DVD Reminds Dodger Fans: Wait Till Yesteryear

You can’t always judge a book by its cover, but what about a DVD chronicling the Dodgers’ World Series victories?

There on the front packaging of “Dodger Blue: The Championship Years” are images of such luminaries as Jackie Robinson, Sandy Koufax, Kirk Gibson and Fernando Valenzuela, along with the following championship timeline: 1955, 1959, 1963, 1965, 1981, 1988.

And ... ?

Dodger fans born in the summer of the team’s last World Series championship season are now almost old enough to vote. Older fans who remember the titles of ’88 and ‘81, or even ’63 and ‘65, will notice on the packaging a lack of the usual promotional blurbs, and they will be tempted to provide their own:

You’ll laugh!

You’ll cry!

You’ll wish Frank McCourt would watch every second! Or at least listen to the part where he’s talking about Dodger tradition!

“When you look at the future, you start with taking a look back at the past,” McCourt says near the end of the DVD. “You know, winning is an attitude. It is a culture. Winning begets winning, and I think that these guys know when they put the Dodger jersey on, it’s not just any jersey. It’s one of a kind.”

At least it is until it’s ripped off your back because your salary is too big to accommodate current Dodger culture, which is: Paying -- and settling for -- less.

Dodger fans will find “Dodger Blue” a pleasant departure from current events, though the aftertaste is distinctly bittersweet.

They will smile at the images of Koufax and Don Drysdale blowing fastballs past the New York Yankees and Minnesota Twins during the ’63 and ’65 World Series ... before wincing at the back-to-reality check of a 2005 Dodger team ranked 14th in the National League in earned-run average.

They will listen to Steve Garvey wax nostalgic about the Garvey-Davey Lopes-Ron Cey-Bill Russell infield that remained intact for eight years, contributing to four pennants ... and ask why the NL West-winning infield of 2004 couldn’t stay together for more than eight months.

They will scan the honor roll of the Dodgers’ remarkable mid-90s rookie-of-the-year run -- Eric Karros in ‘92, Mike Piazza in ‘93, Raul Mondesi in ‘94, Hideo Nomo in ‘95, Todd Hollandsworth in ’96 -- and wonder how that kind of windfall went wasted on the rocks of October failure.

They will see footage of a brand-new Dodger Stadium in 1962 and hear narrator Charley Steiner observe that “the beauty of the ballpark stunned everyone” ... and wonder why McCourt just couldn’t leave well enough alone.

If this is a frustrating time to be a Dodger fan, “Dodger Blue” opens with a helpful underlying message: Hey, things could be worse.

After a decade-and-a-half of postseason agony -- five World Series defeats at the hands of the Yankees -- the Brooklyn Dodgers finally broke through against the Yankees in 1955. Vin Scully describes the ensuing celebration in Brooklyn as being “like V-J Day, V-E Day, all the great holidays rolled into one. It was one vast block party.”

A Dodger fan enjoying the revelry is pictured wearing a white shirt adorned with the words: “There’s No Next Year.”

Two years later, those words became cruelly prophetic for Brooklyn baseball fans. After the 1957 season, just two years after the dizzying heights of ‘55, Walter O’Malley announced that he was moving the franchise to Los Angeles, where the Dodgers would further torment supporters left behind in New York by winning the World Series in 1959.

“Dodger Blue” features an impressive roster of interviewees, ranging from Duke Snider to Yogi Berra to Willie Mays, yet the interviews yield little that’s enlightening. Mostly, they are short sound bites that simply state the obvious or reinforce what the viewer has just seen.

A typical example: After highlights of the Dodgers beating the Chicago White Sox in the ’59 Series, former White Sox pitcher Billy Pierce succinctly assesses, “The Dodgers did everything right and they won the World Series.” Hard to argue with that.

An exception is the behind-the-scenes detail accorded the most famous at-bat in Los Angeles Dodger history, Gibson’s pinch-home run against Oakland’s Dennis Eckersley in Game 1 of the ’88 World Series.

Eckersley admits that watching Gibson hobble to the plate, taking an excruciatingly long time to settle into the batter’s box, “was driving me nuts. It’s like, get this guy up here, he’s the last out, let’s get this thing over with.”

Eckersley got two quick strikes on Gibson “because he couldn’t catch up with the fastball,” but that situation didn’t ease the mind of Oakland Manager Tony La Russa.

“Gibson was the MVP that year,” La Russa says, “and one of the reasons that he was so clutch for them, he had done a terrific job of being a two-strike hitter. When he got to two strikes, we knew he got into this emergency kind of stance. I was really, really worried.”

Gibson worked the count full.

“Before the 3-2 pitch,” he recalls, “I stepped out of the box and said to myself, ‘Pardner, sure as I’m standing here breathing, you’re going to throw me that 3-2 backdoor slider, aren’t you?’ ”

Gibson sent the next pitch into the right-field seats. As the ball clears the fence, the camera freezes on a pair of brake lights flashing bright red in the Dodger Stadium parking lot.

“To this day I can remember seeing the brake lights in the Dodger parking lot come on,” Gibson says with a grin. “Because they all said, ‘Oh my God! I should have never left!’ ”

After ‘88, the action on the DVD dims noticeably, although there is a final segment very optimistically titled, “Future Champions.” Easy for them to say.

For Dodger fans gamely trying to hold on until that pipe-dream future, if and when, “Dodger Blue” now exists as a handy and useful time- and pain-killer.