She is gone!

The Dodgers make the postseason so regularly that it’s hard not to become somewhat blasé about October baseball as a Dodger fan. The fanbase has been temperamental about the postseason due to recent history. You can start with the Astros sign-stealing scandal in 2017. Or a short-season championship in 2020 that fans of the Padres… Giants… or anybody really… calls a “Mickey Mouse ring.” Or you can look at the last two years: getting bounced in the NLDS to division rivals—Dodgers fans certainly don’t have it hard most of the time, but they have been grumpy come October.

There’s an old Dodger blog I used to read in the mid-aughts called Dodger Blues — it’s kind on the web but inactive (your browser will tell you it’s unsafe to visit it if you try), but back in the late aughts, it was a regular haunt for disaffected Dodger fans (yes, there was a time).

In the upper lefthand corner of that blog was a clock sarcastically labeled “Time since the last meaningful Dodger moment” with an image from Kirk Gibsons’s famous home run in the ’88 series. The fellow who ran that site stopped posting around 2012, but he ultimately determined that winning in 2020 was a meaningful enough moment to ice the clock. I think he might’ve been a bit early to do so.

The last World Series win for the Dodgers in 2020 was played after a shortened season with no fans in the stands until the postseason, and even then, attendance was limited to a third of capacity. While I believe that World Series is legitimate, deserved, and an accomplishment to be proud of, many others do not. And if all that was not enough, the most iconic image of that series is of Julio Urías getting the final out. Urías has since gone through some rather disturbing and unfortunate legal problems. I now cringe every time I see that image of him getting that out.

So, left with a recent history of coming up embarrassingly short in the last two years, being cheated in 2017, getting whooped in 2018, and a domestic abuser featuring prominently in a shortened 2020, Dodgers fans are a bit grumpy.

I think now we have the moment. Freddie Freeman came to the plate in last night’s game in the 10th inning and took Nester Cortes deep for the first walk-off Grand Slam in World Series history. There isn’t a guy on that team who deserves that moment more, this year especially. Dodgers fans may have finally gotten that truly wholesome, iconic moment that stands shoulder to shoulder with Kirk Gibson’s home run in 1988. Eventually, winning the series will seal it as such.

And when Joe Davis let out an emphatic, “She is gone!” — an obvious reference to Vin Scully’s famous call of the Gibson homer, I am reasonably certain my neighbors heard me cheering.