Indifferent to baseball and thankful for alcoholism: the survivor’s tale of Charles Dobson

The old ballplayer is retired now, and not just from the game he loved but mostly hated. After 72 years and 15 operations and the stroke that temporarily paralyzed him and the cancer diagnosis and far too many scotches to count, he moves around slowly when he feels good, and with the help of a wheelchair when he doesn’t.

The other day, he planted 150 flowers out front. That was a great day. If you remember his big-league career, you know him as Chuck Dobson. But he goes by Charles now, and he’s learned to appreciate the good days, almost as much as he now appreciates the bad ones.

He lives in the same Hyde Park house where he grew up, though he’s renovated and added on enough that the old front porch is now the living room, and his childhood bedroom is now the laundry room. Out back, that’s where he once hung from the clothesline, against mom’s orders, and when he came inside with a bloody lip she only hit him more. Down in the basement, his grandfather died, drenched in his own urine, a life wrecked by alcohol in a family full of similar stories.

“If I had to do my life again,” Dobson says, “I wouldn’t drink.”

All around this place are the reminders of a life he has redefined, over and over. From a scared nerd who graduated as a virgin from the old De La Salle High to a promising pitcher for the Kansas City A’s who once led the league in shutouts. From a drunk who ruined three careers with the bottle to a counselor who now helps others find their way.

From a loved friend and teammate of Hall of Famers to an unassuming man whose life in baseball is unknown to even many of his neighbors and friends.

Why, he’s even redefined his name. When Dobson was a boy, his mother stood behind home plate, yelling, screaming, taunting, turning his name into two syllables: COME ON CHARRR-UHLLLS! Dobson hated it, so he started going by Chuck.

That’s a strong name — Chuck Dobson. You could imagine it being the lead of a movie, right? But he grew to hate that one, too. Sounded ugly to him: Chuck. Suck. Yuck. Muck. So, now he introduces himself as Charles again.

“It’s a nice name,” he says. “Soft. That’s how I look at myself now. I’m a soft person, not a hard person.”

Dobson’s is the story of a man blessed with enormous physical athletic gifts, but without the confidence or dedication or love of the sport to maximize. It is a story far more common than most fans realize, because Dobson’s willingness to talk so openly about it all is so rare.

It is the story of a man some of his peers say was more talented than many who made the Hall of Fame, now living out his days in relative anonymity on his pension and Social Security, finally with the self-esteem to be happy with all of it.

“I write checks to help my nephew, lead meetings for others who need it, and give back to people I’ve taken from,” he says. “I’m just a guy. People don’t know I was a ballplayer. I like that. This is what I’ve wanted my whole life.”

Parts of Dobson’s life sound made-up, a fairytale, and if you are so inclined you could tell it that way — Kansas City boy grows up close enough to Municipal Stadium to hear the crowds on summer nights, then pitches his way into the A’s rotation with Catfish Hunter.

Yes, there were some good moments. He struck out Hall of Famers, partied with legends, and his friendship with Reggie Jackson is believed to be the first time white and black ballplayers volunteered to room with each other.

The Orioles rocked Dobson one night after he hadn’t slept because a teammate and the woman he brought back to the hotel were making so much noise on the other bed. Dobson was furious. So the next day, Dobson asked Jackson if they could room together.

“Racial stuff was a big thing for me,” Jackson says now. “Not that I needed to be protected, but I always felt like he was with me, that he was my friend. That really helped me through a hard time.”

“I don’t think it’s far-fetched to say if he stayed healthy he would’ve been knocking on the door of the Hall of Fame,” says Sal Bando, an old teammate who went on to be the Brewers’ general manager for a time.

Dobson did not love baseball, at least not in the way we often want our professional athletes to love their sport. Even when he got to the big leagues, he wasn’t impressed.

Some of that was good — it meant he kept taking college classes in the offseason, and eventually graduated.

Some of it was bad — he didn’t mind so much if a hangover meant he gave up four runs instead of one.

“Looking back on it now,” Dobson says, “I should’ve worked harder, made my money, and then done something else. But I wasn’t that smart.”

The truth is, Dobson did not choose baseball so much as baseball chose him. Maybe it was the constant arguing and fights at home, but Dobson grew up scared. Scared of everyone, and everything, from girls to nuns to priests to peers.

