This post is part of a media project called SoCal Sports History 101: The Prime Numbers from 00 to 99 that Uniformly, Uniquely and Unapologetically Reveal The Narrative of Our Region’s Athletic Heritage. Pick a number, and consider the list of athletes attached to it. Who wore it best? Or, what’s the most compelling story linked to it? Any person, place or thing is in play with Southern California connections. Star power, transformational achievement, longevity, notoriety and quirkiness all factor in. Whatever leads to a lively discussion and interpretation.
The most obvious choices for No. 29:
Eric Dickerson: Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Raiders
Rod Carew: California Angels
Adrian Beltre: Los Angeles Dodgers
Tarik Skubal: Los Angeles Dodgers
The not-so-obvious choices for No. 29:
Eric Turner: UCLA football
Bobby Knopp: Los Angeles/California Angels
Harold Jackson: Los Angeles Rams
Billy Smith: Los Angeles Kings
The most interesting story for No. 29:
Jay Johnstone: Seattle Mariners player in the film “The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!” (1988), California Angels outfielder (1966 to 1970), Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder (1980 to ’82, 1985), via Edgewood High in West Covina.
Southern California map pinpoints:
Arcadia, West Covina, Anaheim, Los Angeles, Hollywood, Granada Hills, San Gabriel
Reference books on the subject:
“Temporary Insanity: The Uncensored Adventures of Baseball’s Craziest Player,” by Jay Johnstone with Rick Talley, 1985
“Over the Edge: Uncensored Exploits of Baseball’s Craziest Player,” by Jay Johnstone with Rick Talley, 1988
“Some of My Best Friends Are Crazy: Baseball’s Favorite Lunatic Goes in Search of His Peers,” by Jay Johnstone with Rick Talley, 1990
Jay Johnson steps up to the plate at Dodger Stadium wearing No. 29 for the Seattle Mariners, and already things look very goofy.
The Mariners were not among the eight MLB teams he played for in 20 seasons, which started as a member of the Angels of Los Angeles and ended with the Dodgers of Los Angeles. No. 29 was not one of the seven numbers he wore over that period. And one noticable tell — he was in the right-handed hitting box. He never once before ventured into that territory, the natural left-handed swinger that he was.
Rather quickly, wearing what looks like an oversized Little League helmet, Johnstone starts making making faces. He’s getting felt up by the home-plate umpire. Who happens to be Leslie Nielsen.
This package deal is our best gift to summarize Johnstone’s contribution to the sport — an ability to laugh at his own expense from someone who was Type A in aspirational absurdity. Putting the jock in jocularity, and the player in playfulness.
Johnstone’s role in “The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!” from 1988 followed a script, but there were times he just couldn’t help himself. His improv might have actually improved the scene had they just let him kept the cameras rolling.
Larry Stone, writing in the Seattle Times, presented it this way:
Jay Johnstone was a Seattle Mariner for one day. One at-bat, if you want to get technical. Surely, if you are of a certain age, you know where I’m going with this. Yet that lone cinematic plate appearance immortalized Johnstone in comedy history. Even if he did strike out while looking at three pitches.
And, I promise, I’ll quit calling you Shirley — to cross-reference another classic Leslie Nielsen movie.
Johnstone played the part in a made-up game, hitting leadoff, facing the California Angels in Chavez Ravine. The more nonsensical the better.
There was Nielsen, as Lt. Frank Drebin, infiltrating the proceedings disguised as the plate umpire with the primary job to frisk every player — the assumption was that one of them was involved in a plot to assassinate the queen of England, who for some reason was in attendance. Not to give a spoiler alert, but check the zombied-out Angels DH wearing No. 44 and there’s your suspect.
Johnstone said he didn’t hesitate when director David Zucker called to see if he’d like to be in the movie. He wasn’t the only big-leaguer — Reggie Jackson had a key role. Then there was O.J. Simpson, aka Nordberg, allowed to carry an actual weapon.
“It took six hours to film eight minutes,” recalled Johnstone.
At one point when Nielsen patted him down between pitches, Johnstone said his ad-lib cracked up his fellow actors.
“Zucker said, ‘Cut, cut, no lines!’ ” Johnstone recalled. “I said, ‘But it’s funny.’ He said, ‘I don’t care. No lines.’ They had to re-shoot.”
Johnstone also remembers when he was instructed to have the bat of his backswing hit Nielsen’s mask, sending him careening backward into the screen.
