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1959 World Series - Los Angeles vs Chicago [VHS]

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Moving a baseball team to a new location was a traumatic experience for cities like Boston, Brooklyn, New York, and Philadelphia in the late 1950s, but it was hard to argue with the success. The Braves won two pennants in 1957 and 1958, and the following year the Los Angeles Dodgers managed to do in their first try what took the Brooklyn teams eight attempts to manage, win the World Championship (talk about adding insults to injury back in the borough). After the Dodgers left Brooklyn they were rocked by the accident that paralyzed beloved catcher Roy Campanella and in 1958 finished in seventh place. When they won the National League title the next year they became the first team ever to do so after beating Milwaukee in the third playoff in N.L. history (remember, the Bums had lost playoffs in both 1946 and, of course, most famously in 1951). Facing the Dodgers in the Fall Classic were those hitless wonders, the Chicago White Sox. Led by future Hall of Famers keystone combination of Luis Aparicio and Nellie Fox, Chicago was managed by Al Lopez, the former manager of the Cleveland Indians and consequently the only manager to win the A.L. title besides Casey Stengel during the Ol' Perfessors's reign at the helm of the New York Yankees. Lopez also had his old Cleveland warhorse, Early Wynn on the mound. It was also the first time (and only time) the White Sox had been back to the World Series since the 1919 Black Sox Scandal.

Los Angeles won the title in six games and the star of the series was 24-year-old pitcher Larry Sherry, who relieved in all four games won by the Dodgers. Sherry ended up winning two of those games and earned saves in the other two. Chicago belied their nickname by whipping L.A. 11-0 in the opener as Ted Kluszewski had 2 home runs (he would end up with 10 RBI's, tying a series record that would be broken the following year by Bobby Richardson of the Yankees). The Dodgers then won three in a row, with Johnny Podres, Don Drysdale, and Sherry getting the wins. Bob Shaw and Dick Donovan out dueled Sandy Koufax in a 1-0 Game 5 before the Dodgers won the title going away 9-3 as Duke Snider hit his 11th and final World Series home run, setting a N.L. record. For Dodger fans this is clearly the transitional team between the Brooklyn squads dominated by hitting stars such as Snider, Campanella, Gil Hodges, and Jackie Robinson, and the pitching dominated Los Angeles squads of Koufax and Drysdale, who would return to the World Series three more times in the Sixties. This video only runs 35-minutes, but it represents the first big moment in L.A. Dodgers history as well as a bitter reminder of what might have been for the citizens of Brooklyn.