The Mets face eternal revenge for the biggest theft in Los Angeles

The flag stared back at her. They mock her. The four men had arrived at the hospitality room at the 1959 World Series thirsty and hungry, and this was the place to satisfy both needs when covering events between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Chicago White Sox as a sportswriter.

But the men soon lost their appetite.

There, on one of the walls, was evidence of the greatest theft of all time.

It was a pennant you couldn't miss: 17 feet long and 8 feet wide. It was white, somewhat weathered. And had blue lettering.

It read: “World Champions 1955 Dodgers.”

The four men immediately recognized what lay before them. This was the flag that stood guard at Ebbets Field for all 77 home games of the 1956 season, the only one in which the Brooklyn Dodgers would ever reign as world champions. Seventy-seven times it had announced to the world that the next year had arrived last year, in 1955, and that the beloved Bums had finally beaten the hated Yankees.

In Brooklyn it had been a holy relic.

And now it was hanging on the wall of a hotel in Los Angeles, like a tacky Santa Claus at a company Christmas party.

“It should be noted that the heat that burned within the rebels was devotion to justice and not the fire of free alcohol,” wrote Stan Isaacs, one of the four empty-stomach, sour-tempered men, about 40 years old later.

For four decades, Isaacs was the voice and conscience of the Newsday sports pages, and he always had a flair and a soft spot for the lighter side of sports. One day, while covering a game between the towering Yankees and the lowly Athletics at Kansas City's Municipal Stadium, he had wandered over to the outfield, where A's owner Charley Finley kept a team of sheep that grazed throughout the game. Isaac sat with the sheep. The next day, after a news outlet took a photo of Isaacs and his new friends, Newsday published the photo's caption: “Is That Really Ew, Stanley?”

Isaac's column in Newsday was appropriately titled “Out of Left Field.”

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But that wasn't a joke. That was blasphemy. It wasn't bad enough that Walter O'Malley stole the Dodgers from Brooklyn and moved them 3,000 miles away. Here was proof that he had also been hiding out with sacred artifacts, turning one of them into secular wallpaper.

So Isaacs and his three comrades made a decision: Charley Sutton of the Long Beach Independent, Steve Weller of the Buffalo Evening News and Isaacs' Newsday colleague Jack Mann:

This pennant must be returned to its rightful place.

And that's how it was. When the four flew home to New York, the flag was folded and stored in a piece of luggage. It spent several years in a basement in Roslyn, Long Island, and then in a storage room in Cooperstown, where the four bandits believed it deserved a noble resting place.

But the Hall of Fame could never find a place for such a huge sucker, even one with such sentimental value to millions of baseball fans. Finally, in 1995, it was returned to the Brooklyn Historical Society with the help – irony of ironies – of Peter O'Malley, the son of Walter, who was then in his final years managing the Dodgers.

“That,” Isaacs told me a few years later, smiling, “was Kismet, the son who hoped to make amends for the sins of the father.”

It's a good old-fashioned heist, a story made even better by the fact that the Dodgers never sought any form of justice, even after learning the identity of the robbers. They knew what they had done. A guilty conscience sometimes needs more than an apology and a quick trip to a confession booth to clear itself.

Why bring all this up now, you ask?

Well, stealing back the 1955 pennant may have been an emotional victory, but it was also a temporary one. New York has a chance to exact an even sweeter and longer-lasting revenge over the next two days.

It can steal the baseball season from Los Angeles.

Forget the fact that the Mets' loss in the 1988 NLCS – the memory of which still hurts Mets fans more than it invigorates Dodgers fans – has already been avenged twice, by both the 2006 Mets and the Mets 2015.

No, this is about the heart of baseball's original sin, the abandonment of Brooklyn, the Dodgers' unforgivable (albeit extremely profitable) move from Flatbush to Fantasyland. Some will say that 67 years is long enough to hold a grudge and keep a grudge alive, that it's time for everyone to move on – especially because there are fewer and fewer people with us who will ever actually move on Watched the game at Ebbets Field. and even fewer have actual memories of this 17 x 8 flag that represented one of the most joyous times in the Church District's history. It's a completely reasonable argument.

And completely wrong.

“Forgive and forget?” a reader named Bob McPartland recently wrote. “NO. Never. Not always. Not until I see Walter O'Malley in Hell and tell him this. I can't say I'll ever be there. But I know damn well O'Malley is. “

Yes. There is still a lot of scope for revenge here.

“The flag belongs in Brooklyn,” Stan Isaacs wrote in 1989. “We want it. We will fight for it.”

Thirty-five years later, in the next two days, the Mets have a chance to add something to this quest, this sacred mission, the eternal quest for revenge: “The National League pennant belongs in Queens. We want it. We will fight for it.”