Sport: Two Paths to Glory

• Share

(2 of 3)

As for the Yankees, who lack farmclub talent, the team would have been crippled by the early-season miseries of Pitchers Don Gullett and Catfish Hunter had not the remarkable left arm of Ron Guidry saved the day. Guidry finished with 25 wins and just three losses, one of the best records in modern baseball history. There were other problems—there always are with the Yankees—but the team created by Owner George Steinbrenner's money managed to make one of the most remarkable comebacks in baseball history. New York rallied from 14 games behind the Boston Red Sox to win a rousing pennant race and show the kind of poise and resiliency they would later need—and display—against the Dodgers.

Still, the long drive for the American League championship left the Yankees drained and hobbled. Three key regulars—Centerfielder Mickey Rivers, All-Star Second Baseman Willie Randolph and First Baseman Chris Chambliss —missed one or more of the early Series games. Other Yankees suffered nagging injuries that did not remove them from the lineup, but slowed them a step or took some snap from their bats.

The Dodgers entered the World Series bearing the emotional burden of a death in the family. First-Base Coach Jim Gilliam, a Dodger for 26 years, died after a cerebral hemorrhage, just two days before the World Series started. Each game at Chavez Ravine began with lowered flags and silence, and the Dodgers wore Gilliam's number 19 bordered in black on their uniform sleeves. On the morning before the second game, sitting together with some Yankees at the Trinity Baptist Church, the players said goodbye to the last of the boys of summer to wear a Dodger uniform.

The effect of Gilliam's death on the club varied with each player, but there was little doubt that the Dodgers' fierce concentration during the opening games was heightened by their determination to make Gilliam's last team a championship club. Captain Davey Lopes insisted the night before the funeral that the Yankees would have to beat 50 Dodgers, "all 25 men on the roster and then the part of Jim Gilliam that is in all of us."

Another home-grown Los Angeles star, Lopes was perhaps closest to Gilliam of all the Dodgers. In Game 1, he played with a vengeance. For all the intricate meshing of team play in baseball —the lightning ballet of the double play, the slick-quick coordination of a relay from the outfield—the sport remains a game of individual skills. Lopes produced the first of a string of great individual performances in this 75th World Series. He crashed two home runs into the bleachers in left center, the last a screamer that was still on the rise when it rifled into the stands ten rows behind the 385-ft. marker.

The Yankees, accustomed to pyrotechnics themselves, had to play pecking baseball, although Jackson stretched his World Series home-run string to four straight games. His towering blast cleared the left-field fence, the Yankee bullpen, and nearly carried over the wall to the parking lot beyond—460 ft. to the last line of defense in Chavez Ravine. It was not enough. With Lopes driving in five runs, the Dodgers took the opener, 11-5.