Sacrifice bunts part of Dodgers’ NLCS strategy against Mets [Video]

It was exactly 36 years ago Tuesday that Kirk Gibson hit his famous walk-off home run off Dennis Eckersley and hobbled around the bases in Dodger Stadium, a 1988 World Series Game 1-winning shot that was so stunning it elicited this famous response from Jack Buck on the national radio broadcast: “I don’t believe … what I just saw!”

If Buck were still alive and in Chavez Ravine on Sunday night, he might have had a similar reaction to a pair of peculiar plays that lacked the drama of a walk-off homer but seemed almost as rare.

Not once, but twice in the first four innings of the National League Championship Series opener against the New York Mets, the Dodgers dropped perfectly placed sacrifice bunts, practically a lost art in today’s game.

Yes, you read that correctly. A Dodgersteam that led all of baseball with a .446 slugging percentage, ranked third with 233 home runs and had all of 10 sacrifice bunts in 162 regular-season games gave up two outs to …