The crowded 2024 race for the late Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat now includes GOP baseball star Steve Garvey. He won’t win but might keep the general election from being an all-Democratic contest for Schiff, Lee, Porter, and maybe Butler.
The 2024 U.S. Senate race for the seat held by the late Dianne Feinstein took another turn on Tuesday when Republicans acquired a celebrity candidate: the former Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres star Steve Garvey. The 74-year-old hasn’t played the game in 36 years, but he has received some continuing publicity as an unsuccessful perennial candidate for the Baseball Hall of Fame and remains relatively well known in the media footprint of the Dodgers, which Garvey helped lead to a world championship in 1981.
As a player, he came across as a paragon of square-jawed probity, though Garvey gained an unwholesome reputation shortly after retiring, as the Los Angeles Times recalled in 1989:
Control is what Steve Garvey meant off the field as well; it framed his urge to be not just a ballplayer but also a role model. He said “yes, sir” and “no, ma’am,” he didn’t drink or smoke, he made bedside visits to hospitalized kids …
And that utter control is why Steve Garvey commanded attention when his life went haywire. In February, Garvey went public with an account of his complicated romantic life — a bizarre, cross-country tangle in which he got two women pregnant and married a third.
