Book Reviews

Why I Wrote a Book about the God Squad, the 1978 San Francisco Giants

by Matthew Sieger
09/21/26
Free to Share

  Message Writer
  Hire Writer

Tweet

I retired from writing sports for The Reporter, a daily newspaper in Vacaville, California, in 2020.. Early in 2023, I was driving to my local library in Martinez, California, and I thought to myself, I’d like to write a book. What could I write about?

Immediately an idea came to me: I could write about the 1978 San Francisco Giants.

Why that team? Here’s the story:

I am Jewish, and, through a series of providential events, came to believe in Jesus in August 1978. Gaining a new appreciation of my Jewishness after coming to believe in Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, I joined a group called Jews for Jesus and moved 3,000 miles across the country to work with them at their San Francisco headquarters in 1980.

I began to read the local sports pages in the Chronicle and the Examiner, the two main San Francisco papers. The Chronicle had two controversial sports columnists, Glenn Dickey and Lowell Cohn. Both were excellent wordsmiths. Cohn was a master of satire. Dickey was more blunt, a sledgehammer.

In 1978, a number of born-again Christians on the Giants (there were nine or ten) began to speak out about Jesus in post-game interviews, thanking him for the abilities they had. The Giants, who had been mired in mediocrity for most of the 1970s, came to life that year and led the division until mid-August before a September swoon landed them in third place behind the Dodgers and Reds.

The press didn’t trouble the born-again Giants when they talked about Jesus, as they were winning. But the next year, when the Giants reverted to their losing ways, the media dubbed the Christians the “God Squad” and began to take potshots at them.

Dickey called Christianity a crutch and called for the Giants ownership to break up the God Squad, which he called a clique, and trade some of them. Cohn, ever the satirist, wrote a column in 1980 called “Can Satan Save the Giants?” in which he suggested that since God wasn’t helping the Giants very much, one of them should sell his soul to the devil.

A year later, Cohn wrote another column called “Lavelle and the Fiend,” in which he said that pitcher Gary Lavelle, who had called San Francisco a satanic region (in part because the Church of Satan was founded there by Anton LaVey in 1966), was intolerant.

As I was reading these columns in the Chronicle, they irritated me. Of course, Cohn and Dickey intentionally provoke reaction. But as a Jesus believer, I felt that they were unfairly picking on the God Squadders.

In late 1982, the pastor of my church in South San Francisco asked if I could pinch-hit for him and deliver a message to the local chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA). So I found myself in the home of two brothers, Keith and Drew Petiti (Drew later became my brother-in-law) talking to some college-aged kids about Jesus. After the meeting, Keith told me that their next guest speaker would be Gary Lavelle.

I attended that meeting and afterwards approached Gary to see if I could interview him for an article for the FCA magazine. He agreed, and I met with him in his home in Foster City, interviewed him and got the article published. In speaking with Gary, I referred to the treatment he was getting from Cohn and Dickey and suggested that the God Squad controversy would make for a good book. He agreed. But we soon realized that neither of us had the time to devote to the project.

Fast forward 40 years as I am driving to the Martinez library and have the idea of writing a book about the God Squad. Are any of those guys still around? What about Cohn and Dickey? If so, would they be willing to talk with me?

I attempted to reach several God Squad “members” – pitchers Lavelle and Bob Knepper, utility infielder Rob Andrews, shortstop Johnnie LeMaster, outfielder Jack Clark, first baseman Mike Ivie and others. Some I couldn’t reach, others declined, but two said yes – Lavelle and Knepper.

Lavelle was willing because he already knew me. Knepper was reluctant at first because he had been so badly burned by the media during his years with the Giants. But he eventually agreed and we have become very good friends.

I was wary of approaching Cohn. I assumed his personality matched the acerbic tones of his column. Also, Cohn is Jewish. How would he respond to a Jew who believes in Jesus? But I was pleasantly surprised. He was very willing to help a fellow writer and we talked on the phone for a good 40 minutes. He was gracious and encouraging and it was one of the best interviews of my career. We too have become good friends.

I learned that Dickey has dementia, so an interview with him was not possible.

In spring 2023, my wife and I traveled to Southern California to be with our daughter as she recovered from back surgery. I spent those days on the couch in her apartment beginning to write my book. It came together so quickly. I started in May and completed my final draft by July. I was able to find an abundance of articles about the God Squad in newspaper archives online – a far cry from my days in journalism school when I had to plow through library microfilm to write my papers.

Finding a publisher was harder than writing my book. But then my pastor at Creekside Church in Martinez told me that we have a book publisher in our congregation – Alive Book Publishing, run by Eric and Peggy Johnson. They were great to work with, and my book, The God Squad: The Born-Again San Francisco Giants of 1978, was published in November 2023.

Maybe you have a book in you as well.

Matt Sieger, now retired, is a former sports reporter and columnist for The Cortland (New York) Standard and The Vacaville (California) Reporter. He is the author of The God Squad: The Born-Again San Francisco Giants of 1978 and In My Humble Opinion: Musings of a Sports Columnist.