A couch with an arched back sat in the living room, and Dobson would hide between the furniture and wall. At first, he did it when his parents fought. Eventually, he did it to feel safe. Every January 10th, starting on his sixth birthday, he remembers telling himself: This year is going to be different. I’ll be different this year.

Sports became his way into the world. He was good, and good at everything. Baseball. Basketball. Fighting. Nebraska and Notre Dame offered him football scholarships. Playing sports was the first time Dobson remembers people noticing him, being impressed by him, and he was hooked.

“It was this love-hate thing,” he says. “I loved the attention, but I hated that it was the only thing I had. That was my shell from the world, my strength, but inside that shell was nothing.”

That high of being accepted, and the insecurity that came with believing this was his only way, would drive much of the rest of his life — the good and the bad.

If you wanted to summarize Dobson’s decade in pro ball with one day you should know about Aug. 5, 1970.

Dobson’s A’s were in Kansas City that day to face the Royals, then in their second season. Dobson hated coming to Kansas City, because it meant all the guilt and shame that came with seeing his parents. They harassed him about everything, even as an adult. Take better care of yourself. Get a haircut. Call home more. They were right about some of it, but the weight of it all drove him mad.

That day was scorching hot — 100 degrees, and humid. The team was staying at the Muehlebach Hotel, and Dobson’s plan was to go across the street for a steak, take a nap, and then head to the ballpark.

Except, well, the waitress asked if Dobson wanted something to drink. Of course he wanted something to drink. J&B and water. Then the salad comes, and she asks again. So, yeah. J&B and water. Then the steak comes. J&B and water. Then she comes back to check on the meal. J&B and water. Then the meal is over. J&B and water.

By this point, it’s maybe 3 o’clock or so, and he really should get going, except he saw an old friend, and then went to the bar next door, and next thing Dobson knows he’s eight or nine scotches deep, sliding onto the last bus to the ballpark, hammered drunk and due to pitch a big-league baseball game in an hour or so.

First thing is a cold shower, then a visit to the teammate who supplied a greenie, then a soda, another cold shower, another greenie, and luckily it’s so hot outside that with the wool uniform he’s sweating himself toward something close enough to sobriety.

“Dammit roomie,” Dobson remembers Jackson saying in the dugout, “it smells like a (freaking) brewery in here.”

Somehow — well, the Royals were pretty bad that year — Dobson kept it together enough to give up just one run and four hits over nine innings. He shut out the Twins in his next start, and the Orioles the start after that. This is how it went for Dobson: reckless, but some combination of luck and talent and charm keeping him from trouble. Reached for this story, many of Dobson’s teammates didn’t know he had a drinking problem during or after baseball.

“I always thought Chuck had good common sense,” Bando says.

“He was the kind of guy you’d like your daughter to marry,” says Ken Harrelson.

“I never saw Chuck drunk,” Jackson says. “Well, I want to rephrase that. I never saw him have too many.”

But Dobson did, in cities all over the country, the alcohol helping him shake that insecurity. He used alcohol to forget his problems, about his childhood, about whether people liked him beyond baseball, about being too shy to dance or talk to women or ask them to come home with him.

He didn’t have those problems after eight or nine J&Bs. He had other problems, though.

In some ways, the day he binged on J&Bs and then pitched a big-league game was the pinnacle of his career. That was his best season, when he won 16 games and pitched 267 innings and led the league in starts and shutouts. The next year, his arm was done, but the A’s doctor didn’t think he needed surgery so he tried to pitch through it.

He had no way of knowing it then, but he was at that moment in 1971 essentially done as a productive big-leaguer at the age of 27. He spent part of the next year on a minor-league team in Alabama, where he met Denny McLain, who won 55 games, two Cy Young Awards and MVPs in 1968 and 1969, but by then was also effectively done as a big-leaguer.

“He’s the craziest guy I’ve ever known,” Dobson says. “He never slept.”

“Listen,” McLain says, “he was one of many.”

The low point came after baseball, and it was not being fired from a broadcasting job for showing up drunk, nor was it that he stopped getting acting and modeling gigs because the crews smelled booze on him.

The low point was not when he’d been so drunk he fell off his stool, climbed back to the bar, and ordered another. The low point was not the day he spent nine hours drinking scotch at a bar, left, picked up a liter of scotch and drank all but about an inch of it before passing out. He got in fights a lot back then, though he doesn’t remember all of them, and the first thing he did most mornings was look at the window to see whether he drove home.

