Results tagged “Kirk Gibson” from The Sports Desk

Dodgers fans are reminiscing about 1988 now that the team has a shot at its first championship since that season of Kirk Gibson and Orel Hershiser. How did the 1988 playoffs look as they happened? Read on to see the Daily News' lead story from Oct. 6, 1988. It's about the Dodgers' victory over the New York Mets the night before in game 2 of the National League Championship Series.That victory marked the start of the Dodgers' October run of upsets over the Mets and the Oakland A's.

In an editors' meeting this morning, there was talk of doing a story about signs of Dodgersmania, and some of us remarked that there's never been so much excitement about a team taking a lead in a playoff series ... a first-round series ... against the Cubs.

But the more I think about it, the more I get it. At lunch, I looked around at the mostly young faces eating at the local Chipotle, and I realized how few people in that restaurant were alive the last time the Dodgers accomplished even this much. If you're under, what, 26 years old, you can't remember the Dodgers' victory in the 1988 World Series, and Kirk Gibson is just a name your dad says a little too often.

One great thing for young Dodgers fans today is that they've grown up in a time when rooting for a screwed up baseball team is portrayed as a badge of honor. The team is a bunch of "lovable losers," the fans are long-suffering, their frustration given religious significance. So kids have had that going for them, and now they get to enjoy the possibility that their club is shedding its history of October bumbling, the only history they've ever really known.

Matt McHale died of a heart attack Monday, after battling diabetes throughout this decade, and it seemed as if everybody who ever met him had a fond personal rememberance.

Less dramatic -- indoors, there are no brake lights -- but was the Lakers' game 1 victory over San Antonio a Kirk Gibson moment?

The story about tough-talking Larry Bowa by our Dodgers beat writer Tony Jackson gave me new appreciation for Joe Torre's third-base coach. I hadn't liked what I'd seen of Bowa. Which just might be a good omen.

I'm reminded of the spring of 1988, and my reaction to Kirk Gibson stomping out of Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Fla., angered by a prankster teammate putting eye black in the left fielder's cap.