Mets must get eternal payback for Los Angeles greatest larceny

The flag was staring at them.Sneering at them.

The four men had arrived at the hospitality room for the 1959 World Series thirsty and hungry, and this was the place to come to satisfy both needs if you were a sports writer covering the proceedings between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Chicago White Sox. But soon the men lost their appetites. There, on one of the walls, was evidence of the greatest larceny of all time. It was a pennant, and it was impossible to miss: 17 feet long, 8 feet wide.It was white, a little weathered.

And had blue lettering. It read: “World Champions 1955 Dodgers.” At once the four men recognized what was before them.This was the flag that had stood sentry at Ebbets Field for all 77 home games during the 1956 season, the only one in which the Brooklyn Dodgers would ever reign as world champions.

Seventy-seven times it had declared for the world that Next Year had arrived last year, in 1955, and that the beloved Bums had finally beaten the detested Yankees. In Brooklyn it had been a holy relic. And now here it was, slapped on a wall in a Los Angeles hotel, like a cheesy Santa Claus at a company Christmas party. “It should be pointed out that the heat that burned in the rebels was devotion to justice and not the fire of free liquor,” Stan Isaacs, one of the four men with empty stomachs and sour dispositions, would write some 40 years later. For four decades, Isaacs was the voice and the conscience of the Newsday sports pages, and he’d always had a nose and a weakness for the lighter side of sports.One day, covering a game between the lordly Yankees and the lowly Athletics at Kansas City’s Municipal Stadium, he’d wandered beyond the outfield where A’s owner Charley Finley kept a team of sheep that grazed all game long.

Isaacs sat with the sheep.The next day, after a wire service had snapped a picture of Isaacs and his new friends, Newsday ran the photo headlined: “Is That Really Ew, Stanley?” Isaacs’ column...