Oct. 10, 1977 – Renewal of a rivalry
- Sal Maiorana
- Oct 10, 2017
- 4 min read
NEW YORK – During the heyday of baseball past, when New York City was the epicenter of the baseball universe in the middle of the 20th century, the Yankees and the Dodgers made it a ritual to play each other in the World Series.
The bulk of those encounters came at a time in the 1940s and 1950s when the Dodgers still resided at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, just a short subway ride away from Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. Seven times between 1941 and 1956 the teams met, and the Yankees won the series every time except 1955 when Dem Bums finally ended their forever championship drought.
And while it wasn’t quite the same when the Dodgers relocated to Los Angeles and the teams collided in 1963, it was still the World Series, and many of the players from the Brooklyn days were still on the Dodger club. The Dodgers won that one, but not since that four-game wipeout when Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale and Johnny Podres dominated the aging Yankees and held them to four runs total had the teams faced each other in the Fall Classic. Until 1977.
Dodgers first baseman Steve Garvey recalled those days because he lived it. “I was the Dodger bat boy in spring training,” Garvey said on the eve of Game 1 at Yankee Stadium, recalling his youth at Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Florida. “I remember the tone of voice the old Bums had when they mentioned the Yankees. They never called them by their real name. Gil Hodges would always say, ‘The pinstripes just went inside.’”
Not since 1963 had the Yankees and Dodgers met in a World Series. Here are highlights from Sandy Koufax's Game 1 gem.
With apologies to other 1970’s matchups such as A’s-Reds, or Pirates-Orioles, or even Yankees-Reds, there was just something special about a Yankees-Dodgers World Series.
The crush for tickets was unprecedented, people lining up at the Yankee Stadium box office just minutes after the final pitch of the ALCS was thrown in Kansas City. By the time the windows opened nine hours later, 5,000 bleacher tickets were gone in an instant. Those that weren’t in line were at the Newark airport to welcome the Yankees home from Kansas City in the wee hours of Monday morning, an estimation of at least 5,000.
“The fans owned the airport,” Mike Torrez told reporters. “The pickpockets were frisking us as we went past, I was patted everywhere but on the back. Billy Martin had his pocket ripped right off his pants and the chain torn from around his neck. I was lucky. The only thing I had ripped off was a handful of bills. The guy unzipped my bag while I was looking at him, reached in, grabbed what he could and ran. If he wants to pay my bills, that’s O.K. with me.”
While the Dodgers took batting practice on this off day, more than 1,000 fans were outside the stadium cheering as the Yankees arrived for their workout, and the Dodgers were guessing which players had shown up by the depth of the cheer.
“That must be Munson,” said Dodger catcher Steve Yeager. And then Don Sutton, who would be the Game 1 starter for Los Angeles, said, “There’s Reggie.”
The teams themselves were so polar opposite it was startling, and Garvey noted that. “Teams become characteristic of their towns,” he said. “Especially these two.”
Steve Garvey, Reggie Smith, Ron Cey, and Dusty Baker all hit more than 30 home runs in 1977, the first time that had happened in major league history.
You had the peaceful Dodgers, playing in their Southern California palace, loving life and each other, thrilled to be in the World Series for the first time since losing in 1974 to the A’s. You had the Yankees, playing in a beautifully refurbished stadium amidst the squalor of the 1970s Bronx where life was not good at this time in the city’s history. And of course, the team was a dizzying concoction of turmoil; players fighting each other, begging to be traded, playing for a manager who was on the brink of being fired three times by a semi-crazy egomaniac owner who drove his team to exhaustion with the pressure he exerted on it to succeed.
What a time it was.
“We sense how much our fans love us,” said Garvey, “and we try to do everything to satisfy them and cater to them. You almost never hear a boo in Dodger Stadium. We know we’re completely different. We swear by our manager, they swear at theirs. But it’s more than that. We’re like oil and water. You know something’s going to happen. The Yankees can’t go a whole week without an explosion. We expect that. You’ve got Tommy Lasorda and Billy Martin. They’re friends, but wait until they get into each other. We may end up with a Broadway play before this one is over.”
It was delicious, and it was about to get underway.
Comments