Fenway Park

by John Powers

  But on October 1, 1983, in his final game after 23 years of faithful service, Yaz broke down in full public view, before a sellout crowd at Fenway Park.

  “I thought I had it under control,” Yastrzemski said. “But then, when I started to hear the fans . . . that’s why I put my head down when I got to first base.”

  For most of his final season, Yaz hadn’t wanted any fuss. He just wanted to be what he always had been—the ballplayer, the worker. On this day, he endured the speakers and their kind words and the bows, until Yastrzemski himself was speaking, asking for a moment of silence for his mother and for former owner Tom Yawkey.

  “New England, I love you,” Yaz finally said, and then he was running around the perimeter of the field, touching as many hands as he could.

  “I wanted to show my emotions,” he said. “For 23 years, I always blocked everything out. I wanted to show these people that deep down, I was emotional for all that time.”

  When Yaz retired, he had played in more games (3,308) than anyone in baseball history, all of them for the Red Sox.

  “I’ve always had tremendous happiness coming to this ballpark,” said Yaz in a 1989 interview. “Never in my life did I think I’d make the Hall of Fame and have my number retired. I worked, and just working so hard overshadowed everything. I never enjoyed it after a game in which I did well. I was always thinking about tomorrow. I just never dwelled upon the success.”

  “I came to love Fenway. It was a place that rejuvenated me after a road trip; the fans right on top of you, the nutty angles. And the Wall. That was my baby, the left-field wall, the Green Monster.”

  —Carl Yastrzemski

  Clemens went on to submit a 9-4 record, and with the outfield of Rice, Tony Armas, and Dwight Evans combining for 103 homers and 349 RBI, Boston managed to post 86 victories and climb to fourth place.

  The club’s transition complete, Houk retired at the end of the season and was succeeded by John McNamara, who’d been managing the Angels. “Am I too late to apply for the job?” Don Zimmer jokingly asked Sullivan over the phone after the announcement was made. Even before he’d checked into his hotel room upon arrival, McNamara discovered what Zimmer had learned—that everyone in New England was a would-be manager. “Is Rice going to hit fourth?” the Sheraton-Boston bellman inquired.

  Rice batted third until August, but his 1985 season was cut short by a knee injury. Armas missed nearly two months with a torn calf muscle, and Clemens, dogged by a shoulder injury that required late-summer surgery, had only 15 starts as Boston finished fifth, more than 18 games behind the Blue Jays. “It’s certainly not the kind of record I had in mind when I came here,” McNamara conceded after his club was swept at home by the Brewers on the final weekend to end with a .500 record. “To me, this has been a very disappointing season.”

  In 1986, the disappointment was limited to two October nights in Queens, but it was painfully profound. The regular season, highlighted by Clemens’s record 20-strikeout performance against the Mariners in April, proved surprisingly easy as the Sox held first place from May 16 until the end, won 95 games and claimed the division by five-and-a-half games despite losing the final four to the Yankees at home. “The usual rallying cry around here is, ‘Wait until next year,’” remarked McNamara as his men prepared to take on the Angels in the league championship series. “Well, next year starts Tuesday night. We’re prepared.”

  Boston hadn’t played a postseason game since the one-game divisional playoff in 1978 with the Yankees, and the ALCS opener at Fenway was over almost as soon as it began. The visitors rocked Clemens for four runs in the second inning. “We’ll be all right,” Clemens insisted after California counterpart Mike Witt took a no-hitter into the sixth inning and wrung out the Sox by an 8-1 count.

  THE LEROUX COUP

  In the annals of bizarre incidents at Fenway Park, probably none can top the night of June 6, 1983. The Red Sox had announced plans to honor former player Tony Conigliaro, who had been in a coma for months following a stroke. Many of his teammates from the revered Impossible Dream team of 1967 were gathered, along with a large media contingent.

  Co-owner Buddy LeRoux interrupted the proceedings to announce that enough of the team’s partners had voted in his favor to give him control of the Red Sox over co-owners Haywood Sullivan and Jean Yawkey, with whom he had been feuding for years. A half hour later, Sullivan and John Harrington, representing the Yawkey Foundation, held a rebuttal news conference to announce that the team’s chain of command was intact, and that LeRoux’s announcement was “illegal, invalid and, above all, not effective.”

