Years before Major League Baseball returned to the nation’s capital and our love for the Washington Nationals was born, my brothers and I lived and breathed with Tommy Lasorda’s Dodgers teams of the 1980s and ’90s. There was no great explanation for it. Maybe it was because our cousins were fans; or the fact that our parents had lived in Los Angeles for a time before I was born. Either way, my older brothers David and Pablo loved Dodger Blue — so I did, too.
By the time 10th grade rolled around and Mr. Dugan asked my class to write speeches on the “greatest moment of your life,” the choice for me was easy: Kirk Gibson’s walk-off miracle in the 1988 World Series. With the Nationals facing the Dodgers in the National League Division Series beginning Friday, I’m reminded of that home run and how it touched my family — in more ways than one.
I was two weeks from my 10th birthday on the night of Oct 15, 1988. It was well after midnight on the East Coast, my 11-year old brother Pablo and I fixated in front of our basement television rooting on a Dodgers team Bob Costas had just called “the worst lineup ever to take the field for a World Series game.” The Dodgers weren’t mere underdogs against the Jose Canseco and Mark McGuire Oakland A’s; they were given virtually no chance with Gibson — their best hitter and the National League MVP that season — sidelined by injuries. So when Lasorda called on his hobbled star in the bottom of the ninth to pinch hit, down 4-3 with a runner on and the game on the line, it was like a scene out of a movie.
Gibson could barely walk. He wasn’t supposed to play at all in the series, let alone Game 1 that night. And now, looking helpless as he barely fouled off pitch after pitch from Dennis Eckersley — the most dominant closer in baseball — the stage was set.
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In what would turn out to be his only at-bat of the series, out of nowhere, Gibson hit what some consider the greatest home run in World Series history . My brother and I lost it. I remember us screaming so hysterically that my mother came racing down the stairs thinking someone had been badly hurt. Hall of Fame announcer Vin Scully, after a minute-long pause, put it this way: “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened.”
As the crowd roared and Gibson pumped his fist, the ball he’d crushed disappeared deep into the outfield crowd — so deep that it was never recovered. Over the years, documentaries and investigations sought to answer the question of the whereabouts of that ball. Where did it go?
It wasn’t until many years later that my family learned the Gibson homer had hit closer to home than we could have ever imagined.
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As improbable as it seems, Scully was right, the impossible had happened. The home run I once had told my 10th grade class was the greatest moment of my childhood, the ball we had watched disappear on the TV screen that night in 1988, actually landed on my aunt Pamela in those very outfield seats — an aunt I didn’t even know existed at the time.
Pamela Guard is my mother’s half-sister, from my grandfather Rudy Chavez’s first marriage during World War II. My mother lost contact with her at the age of 5 when Pamela was given up for adoption. They reunited in 2000 after 47 years apart, when Pamela contacted my mother by email. Soon after, I met my aunt for the first time — and learned of our family connection to that ball.
Among the gifts Pamela brought when she came to visit was a copy of the picture taken the day after that World Series game, the photo seen here. The bruise on her leg was from where the ball hit, as Gibson later described in an interview, “kind of high on her skirt…She was all black and blue.” Gibson reportedly still has that photo.
The Gibson home run always seemed like something out of a movie to me, but after discovering the ball had hit my long-lost aunt, it seems more like an episode of the “Twilight Zone.” Now, 28 years later, the team from my childhood faces a Nats team I’ve been rooting for most of my adult life. And after some disappointing first-round exits in recent years by each team, it’s a series both fan bases understandably feel is must-win.
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David, Pablo and I will all be rooting our hearts out for a series win, albeit not all sporting the same team colors. While David and I mostly moved on from our childhood team once our hometown city got a team of its own, Pablo remained loyal to Dodger Blue all these years. But when Bryce Harper and the Nats take the field this weekend, we’ll all be thinking of my aunt Pamela.
No matter who wins this series though, we’ll always be reminded of that ’88 team and how the magic of sports can touch a family.
Rudy Gersten is a Washington native.
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