Mets must get eternal payback for Los Angeles’ greatest larceny

The flag was staring at them. Sneering at them. The four men had arrived at the hospitality room for the 1959 World Series thirsty and hungry, and this was the place to come to satisfy both needs if you were a sports writer covering the proceedings between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Chicago White Sox. 

But soon the men lost their appetites. 

There, on one of the walls, was evidence of the greatest larceny of all time. 

It was a pennant, and it was impossible to miss: 17 feet long, 8 feet wide. It was white, a little weathered. And had blue lettering. 

It read: “World Champions 1955 Dodgers.” 

At once the four men recognized what was before them. This was the flag that had stood sentry at Ebbets Field for all 77 home games during the 1956 season, the only one in which the Brooklyn Dodgers would ever reign as world champions. Seventy-seven times it had declared for the world that Next Year had arrived last year, in 1955, and that the beloved Bums had finally beaten the detested Yankees. 

In Brooklyn it had been a holy relic. 

And now here it was, slapped on a wall in a Los Angeles hotel, like a cheesy Santa Claus at a company Christmas party. 

“It should be pointed out that the heat that burned in the rebels was devotion to justice and not the fire of free liquor,” Stan Isaacs, one of the four men with empty stomachs and sour dispositions, would write some 40 years later. 

For four decades, Isaacs was the voice and the conscience of the Newsday sports pages, and he’d always had a nose and a weakness for the lighter side of sports. One day, covering a game between the lordly Yankees and the lowly Athletics at Kansas City’s Municipal Stadium, he’d wandered beyond the outfield where A’s owner Charley Finley kept a team of sheep that grazed all game long. Isaacs sat with the sheep. The next day, after a wire service had snapped a picture of Isaacs and his new friends, Newsday ran the photo headlined: “Is That Really Ew, Stanley?” 

Isaacs’ column in Newsday was appropriately titled “Out of Left Field.” 

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But this was no joking matter. This was blasphemy. It wasn’t bad enough that Walter O’Malley had stolen the Dodgers from Brooklyn and moved them 3,000 miles away. Here was the evidence that he’d also secreted off with sacred artifacts, too, and turned one of them into secular wallpaper. 

So a decision was made by Isaacs and his three compadres: Charley Sutton of the Long Beach Independent, Steve Weller of the Buffalo Evening News, and Isaacs’ Newsday’ colleague, Jack Mann: 

This pennant must be restored to its rightful home. 

And so it was. By the time the foursome flew home to New York, the flag was folded up and tucked inside a piece of luggage. It spent some years resting in a basement in Roslyn, on Long Island, then in a store room at Cooperstown, where the four banditos believed it deserved a noble resting place. 

But the Hall of Fame never could find a spot for such an enormous tchotchke, even one with such sentimental value for millions of baseball fans. Finally it was returned to the Brooklyn Historical Society in 1995 with the help — irony of ironies — of Peter O’Malley, son of Walter, then in his final years running the Dodgers. 

“That,” Isaacs told me a few years after that, smiling, “was kismet, the son hoping to make good the sins of the father.” 

It is a good old-fashioned heist, a story made even better by the fact that the Dodgers never pursued any form of justice even after they learned the identities of the heisters. They knew what they’d done. A guilty conscience sometimes takes more than an apology and a quick trip to a confessional booth to cleanse. 

Why bring all of this up now, you ask? 

Well, stealing the 1955 pennant back might’ve been a visceral victory, but it was also a temporary one. New York has a chance across the next two days to exact an even sweeter and longer lasting brand of revenge. 

It can steal the baseball season from Los Angeles. 

Forget the fact that the Mets’ loss in the 1988 NLCS — the memory of which still stings Mets fans more than it invigorates Dodgers fans — has already been avenged, twice, by both the 2006 Mets and the 2015 Mets. 

No, this one goes to the heart of the Original Baseball Sin, the abandonment of Brooklyn, the unforgivable (if wildly profitable) shifting of the Dodgers from Flatbush to Fantasyland. There are some who will say that 67 years is long enough to hold a grudge and keep alive a grievance, that it’s time everyone moves along — especially since there are fewer and fewer people still with us who ever actually saw a game inside Ebbets Field, and fewer still who have actual memories of that 17-by-8 flag that represented one of the most joyful times in the history of the Borough of Churches. It is a perfectly reasonable argument. 

And perfectly beside the point. 

“Forgive and forget?” a reader named Bob McPartland wrote recently. “No. Never. Not ever. Not until I see Walter O’Malley in hell and tell him that. I can’t say I’ll ever be there. But I damn well know O’Malley is.” 

Yep. There is still plenty of elbow room for revenge here. 

“The Flag belongs in Brooklyn,” Stan Isaacs wrote in 1989. “We want it. We will fight for it.” 

Thirty-five years later, the Mets have a chance over the next two days to add to that quest, that holy mission, the eternal search for vengeance: “The National League pennant belongs in Queens. We want it. We will fight for it.”