The Dodgers lost the first two games of a 1981 National League playoff series in Houston, both in walk-off fashion, before storming back to win three straight over the Astros in Los Angeles to win the series, which pitted the first-half and second-half division winners from the strike-interrupted season.
That earned them a spot in the best-of-five NL Championship Series, where the Dodgers erased a two-games-to-one deficit by winning twice in frigid Montreal, including a 2-1 Game 5 thriller in which Rick Monday hit a game-winning two-out homer in the ninth inning of what Expos fans still refer to as “Blue Monday.”
So when the Dodgers lost the first two games of the 1981 World Series in Yankee Stadium, there was no panic, no sense of dread, on the five-hour flight from New York to Los Angeles for Games 3, 4 and 5.
“We were actually feeling pretty confident,” said Ron Cey, now 76 and the third baseman on that 1981 team. “It was like, OK, our backs are against the wall … again … and we need to respond.”
Cey provided a haymaker of a counter-punch, slugging a three-run home run in the first inning of Game 3, a series-turning two-out shot that propelled the Dodgers toward four straight wins and a championship in the last World Series meeting between two of baseball’s most iconic franchises, who will resume one of baseball’s oldest October rivalries when they open the 120th Fall Classic in Dodger Stadium Friday night.
“Anyone who discounts momentum has probably never competed on a big stage, because that [Cey homer] was momentum right there,” said Monday, now 78 and in his 31st year as a radio broadcaster for the team.
“Our club was just goofy enough to believe that even though we were down 2-0 in the series, we could come back and win this thing. I see a lot of the 1981 club in this year’s team, where they just don’t believe, at any time, that it’s impossible to win a ballgame.”
It took a series of clutch hits, some dazzling defense, a gutsy pitching performance from a 20-year-old phenom who spawned the “Fernandomania” craze that spring, a stout start from a veteran left-hander and a deep reservoir of resilience for those Dodgers to avenge World Series losses to the Yankees in 1977 and 1978.
“Most of us still had a sour taste in our mouths from 1977-78, and I think that was an added incentive for us,” Monday said. “It was a chance for redemption.”
Fernando Valenzuela was a teenager in Mexico when Yankees slugger Reggie Jackson clubbed three Game 6 homers to clinch that 1977 series and swung the 1978 series toward New York with his controversial hip-check of a potential double-play relay throw to first base in Game 4.
But the pudgy screwball specialist with the funky delivery emerged as the team’s ace in 1981, going 13-7 with a 2.48 ERA in 25 starts and winning the NL Cy Young and Rookie of the Year awards, a performance that earned him a long leash in the postseason. Too long of a leash, in the eyes of some.
Valenzuela, who died at the age of 63 on Tuesday, did not pitch well in Game 3 in Los Angeles, giving up four earned runs and nine hits, walking seven and striking out six. But manager Tommy Lasorda refused to take him out, allowing Valenzuela to throw 147 pitches in a complete-game 5-4 win.
“I don’t know if Tommy was watching this game very closely,” Cey said, “because he let Fernando go the distance.”
Valenzuela gave up two runs in the second and third innings, the Yankees taking a 4-3 lead. The Dodgers scored twice in the fifth, one on a Pedro Guerrero RBI double, for a 5-4 lead.
Cey thwarted a Yankees rally in the eighth when, with two on and no outs, he made a spectacular diving catch of a bunt that Bobby Murcer popped into foul territory and threw to first base to double off Larry Milbourne. Valenzuela retired the side in order in the ninth, one of only two clean innings on the night.
“I was on the bench watching that game and thinking, ‘Wow, he’s staying with him,’ ” then-Dodgers pitcher Jerry Reuss, now 75, said of Lasorda. “Fernando’s tank was empty because we were pitching every fourth day, and we had to go the distance to beat Houson and Montreal … I can understand why Fernando was out of gas, because I was, too.”
Even running on fumes, Reuss pitched the Dodgers to the brink of a title.
The Dodgers erased a 6-3 deficit in the sixth inning of Game 4 when Jay Johnstone hit a pinch-hit two-run homer, Jackson lost a fly ball in the sun in right field for a two-base error and Bill Russell hit an RBI single. The Dodgers scored twice in the seventh (Steve Yeager sacrifice fly, Davey Lopes’ RBI single) and held on for an 8-7 win.
“Our confidence was soaring after we evened the series,” Monday said. “But if you’re climbing Mount Everest, you don’t stop to high-five half-way up.”
Reuss moved the Dodgers closer to the summit when he allowed one run and five hits, struck out six and walked three.in nine innings of Game 5, Guerrero and Yeager hitting back-to-back homers off Yankees ace Ron Guidry in the seventh to turn a 1-0 deficit into a 2-1 Dodgers win.
“It seemed like every inning until the seventh, the Yankees had a man on base, and there was a constant threat,” Reuss said. “Plus, we played from behind for seven innings.
“Then we hit a couple of home runs, the momentum shifted in that game and the series, and within a week, we were world champions, and I was on ‘The Tonight Show’ with Johnny Carson. That gives you an idea of how quickly fortunes can change.”
The Dodgers blew out the Yankees 9-2 in the Game 6 clincher in New York, but their fifth World Series title in franchise history came with a dose of drama.
Cey, the stout slugger who was nicknamed “Penguin,” was hit in the head by a Goose Gossage fastball in the eighth inning of Game 5 and carted off the field. While the Dodgers headed to the airport for their flight to New York, Cey went to Centinela Hospital, where he was diagnosed with a concussion.
“In today’s protocol, that would have been it, I would have been done for the series,” Cey said. “That would have hurt a lot worse than getting hit in the head by Gossage.”
Cey was cleared to fly on the off day before Game 6, which was postponed because of rain, giving him an extra day of rest. Cey got to Yankee Stadium early before Game 6, was fitted with a new helmet with an ear flap and underwent a series of tests to determine if he could play.
“Tommy was following me around like a shadow dog all day long, saying, ‘How do you feel? How do you feel?’ ” Cey said. “He showed me a lineup card in his office, and the cleanup spot was blank. He said, ‘This is where your name is going.’ ”
Cey played and had two hits and an RBI in the clinching win, though he departed after seven innings because of dizziness. He hit .350 (seven for 20) with a homer and six RBIs in the series and shared MVP honors with Guerrero, who had five RBIs in the clincher, and Yeager, who hit two homers in the series.
In what turned out to be a last hurrah for the long-tenured Dodgers infield of Cey, Russell, Lopes and Steve Garvey, the four players earned their only World Series rings.
“You’re sitting on top of the mountain, you’ve reached the pinnacle of success, and then to have a World Series MVP tacked onto it?” Cey said. “It doesn’t get any better than that.”
With the Dodgers and Yankees playing in the World Series for the first time in 43 years, the memories of that 1981 series and a great October rivalry have come flooding back, especially for Reuss, who had admittedly lost touch with the game for the past decade.
“After I wrote my book [in 2014], I really haven’t given baseball a lot of thought,” said Reuss, who lives in Las Vegas. “… Growing up in St. Louis, I became interested in baseball when I was six or seven years old, when the Yankees and Dodgers were playing in the 1955 and 1956 World Series. A store in my small town of Overland, Mo., Brockman’s TV & Appliance, would put the biggest TV they had–a 27-inch black-and-white–in the window with a speaker outside, so I’d come home from school, stand on the sidewalk and watch the games.
“So when the Dodgers won [the NL Sunday night], it fired the embers that I thought had long gone out. This series has me more interested in any World Series since I retired from the game 34 years ago. Why? Because it’s Dodgers-Yankees.”