  “Le Coup LeRoux,” as it was dubbed, reduced the celebration of the 1967 team and the stricken Conigliaro to an afterthought.

  In the next day’s paper, Globe columnist Michael Madden wrote, “Buddy LeRoux and his bottom-line men did not have the patience, the class, the sensitivity, the good taste or even the most basic respect to wait another day.” Madden called it “a sideshow, a shoddy, slippery coup by banana-republic generals. . . . What was to have been the Night of the Impossible Dream was transformed meanly into the Day of the Shameful Scene.”

  Former player George Thomas watched the competing news conferences, both held directly under a color portrait of the late, longtime owner of the Sox, Tom Yawkey.

  “If he could see this now,” said Thomas, “he’d be spinning in his grave.”

  Ironically, LeRoux had developed a strong bond with the Yawkeys as the team’s trainer in the 1960s. He went on to build a real estate empire, and in 1977, with Sullivan as his partner, LeRoux led a group that sought control of the Red Sox after Tom Yawkey’s death. When some questions arose about financing, Jean Yawkey joined the consortium and the sale was approved by Major League Baseball.

  LeRoux took over the business end of the Sox operations, guiding the construction of luxury boxes at Fenway and signing lucrative TV and radio contracts. Before long, however, the ownership group became divided, leading to the stunning events of “Tony C Night.”

  The outcry over LeRoux’s takeover bid was immediate and harsh. He was taken to court by Yawkey and Sullivan and eventually lost the battle for control of the team. Once he realized that he would never be able to buy the others out, LeRoux sold his shares to Yawkey in 1987.

  Boston indeed bounced back the next afternoon. The sun-blinded Angels ran into outs, watched balls skip over and away from them, and made three errors in the seventh inning—when the hosts scored three runs on one hit. But the Sox dropped the next two in Anaheim, including a killer 11th-inning loss in Game 4 after they’d blown a 3-0 lead in the ninth with Clemens on the mound. It seemed that the season would end on the Left Coast, especially when the Angels took a three-run lead into the ninth inning of Game 5. Don Baylor cranked a two-run homer to draw the Sox to within 5-4, but pretty soon the visitors were down to their final strike, and the home team was preparing to rush the diamond in triumph. “I looked across the field and I could see everyone in the Angels dugout getting ready to celebrate,” said Boston’s Dave Stapleton. “Gene Mauch. Everyone. They had those little smiles that you get before you start hugging everyone.”

  THE ROCKET’S AWESOME COMING-OUT PARTY

  As the 1986 Red Sox season opened, Roger Clemens was a 23-year-old question mark coming off shoulder surgery that curtailed his 1985 season. But he turned the question mark into an exclamation point on a weeknight in late April when the Red Sox game was playing a distant second fiddle to a Celtics-Atlanta Hawks playoff game that featured Larry Bird across town at the old Boston Garden.

  Only 13,414 fans were on hand at Fenway Park on April 29 to see “Rocket Roger” do something that no pitcher in 111 years of major-league history had managed to do before: strike out 20 batters in a nine-inning game.

  The Mariner lineup included a couple of guys who would later factor into Boston’s amazing run to the 1986 World Series: Spike Owen and Dave Henderson. Owen had also been Clemens’s teammate at the University of Texas. Clemens ca
me into the game with a 3-0 record, which would eventually grow to 14-0 en route to a 24-4/MVP/Cy Young Award season. Clemens struck out the side (all swinging) in the first inning. He fanned two more in the second and one in the third. Although he went to three balls on five of the first nine batters, he ended up with zero walks to go along with his 20 strikeouts.

  After giving up a single to Owen to start the fourth, Clemens struck out eight in a row, tying an American League record. But in the seventh inning, Seattle’s Gorman Thomas drove a 1-2 fastball into the center-field bleachers to give Seattle a 1-0 lead. Amazingly, Clemens was on his way to history, but was in danger of losing the game. Fortunately, Dwight Evans crushed a three-run homer in the bottom of the inning to put the Sox ahead, 3-1, the eventual final score.

