Retro Sports Radio: Classic Games from History
1981 - Baseball Clip - 1981 Los Angeles Dodgers - Vin Scully Highlights
The 1981 Dodgers season was split into two halves by the players' strike that wiped out roughly two months of the schedule in June and July. Los Angeles won the National League West outright in the first half under manager Tom Lasorda, then qualified again as a division half-season winner, which meant an extra postseason round — the first National League Division Series — was added against the Houston Astros , who'd won the second half. The Dodgers took that series in five games. The season is also remembered as the year of Fernando Valenzuela , a 20-year-old left-hander who opened the year with eight straight wins, five of them shutouts, and went on to win both the Cy Young Award and Rookie of the Year, a combination no pitcher had achieved before. From there, Los Angeles beat the Montreal Expos in the NLCS on Rick Monday's ninth-inning home run in the deciding Game 5 — a moment still referred to in Montreal as Blue Monday — and went on to face the Yankees in the World Series . The Dodgers dropped the first two games in New York before winning four straight, giving the franchise its first title since 1965 and its first over the Yankees since 1963, following World Series losses to New York in 1977 and 1978. Veterans Steve Garvey, Ron Cey , and Steve Yeager were in their final years together as an infield/battery core that had been intact since the mid-1970s, while Valenzuela, Fernando-mania aside, was in just his first full big-league season. #1981Dodgers #Fernandomania #BlueMonday #WorldSeries1981 #MLBHistory
