The 1988 World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers are best remembered for Kirk Gibson's dramatic home run, Orel Hershiser's pitching dominance, and manager Tommy Lasorda's masterfully corny motivation, but there was much more that made the season memorable, bittersweet, and controversial. Miracle Men by Josh Suchon takes a new generation of Dodgers fans back to that championship season, from the end of Don Sutton's Hall of Fame career to the memorable 46-day stretch of pitching by Hershiser that hasn't been equaled since. Hershiser closed out the 1988 World Series in Oakland by winning Game 5 and then had a chance encounter with the author.

The Los Angeles Dodgers broke my heart in 1988. I was 15 years old and a rabid fan of the Oakland Athletics. My real home was Pleasanton, California, a suburb 20 miles east of Oakland. But my practical home was the Oakland Coliseum.

My dad annually bought tickets to 20 games from a friend of his who had season tickets. The seats were amazing: Section 123, Row 2, Seats 12 and 13 -- on the aisle, just to the left of the A's dugout.

Even when we didn't have those choice seats, I'd go to games with a handful of good friends from Foothill High. We'd take the bus from Hopyard Road in Pleasanton to the Hayward BART station and ride it for three stops to the Coliseum exit. We'd leave right after school, arriving to get autographs in the parking lot, chase down batting practice home runs, watch the game, and stay late for more autographs.

We'd buy $2 bleacher seats or third-deck seats (I could pass for under age 12 to buy half-price tickets that cost $3). Then we'd think of creative ways to annoy the ushers by sneaking into seats that didn't belong to us. I went to 53 regular season games in 1988. I know that number precisely. I saved the ticket stub from each game and kept them in my wallet, chronologically. If somebody at school didn't believe me, I'd show the ticket stubs for proof. If there was a day game, my friends and I usually skipped school to attend. Sometimes our parents knew. Usually, they didn't know.

When the 1988 playoffs began, I skipped school to watch Game 1 of the American League Championship Series against the Boston Red Sox on TV at home. I went to Game 4 of that series in Oakland and chanted "SWEEEEEEP" along with the sellout crowd.

For the World Series, I watched Games 1 and 2 from home. When the series shifted to Oakland, I snuck into Game 3 without a ticket. It was actually miserable not having a seat and walking around the whole game looking for an empty seat. I barely saw Mark McGwire's game-winning home run off Jay Howell. I watched Game 4 at home when the A's fell behind 3–1 and was dreading the elimination game.

We had tickets for Game 5. As usual, I took public transportation to the game with friends (who had seats elsewhere) and met my dad at "the good seats." I remember getting Bobby McFerrin's autograph in the parking lot before the game, and he wrote, "Don't Worry Be Happy." Still, I was worried. It felt like going to a funeral. I knew this night would end miserably for my beloved A's.

Sometime around the seventh inning, when the end was inevitable, my dad was losing his patience. Can't remember exactly what he yelled, but it must have been awesome and totally inappropriate because I vividly recall Mary Hart, from Entertainment Tonight fame, hearing it and turning around to see who would say such a thing.

Anchored by a pair of No. 1 draft picks -- the steady, serious Stephen Strasburg and the brash, bold Bryce Harper -- the Nationals won the N.L. East in 2012, clinching the first playoff appearance by a major league team in Washington since 1933. Beltway Boys by Elliott Smith takes an insider’s look at the Nationals' breakout season and their unique strategy to piece together a contending team. This excerpt examines how the Nationals came into existence and why the franchise started out with the deck stacked against it.

With the Baltimore Orioles blossoming into a perennial playoff and World Series contender, the Senators drifted into irrelevance, and Washington owner Bob Short fell deeper into debt, making him increasingly receptive to the siren call of other cities looking to poach an MLB team. And on September 21, 1971, owners agreed to let Short move the team to Arlington, Texas, where they would become the Texas Rangers. "It was a great deal," Wood said. "[Dallas-Fort Worth was] offering [Short] 10 years of broadcast revenue up front -- roughly $7.5 million. The money would be his to keep, so he moved to Texas, and about three years later, he sold the team. He made out real well."

But D.C. fans had the last word, turning the Senators' last game at RFK into a near riot by storming the field in the ninth inning and stealing souvenirs. The umpires were forced to award the New York Yankees the game in a forfeit, an inglorious -- but perhaps fitting -- end to baseball's turbulent and unsuccessful years in the nation's capital.

The ensuing years were relatively quiet, with dissatisfied teams occasionally using D.C. to gain leverage in their stadium talks. Most fans in the D.C. and Virginia area drifted to the Orioles, who slowly took over the market. "In 1972 the Orioles bought a few billboards around D.C. that showed Boog Powell following through on his swing that said, ‘Take a short drive to see a long drive.' But in '72 with no team in Washington, the Orioles' attendance went down," Wood said. "It didn't catch on. Part of the reason, from my perspective, was that O's used to come to D.C. and beat our brains out.