“The first time, I didn’t hit him hard,” said Johnstone. “He said, ‘No, you’ve got to hit me. I want it to look real.’ So I cranked it up and whacked him. That’s what Leslie wanted, to make it look real.”
As for why he batted right-handed, it was all about camera angles. And if you see the fans in the stands, maybe that’s the first test of the COVID-19 cardboard cutout compromise.
“I said, ‘OK, because it’s the movies’,” recalled Johnstone.
For the first 81 games of his Triple-A career after joining the Los Angeles Angels’ franchise, Johnstone actually was a Seattle professional baseball player. He was a key member of the 1966 Seattle Angels, eventual champions of the Pacific Coast League — the last Seattle team to win a pro baseball championship. It made Johnstone a bit of a local legend.
Aside from the array of Angels’ veterans trying to claw their way back to the big leagues, Johnstone was among several prospects ramping up their value with Andy Messersmith, Rudy May, Marty Pattin, Clyde Wright and Rick Reichardt.
The Angels signed the 17-year-old Johnstone to a $35,000 bonus out of Edgewood High in West Covina. He had already attracted college football recruiters for his ability to quarterback in the popular T-formation on the football team.
Born in Manchester, Conn., Johnstone moved West with his family when he was 3. His father, Jack, was in combat in the South Pacific with the U.S. Army in World War II. During the war, he met an Australian woman, Audrey Whebell, and they married. Jay was the oldest of their three kids, officially named John, after his dad.
According to his SABR bio, Johnstone told the Christian Science Monitor in 1968 that his father greatly influenced his competitive spirit.
“I’d get three hits in a Little League game and be afraid to face him. He’d want to know why I didn’t get four. I’d always know what his reaction would be.”
Jack Johnstone was once good enough to sign with the St. Louis Cardinals, but he never got a chance to play pro ball because he went into the service.
A month before his own 20th birthday, Jay Johnstone realized that even though he was in the minor leagues, there was value enlisting to be in Marine Corps Reserve as a way to serve his country during the Vietnam War.
Back and forth playing between Seattle and Anaheim in ’67 and ’68, Johnstone eventually stuck the landing with the Angels full time in ’69. He was credited with preserving Clyde Wright’s no-hitter in the seventh inning against Oakland on July 3, 1970 when he chased down a fly ball hit by Reggie Jackson to straightaway center field just in front of the wall.
Johnstone’s survival on MLB rosters was instinctual. Whatever he could do — including taking on clubhouse clown — was in his tool box.
He once found himself back in Triple A at age 27 for Oakland’s Tuscon affiliate and then at age 28 for Philadelphia’s Toledo affiliate. He didn’t quit. He persevered. Playing all three outfield positions, a little first base, and learning the art of pinch hitting.
One his biggest influences was Angels outfielder Jimmy Piersall, the eccentric player known for … a lot of stuff.
“Jimmy Piersall once told me that as long as it’s not derogatory, get your name in the paper any way you can,” Johnstone once said. “That’s never been my goal, but I never minded all the talk about being a flake.”
Bill Rigney, the Angels’ first manager, admitted: “I plead guilty to assigning Jay Johnstone and Jim Piersall as roommates. It was an easy decision. I didn’t want to screw up two rooms.”
It helpled that Johnstone’s lifetime batting average of .267 with 102 home runs was similar to what Piersall posted over his 17 seasons – .272 and 104. As one scribe put it: “A pop-off guy can’t be a pop-up guy.
At some point during his early years with the Angels, Johnstone was called “Moon Man,” as teammate Buck Rodgers said. One day Johnstone lost a ball in the sun, “but when he came back to the bench he said, ‘I lost it in the moon’,” said Rodgers.
As “Cardboard Gods” author Josh Wilker wrote in 2009 on a post about Johnstone:
“(He) posed on a 1983 card wearing a Budweiser umbrella hat. I don’t have that card, but I understand that if one card had to be chosen to represent Jay Johnstone, one of the game’s more renowned pranksters, it would be the one that shows him to be sympathetic to the practice of imbibing intoxicants and ridiculously safe against accruing moisture on any part of his head or neck.”
In his first postseason appearance for the Phillies in 1976, Johnstone went seven for nine (hitting .778 with a 1.911 OPS) and three RBIs in a three-game National League Championship Series loss to Cincinnati. In the 1978 World Series, he became part of the New York Yankees team that outlasted the Dodgers for the title.
