In the name of “inclusion,” of course, and, be it noted, the first and greatest of capital sins, Pride. The team that once defied racists has now caved in to anti-Catholic bigots. Over the past several weeks, the Dodgers have demonstrated a cringe-inducing cravenness in the face of woke pressures. This was Dodger baseball, and, as the psalmist said, we rejoiced and were glad in it. Can any serious baseball fan’s spine not tingle when watching replays of Kirk Gibson, barely able to walk, hitting a pinch-hit home run off the great Dennis Eckersley in the 1988 World Series? Or, to revert to unmitigated joy, how about the look on Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda’s face when he charged out of the dugout to embrace Gibson? This was the national pastime at its best. Over the decades, the Dodgers remained the consistently successful team no one loved to hate (unlike the gang in the Bronx). Those Dodgers also gave baseball two of its most elegant radio wordsmiths, Red Barber and Vin Scully. But they also had silken shortstop Maury Wills and the noble Sandy Koufax, who declined to pitch Game One of the 1965 Series because it fell on Yom Kippur. True, those 1966 Dodgers had a mean master of the brushback pitch in Don Drysdale. It was the Dodgers, “Dem Bums,” who inspired what is arguably the best book ever written about a baseball team, Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer. It was the Dodgers who had broken baseball’s infamous “color line” by playing the immortal Jackie Robinson, “42,” at first base on Opening Day 1947. (The Yankees were, and are, an empire, not a franchise). That victory was made all the sweeter by the fact that the Dodgers, even after their 1958 translation from Brooklyn to Lala Land, remained the class act of major league baseball - the franchise everyone tried to emulate. On a brilliant autumnal Sunday, I was sitting with my Grandfather Weigel behind first base in Baltimore’s old Memorial Stadium, which erupted in jubilation when Lou Johnson’s fly ball settled into the glove of center fielder Paul Blair and the underdog Orioles completed a four-game sweep of the World Series against the lordly Los Angeles Dodgers. ![]() When I dip into life’s memory bank for moments of unalloyed joy, the afternoon of October 9, 1966, quickly surfaces.
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