The flag was staring at them. mocking them. The four arrived at the 1959 World Series hospitality room thirsty and hungry. If you were a sportswriter covering a game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago White Sox, this was the place to come to meet both needs.
But soon the men lost their appetite.
On one of the walls there was evidence of the greatest theft in history.
It was a pennant and impossible to miss. It was 17 feet long and 8 feet wide. It was white and slightly weathered. And it was in blue text.
It read, “1955 World Champion Dodgers.”
The four men immediately recognized what was in front of them. This was the flag that stood guard at Ebbets Field for all 77 home games during the 1956 season, the only game in which the Brooklyn Dodgers reigned as world champions. Last year, for the 77th time, the association proclaimed to the world that next year had arrived in 1955, and the beloved Bums had finally defeated the hated Yankees.
In Brooklyn it was a holy relic.
And now it's slammed against the wall of a Los Angeles hotel like a cheesy Santa Claus at a company Christmas party.
“It should be pointed out that the heat that kindled within the rebels was a dedication to justice, not a fire of free booze,” said one of the four, who were hungry and fastidious. , Stan Isaacs wrote some 40 years later:
For 40 years, Isaacs was the voice and conscience of Newsday's sports page, but he always had a soft spot for, and a soft spot for, the lighter side of sports. One day, while covering a game between the prestigious Yankees and the lowly Athletics at the Kansas City Municipal Stadium, he saw Charlie Finley, the owner of the Athletics team, looking across the outfield where he was keeping a team of sheep grazing during the game. I was wandering. Isaac was sitting with the sheep. The next day, after news agencies took photos of Isaacs and his new friends, Newsday published a photo with the headline, “Stanley, Is That Really You?”
Isaacs' column in Newsday was aptly titled “Out of Left Field.”
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But this was no joke. This was blasphemy. It wasn't all that bad that Walter O'Malley stole the Dodgers from Brooklyn and relocated them 3,000 miles away. Here there was evidence that he also secreted sacred artifacts and turned one of them into secular wallpaper.
So Isaacs and three of his colleagues, Charlie Sutton of the Long Beach Independent, Steve Weller of the Buffalo Evening News, and Isaacs' Newsday colleague Jack Mann, wrote: A decision was made.
This pennant must be returned to its rightful home.
And so it was. By the time the quartet flew back to New York, the flag was folded and stuffed into their luggage. It rested for several years in a basement in Rosalyn, Long Island, and then in a shed in Cooperstown, where the four bandits believed it deserved a noble resting place.
But the Hall of Fame couldn't find a spot for such a giant tchotchke, even though it has such sentimental value to millions of baseball fans. Eventually, the document was returned to the Brooklyn Historical Society in 1995 with the help of Peter O'Malley, Walter's son in his later years, then leading the Dodgers.
“It was kismet, the son hoping to atone for the sins of his father,” Isaacs told me years later with a laugh.
This is a good old heist, but the story was made even better by the fact that Dodger never pursued any justice even after learning the identity of the robber. they knew what they did. Sometimes remorse requires more than just apologizing and going to the confessional booth to cleanse oneself of one's sins.
Why bring this up now?
Yes, taking back the 1955 pennant may have been a gut-wrenching victory, but it was also temporary. New York has a chance to exact even more fascinating and protracted revenge over the next two days.
It could steal the baseball season from Los Angeles.
The Mets' loss in the 1988 NLCS — a memory that still hurts Mets fans more than it cheers Dodgers fans — has already been avenged twice by the 2006 Mets and 2015 Mets. I want you to forget the fact that it's happening.
No, this gets to the heart of baseball's original sin: Brooklyn's abandonment, the Dodgers' unforgivable (if hugely profitable) relocation from Flatbush to Fantasyland. Some might say that 67 years is long enough to hold a grudge and hold a grudge, and it's time for everyone to move on — especially at Ebbets Field. Even now, fewer and fewer of us have ever seen a match. And even fewer people actually remember that 17-by-8 flag, which symbolized one of the happiest times in the history of the borough. That's a perfectly reasonable argument.
And that's completely off the mark.
“Do you forgive and forget?” a reader named Bob McPartland recently wrote. “No. Never. Never. Until I saw Walter O'Malley in hell and told him that. I can't say I'll ever go there. But I know O'Malley is. I know very well.”
yes. There's still plenty of room for revenge here.
“The flag belongs to Brooklyn,” Stan Isaacs wrote in 1989. we will fight for it. ”
Thirty-five years later, the Mets have a chance to further their quest, their divine mission and their quest for eternal revenge over the next two days. “The National League pennant belongs to Queens. We want it. We'll fight for it.”
