Steve Garvey, the ageing Republican Major League Baseball star, has talked about becoming a US senator for more than 40 years.
That dream was derailed for decades by what Garvey called his “midlife disaster”. Now, at age 75, the former first baseman is finally in the running – headed for a November face-off with the Democratic congressman Adam Schiff to fill Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat.
Garvey, who has no political experience, came in second in California’s jungle primary as a self-described “conservative moderate”, defeating two nationally prominent progressive Democrats, congresswomen Katie Porter and Barbara Lee.
Garvey had surged to first place in opinion polls despite not buying any television ads at all through 1 March, according to AdImpact, a firm that tracks ad spending.
Nor did he run a vigorous grassroots campaign. In fact, the Los Angeles Times reported that he barely seemed to be campaigning at all. In the final weekend of the primary, as his Democratic Senate opponents campaigned furiously across the state, Garvey was reportedly at home in Palm Desert, a golf community popular with retirees. That weekend, he did an interview on Fox News, in which he offered nostalgia as a central part of his platform: “I never took the field for Republicans or Democrats or Independents, I took the field for all the fans,” he said.
That kind of answer is characteristic: Garvey loves to use sports metaphors – why make one baseball reference when you can make two or three. “Garvey’s lack of grasp on nearly every issue he was asked about was startling,” Politico reported after one campaign debate. Pushed by reporters at campaign events to articulate his policy for addressing homelessness in California, he gave responses like: “I’ll find that out.”
Garvey has presented his unexpected victory as destiny: he has described himself as someone who has had a “50-year relationship with Californians”, a relationship that is finally bearing fruit.
Most political analysts see something else: that three prominent Democrats split the progressive vote, and that Garvey advanced to the runoff because Adam Schiff wanted him to. Supported by a massive war chest, Schiff’s campaign spent millions of dollars on TV ads “attacking” Garvey to raise his profile among conservative voters – so that Schiff could run against a Republican he could easily beat in the general election.
Garvey’s campaign declined a request for an interview with the candidate on Monday, with spokesperson Matt Shupe saying he was “totally booked up” until after the primary. The campaign did not respond to emailed questions.
But Garvey maintains an active profile on Cameo, the website that lets fans buy personalised videos from their favorite celebrities. Garvey sells his videos for $149 each.
When the Guardian asked Garvey over Cameo if he still had time to make a video while he was running for Senate, someone responded at 11.50pm on Monday, the night before the election: “Hi ... Yes”.
In some ways, Garvey’s late-in-life Cameo career is a logical progression of the relationship with fans that he’s been cultivating his entire life. Garvey started out as a bat boy and had a “storybook career” as a professional baseball player for the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Diego Padres, retiring in 1988. He was known for his MVP talent, his consistency – he holds the National League record for consecutive games played, at 1,207 games – and for his breathtaking skill at public relations. He was a good Catholic boy. He did charity work. He signed autograph after autograph.
Garvey cultivated a wholesome, all-American image, and he and his first wife, Cynthia, built prominent public profiles, becoming what newspapers called the “Barbie and Ken” of Major League Baseball. At one point, a California middle school was renamed in his honor.
In 1981, at the height of his fame, he sat down for an interview with Playboy, in which he talked about his ambitions for a career in politics after he retired from baseball. He did not plan to waste his time on local politics, he said: “I start at the US Senate or nothing.”
When he retired, in 1988, news articles speculated about his next political steps, and he told the San Diego Union-Tribune: “We’ve had an actor in the White House. Why not a first baseman?”
Instead, in 1989, Garvey, once known as “Mr Clean”, had two children with two different women in the same year, and then married a third woman, setting off years of child support battles.
Garvey’s personal life became the punchline of jokes at the Academy Awards. Bumper stickers advertised “Steve Garvey is Not My Padre.” Some took his behavior more seriously: a California bishop reportedly called him a “sociopath”. So did his first wife, Cynthia, who wrote a tell-all memoir about their troubled marriage.
Garvey said publicly that he had assumed the two serious career women he was dating had been on birth control, and he pledged to take moral and financial responsibility for his children.
But those children, now in their 30s, told the LA Times that, since their childhoods, they had tried and failed to establish any personal relationship with Garvey. One said she had run into him once by accident: the other said she had never met or spoken to him.
Another daughter from Garvey’s first marriage said he had largely cut off contact with her 15 years ago, and that one of the only times she had heard from him recently was when he informed her he was running for Senate.
Garvey has spent the past decades doing marketing, consulting and motivational speaking, and touts clients like Adidas and McDonald’s. He announced that he was joining Cameo in 2019.
This is an uncharacteristic move for a US Senate candidate. A spokesperson for Cameo, which says it offers “tens of thousands of pop culture personalities”, said it had only nine current and former politicians on the platform. The most famous of them is the pro-Brexit politician Nigel Farage ($90 per video), who has staged seven failed campaigns for the UK parliament. Garvey charges $149 per video, and has a 4.9 star rating.
Not all of his business ventures have been equally successful. In 2000, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed charges against him, alleging that he had an active role in developing the deceptive claims used to market a miracle weight-loss drug that he had promoted as an infomercial host. The ninth circuit court of appeals eventually ruled that Garvey was not liable for the claims he had made as an infomercial promoter, in what was seen as an embarrassing defeat for the FTC.
In 2006, a newspaper investigation found that, for years, Garvey and his wife Candace had “neglected bills large and small, leaving dozens of people who worked for them or sold them merchandise wondering if they were ever going to get paid”, and that the celebrity athlete was struggling with massive debt, even as he continued to live a lavish lifestyle. The article was headlined: ‘Dodger’ has new meaning for Garvey.
That line continues to follow Garvey around: “Once a dodger, always a dodger”, Porter, the California congresswoman running against Garvey, told him in an early primary debate, as Garvey refused to answer questions about whether or not he supported Donald Trump for president.
But after a big win in his very first political primary – a victory that pushed Porter out of the Senate race, and out of Congress – Garvey suggested he was the one who will have the last laugh. Celebrating his primary victory on Tuesday night, Garvey thanked Schiff for his support – and said the Democrat might come to regret it.
Schiff is “like the pitcher that throws me 70 miles an hour fast balls, and then watches me run around the bases”, Garvey said.
“They say in the general election we’re going to strike out,” Garvey said, as his supporters booed. “It ain’t over till it’s over.”
• This article was amended on 8 March 2024 because Steve Garvey holds the National League record, not the Major League Baseball record as an earlier version implied, for consecutive games played.
