Captain Hook

George Lee Anderson was born in Bridgewater, South Dakota, on February 22, 1934, on what was still automatically celebrated as George Washington's Birthday before such holidays were homogenized into pointless three-day weekends. Bridgewater is a town in the southeast corner of the state, population listed as 653, less than twenty miles due west of Pumpkin Center, which is just about that far west of the nearest metropolis, Sioux Falls (population 81,000).

The Andersons were poor by today's standards, but not by theirs. Nine of them lived in a two-story house: mother and father, two grandparents, an older sister, George, a younger brother, and two younger sisters. The grandfather painted houses, the father painted barns and silos and worked for the post office. The kids played ball in the summer, froze in the winter, and played hockey on ice without skates. The "rich family" in town had the only house with an indoor bathroom.

According to Sparky, he loved every moment of it. When he was nine, the family moved to Los Angeles, to the ghetto later famous as Watts. There the house had a bathroom, but only two bedrooms. The boys and the grandparents shared one; the parents and the two younger daughters shared the other; the older sister slept on a couch in the living room. As the boys grew older, they moved their bed out to a porch for privacy, displacing a washing machine.

Shortly after moving there, while walking home from the first day of school, George was passing the field where the University of Southern California baseball team practiced. The campus was only a few blocks from his new home. A ball came flying over the fence. He retrieved it, and went inside the enclosure to return it.

That started a lifelong friendship with Rod Dedeaux, the USC baseball coach, who was nationally known for sending so many players to the major leagues and who knew everyone in baseball from Casey Stengel on down. Dedeaux made Georgie the team's batboy, a position he held for six years, and became a second father to him.

His own father, who had done some catching in semipro ball, was a tough man physically but gentle at heart. Dick Williams's father had told him, "Never give in". Anderson's father told him, "Be nice to people. That's the only thing in life that's free. It'll never cost you a dime to be nice. And you'll feel good."

Georgie felt good. To this, Dedeaux added an appetite for enthusiasm, kept after him about keeping up his grades in school, and taught him about the larger world.

While in high school, Anderson also played on an American Legion team that won the national championship in 1951 at Detroit's Briggs Stadium, as it was called then. By now, he had another influential guide. When he was fourteen, he had met Lefty Phillips, then a scout for Cincinnati, who drove him to games, taught him more baseball, and got him a summer job upstate. Phillips soon became affiliated with the Dodgers (still in Brooklyn), became a coach under Alston after the move to Los Angeles, and eventually managed the Angels. One of the kids he signed around this time was Don Drysdale.

And in February, 1953, Phillips signed the nineteen-year-old, small and slight, hustling and combative second baseman straight out of high school, to a Dodger system contract. Dedeaux had wanted Anderson to go to USC, but Georgie wasn't interested and knew he couldn't get admitted even with that kind of sponsorship. He took a $1,200 bonus, a $1,200 salary for the season, and went up to the Santa Barbara farm club in Class C.

He was a good-field, not-much-hit infielder. Both Dedeaux and Phillips were believers in the Rickey system. Now he was being schooled in it full bore. At Santa Barbara, he played shortstop and led the league in putouts. At Pueblo, Colorado, in 1954, he switched to second base and led that league in putouts. He moved up to Fort Worth in 1955 (where he was a teammate of Dick Williams's) and led that league in putouts and assists. He excelled at making the double play, which is the basic test of guts on a ball field. In 1956, he was up at Montreal, the top of the chain, hitting .298. In 1957, in a sort of lateral move, he was sent to Los Angeles in the Pacific Coast League, since the Dodgers had acquired that franchise prepatory to their move the next year. He played second and short and led the league in putouts, assists, fielding average (.985!), and games played, but hit only .260. In 1958, with the Dodgers in Los Angeles, Anderson was back at Montreal, leading the league in putouts and assists and fielding average.

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