Salt Lake City » If we’ve heard the saying once, we’ve heard it a thousand times. … This intangible element of baseball — Pride, with a capital P — is the main reason the Hawaii Islanders are the champions of the Pacific Coast League today.
"Baseball is a game of pride," Rod Gaspar said last night after the Islanders edged the Salt Lake Gulls, 3-2, at Derks Field to win the PCL title for the second straight season. "The way this season has gone, we would have played for nothing. We were in that kind of mood."
The Islanders, heavy underdogs to the high-flying Gulls, winners of 90 regular-season games, played this championship for nothing, money-wise, since the Internal Revenue Service attached their share of the gate receipts in this best-of-five set which they won, 3-2, in games.
But money can’t buy everything and, according to Gaspar, the Islanders wouldn’t have gotten this far if it wasn’t for the adversity that dogged them for the last three weeks.
"If those things hadn’t happened," said Gaspar, the league’s All-Star centerfielder, "we wouldn’t have won it. All year long these guys (the Gulls) were the better team. They had great young talent. But it’s tough to be a team of veterans.
"We were in the mood. We were ready to go. This is the greatest thrill of my baseball life. This easily tops last year’s championship and tops the World Series we won in ’69 when I was with the Mets. And I got a big paycheck then." …
This pennant is different than most. They won the title of a league that, technically, they’re no longer a part. …
The Islanders’ feat, which didn’t sit well with some of the crowd of 5,186, who pelted the field with full beer cans and even a folding chair in a classic display of bush-league behavior after Frankie George flew out to Gene Richards in leftfield to end the game, has to be a cause of embarrassment to league officials, who supported the Islanders financially throughout the series.
The Islanders, right now, don’t have a future but they impressed a lot of people around the league, including PCL President Roy Jackson, who witnessed last night’s triumph.
"We’re glad they won it," said Jackson, "and we’ll do everything we can to get them back in the league."
Every Sunday, “Back in the Day” looks at an article that ran on this date in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. The items are verbatim, so don’t blame us today for yesteryear’s bad grammar.