  Clemens had 18 strikeouts after eight. Owen struck out on a 1-2 fastball to open the ninth, and when umpire Vic Voltaggio rang up Phil Bradley on an 0-2 fastball for No. 20, Wade Boggs jogged to the mound from third base and shook Clemens’s hand. Ken Phelps grounded to shortstop for the final out on Clemens’s 138th pitch.

  Clemens would go on to throw another 20-strikeout game (no walks again) in Detroit 10 years later, but this was the night that signaled Clemens’s ascendancy.

  “In the clubhouse afterward,” General Manager Lou Gorman said, “even the veterans were awed.”

  ‘OIL CAN’ KEPT US GUESSING

  In the 1980s, few people called him by his given name, Dennis. Years later, “Oil Can” Boyd told Dan Shaughnessy, “I’m blessed with this mystique. I got a nickname and I know how to pitch.”

  The Can started 207 games in his 10-year MLB career. He started the third game of the 1986 World Series and was lined up to pitch Game 7 before rain and Red Sox Manager John McNamara changed history. The Can went 78-77 in the big leagues with a 4.04 ERA and pitched the division-clinching game for the Sox in 1986. But his favorite baseball memories come from his younger days in Meridian, Mississippi.

  “That was the most fun, around when I was 12-15 years old,” he recalled. “Baseball was the epitome back then. I played a lot of baseball when I was little, so I have big reminiscences of baseball and that’s how I came to be the player I came to be.”

  Boyd could throw a ton of innings and he always wanted the ball. Baseball was in his blood. His dad, Willie James Boyd, once faced Henry Aaron and Willie Mays at the ballpark in Meridian. Dennis Ray Boyd was nicknamed “Oil Can” because of his fondness for beer (the nickname gets a special citation from Susan Sarandon in Bull Durham), and he became one of the more delightful characters on the Boston sports scene after splashing down in 1982. Manager Ralph Houk—and later McNamara—didn’t know quite what to make of the Can, but they knew he wanted the ball every fifth day and that he could pitch.

  There was plenty of controversy. The Can was hospitalized with a mysterious liver ailment in 1986, and then went into a rage and temporarily quit the Sox when he didn’t make the All-Star team. There were rumors of drugs, and he got into a jam with the police. The Sox subjected him to a psychological evaluation and went public with their concerns. When team-mate Wade Boggs announced he was a sex addict a few years later, Can said, “Now who needs the psychiatrist?”

  In the end, blood clotting in his throwing shoulder took Boyd away from the game he loved. He pitched for the Expos and Rangers before retiring after the 1991 season.

  Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd was restrained by a teammate and an umpire as he argued a call during a 1986 playoff game.

  Then Dave Henderson, picked up from Seattle in August, whacked another homer off Donnie Moore to tie the score in the ninth. And it was Henderson again in the 11th inning, knocking in Baylor with a sacrifice fly to put the Sox ahead, 7-6. “If we lost this game today, it wouldn’t have been fair,” concluded Baylor after Calvin Schiraldi, a mid-season call-up turned closer who had blown the save in Game 4, had set down the Angels in the bottom half of the 11th to preserve the Game 5 victory.

  Once back in their own yard, the Sox closed out the Angels with a pair of emphatic blowouts. In Game 6, Boston easily evened the series with a 10-4 decision, knocking out starter Kirk McCaskill by way of five runs in the second inning. “Both teams have shown they know how to play and win,” Mauch observed. “Now we’ll find out which one knows how to win when they have to win.”

  Not since the 1912 World Series had the Sox won an October postseason series that had gone the distance. But the finale was nearly a walkover. Clemens stifled the Angels while his mates laid a battering on John Candelaria, who gave up seven runs in the first four innings. The Sox outburst was punctuated by Rice’s three-run shot over the left-field wall. “Yogi’s quote gets better and better,” exulted McNamara after his club had banished the Angels by an 8-1 margin to advance to the World Series for the first time in 11 years. “It’s still never over until it’s over. For me, it is a dream come true to get there.”

