The last time the Dodgers won the World Series was 1988. It was also the year that one of my best friends in high school and college, Carl Nishioka, got married.
Of course this is the part where the story continues with Carl being a huge Dodgers fan, and how he is super stoked about how they are clearly the best team in baseball and look like they’re on their way to finally winning it all again, for the first time since the year of his wedding.
Well, not so fast.
Carl was a tank commander in the Marine Corps for 20 years. But he’s the only Marine I’ve ever met who is not a fan of team sports.
It’s his wife, Mary, who loves sports, and is anticipating the Dodgers’ first championship in nearly 30 years. They certainly looked unstoppable Sunday, crushing the Mets 8-0 and completing a series sweep that put them at 79-32, 151/2 games ahead of Colorado in the National League West.
Anything can happen in the playoffs and World Series. But a team that already had the best pitching staff in baseball and added Yu Darvish at the trade deadline looks like a good bet to seal the deal come the postseason. Darvish held the Mets to three hits in seven innings of a 6-0 win Friday. The Dodgers lineup is solid, too, led by rookie phenom Cody Bellinger.
The Nishiokas live in Mililani now, but Mary grew up in Twentynine Palms, Calif., with four brothers and two sisters. Their dad, Jim, also a Marine, decided that each of the boys would be fans of different baseball and pro football teams (there was no variance when it came to college football, everybody got Notre Dame).
Favorite teams were not bestowed upon the girls, so Mary picked the Dodgers (and the Kansas City Chiefs).
That was fortuitous when Mary went to college at Mount St. Mary’s, about a half hour away from Dodger Stadium.
“My best friend’s parents had season tickets, so I went to quite a few games and became a big Steve Garvey fan,” Mary said. “I saw a lot of games in 1981, when they won the World Series.”
Later, Mary’s nephews and nieces went to school with Garvey’s kids in California. When the Garveys came to Hawaii for a baseball tournament that Steve’s son, Ryan, was playing in about 10 years ago, Mary gladly played tour guide for the Hall-of-Fame first baseman who was her childhood hero.
“We were eating at Sam Choy’s, and so many people kept coming up to him and telling him how much they loved watching him play and loved the Dodgers,” Mary said.
It’s always pretty hard to tell which Major League Baseball team is Hawaii’s favorite. Sometimes it seems it is the one that is currently winning championships with a prominent player from the islands, like the Mets when they had Sid Fernandez or the Phillies or Red Sox with Shane Victorino.
The Giants and Dodgers, however, have had plenty of loyal fans in Hawaii for a very long time. Longevity and geography are the main reasons for that. They’re two of the oldest franchises, and they both moved to California from New York after the 1957 season.
Until the Columbia Inn closed in 2001, Dodgers players or other personnel, like manager Tommy Lasorda, in town during the offseason would often stop by. The 24-hour establishment next to the old newspaper building on Kapiolani Boulevard was the unofficial Dodgers headquarters in Hawaii.
The owner, Tosh Kaneshiro, was one of the biggest Dodger fans in the state, and the memorabilia on the Columbia Inn walls included an autographed picture of Don Larsen, the Yankees pitcher who threw a perfect game in the 1956 World Series against the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Larsen also pitched in Hawaii, while a member of the Army during the Korean War.
Another picture on the wall was of a youth league team from the Big Island. They were originally called the Braves, but their coach changed their name to Dodgers when Kaneshiro said he’d sponsor them if they did so.
As it goes with any hot team, expect to see plenty of Dodgers caps around town in the coming weeks. Some will be worn by bandwagon jumpers, but many will be donned by folks who had to dig around in the back of a closet to find that dusty old hat they still have from a few decades ago.