"It took until 1979, when Edward Bennett Williams bought the O's, for it to click in. Fans in D.C. thought Williams was going to move the team here. Fans in Baltimore thought the same thing, but they were drawing more fans from Baltimore. The Orioles had never drawn more than 2 million, but it took 10 years after Senators left to do so."

So when Selig posited moving the Expos to Washington, there was one man standing in the way of making the move happen -- Orioles owner Peter Angelos.

Since 1972, Angelos' Orioles held the Baltimore-Washington market to themselves, and he considered a new team in D.C. a major affront to his domain, despite the fact that the Senators and Orioles had shared the population just fine in the past. "It was a situation where [MLB] had no place else to go, where there was a park that had 40,000 seats, parking, and people clamoring to write them big checks," Wood said. "So they worked out a deal with Angelos, where he would own no less than 67 percent of the TV rights. They gave him $75 million to get it started. Those were the roots of [Mid-Atlantic Sports Network] MASN. People thought it was, ‘I'll do this and I won't sue you.' That's not true, but Angelos was a litigious guy, and he wouldn't have hesitated to get a temporary restraining order."

On September 29, 2004, despite Angelos' objections, MLB announced the Expos would be moving to D.C. to start the 2005 season. "This is another important step in finalizing the relocation of the Montreal Expos to Washington, D.C.," Selig said. "We are looking forward to finishing the last few steps, including the sale of the ballclub, and the rebirth of the club as the Washington Nationals." The team would start play in venerable (to put it kindly) RFK Stadium, while a new home for the team was found and built. On December 3, 2004, the owners approved the move by a 28–1 vote. (Guess who was the lone dissenting voice.) And baseball was officially back in the nation's capital.

Of course, it wouldn't be that easy. The Nationals still had to navigate through the sordid realm of D.C. politics, Angelos' desire to control Washington's TV rights, and myriad other issues before actually taking the field. And, in reality, the Nationals were in tatters, a shell of an organization given short shrift by the owners, who didn't want to invest any of their money in a team that could potentially cost their own franchises revenues. "By the time they reached the end of their rope in Montreal, they were viewed basically as an orphan of Major League Baseball," said CBSSports. com baseball columnist Scott Miller. "They were the poor street kid that was bruised, and dirty, and taken in off the street, and plopped down in a new home. The first couple of years it was clear it was going to take a long time for them to become relevant."

But on April 4, 2005, those matters were secondary, as the Washington Nationals played their first game, against the Philadelphia Phillies, an 8–4 loss. The Nats would pick up their first win, a 7–3 victory on April 6, in the season's second game behind Brad Wilkerson, who hit for the cycle.

Ten years ago Brad Johnson led the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to a Super Bowl title.

Now the 44-year-old has trouble walking down the stairs at his home in Athens, Ga.

"I go down one step at a time with two feet. One step. One step. One step," Johnson told USA Today's Robert Klemko. "My 73-year-old dad was visiting and I told my son to help him get his suitcases up the steps. He walks slow and he's got a bad knee. He starts walking and my son turns to me and he says, 'Dad, he walks just like you.' I never thought it would be like this."

At one point, Johnson was known as one of the toughest quarterbacks in the NFL. He started 125 games during his career, throwing for at least 3,000 yards in five different seasons. Former Tampa Bay offensive lineman Roman Oben blocked for Drew Brees, Philip Rivers and several other quarterbacks, but he says Johnson was his favorite.

"This is a tough guy who could step into the huddle and you knew things were going to work out," Omen told Klemko.

The injuries Johnson suffered throughout his 15-year career read like a laundry list of pain. While with the Minnesota Vikings in 1997, Johnson felt his neck stiffen up. It got so bad that he had trouble driving and couldn't palm a football. As it turned out, he would need surgery to correct nerve damage in his spine between the C4 and C5 vertebrae.

Michael Graham has won it all -- again.

Some 29 years after the former Georgetown star, nicknamed "The Enforcer" for his relentless, physical style, helped the Hoyas to the national championship, Graham is in the news again. The D.C. Lottery announced this week that Graham purchased a winning ticket, and is now $1 million richer.

Graham bought the lucky stub on March 26 at a Shell gas station in Washington.

"Graham, now in retail sales management, says he’s hasn’t slept since learning of his big win and is looking forward to relaxing and getting back to normal," the release read.

The 6-foot-9 Graham was a bonafide star for Georgetown during the Hoyas' run to the NCAA tournament title in 1984. He won All-Tournament honors and was even featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated. But academic issues led to his release from the squad, and even though he was drafted by the Seattle SuperSonics in the fourth round, he never played a game in the NBA.