The Background (From Wikipedia):

The 1966 World Series matched the American League (AL) champion Baltimore Orioles against the defending World Series champion and National League (NL) champion Los Angeles Dodgers, with the Orioles sweeping the Series in four games to capture their first championship in franchise history. It was also the last World Series played before Major League Baseball (MLB) introduced the Commissioner’s Trophy the following year.

This World Series marked the end of the Dodgers dynasty of frequent postseason appearances stretching back to 1947. Conversely, it marked the beginning of the Orioles dynasty of frequent postseason appearances that continued until 1983.

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The Orioles closed out their four-game sweep on Sunday, October 9th. In Quantico, we followed the game, which began at 1400 and ended, probably, around 1630. Three of us, all members of the lowly (alphabetically speaking) fourth platoon of B Company, TBS 1-67, got it into our heads to pile into my ’62 Chevy and head north to Baltimore to take in the celebration that was surely going to take place. (And yes, we packed some beer to chug en route–true confessions.)

On arrival, we found precious little in what we thought would be the celebratory parts of Baltimore. Resigned to not much, we spotted a hotel with a bar/restaurant in downtown Baltimore, entered, found a table, ordered up more beer and studied a carbon copy of a telegraphed filing of a story to a St. Louis paper about the game and the series that had been left on the table.

Suddenly a group of cheering young people (okay, almost our age college kids, guys and girls) stormed into the bar. We watched, bemused. Then, one of the women looked our way, stopped the others, and shouted to us, “Hey, you look like Dodgers!!” One of us, maybe me, maybe Sully, said, “Yeah, we are just relaxing before our flight back to LA.”

Quickly, they joined us. One of the women said she was a reporter for her college newspaper (possibly Towson, possibly UMaryland, most unlikely Johns Hopkins), and was hoping to do a story on the Series. I handed her the carbon copy of the newspaper report and said it was from a friend of mine who had filed it and left the copy with me. Here, as I said I hoped it would be useful to her, I was also hoping for a round of free beers.

Excitedly she took it and started to grill us about who we were. I said I was Joe Moeller, the third pitcher in the Dodgers rotation behind Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, who pitched only a couple of innings in relief in the first game. The Dodgers had elected to stay with their top two, future Hall of Fame, pitchers in games three and four. I figured Moeller’s was a safe personna to adopt–who after all had really seen him? Sully decides on Jim Lefebvre, a top notch second baseman. Sully, from Los Angeles, knew what he was talking about, but it was a risky choice. The third member of our group (not at all into baseball) declared, to my horror, that he was a member of the Dodgers “taxi squad.” This went entirely unremarked upon to my amazement.

And so we chatted about the game and this and that, and, to the best of my memory, we got no beers out of the deal–just as well, in retrospect.

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Fast forward to January 2016. I am schmoozing after an annual award ceremony for the journal I edit and manage (Studies in Intelligence) and chatting with an award winner. Somehow we get into baseball–I don’t know how–and she reveals that the best man in her wedding was Joe Moeller. “No kidding!!” I respond and tell the above story.

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Fast forward again, to December 2017. The award winner calls and says she wants to meet with

me at work. “Sure.” We agree on a time. As promised, she materializes and hands me a little gift bag inside of which is the baseball you see in the image to the right. What a world we live in!