Time to stop dodging us

OK, Dodgers, where were we?

The last time one of youse showed up here was 1916. We've been wondering when you were going to come back. And what's this LA business? Wait till Vin Scully hears about this. I can't see a Fordham guy like him ever taking to Tinseltown.

A few things have changed since we last saw any Dodgers (or Superbas or Robins or whatever you were calling yourselves in 1916) around here. For one thing, we were used to winning in those days. We won it in '03, we won it in '12, we won it in '15, and we sure didn't think we were gonna have much trouble putting you Brooklyn guys away in the 1916 World Series. Didn't matter we had to trade away Tris Speaker before the season 'cause he was getting what Theo Epstein would probably call cost-prohibitive. Didn't matter that Smoky Joe thought he was getting stiffed and sat out the whole darn season. We still had enough to beat you bums in 5.

We still had Harry Hooper and Duffy Lewis in the outfield. We still had Everett Scott at short. We still had Larry Gardner at third. And we still had a peachy pitching staff: Dutch Leonard (18-12, 2.36), Carl Mays (18-13, 2.39), Ernie Shore (16-10, 2.63), Rube Foster (14-7, 3.06), and, oh yeah, that goofball Ruth kid (23-12, 1.75). You guys had Jeff Pfeffer, Larry Cheney, Sherry Smith, Rube Marquard, and Jack Coombs. Pretty good, but, c'mon. You really think you had a chance against our guys?

Oh, boy, were we a baseball town. Gettin' a ticket was wicked hahd. "DEMAND FAR EXCEEDS SUPPLY." That was a headline a couple of days before the Series started. Joseph Lannin was our team president, and he had this to say: "If we had 100,000 seats, not one would go abegging." You know what we did? We moved our home games from Fenway to Braves Field, which held more people. No one ever waxed particularly poetic about Braves Field, but the heck with Updike's "lyric little bandbox of a ballpark."

Business was business then, just like now.

The first (or "foist," if you like) was a pip. We had youse down, 6-1, going into the ninth. Shore was in chahge. Then he kinda lost it and you guys scored four times and had the bases loaded with two outs against Mays. You had your best hitter up, too. And Jake Daubert smacked one in the hole. Gardner couldn't get it, but Scott went to his right, made the stop, and threw him out -- barely.

Whew!

"It was a lightning stop and throw," said the one and only Tim Murnane (the game's foremost writing authority). Summing it all up, Murnane said, "In the ninth was the glorious uncertainty of the great game."

To Messrs. Shaughnessy, Edes, Hohler -- even Gammons -- I say this: None of us is worthy to be in Tim Murnane's journalistic presence.

Game 2. Now this was baseball. Hy Myers led off the game with a shot to right-center. Hooper dived and missed. Right fielder Tilly Walker fell. Myers circled the basepaths for an inside-the-parker. Brooklyn, 1-0.

And that was it. The Babe hitched up the pants and stahted hummin' the ol' pea. The Dodgers got five more hits, but no runs. We scored in the third when Scott tripled and scored on The Babe's infield out. On and on they went, Ruth and Sherry Smith mowin' 'em down, until the bottom of the 14th. Then Dick Hoblitzell walked. Lewis moved him over. Manager Rough Carrigan sent Mike McNally in to run for Hoblitzell and Del Gainor up to hit for Gardner. Gainor singled him home. Sox win, 2-1. Good thing, too.

"It was getting dark. The chances are another inning couldn't have been played," Murnane explained.

The entire thing took 2 hours 32 minutes. Told you a few things have changed since youse wuz last here.

We were up, 2-0, and playing some bang-up ball, especially in the second game.

"I think it was the best game I have ever seen in a postseason," declared American League president Ban Johnson.

"Click your glasses, boys, to the classiest of ball teams," chirped Murnane.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we let you have the first one at your place. I mean, it was the first World Series game ever played at Ebbets Field. You guys jumped on Mays to go up, 4-0, after five on your way to a 4-3 win, but that was nothing compared to the way Murnane jumped on Carrigan.

"The loss of the game," he fumed, "can be wholly attributed to manager Carrigan's choice for the box man. Carl Mays, the young man from the Golden West, blew the game, good and clear, showing astonishing lack of confidence. From the first ball sent to the plate that hit the first man up [Myers], Mays was up in the air."

We got back on track in Game 4, 6-2. (The original) Dutch Leonard threw a five-hitter and Gardner, a true-blue New Englander from Enosburg Falls, Vt., put you out of your misery with a three-run homer in the second. Apropos of that blast, Murnane opined "the sound echoing across the field was like the breaking of a bed-slat at midnight."

Youse was done, right then and there, even if you didn't know it. We had Ernie Shore of East Bend, N.C., ready for Game 5, and all you could get was three hits and one chintzy run. It only took us 1:43 to win it, 4-1. We had (yawn) defended our title and Murnane was ready to heap a little praise on us.

"With a keen understanding of the fine points of the game," he said, "they were fully conscious of the masterly performance of the giant youngster from the Tar Heel state, just when his best work was called for." And just think: None of us knew from pitch counts and quality starts.

Our guys took home $3,826.25 apiece for winning. There was no question which was the better team.

We never saw hide nor hair of you Brooklyn guys again. We came close to seeing you in '46, when we won the AL pennant, but you lost the three-game playoff to the Cardinals. It coulda happened in '49, too. You guys won the NL and we had that one-game lead entering Yankee Stadium on the last weekend of the season. (We don't talk about that, pal.)

Too bad you left Brooklyn. How's that LA thing working out, anyway? Suppose you won a World's Series out there. You wouldn't really count it, would you? We're kind of particular here. Some teams accept gifts, like balls going through guys' legs after they were one out and two runs away from being beaten, but we'd never do that here. We want to win one, nice and clean, the way we did 88 years ago, when youse last paid us a visit.

Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist. His e-mail address is ryan@globe.com.