The roles reversed when Johnstone made his biggest contribution to the Dodgers in Game 4 of the 1981 World Series, on Oct. 24, against the Yankees. Trailing 6-3 in the sixth, Johnstone followed Mike Scioscia’s walk with a pinch-hit, two-run homer off Ron Davis to pull the Dodgers to within 6-5. The Dodgers won it, 8-7, to even the series, and went on to win the title in six games.
In that World Series, he hit .667 with a 2.333 OPS — because of course he did.
“It was certainly memorable,” said Fred Claire, the former Dodgers general manager who was the team’s vice president of public relations and marketing in 1981. “But I think the biggest contribution of Jay was just in keeping all the guys around him loose.”
Claire said he was once heading from the field to the press box as a game was about to start when he saw Johnstone — in full uniform — ordering a hotdog from a concession stand outside the Dodgers clubhouse.
Johnstone was the usual suspect if someone’s cleats were set on fire or nailed to the floor. He and former Dodgers pitcher Jerry Reuss once replaced the celebrity photos in manager Tommy Lasorda’s office with pictures of himself, Reuss and Don Stanhouse.
As Johnstone and Monday went to WAR together as co-conspirators in prankdom, Reuss was the third stooge.
Johnstone and Reuss famously pulled on groundskeepers uniforms and dragged the Dodger Stadium infield in the fifth inning of a game against Pittsburgh on Sept. 2, 1981. They ran to the clubhouse to change into their uniforms and returned to the dugout, only to have Lasorda send Johnstone up as a pinch hitter. He hit a home run.
“Hey, Tommy,” he said afterward, “next time you need me, I’ll be down in the groundskeepers’ room.”
“Who in the history of baseball has dragged the infield in the fifth inning and hit a pinch-hit homer in the sixth?” asked Reuss.
Or, who would take credit/blame for tying his tying the door to the managers’ office to a palm tree, after he put dye in the shower head, then removed the mouthpiece of the phone so Lasorda couldn’t call out for help, as well as putting a nail in his window so that it only opened a few inches. Hey, the spring-training prank worked. Johnstone became a hero to his teammates.
In retirement, Johnstone re-invented himself as an ambassador for the game, doing TV appearances that allowed him to do far more tame pranking on unsuspecting foils. He briefly worked as a radio color commentator for the Yankees and Phillies. During an interview with Yankee players Deion Sanders and Mel Hall, he got them to uncover a restaurant bread basket cloth without them knowing it also contained a snake, getting both players to jumped out of their seats for a hidden camera.
Johnstone wrote a 1985 book, which came out as he was still an active player at the end of his career, called “Temporary Insanity: The Uncensored Adventures of Baseball’s Craziest Player.”
“I’ll be honest,” Reuss said with a laugh, “there was nothing temporary about it.”
He followed it with “Over the Edge” in 1988 and “Some of My Best Friends Are Crazy: Baseball’s Favorite Lunatic Goes in Search of His Peers” in 1990.
From page 157 of the later, about his teammate Steve Garvey, who wrote a blurb for the “Temporary Insanity” cover but whose endorsement was missing from this one: “As for my pal Garvey, he took a lot of heat over one pregnancy that was a setup and another that was an accident. I guess he didn’t see me in my movie debut, ‘Naked Gun,’ when we talked about safe sex.”
It always comes back to being naked.
In the 1990s, Johnstone spent time visiting U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Germany. He held clinics in Japan with the World Children’s Baseball Federation and visited American children’s schools in London, Paris and Brussels. In 2010, he was a spokesman for Hope4Heroes, a nonprofit organization designed to benefit military veterans.
Reuss talked about Johnstone again: “There was also another side to Jay. The side he chose to keep private. He spoke at Little League banquets, gave impromptu batting tips to kids, made other appearances when no one else was available and was there when a friend needed a helping hand. That’s also Jay Johnstone.”
“When the game was on the line, he was able to transform that little 7-year-old child that was always in a playful mood into serious,” Monday said. “Jay was always bigger than life. If the team was in a spot where you felt your backs were against the wall, he was one of the reliable guys.”
In the fall of 2020, Johnstone was among the millions who didn’t survive the affects of COVID-19 and died at age 76. He had been suffering from dementia and was in a Granada Hills nursing home. He was buried at the San Gabriel Mission.
