The first in an occasional series of profiles on once-iconic Southern California athletes who have flourished in their post-playing careers.
Maurice Wesley Parker III has been on this earth 85 years.
For 32 of those years, he was an actor. For 12, he taught at the Braille Institute. He’s a near-scratch golfer, a passionate bridge player and he spent years in a TV broadcast booth.
Yet despite all that, Wes Parker is mostly remembered for a part of his life that ended more than 50 years ago when he walked away from the Dodgers and Major League Baseball at 33 after winning his sixth Gold Glove Award and leading the National League in fielding percentage.
“That’s my mark. That’s how people know me, as a ballplayer,” Parker said with a shrug and a smile. “Which is fine. It doesn’t change who I am. It doesn’t change my other interests.
“People start talking to me, I’ll talk baseball for a while. But we always move on to something else.”
Parker has spent a lifetime always moving on to something else — often something bigger, better or at least more important. So the fact he’s still defined by just a sliver of that lifetime may have less to do with Parker and more to do with the Dodgers, their unique place in Southern California culture and the iconic players with whom he shared a clubhouse.
Parker made his big-league debut in 1964, just seven years after the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles and three seasons after the team moved from the Coliseum to Dodger Stadium. In his first start he played behind Sandy Koufax and batted behind Maury Wills, Jim Gilliam and Tommy Davis.
The Dodgers went to the World Series the following two seasons and their players rivaled Hollywood stars for celebrity in the city. But the team didn’t make the playoffs again during Parker’s career. And when the core of the team he broke in with began retiring or were traded away, the game lost its joy. So eight days after his 33rd birthday in 1972, Parker quit.
“I was ready. I was so ready,” he said. “I had to think ‘were we ever going to win again?’ And how many more years could I travel? I just didn’t want to do it.
“And the guys. That was the other thing. I didn’t want to go through this whole makeover and learn how to play with different guys of a different generation.”
The game he grew up with, the team he grew into, were changing.
“I could feel it evolving from a team-oriented game to an individual-oriented game,” he said. “I did not play well when I played for myself. If it wasn’t a team-oriented game, I really was not much value.
“So I decided this was a good time to get out.”
That was 53 years ago and it was a decision that changed the direction of the team and much as it did the rest of Parker’s life.
With first base suddenly open, the Dodgers were able to move a scatter-armed third baseman named Steve Garvey across the diamond. That also created an opening at third for Ron Cey; the two anchored an infield that spent the next nine seasons together, winning four National League pennants and a World Series.
As for Parker, who had a college degree before he had played in a big-league game, he spent the next season as a TV analyst with the Cincinnati Reds, then played a year in Japan where he became one of the first players to win a gold glove on both sides of the Pacific.
As an actor he made guest appearances in several popular TV shows, becoming better known to a new generation through syndication than through baseball.
“When I go out and talk to kids, more of them by far knew me from my appearance on ‘The Brady Bunch’ than my entire career,” Parker said. “Of course they weren’t alive when I was playing.”
He also had a recurring role in “All That Glitters,” a groundbreaking soap opera parody created by Norman Lear. But he soon tired of that, too; like baseball, acting had changed for the worse.
“I don’t like the business. It’s not a team business, except in rare instances,” said Parker, whose last four credits were for voice work in video games. “You run into so many egos and so many people who want all the spotlight and all the publicity and all the close-ups.”
Yet through all the retirements and the restlessness, the rejections and the reincarnations, Parker has always managed to land on his feet. In 2020, he listed the three-story Pacific Palisades home he paid $90,000 for in 1972 at more than $7 million. He then bought a new home nearby and sold it last December, closing escrow less than two weeks before the neighborhood was ravaged by a deadly wildfire.
As a result his baseball mementos, including the six gold gloves, were in storage and not in harm’s way when the fire hit. But that’s also left him living out of a suitcase the past three months, staying with friends or in motel rooms in between bridge dates, golf games and going to the movies, which is another passion.
If Parker has slowed in retirement, he certainly hasn’t stopped.
“He knows a lot about movies. He’s a fabulous connoisseur of classical music,” said Maria Pendergast, a frequent bridge partner. “He wants to excel at everything he does and once he was out of the Dodgers, he doesn’t even go to Dodger games. He’s moved on.”
Some former players revel in their past fame; Parker takes pains to avoid it.
“When I first met him at the bridge club he preferred to be called Maurice,” Pendergast said. “The minute you introduce yourself as Wes Parker in Los Angeles, to the people our age playing bridge, everybody knows who you are. Beyonce could walk into our bridge club and nobody would know who she is.
