Penguin Power: Dodger Blue, Hollywood Lights, and My One-In-a-Million Big League Journey by Ron Cey, with Ken Gurnick

I admit I read this book for less than pure reasons. I’m not really a baseball fan. But I am, often, a fan of baseball players. And none more so than Ron Cey. As a young teen in the mid-1970s, I was turning the pages of the Los Angeles Times when I came across a set of three pictures of the Dodger third baseman warming up during a spring training practice and I was instantly smitten. Stunned is more the right word. He would have been about age 30 at the time. Big blonde mustache, big gorgeous smile, big powerful legs and arms: he activated every part of my adolescent interest. I started reading the sports page and watching Dodger games on television, to the total surprise of my family. And I learned, gratifyingly, that Cey was actually a great player, a key part of the Dodger team, and that baseball itself was a fascinating game, for the play, as well as the players.

So I’ve followed Ron Cey as my baseball crush ever since. I’ve had others but you always remember your first. He played with the Dodgers through 1982. I watched him on TV, followed his career in the paper. He was also a local personality who would sometimes appear in commercials (“Howard’s” an appliance store in Los Angeles). Nicknamed by a college coach “The Penguin” because of his running style, he was featured in a Nike advertising poster posed in a tuxedo holding up a baseball bat standing on a fake ice sheet surrounded by penguins. I bought the poster, titled, “Penguin Power” at the bottom like this book, and hung it in my bedroom. (The poster is included in the photos section of the book.) When I was at UCLA in the marching band, I got to play the Star Spangled Banner for a game at Dodger Stadium and then had seats in the outfield bleachers. When Cey went to the Cubs in 1983 I followed him a little less closely. He finished his career in 1987 in Oakland playing one season as a designated hitter for the A’s.

Penguin Power is the story of his career, told in Ron’s voice as he reminisces to a journalist, Ken Gurnick. He starts playing college ball in Washington State. He’s drafted early into the Dodger organization and plays in Albuquerque and Bakersfield before coming to Los Angeles in 1971. There’s a lot of, literally, “inside baseball” stuff, that I, not being a true fan of the game didn’t entirely understand or care about. The book is divided into seventeen chapters. I have the sense that Gurnick showed up at Cey’s house over several weeks each visit arriving with an opening question such as, “Tell me about your years as part of the longest together infield” or “Tell me about the managers and coaches you played with” and then just let Cey talk. His stories often repeat themselves in more than one chapter. He drops a lot of names. The stories are repeated as he tells them rather than retold to heighten the drama. I wish there were more personal stories about it felt to be a professional ball-player. What was it like on the road? How did you juggle job and family? What does it feel like to step on to the field at a World Series?

Perhaps my favorite chapter is when Cey describes his own heroes, Willie Mays being the uppermost, plus several basketball stars, surprisingly. There’s another endearing chapter where he describes being starstruck around the Hollywood celebs he gets to meet without quite understanding that he’s a celebrity himself. I was surprised to learn that Cey had played both football and basketball as a kid, being all of five foot ten. Cey was on the field when Hank Aaron hit his 715th homer, in Atlanta. Cey wanted to shake his hand as he came around third base but decided he shouldn’t take away Aaron’s focus from enjoying his moment. I liked the chapter where Cey recounts his long personal friendship with Billy Buckner and how Buck was so much more than the error he’s remembered for during the 1986 World Series (he let a crucial ball roll between his legs). There’s some stuff about the business side of baseball and how that’s changed since the 1970s with the rise of the union and free agency, and the extraordinary amount of money now involved. Cey says nice things about Walter O’Malley and his son Peter O’Malley who owned the Dodgers for decades. He comes across as a genuinely nice guy, well-behaved, devoted to his sport, a team player, solid and principled and grateful for the chance to grow up to live his dream. He dedicates the book to his wife of 51 years, Fran and their two children, and speaks lovingly of his family in the text.

The take away is that Cey truly was a great player with a career to be proud of: multiple All Star games, World Series appearances, even a World Series MVP (shared with Yeager and Guerrero.) Although he didn’t make it into the Hall of Fame he makes a good case for himself in a chapter called, “Where Do I Rank?” with appropriate humility but also a hint that he hopes his absence in Cooperstown might yet be an error that baseball could correct. I’d love to see that myself.

The book came out in 2023. Somehow I didn’t hear of it until now and ordered a copy immediately. I took it with me on a recent trip to Santa Fe, knowing that I would finish the other book I was reading (The Pat Hobby Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald) while I was there. I read this mostly on the plane home and finished it the following day.