National Post (National Edition)
Dodgers have been chasing Gibson's ghost since 1988
Year of last championship fresh to L.A. fans
Orel Hershiser has nothing to do with Clayton Kershaw. Kirk Gibson has no impact on Mookie Betts. What Tommy Lasorda did with his pitching 32 Octobers ago has no relation to when Dave Roberts will lift Tony Gonsolin, his starter in Game 6 of this World Series.
The 2020 Los Angeles Dodgers have a chance to win the World Series on Tuesday night. Fail then, and they have another chance Wednesday in Game 7. This is about the pandemic-shortened season being completed in a bubble, about Justin Turner and Corey Seager, not Mickey Hatcher and Alfredo Griffin.
Right?
“It's interesting,” Roberts, in his fifth year as the Dodgers manager, said Monday. “We've heard it a lot, and we've seen a lot of highlights, and it's fantastic. But I think that we want to make our own mark on Dodgers history.”
The 2020 Los Angeles Dodgers will tell you that what happened in 1988, when the franchise last won the World Series, has no impact on this year's team. I'm here to tell you that's not true.
What is true: Fans, of course, typically know more about history than players. That's not because players are ignorant. It's because fans live it, grow up with it and revel in it. A 50-yearold Dodgers fan pulling for Betts and Gonsolin on Tuesday night was an 18-yearold Dodgers fan pulling for Hershiser and Hatcher in 1988 — the year Kershaw was born, the year Gibson hobbled to the plate to face Dennis Eckersley, Oakland's unhittable closer, in Game 1 and took him deep. The Dodgers rolled in five games.
Those high-water marks are euphoric until they become suffocating. They not only cast as legends the participants on those particular nights, but they provide a standard by which every ensuing team must be measured. As Roberts said Sunday night, “Ultimately, my job is to help the Dodgers
win the World Series,” a phrase he has uttered repeatedly during his tenure. That's what Lasorda did all those years ago. That's what Roberts must do now.
So far, he hasn't, and that colours everything, both for his team and for his town. Players come and go. Why get sucked in? But for fans, there is a shared, communal experience in all the suffering between titles. It defines an avocation that consumes hours that add up to days that add up to weeks. The data points of disappointment — sweeps in the division series in 1995 and '96, National League Championship Series losses in 2008, '09, '13 and '16, a Game 7 World Series loss to the (cheatin') Astros in 2017, Howie Kendrick's 10th-inning grand slam last fall — congeal into heartburn and heartbreak. Those are distinctly different sensations, but they're both miserable.
Two years ago, back when the World Series could be played in ballparks packed with fans of the home team, the Dodgers opened their first home game of the series by handing a ball to Lasorda, the then-91-year-old former manager. The next night, Hershiser, the then-60-yearold right-hander, drew the honour, throwing to Hatcher, who homered in the decisive fifth game, which Hershiser won.
They were ceremonial first pitches that had no relation to the action over those evenings. Still, they were heroes of another era — a championship era — thrown in the face of the team trying to make them more distant memories. There is a weight that comes every time Lasorda or Hershiser or Gibson walks on that field, shakes a hand, waves to a standing ovation. The players' job is to deny it. They can't help but hear it, carry it, wear it.
This isn' t a uniquely Dodger experience. It has manifested itself in other towns and other sports. In 2016, the Chicago Cubs were built to break a 108-year championship drought. Playing in their first World Series since 1945, they lost their first two home games to the Cleveland Indians to fall behind, 3-1. For long stretches of those games, Wrigley Field became not a raucous bandbox that spurred on the home team but a tense, nervous cauldron that brought all the failures of the past to the corner of Waveland and Sheffield.
The vibe was so suffocating that when the Cubs squeaked out a Game 5 victory and prepared to board a plane the next day to Cleveland, Dave Martinez, then the Cubs' bench coach, plopped into a seat on the bus and said to a front-office member, “We just need to get out of town.” Neither Steve Bartman nor any billy goat rode that bus or occupied the clubhouse. But that cursed past unquestionably contributed to the environment around the team. In Cleveland, removed from those reminders, the Cubs won twice.
Maybe, then, the Dodgers could be freed by going for this championship not in the chaos of Dodger Stadium but in isolation in Texas. It rained here Monday, but the Dodgers planned to have barbecue brought into their bubble for a team meal. They might have talked about the opposing Tampa Bay Rays. They most certainly didn't talk about 1988, which will define the Dodgers until it doesn't.
WE WANT TO MAKE OUR OWN MARK ON DODGERS HISTORY.