September 1980, Colletti learned his father, who died at age 51, had lung cancer. A year later, Colletti and his wife had a child and a duplex in Philadelphia with an 18 percent mortgage rate — and then his paper, the Journal, folded in December. Meanwhile, his father’s condition worsened.
Colletti had met Bob Ibach, who joined the Cubs’ media staff as part of the Dallas Green regime in 1981, while working in Philadelphia. Ibach knew of Colletti’s predicament and offered him a position with the Cubs that paid $14,000 a year. At first, Colletti was clearing $1,001 every month with a $700 mortgage payment on the Philadelphia home.
“Through all those trials, the doors that were opened for me, through the grace of God, were amazing,” Colletti says. “Three years later, the Cubs win the division for the first time in 40 years. I’m there for that. That winter Dallas Green starts getting me involved in contracts and salary arbitration stuff. A couple of years later I’m doing baseball rules and player evaluations for Jim Frey. It just starts going.”
Said Frey, the former Cubs manager and GM: “I would say this: At some point, when he was starting to get involved and rubbing shoulders with everyone at that [front-office] level, going to meetings with me, I’m sure he started to think, ‘What the hell, I can do what these guys are doing.'”
But the next, necessary step in Colletti’s executive evolution required a sharp pain. Four days after Christmas 1993, new Cubs GM Larry Himes called Colletti in for a meeting and informed him his services were no longer required.
For the kid from Addison and Narragansett, who stalked Ron Santo when the Cubs’ third baseman visited Al & Joe’s Deli for prosciutto, it was a brutal defeat of romanticism. Still, that night, Colletti and his brother took their mother to see The Three Tenors in Rosemont.
“It crushes you,” Colletti said of the parting. And though he and Himes have since discussed it in “friendly” terms, “I was devastated by it.”
Planets finally align
Soon, all was right once more. Walt Jocketty had left the Colorado Rockies’ front office for the St. Louis Cardinals. Tony Siegle left the Giants for the Rockies to replace Jocketty. Siegle happened to be good friends with Colletti and happened to pass along the information about an open position in the Giants’ front office.
Colletti landed in San Francisco and stayed for 11 years, spending the last nine as assistant general manager before the Dodgers hired him in November 2005.
“We gave him access to a lot of decision-making and thought processes, but [Giants GM] Brian Sabean probably did as much for him as anyone by giving him pretty much free rein in San Francisco,” Dallas Green said. “You go from being a P.R. guy to being a true baseball guy.”
Every morning he is home now, Colletti wakes up to a view of the Pacific Ocean. He lives in Manhattan Beach, and when he gives directions to his general neighborhood, anticipating a visitor’s reaction to it, his eyebrows rise.
The area is a far cry from Franklin Park, from a four-room house, from a family car with a softball-sized hole rusted out in the floor under the back seat.
“Nothing will ever change who I am,” Colletti says. “My buddies know that I’m the same guy I was when I was 10 years old. I might have a different job, a job that people are really kind of taken by, but that’s never changed me.”
As if to prove the point, he meanders over to a shelf and retrieves a picture. It’s dated Aug. 8, 1963, and comes from a local newspaper.
It features local Little League champions sponsored by J & L Cement. Ned Colletti sits second row, middle. He asks a visitor to guess who sits to his right in the frame, but the blue pen underlining the caption gives it away: Mike Shanahan, longtime Denver Broncos coach.
He then rattles off other names — former NBA GM Glen Grunwald, former NBA coach Jimmy Rodgers, current Bulls analyst Tom Dore — who came through East Leyden High School. He sounds like a proud club member, unswayed by the ocean whitecaps he can see every morning, trying to make sure nothing changes while, really, everything has changed.
“This little industrial town and this industrial high school — there’s a steel company right across the street — had all those people who ended up going on to do stuff in professional sports,” Colletti says. “Kind of amazing. That’s something.”
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bchamilton@tribune.com