An obituary in the Los Angeles Times quote Mary Jayne Sarah Johnstone, his daughter: “COVID was the one thing he couldn’t fight. It’s really kind of shocking.”
She insisted her dad’s sense of humor only made their way to the park after he practiced them at home. There were rubber snakes in their pool and spiders by the bathtub. Her friends loved being around him because “he wanted to find the humor in life no matter how serious things got. That was his motto to everything, bring a smile to people’s faces. Everyone loved him.”
Take note: On the night Johnstone died, Sept. 26, a power outage occurred at Dodger Stadium. It happened during an actual game where Johnstone’s first team, the Angels, were playing his last team, the Dodgers. On the same field Johnstone was part of the “Naked Gun” filming.
The blackout lasted about 25 minutes. No fans were affected because games were still being played before cardboard cutouts in the stands. Kinda like in the “Naked Gun”?
Angels manager Joe Maddon called the scene “surreal.”
Monday knew better.
“He may have had a hand in it or a victory lap of remembrance,” said Monday, at the park as part of the Dodgers’ broadcasting team.
Surely, Johnstone had to be behind that blackout, at that place, with those teams, under those circumstances.
Surely, you jest?
Just don’t call him Shirley.
Author Susan Orlean once said: “I think from the beginning of its days, Los Angeles has been what happens when you take the map of the U.S. and you tilt it, and the kookiest, most eccentric, most interesting people roll to the southwest corner, and they end up in L.A. It’s the California gossamer. It’s the magic of the edge of the country, of a place where there’s gold in the hills, where people came to reinvent themselves.”
That was Johnstone.
Who else wore No. 29 in SoCal sports history?
Make a case for:
Eric Dickerson: Los Angeles Rams running back (1983 to 1987); Los Angeles Raiders running back (1992):
Best known: On Pro Football Reference.com, under players “whose career was of similar quality and shape,” Eric Dickerson is determined to be on par at various points in his career with Franco Harris, Barry Sanders, Thurman Thomas, Tony Dorsett, Marcus Allen, Walter Payton, Emmitt Smith and O.J. Simpson. That may have undersold him. Dickerson ultimately is most compared to Simpson, since it was Simpson’s single-season NFL rushing record that Dickerson right past blew past 12 years after Simpson was the first to break 2,000 yards. Six Pro Bowls, five first-team All Pro selections and four rushing titles were on Dickerson’s resume when he retired in 1993 with 13,259 yards. At the time, only Payton (16,726) had more yards.
A running style that almost made him look like a thoroughbred race horse shifting through the pack of competitors with deft precision, Dickerson was only around for four-plus seasons in Los Angeles for the Rams, and none were in Los Angeles. The greatest single-season in yards accumulated for an NFL runner in league history came in 1984, in Anaheim. The most polarizing contract debate about the same player’s future came three years later. Cashing in on his own notoriety.
Dickerson had a series of nicknames in his career. “Mr. Fourth Quarter,” because of his stamina; “Number One,” because he was often the first choice in the offensive play calling. He was also “Mr. Benny,” for his known frugality. For obvious reasons, he was also “The Dick.”
The bickersome Dickerson left Southern California in 1987. Prematurely. To some, it left the Rams in a ramshackle status for years beyond.
Dickerson did come back to L.A., with enemy colors, for one last statement, in 1992.
At least 20 years after his NFL retirement, in 2016, when the Rams moved back to L.A., Dickerson signed a one-day contract with the Rams so he could officially quit on his terms with the team.
By then, who was paying attention?
Dickerson was the Texas native from a city famous for making bed mattresses. He wore No. 19 for four years when he was part of a “Pony Express” backfield at Dallas’ Southern Methodist University, twice leading the nation in rushing and third in the 1982 Heisman voting behind Herschel Walker and John Elway.
In the 1983 NFL draft, Dickerson landed in the Rams’ laps at No. 2 overall because, in the famous “Year of the Quarterback” draft, Elway went No. 1 (to Baltimore, traded to Denver), and the first round included Jim Kelly, Dan Marino, Todd Blackledge, Tony Eason and Ken O’Brien. Dickerson already angered Houston fans by stating flatly that he didn’t want to play for the Oilers and later irritated more Texans by asserting that he hated the Dallas Cowboys.
