How a Dodgers prospect became an advisor to four

The ninth in an occasional collection of profiles on Southern California athletes who have flourished in their post-playing careers.

When the Dodgers drafted David Lesch in January 1980, they’d visions of his fastball lighting up radar weapons at Dodger Stadium.

He never made it that far.

Lesch never climbed above the bottom rung on the minor league ladder, where he pitched just 10 innings and gave up more runs, hits and walks than he acquired outs. Less than 18 months after he was drafted, Lesch, wracked by a rotator cuff injury, was launched, his major league dream over before he was outdated enough to legally buy a beer.

“I went to Disney World after that,” he said.

But that wasn’t the only determination the Dodgers made that modified Lesch’s life. When he was drafted, the workforce gave him just a small bonus, but sweetened the deal by offering to pay for school if he ever went back to college. For the workforce, it appeared a secure wager.

“They probably have this algorithm saying ‘this is the No. 1 draft pick. If he doesn’t make it, he’s not going back to college. He’ll be assistant baseball coach of his high school or something,’” Lesch said.

Oops.

Lesch not only went back to school, but he also wound up getting three levels, including a grasp’s and a PhD from Harvard. It was arguably the most important investment in humanity the Dodgers made since signing Jackie Robinson, because Lesch went on to turn out to be one of the world’s top consultants on the Middle East, writing 18 books and more than 140 other publications while advising four presidents and a cadre of United Nations diplomats.

“That was the best deal,” Lesch, 65, said by telephone from San Antonio, where he’s the Ewing Halsell Distinguished Professor of History at Trinity University.

“Without that I probably could not have said yes to Harvard because of the price. The Dodgers committed to paying.”

And by doing so, the Dodgers might have altered historical past just a bit.

Lesch’s common conferences with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, which ended with Lesch facilitating an important if short-term breakthrough in U.S.-Syrian relations? The diplomatic and conflict-resolution work in Syria and the broader U.N. initiatives on regional points throughout the Middle East? The 1000’s of college students Lesch impressed to go on to carry out important diplomatic and public-service roles of their own?

None of that occurs if Lesch’s shoulder had held on or if the Dodgers had reneged on their deal.

“It was very fortunate that he hurt his rotator cuff. Baseball’s loss is academia’s gain,” said Robert Freedman, a scholar and knowledgeable on Russian and Middle Eastern politics who taught Lesch at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

“I’ve been teaching for, I guess, 60 years now and I can tell when a student can see a complex problem and can penetrate right to the heart of the problem very quickly. He was one of those students.”

Still, it took a barely offhand remark from Freedman, who now teaches at Johns Hopkins, to launch Lesch on his post-baseball profession.

“We were having lunch and he was looking for a project and I mentioned to him ‘you know, there hasn’t been a good American scholar doing work on Syria for many, many years,’” he said.

“That struck his interest.”

Playing a little one’s sport and managing life-and-death Middle East politics share little or no in common. But Lesch made the transition seamlessly.

“It is like he’s several different people, or has been,” said journalist and writer Catherine Nixon Cooke, whose guide “Dodgers to Damascus: David Lesch’s Journey from Baseball to the Middle East” traces those parallel lives.

“I’m wondering if, in a sense, it all worked out the way it was supposed to,” Cooke continued. “Even though his dream was to be a major leaguer, David certainly has reinvented himself to this really remarkable man following a completely different path.

“It was the Dodgers who paid for him to go to Harvard and so it’s kind of a weird thing. Baseball took away his dream because he got hurt, but baseball also gave him his backup plan.”

Lesch was still a teenager when, 20 minutes into his first spring training camp in Vero Beach, Fla., Dodgers supervisor Tommy Lasorda plucked him off a minor league follow discipline to pitch batting follow in the main stadium.

Waiting for him had been Ron Cey, Bill Russell, Steve Garvey, Davey Lopes and Reggie Smith, the guts of a lineup that would win a World Series a season later.

It was the first time — and practically the last — that Lesch confronted big-league hitters. And it didn’t start nicely.

Batting follow pitchers throw from behind an L-shaped screen that protects them from comebackers and Lesch had never used one. That, mixed with his comprehensible nervousness, prompted him to short-arm his first fastball, which sailed at Cey’s head, sending him sprawling into the filth.

“He got up and gave me this mean look,” Lesch said. “I remember it so vividly right now. I really thought I was going to be released that day.”

Instead, he gathered himself and completed the session, incomes pats on the back from both Garvey and Lasorda. The incident, he said, has coloured the remaining of his life.

