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Video: Don Drysdale's Call of Kirk Gibson's Home Run 25 Years Later
"In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened," Vin Scully intoned on the national NBC broadcast. "I don't believe what I just saw," Jack Buck exclaimed on the CBS Radio broadcast 25 years ago today.
That was the Game 1 of the 1988 World Series right after the underdog Dodgers beat the heavily favored New York Mets in seven games in the NL Championship Series. Equally as big of an underdog in the World Series against the Oakland Athletics and the "Bash Brothers", the Dodgers were trailing the A's 4-3 with two outs in the ninth inning. Kirk Gibson on two bad legs made his only World Series appearance:
The Dodgers won the World Series in five games, and that moment in Game 1 is forever ingrained in the memories of every Dodger fan.
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25 years later ESPN LA has an oral history. Fox Sports West also has an oral history of their own.
Former Dodger Talk co-host and Miracle Men: Hershiser, Gibson, and the Improbable 1988 Dodgers author Josh Suchon shared a rarely-heard call of the famous home run by Dodger legend and Dodgers Radio Network broadcaster Don Drysdale.
"Way back! It's gone! It's GONE!"
Drysdale died of a heart attack a few years later in 1993 in a hotel room in Montreal before having to call a Dodgers-Expos game. He won three World Series with Dodgers in 1959, 1963 and 1965 and won the Cy Young Award in 1962.
The entire Game 1 can be streamed legally on YouTube:
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