In cool and collected SoCal, Dickerson set the NFL record with 2,105 yards rushing in 16 games, which adds up to 131 yards a game. A 5.6 yards per carry went with a league-best 14 touchdowns, which were four fewer than he scored as a rookie the year before when he also racked up 1,808 yards.
In 1985, he thought he was worth more money. He held out the first two games of the season. Some Rams fans seemed to side with team management and some threw Monopoly money at him, others setting fire to their own No. 29 jerseys. Call it another SI jinx.
In a 2025 USA Today story about the NFL’s timeline of the most notable holdouts, Dickerson was at the top. While he did return and help the Rams to the playoffs with his 1,234 rushing yards and 12 touchdowns, the damage was done.
Back to a full season in ’86 at age 26, Dickerson piled up another 1,821 yard rushing season on a phenomenal 404 rushing attempts. For the third season in his first four years, he also went past 2,000 in total offense, leading the league each time.
Those first four seasons as a Ram also accounted for about 7,000 yards rushing and about 1,600 carries. As of 2025, three of the top 25 NFL single-season rushing seasons were posted by Dickerson in a Rams’ uniform at age 23, 24 and 26. But when the 1987 season started, the Rams were again baffled by Dickerson’s latest training camp holdout. He was making $682,000 that season. The Rams offered him $975,000. Not the million-a-year Dickerson thought he was worth.
After the first three games, Dickerson’s incessant complaining led the Rams to trade him to Indianapolis in a blockbuster 10-player, three-team deal. The Rams hardly got a even trade, accepting Greg Bell and Owen Gill to fill his place in the backfield. The Colts gave Dkcierson a four-year, $5.6 million deal.
By 1988, Dickerson was back to leading the league with 1,659 yards rushing. Still, “The Dick” was underneath. The Colts suspended him for part of the 1991 season for “conduct detrimental to the team,” and subsequently traded him to the Los Angeles Raiders for the 1992 season. The Raiders, using him as a situational running back, released him at age 32. He signed with the Atlanta Falcons.
He retired in 1993 after four games, never having played in the Super Bowl. But he had a smokescreen.
In his 2022 memoir, “Watch My Smoke,” Dickerson is in vintage 1980s NFL Jheri curls.
Two years after he was named to the NFL’s 100th anniversary team, he took the time in a book to explain himself – the contention with Rams management that led to his ridiculous trade, the opinions he holds today that allows him to be a frequent guests on Los Angeles talk radio and has a role in the Rams front office as vice president of business development.
Of course, in 2016, Dickerson used his clout to dismiss things coach Jeff Fisher was doing on the field. Dickerson revealed that Fisher, in his mind, banned him from the sidelines because of his criticism toward the team. Dickerson vowed then that he would not show up to a Rams game so long as Fisher was employed. Fisher was fired. Dickerson came back.
In his book, he talks more about the life of a black celebrity in a town of celebrities and all other things he encountered. The scandal he was part of when recruited at SMU in the 1970s.
His name, image and likeness around Los Angeles remains. Rams, Raiders, Traitor.
Amidst a collection of fading Star Wars memorabilia and outdated Elton John concert T-shirts, the window of a vintage clothing store on Main Street in Santa Monica knows how to cash in nostalgia and draw customer attention with a Rams’ No. 29 blue-and-gold jersey.
The gold numbers are bold and dynamic. Large and upright.
“The numbers two and nine stand for my birthday … sort of,” he told me once. “My birthday is actually Sept. 2 — or 9-2 — but that doesn’t work for a running back so I flipped the numbers around.”
However the numbers work out.
Rod Carew, California Angels first baseman (1979 to 1985):
Best known: After 12 seasons in Minnesota, it could be said that Carew retired to Anaheim to collect his 3,000th hit and become an AL All-Star six more times. His .314 average with the Angels in 834 games didn’t tarnish a career mark of .328 when his Hall of Fame career was finished. The Angels retired his number in 1986 (before a game against the Twins) and, at the time, it was the first player number ever retired by the franchise (after No. 26 for owner Gene Mauch). During the ceremony he received a Los Angeles Rams football jersey number 29 from Eric Dickerson. Carew moved to Anaheim Hills after leaving the game as a coach.
Now well remembered: Carew wrote a book about miraculous post-playing career health issues, “One Tough Out: Fighting Off Life’s Curveballs.”