The low point was when his shakes were so bad he couldn’t drive a car. He was barely 40, three careers and a handful of other jobs gone because of the bottle, his health and mind going away, too, without any desire to stop it.

“I don’t want to dramatize this,” he says. “But I thought I was going to die.”

This was a Friday night in January in St. Louis. Dobson was drunk and sitting in the passenger seat with his girlfriend behind the wheel on their way to get drunker. They got to the intersection at Conway and Ballas, and the car paused for a second. Dobson says he felt something desperate. The bar was to the left. He told his girlfriend to turn right, toward a treatment center.

The center had a rule against accepting drunks, and Dobson was clearly drunk, but his girlfriend lied and said he wanted to be there. They had an open bed and so they took him in. Dobson’s girlfriend had no idea if treatment would work. Dobson had his doubts. He’d been in three times before, the first time for seven weeks, then four, then one. He was trending the wrong way.

Something was different this time, though. They say you need to hit rock bottom, and Dobson had found his. He was living off his earnings from a commercial — for beer, coincidentally — but that money wasn’t going to last forever.

He felt all the things people say they feel when they open themselves up to sobriety: shame, hopelessness, helplessness, guilt, worry, fear. He never had suicidal thoughts — not directly, anyway — but when he drank enough he thought he was going to die and thought he’d be OK with it.

Detox lasted eight days, longer than it does for most, but Dobson kept through it. That was 31 years ago. He says he only considered drinking once since then, a year after he went sober, when a friend called for a ride home from the bar. Dobson went, saw a friend who wanted to recover, and felt the urge to celebrate with a drink.

He ran to the bathroom, slapped his own face, splashed himself with cold water and rushed to the front door, grabbing his friend on the way out.

“Joe,” he remembers saying, “let’s get the (expletive) out of here.”

Dobson tells the story with a tinge of disbelief. He drank so much, so often, for so long, he began to think that’s how he would die. All these years later, he’s still alive, with a peace of mind he could not have imagined before.

“I could not have made that decision,” he says, shaking his head. “Where did that come from? ‘Take a right turn?’”

Dobson has space for five cars in his garages out back. He can tell you the dozen or so breeds of birds he’s seen around his house — doves, woodpeckers, cardinals, on and on — and last year he resealed his driveway from his wheelchair.

He has a girlfriend he sees every day, usually for dinner, which she usually cooks. You would never know he’s an old ballplayer from his house — there are two, maybe three baseball things in the whole place — but he does have an extensive collection of dolls and hats from traveling the world.

He spends much of his time reading, catching up with old friends, watching the History Channel, attending some 12-step meetings and leading others. He hears what others have said, about how good he might have been without the arm injury, and he’s sure he got hurt at least in part because of how much he was drinking.

Hall of Fame? Maybe. A lot of things would’ve had to go right. But here’s something a little more certain: the A’s won three straight World Series starting in 1972, the year Dobson’s arm gave out at age 28. He should’ve been in his prime, pitching in the World Series with Catfish Hunter and Vida Blue, winning rings with the help of Jackson’s home runs.

“I don’t regret that,” he says. “I’m no longer that backward kid. I’m no longer an egomaniac. How would I ever get to this point where I’m sitting right now without that pain? I wouldn’t. Not being in the Hall of Fame, what’s that? I’d rather be sitting here now like I am than being in the Hall of Fame, still drinking, still this morass, preoccupied with self.”

There’s a saying Dobson heard over the years: He who learns must suffer. That’s how he sees this life. There is no joy without pain. The more wretched your experience, the more joy you can find in the future. Pain becomes a synonym to grace.

This is the great lesson of a life fully lived. Dobson’s has come full circle, and in more ways than living in the house he came home from the hospital to. Dobson never wanted anything more than to know himself. He thought he had that in baseball, and then tried to have it through alcohol.

The trip took a lifetime, but the destination was worth it.

“I don’t know if you can reach a pinnacle without reaching a real bottom,” he says. “I think alcoholics have an advantage there in life, really. Once you recover, you enjoy the benefits of life a lot more than a person who doesn’t hit that bottom.”

This story was originally published May 20, 2016 at 3:03 PM with the headline "Indifferent to baseball and thankful for alcoholism: the survivor’s tale of Charles Dobson."