… All the Bobbles

In a well-manicured cemetery near LAX, two men get out of their cars and greet one another. It’s obvious they’re strangers, and it’s equally obvious a deal is going down. Two packages, each the size of half a shoebox, are exchanged, and then the men bid farewell and return to their cars and drive off.

A drug deal? Whistleblower documents?

Try bobbleheads.

“I probably started collecting when I was in high school,” says John Scheerer, an estate and trust litigator at Sacks Glazier Franklin & Lodise in Downtown Los Angeles. “I’d go with my friends and sit in the cheapest seats possible. We’d go to Denny’s afterwards because we couldn’t afford Dodger Dogs. But we’d always want bobbleheads.”

Most of the approximately 50 Los Angeles Dodgers bobbleheads on display on a tall bookshelf in Scheerer’s office were acquired the old-fashioned way—by going through the turnstiles at Dodger Stadium. “I didn’t buy any off eBay,” he says. “What I have done, though, is sometimes I’ll go to a Dodgers game with a friend who doesn’t want their bobblehead. And so I’ll go on Craigslist and trade those bobbleheads for bobbleheads I don’t have. Only Dodgers, of course.”

That was the scene at the cemetery near LAX. Scheerer had an extra Dave Roberts which he traded for a coveted Zack Greinke. “It was a bit of a sketchy situation—meeting a stranger via Craigslist—just to get a bobblehead that’s worth $20, but it meant a lot to me. And it all worked out fine.”

Born in 1987, Scheerer began attending games regularly in the early 2000s just as the bobblehead craze was beginning. He remembers a great early fan vote that led to journeyman reliever Joe Beimel getting his own bobblehead. The most prized item in his collection is a bobblehead of longtime announcer Vin Scully behind his desk. The most valuable, he estimates, is also the most recent: Shohei Ohtani and his dog, Decoy.

“Earlier in the year, there was just a regular bobblehead of Shohei and it was absolute pandemonium,” Scheerer remembers. “And then they made the bobblehead of him and his dog. I have been to probably 200 Dodgers games, including World Series games and All-Star games, but I have never seen a crowd outside Dodger Stadium like that for that Shohei-and-his-dog bobblehead.”

Some of those Shohei/dog bobbleheads were gold-colored, too. “It was like the golden ticket from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. You’d open it and it was fully golden. I just got the regular one, which I was perfectly fine with.”

The collection often becomes a topic of conversation with clients. “If a client pointed out that they had a favorite Dodger, I would hope that I had that bobblehead,” he says. “The bobbleheads they give out are [also] historic. I have a Maury Wills bobblehead, Sandy Koufax, stuff like that.”

Scheerer attended Games 1 and 7 of the 2017 World Series against Houston, as well as Game 3 of the 2018 World Series against Boston. The Dodgers lost both of those Series—though it later came out that the Astros were illegally stealing signs. The one they won, in 2020, was played at a neutral site in Texas because of the COVID pandemic, so Scheerer flew there with friends to see his favorite player, Clayton Kershaw, win Game 5. “To do social distancing,” he says, “you could buy four seats, and there’d be 10 empty seats, and then another four seats. But it was still very loud.”

He was also in attendance, in a way, when they won it all in Game 6. At Dodger Stadium, he says, “it was sort of like a drive-in movie. The Dodgers had the game playing [on a video screen] in the parking lot. You had to sit in your car and watch the game and you could hear it on the radio. When they won, everyone was going absolutely bananas. When the final out came, we got out of our cars, were hugging each other, crying, going crazy—COVID
be damned.”

Most of his litigation cases, Scheerer says, deal with family squabbles that can be fairly high-profile. At his previous firm, he was part of a team that represented CBS and Viacom billionaire Sumner Redstone whose estate planning documents were being challenged while he was still alive. “We prevailed after just a single day of trial because they kept saying, ‘We have to take Sumner’s deposition’—Mr. Redstone had a well-known speech impediment that made it very difficult for him to speak. But they finally got his deposition and he made it crystal clear, ‘I do not want these people in my life.’”

So has he seen any squabbles over bobbleheads in estate plans? “Not yet,” he jokes. “I suspect that will come when the first person passes with a gold Shohei bobblehead.”

A Celebration to Last Throughout the Years

Scheerer did not make it to any of the 2024 World Series games but he had a great seat for the parade, which passed right by his office. “I was able to get a good view amongst an absolute mob of people,” he says. “Reports were that about 250,000 attended, but by my unscientific estimation it seemed like a million.”

Bobbleheads, undoubtedly, will be made from the Dodgers five-game victory over the New York Yankees. Scheerer’s top three options?

1. Freddie Freeman’s raised bat after his walk-off grand slam
2. Walker Buehler’s arms-wide gesture after getting the final strikeout
3. Shohei Ohtani’s clubhouse celebration