Adrian Beltré, Los Angeles Dodgers third baseman (1998 to 2004):
Best known: Beltré’s first seven MLB seasons started when he was (allegedly) aged 19 playing in Los Angeles. It ended with him establishing the then-franchise single-season home run record of 48 in 2004. That total also not only led the National League, but it propelled him into a free-agent frenzy — thanks to aggressive agent Scott Boras. After marginal stops in Seattle and Boston, Beltré became a Texas legend. As Mike DiGiovanna wrotes in the L.A. Times as the 2024 Hall ballots were being counted, Beltré was “considered a teenage prodigy” when he agreed to a $23,000 deal with the Dodgers in 1994. “There was little about his early career, marred by a birth-certificate issue and his slow recovery from a botched appendectomy in the Dominican Republic, which screamed surefire Hall-of-Famer,” wrote DiGiovanna. Beltre’s first five seasons with the Dodgers (’99 to ’03) were a less-than-impressive .262, with a .748 on-base-plus-slugging percentage and averaging just 16 homers and 65 RBIs a season. The Dodgers nearly lost him in 2000 when a Major League Baseball investigation found they had signed him before his 16th birthday. Beltré sat out the first six weeks of 2001 after undergoing surgery to close a wound in his large intestine, the result of an infection from an emergency appendectomy that January. Beltre’s 147 homers as a Dodger franchise player is 18th all time. Voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame with 95 percent in his first year of eligibility in 2024.
Not well remembered: Beltre was never was part of an NL All Star team as a Dodger even thought he was second in MVP voting in ’04 when he was fourth in the league hitting .334 and had 121 RBIs with a 1.017 OPS. The red flag was that Beltré played most of that season with bone spurs in his left ankle that required surgery after the season.
Eric Turner, UCLA football defensive back (1987 to 1990):
Best known: A three-year starter, Turner set a UCLA program record with 14 interceptions in 44 games, which led to him becoming the No. 2 overall pick in the 1991 NFL draft, the highest drafted defensive back in modern pro football history.
Out of Ventura High, where he not only was all-league in basketball but All-CIF in track as a sprinter rand long jumper, Turner led the school to three straight Channel League football titles as a running back (988 yards rushing and 14 touchdowns) and defensive back. He ran a 4.56 in the 40. At UCLA, Turner was nicknamed “E-Rock” and often compared to former Bruins greats Kenny Easley and Don Rodgers.
“Eric looks the way a man is supposed to look at the safety position,” said UCLA defensive backs coach Tom Hayes in 1987. “And he has the intensity to knock people around. When he hits you, you’re hit.” As UCLA held the nation’s No. 1 ranking during Turner’s sophomore year en route to a 10-2 finish, he was third on the team with 87 tackles and three picks, one returned 54 yards for a touchdown against Stanford. As a junior in 1989, he ranked second on the team with 141 tackles and gaining honorable mention All-America acclaim. A first-team All-American as a senior and voted UCLA’s Most Valuable Player on defense, Turner led the Bruins with 93 tackles and five interceptions. His late interception at Washington set-up Brad Daluiso’s game-winning field goal with 10 seconds remaining as the Bruins upset the No. 2-ranked Huskies, 25-22 on November 10.
After nine years and two Pro Bowl appearances, it was revealed in the 2000 NFL offseason that Turner was battling abdominal cancer and he died in Thousand Oaks at age 31. The Ventura High field was named in his honor, he was inducted into the Ventura County Sports Hall of Fame in 2001, and then into the UCLA Athletics Hall of Fame in 2008. At the time of Turner’s death, he still ranked fourth in career tackles at UCLA (369). with 369, trailing only three-time consensus All-America linebacker Jerry Robinson (468), Rogers (405) and Easley (374), also a three-time consensus All-American.
In 2009, Turner’s son, E.J., who also prepped at Ventura High and played on the field named after his dad, made the UCLA football team and wore the No. 29. E.J. caught 32 passes for 378 yards and two TDs for Ventura as a senior.
Not well remembered: As the first half was coming to a close in the 1987 UCLA-USC game at the Coliseum, Eric Turner intercepted a pass from USC’s Rodney Peete at the goal line to not only prevent a Trojans touchdown, but he decided to try to return it. In what looked like a sure 100-yard pick-six, Peete ran him down and tackled him about 10 yards short of the end zone. The play went as an 89-yard return.
