Best of Them ALL

The New York Mets were the best team in the National League in 1988. Their numbers prove it.

The Oakland Athletics were the best team in the American League in 1988. The statistics don’t lie.

Ah, but the Los Angeles Dodgers were indisputably, demonstrably, definitively the best team in all of baseball in 1988. They achieved that distinction the old-fashioned way. They earned it, first crushing the Mets in the league championship series, then humiliating the A’s in the World Series. The Dodgers’ victories left these fine opponents in shock. They left Dodgers fans in a state of euphoric numbness heretofore experienced only by a handful of mystics living somewhere in the upper reaches of the Himalayas.

The 1988 World Series was one of those cataclysmic unnatural events that seems destined to outgrow even its own verifiable dramatics to become the stuff of lore and legend. It probably won’t be enough in the popular retelling simply to describe how the Dodgers, bleeding from uncounted wounds, overcame adversity and went on to victory. What can instead be expected--the circumstances irresistibly invite such myth-making--is that the already-remarkable story of their accomplishments will be magnified and expanded to the point where even the heroes of the Arthurian saga will look like wimps. Did you know, it will be asked, that Kirk Gibson didn’t just hobble up to the plate to homer in the last of the ninth of that first game; he had to be carried to the batter’s box on a stretcher? Did you know that Orel Hershiser pitched his two winning games and got three hits in one of them with both arms broken? Did you know that Mickey Hatcher went through the series with a temperature of 107 and was so delirious he thought all the while he was driving a bus in Cleveland?

In the long winter nights to come, men who this year wore the uniforms of the Mets and the Athletics will toss and turn and awaken to wonder once again, How did those guys manage to beat us? It is a fair question, one that invites thoughtful speculation, but objectively--given the indefinable social chemistry that goes into the making of a winning team--one that is pretty much unanswerable. So for now take the deed just for what it was: stirring, splendid, unforgettable. We salute the world champion Dodgers for what they have done, and we thank them for the memories they leave us.