The baseball season had been over for two months. The next one was four months away.
Vin Scully needed to make a few extra bucks for the Christmas season, so he took a temporary job sorting mail. This was more than half a century ago, when humans still did all the sorting.
The snow was falling, the carolers were singing, the chestnuts were roasting. The goodwill on Earth did not extend to the back room of the post office, where Scully's co-workers were arguing bitterly about whether the Brooklyn Dodgers or the New York Yankees had the better center fielder.
"It was intense," Scully said.
So we can imagine the intensity when the crosstown rivals would face off in the World Series -- or, better yet, we can ask Scully to describe it.
"It consumed the whole day, from the moment you woke up," Scully said. "The whole day was the World Series. There was nothing else."
We're longing for a Freeway Series, when blue flags and red flags would jostle for supremacy in the carpool lane, when neighbors and friends would have to declare their loyalty.
Dodgers or Angels?
We're longing for an actual rivalry, for passion, for hostility. We want the real thing, not the tired hype of interleague play.
We need the World Series for this. Let a million Matt Kemp versus Torii Hunter debates bloom, the revival of all those Duke Snider versus Mickey Mantle (and Willie Mays) debates in New York.
Scully can't see it happening.
By the time Brooklyn won its first World Series, the Yankees had won 16.
"The Yankees were always considered the lordly pinstripers, with all their wealth and success," he said. "The Dodgers were kind of ragamuffins -- not much money, their players were inadequate.
"There was always this contrast between the lordly Yankees and the serfs from Brooklyn. There's none of that -- that I see -- between the Dodgers and Angels."
Mike Scioscia won in blue. Now he wins in red.
In Scully's eyes, what's to hate?
"I don't think Anaheim looks at the Dodgers as Brooklyn looked at the Yankees," he said. "I certainly don't think Dodger fans look down their noses at Anaheim the way Yankee fans looked down their noses at Dodger fans."
We trace the roots of his skepticism to one word: Anaheim.
See, Scully and the guys in that post office all rode the same subways. It was a short hop to Yankee Stadium or Ebbets Field, to Madison Square Garden or the Empire State Building, to homes all around New York City.
