
Those who know me are aware of my intense love for the Dodgers. Despite living in the San Francisco Bay Area for 10 years now, it’s something that I haven’t been able to shake.
This year marks the 25th anniversary since the Dodgers last won the World Series. Because of this, I decided it was the perfect opportunity to read Miracle Men, which takes a look at the scrappy Dodgers team that ultimately went on to win the World Series in 1988.
For the most part, the book is fairly dry read, mostly rehashing play-by-plays from various games during the course of the 1988 season. I’d wager this sort of thing is less exciting than reading a game recap from the night before. That said, it was fascinating to read about so many baseball players that are tied to some of my earliest memories of baseball: Steve Sax, Orel Hershiser, Mike Scioscia, Ramon Martinez, Tim Belcher, Mikey Hatcher, and more.
The areas where this book excelled and became completely interesting were in some of the deeper stories — Hershiser’s pursuit of the consecutive scoreless innings streak, early clubhouse shenanigans during spring training that offended Kirk Gibson, interviews with players on other teams 25 years later, and of course reflections on Kirk Gibson’s incredible home run in game 1 of the World Series.
Some of my biggest takeaways were how different the game was played only 25 years ago. Managers completely abused their pitchers (130 and 140 pitch complete games were the norm, pitching on 2 or 3 days of rest were fine). It surprised me to find out how often balks were called (over 900 times in 1988). Insane!
Bottom line, you’ll probably only enjoy this book if you’re a Dodgers fan. On top of that, you’ll most likely only want to read it for some of the more interesting stories that happened in 1988. It’s a quick read and provides some interesting context on how a scrappy team wound up beating on of the most intimidating teams in baseball in the World Series.
3 stars.