“I’ve met with presidents, prime ministers, been in war zones, all sorts of things,” Lesch said. “Anytime I say ‘well, you know, this should make me nervous,’ I think about that episode and the fact that I made it through and did OK.”

In high college, Lesch had centered on basketball and baseball. Academics? Not so a lot. So after spending his freshman yr of school at Western Maryland College, he transferred to Central Arizona, a junior school, so he can be eligible for the January 1980 draft, permitting him to commerce his books in for a baseball.

The so-called secondary draft, which was discontinued six years later, was particularly focused toward winter high college graduates, junior school gamers, school dropouts and amateurs who had been beforehand drafted but didn’t signal. As a outcome, the bonuses groups supplied winter draft picks had been just a fraction of what gamers taken in the June draft acquired.

Lesch’s was so low, he can’t even bear in mind what it was.

“I want to say $10,000 to $15,000,” he said. “No more than $20,000.”

When it became clear the Dodgers weren’t going to budge on the money, Lesch’s father, Warren, a household doctor in suburban Baltimore, pulled out the Harford County telephone guide and appeared up the quantity for Baltimore Orioles coach Cal Ripken Sr. Lesch performed high college ball against Ripken’s son Cal Jr., who had been a second-round draft choose of the Orioles two years earlier. So his father thought the Ripkens might need some advice on what to ask of the Dodgers.

David Lesch, a former Dodgers draft choose, stands on the baseball diamond at Trinity University in San Antonio.

(Courtesy of David Lesch)

“Ripken goes ‘does your son like school and is he smart?’” Lesch’s older brother Bob remembers. “So Ripken suggested if they offer you XYZ bonus money, take less and say ‘I’ll take this amount, but you have to cover education if he doesn’t make it.’”

Neither facet thought that clause would ever be triggered; Lesch, a big, intimidating right-hander who threw bullets from behind Coke-bottle eyeglasses, wasn’t headed to a classroom, he was going to Dodger Stadium.

Until he wasn’t.

Lesch missed a couple of weeks with a back injury. By overcompensating for the sore back, he developed paralysis in the ulnar nerve in his proper arm, limiting him to 5 appearances in his first minor league season.

He arrived healthy for his second spring in Vero Beach and threw three no-hit innings in his first outing against double-A and triple-A gamers, creating such a buzz that Ron Perranoski, the Dodgers’ major league pitching coach, confirmed up to watch his second sport. By then the shoulder and back stiffness that shortened his first season had returned, and Lesch was rocked. Perranoski left early and unimpressed.

Lesch’s supply had one major flaw: He threw immediately overhand, as opposed to three-quarters or even sidearm, which might increase velocity but also locations extra pressure on the shoulder and elbow. As a outcome, his fastball might top out in the mid-90s in the future, but when the stiffness and pain returned, it left him throwing in the low 80s.

The inconsistency continued to plague Lesch, and ultimately the Dodgers determined they’d seen enough and launched him. When he acquired back to Maryland, Lesch’s father despatched him to see an orthopedic surgeon, who discovered the issue wasn’t in his back or elbow but fairly the rotator cuff.

“We didn’t live in the era of pitch counts. So he just pitched,” said David Souter, a high college and school teammate who went on to develop big-league pitchers.

“He had the ability if he was developed and stayed healthy. I think he probably overthrew and tore his rotator cuff and nobody knew it.”

If Lesch had come along 10 years later, when rotator cuff surgical procedures had been common, he might need returned to the mound. But in 1981, a rotator cuff injury was a death sentence for a pitcher.

“It’s just a crapshoot based on physiology,” Lesch said. “I probably was destined. Something would have happened.”

If he might do it over again, Lesch said he would change one factor.

“I’d throw sidearm,” he said. “It’s much less stress.”

He threw to big league hitters just one more time. Following the strike that interrupted the 1981 season, Ripken Sr. phoned Lesch back and requested him to throw batting follow at Memorial Stadium to help the Orioles put together for the resumption of play. As a reward, the Orioles let Lesch hit — he never had batted in the minors — and he drove a pitch over the left-field wall, then dropped the bat and walked away.

He never stepped on a major league discipline again.

The Dodgers’ investment in Lesch’s training appeared manageable when he enrolled at a satellite tv for pc campus of the University of Maryland, in half because his brother Bob was the college’s sports activities data director.