Bobby Knopp, Los Angeles/California Angels infielder (1964 to 1969), coach (1979 to 1996, 2014 to 2018):
Part of the franchise’s Hall of Fame for his career as a player and coach since 2013, Knopp starred in baseball, football and basketball at Montebello High and shined in American Legion baseball. The Milwaukee Braves signed him in 1956, and the Angels got him in the Rule 5 draft, seeing him as a defensive specialist working the double play combo with Jim Fergosi. He was named team MVP four times during his five-and-a-half seasons, leading AL second baseman in fielding percentage most times and winning three Gold Gloves and making the 1966 AL All-Star team. He was a fixture as the Angels’ first- and third-base coach for another 17 seasons through 1996 and then named infield coach for the team from 2014 to 2018.
Harold Jackson, Los Angeles Rams receiver (1968, 1973 to 1977):
Best known: Three of his five Pro Bowls, more than 3,000 of his career 10,372 yards receiving and 36 of his 76 career touchdowns came with the Rams, where he began as a rookie No. 48 for just two games in 1968 before he was traded to Philadelphia and emerged as en elite receiver. The Rams re-acquired him in 1973 — but the price was quarterback Roman Gabriel. Statistically, Jackson’s greatest NFL game came against Dallas on October 14, 1973 when he caught seven passes for 238 yards and four touchdowns, which came amidst a streak of four games where he caught 13 passes for 422 yards and eight TDs.
Have you heard this story:
Billy Smith, Los Angeles Kings goalie (1971-72):
A fifth-round pick by the Kings in the 1970 draft, Smith got into five games as a rookie in the 1971-72 season, gave up 23 goals, and lost three times. As the No. 3 netminder behind Gary Edwards and Rogie Vachon, Smith was made available in the 1972 expansion draft, and the New York Islanders grabbed him. In 17 seasons there, the team won four Stanley Cups (1980, ’81, ’82 and ’83, and lost in ’84), Smith won the Vezina (in ’82), Jennings and Smythe (in ’83), went into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1993. He was named to the NHL’s Top 100 players of all time in 2017, one of the 15 goalies honored.
Chuck Essegian, Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder (1959 to 1960):
The L.A. Fairfax High grad came back to finish his career for his hometown team after the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn. Essegian made his mark hitting two pinch-hit home runs for the Dodgers during their 1959 World Series run, but he but wasn’t assured of a roster spot in 1960 until the end of spring training. The 28-year-old reserve outfielder wasn’t even listed in the opening game’s official program. As the Dodgers went into the 11th inning of the ’60 opener at the Coliseum against the Chicago Cubs, Essegian came off the bench to hit for starting pitcher Don Drysdale. Essegian connected on a two-out slider to deep left field for a walk-off homer in a 3-2 win before more than 67,000, giving him his third pinch-hit homer in three official times at bat.
Don Stanhouse, Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher (1980):
His eccentricity, bushy hair and extreme mustache preceded him to Los Angeles. As his SABR biography notes: Known as “Stan the Man Unusual” as well as “Fullpack” (a reflection of the number of cigarettes Orioles manager Earl Weaver would smoke while Stanhouse came into a game), Stanhouse was noted to arrive in spring training in a black Cadillac to match his outfit and the paint scheme of his apartment. He used to bring a stuffed gorilla to the games, perhaps the inspiration for the primal screams he would yelp as batting practice concluded and the game was about to start. Coming from his only AL All-Star team selection and from a Baltimore squad that had won the 1979 World Series, Stanhouse benefited from the Dodgers’ desperation to rebound from a losing season by getting a five-year, $2.1 million contract. After only four appearances for the Dodgers, Stanhouse spent the next three months on the disabled list. He ended up striking out only five batters in 21 relief appearances, posting a 2-2 record with seven saves and a 5.04 ERA. By the end of the season, rookie Steve Howe replaced him as the bullpen closer. The Dodgers released him before the 1981 season, where they went on to win a World Series and continued to pay his salary through 1984, by which time he had been retired for two seasons.
We also have:
Tarik Skubal, Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher (2026)
Tommy McDonald, Los Angeles Rams receiver (1965 to 1966)
Tim Wallach, Los Angeles Dodgers third baseman (1994 to 1996, also wore No. 25 in 1993 and No. 23 for the California Angels in 1996)
Christian “Chicho” Arango, LAFC forward (2021 to 2022)
Anyone else worth nominating?