“But Wes Parker? Yeah.”
Maybe that’s because his bond with the fans was a special one, built as much on mutual respect as on anything Parker, a .267 lifetime hitter who never made an all-star team, did on the field.
So it’s not that he avoids baseball. It’s just that he’d rather talk about other things.
“I’m very opinionated about film,” said Parker, who used the Oscar vote he earned as an actor to back “Emilia Pérez” as Best Picture this year. That it lost to “Anora” hardly left Parker deterred.
“It’s a better film, period. I’ll go to my grave saying that,” said Parker, whose all-time favorite movie is “Casablanca.”
He also has an extensive and eclectic music collection, from jazz and classical to movie tunes.
“I love good singers, listening to them,” said Parker, who was once a regular at the Hollywood Bowl and the Music Center. His favorite singer? Tony Bennett.
Away from the arts he spent than a decade volunteering at the Braille Institute where, during his playing days, he spent time reading to blind men and women.
“I applied as a teacher and they said ‘would you like to do a sports class? We always wanted to do one’,” Parker said. “I started with about seven or eight students and we finished with about 35.”
Even then the classes were only partially about baseball.
“They’d all grown up listening to the radio and they loved music, ‘60s rock music,” Parker said. “We’d always talk about that, too.”
He also became a Christian, regularly attending church and retreats at a holistic healing center in San Diego. If leaving baseball early created a void in his life, it’s one he had little trouble filling.
“I filled in those holes through volunteering, through being an actor, through golf, bridge,” he said over a lunch of meatloaf and custard pie. “I’ve had a very active and varied life. That’s filled up a lot of what I was missing.”
At 85, Parker looks to be no more than a couple of pounds over his playing weight of 180 pounds and he still moves with the style and grace that made him the finest-fielding first baseman of his generation. And his impossibly blue eyes still sparkle when he speaks of the people he loved playing for.
“I can’t remember them ever booing me,” he said of the fans.
Even five decades later he chooses humility over vanity when asked to verify a story about his relationship with those fans.
“How did you hear about that?” he said, seemingly reticent to give up the secret even after all these years.
It started in Parker’s penultimate season when, he says, a group of young boys began waiting for him by his car in the Dodger Stadium parking lot after weeknight games. On the third night one of the boys, who said he had come to the game on the bus, finally gave up the reason they were there when he shyly asked Parker to throw a ball with him.
Touched by the request but worried by the hour, Parker promised to play catch with the boys if they came back on the weekend. They did, and they brought reinforcements with them, beginning a Sunday tradition that would see Parker wait for his teammates to leave the ballpark before sneaking out to the parking lot with a bat and ball to play with kids.
Then he would pile as many kids as he could into his Mustang and take them for ice cream and sodas before giving them a ride home so they didn’t have to take the bus.
“Some lived in Hollywood or in the Valley. I didn’t care. I had time,” said Parker, who said he often enjoyed the parking lot games more than the big-league ones that preceded them.
Those moments are the ones Parker most cherishes from his career. It’s not the wins or the losses, the home runs or the impossible plays in the field. It’s the people, whether they were fans, teammates or opponents, he still misses.
“When I was playing the reason I loved it — absolutely loved it — was I played with such great guys and against great guys,” he said. “On our team we had not one bad guy. I got very close to [Don] Drysdale, Jeff Torborg, Maury Wills, Ron Fairly.”
All are gone now, as is Roberto Clemente, who Parker said was the best player he played against.
“Oh, it’s been awful,” he said. “I’ve lost so many good friends. Of our ‘65 championship team I think it’s me, Sandy [Koufax], Jimmy Lefebvre among the regulars.”
Talk of mortality reminds him that for all he has accomplished, there are things that remain undone.
“I still would like to get married,” says Parker, who had a brief matrimony during his playing days that was annulled after less than a week. “I’m not dating anybody currently but I dated so many wonderful women who I could have married. I just was so busy living my life that I didn’t think I could.”
If that sounds like a regret, it’s one of the few he has.
“I totally never regretted retiring,” he said. “Never.”
How else would he have been able to fit in all the bridge and golf, the music and movies? Because if retirement means a withdrawal for most people, for Parker it was just a transition — one that is still playing out more than five decades later.
“He’s one of those very gifted individuals,” said Pendergast, the bridge partner. “He was born with a lot of natural talent and he’s such a good human being that he tries to excel and he doesn’t put anybody down along the way.
“He’s just such a nice guy. I don’t know what else to say.”
That pretty much says it all.
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