But it was 1981 and the Middle East was at the forefront of geopolitics. Lesch became satisfied the Middle East can be central to world affairs for many years to come. Inspired and inspired by Freedman and another professor, Lou Cantori, he utilized to graduate college at Harvard, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago, figuring out he couldn’t afford any of those colleges on his own.

“I probably could not have said yes to Harvard when they accepted me because of the price,” Lesch said. “The Dodgers had committed to paying and whatever it was, it was a lot more collectively — my undergraduate MA and PhD — than I had gotten in the bonus.”

That wasn’t the only time his baseball background labored in his favor. Years after beginning at Harvard, Lesch stumbled upon written evaluations of his software and realized that his grade-point average and other elements had been comparable to those of other candidates, but it was his athletic profession that had swung enough votes in his favor to get him accepted.

“Failure is at the core of sports. And so you have to have this resiliency,” Lesch said. “What a lot of the top colleges have found is that these young kids out of high school who somehow get a 4.6 GPA, they come in — and I’ve seen this as a professor — they get their first C and they’re distraught.

“Athletes stick with it. They say ‘how can I turn this around? How can I get better?’ Admissions departments across the board have looked at athletes much differently.”

The struggles Lesch skilled on the diamond didn’t comply with him into academia. Yet turning into an knowledgeable on the Middle East undoubtedly was a backup plan.

“His first passion was clearly baseball and basketball,” said Souter, the previous teammate. “Every kid dreamed … that.”

If the shoulder injury wasn’t a strong enough signal that that dream was over, the fire that destroyed Lesch’s childhood home a few years later was. The flames, which severely burned both his dad and mom, also erased his baseball profession, consuming all the photographs and memorabilia he had collected, save for the championship ring from his one minor league season, which he discovered buried in the embers. It was the only factor to survive the blaze intact.

David Lesch’s championship ring from his one minor league season, the only surviving souvenir of his skilled profession after a his household’s home was destroyed in a fire.

(Courtesy of David Lesch)

A post-graduate journey to Syria, the first of more than 30 visits he has made to the nation, sealed the deal a few years later. The love he once had for baseball he now felt for a unusual and mysterious place that was as outdated as historical past itself yet as secretive as the classical ciphers.

Soon Lesch was serving to organize high-level conferences between Syrian president Hafez al-Assad and President George H.W. Bush, a baseball fan who appeared as in Lesch’s Dodgers days as his Middle Eastern experience. But his big break got here during the first presidential time period of Bush’s son George W. Bush, when Bashar al-Assad, who succeeded his father as Syria’s president, welcomed Lesch for the first of many interviews that informed his guide, “The New Lion of Damascus: Bashar al-Assad and Modern Syria.”

“His forte is listening,” Cooke, the biographer, said of Lesch, whose well mannered, unassuming method displays an grownup life spent principally in San Antonio. “When he goes in to try to mediate something, he is a big listener. There is a side of David that doesn’t talk much. But he’s listening.”

The guide humanized al-Assad and opened, for a time, the likelihood of normalized relations between Syria and the West, with Lesch serving as an unofficial liaison between Damascus and Washington, as nicely as other Western capitals.

“He’s absolutely a critical player in what we would call two-track diplomacy,” Freedman said. “If the government wants to reach out but doesn’t want to take the political consequences, they send somebody to sound out the situation.

“It’s absolutely critical that we have people like that who can speak the language and understand the overall context, which sadly is lacking in the current administration.”

David Lesch teaches college students in his historical past class at Trinity University in San Antonio.

(Courtesy of David Lesch)

But that opening closed as shortly as it opened. Lesch’s close contacts with al-Assad raised suspicions among some in Syria, and Lesch was poisoned twice. His relationship with al-Assad was severed utterly shortly afterward when he criticized al-Assad for failing to implement promised reforms and turning into a “bloodthirsty tyrant.” The Syrian civil struggle took practically 700,000 lives and displace another 6.7 million people before al-Assad and his household fled into exile in Russia in 2024.

“Many governments think that they can reduce war to a calculation,” Lesch said. “What we cannot measure accurately or fully appreciate is the human element. We cannot assess a people’s sense of grievance, passion, revenge, ideological commitment and historical circumstances that shaped the nature of their response and staying power.

“This is where academics can make a contribution to policy, giving it the depth and insight gleaned from years of study and learning the culture and the people.”

Baseball’s loss wasn’t just academia’s gain. It might show to be humanity’s as nicely.

“I don’t really have any regrets,” Lesch said. “My career turned out great. I could not think of doing anything else at this point and, in fact, in a way I’m glad [baseball] didn’t work out.”