  The Sox hadn’t won the Fall Classic since 1918. But after they had mastered the Mets, 1-0 and 9-3, in the first two meetings at Shea Stadium, the Fenway faithful began believing that they could see it happen in person, even though Boston had been a decided underdog when the Series started. “You look at some of the guys on our ball club,” mused Buckner. “You go down the names, and then you wonder what the bookies were thinking. I think those guys are sorry now. I wish I could have made a bet.”

  Boston never had lost consecutive postseason games at home, but New York dealt them two sobering defeats in two days. The Mets knocked around Boyd for a 7-1 triumph in Game 3. Then Bob Ojeda, who had been traded in 1985, mastered his former teammates, as the Mets ran up a 5-0 lead in Game 4 en route to a 6-2 decision that evened the Series. But Hurst, who’d blanked the Mets in the opener, held them off again, 6-2, in Game 5 and the Sox returned to Queens with two chances to win their rings. “Our backs are not at the door,” declared Rice. “Their backs are.”

  The Mets seemed all but finished in Game 6 after Henderson’s leadoff homer and Barrett’s RBI single gave Boston a 5-3 lead in the 10th inning and Schiraldi had the hosts down to their last strike with two on. But Ray Knight laced a single to score one run and Bob Stanley, who came in to close, uncorked a wild pitch with two strikes on Mookie Wilson that enabled New York to draw even. When Wilson’s bouncing grounder went through Buckner’s legs to score Knight from second, millions of Sox fans, many of whom had awakened children and propped them in front of the TV so that they could bear witness to history, went to bed in shock.

  “I had dreamed of this moment,” said Stanley after the Mets had escaped, 6-5, in the only Series game ever decided by an error. “How I would be on the mound for the clincher and how it would wipe out all the bad things. I was there tonight . . . but the dream turned into a nightmare.”

  Yet Boston had another chance to end 68 years of autumnal futility. A Sunday rainout enabled McNamara to start Hurst for a third time and the Sox staked him a 3-0 lead in the second inning. Redemption seemed at hand. But New York squared things in the sixth off a tiring Hurst, and went ahead 6–3 the next inning. After Boston had drawn to within a run on Evans’s double, the Mets stung Al Nipper for two more in the bottom of the eighth, and soon were spraying themselves with bubbly. “It’s a wrong ending to a storybook year,” said Henderson as his teammates quietly packed their gear.

  Young Red Sox fans bought up every souvenir in sight to cheer on the 1986 team during postseason play at Fenway.

  Fenway fans saluted Jim Rice after his three-run homer sealed the Game 7 victory over the Angels in the 1986 AL Championship Series.

  BUCKNER’S REDEMPTION

  It was October 6, 1986, and Bill Buckner was talking to a Boston TV reporter at Fenway Park about the upcoming postseason for the Red Sox, their first since 1975. “The dreams are that you are going to have a great series and win, and the nightmares are that you are going to let the winning run score on a ground ball through your legs,” said Buckner. “Those things happen, and I think a lot of it is just fate.”

  Fate
brought Buckner to the plate in the top of the ninth inning of Game 5 of the ALCS in Anaheim against the Angels, who led the game, 5-2, and the series, 3-1. The Angels were three outs away from advancing to their first World Series. Buckner’s single started a rally that concluded with Dave Henderson’s dramatic, final-strike, game-tying homer that helped to propel the Red Sox into the Series.

  Fast-forward a couple of weeks to Shea Stadium, to the play in Game 6 of the World Series that propelled the Mets to the world title and unfairly defined Buckner’s career. We can close our eyes and see the videotape of Mookie Wilson’s ground ball, we can hear announcer Vin Scully exclaim, “A little roller up along first . . . behind the bag! It gets through Buckner! Here comes Knight . . . and the Mets win it!”

  Buckner played in four decades. He collected more hits (2,715) than either Ted Williams or Joe DiMaggio did. He won a National League batting title in 1980 and was an All-Star in 1981. But that one play, which has been called the Zapruder film of baseball, took on a life of its own and made him the poster boy for the Curse of the Bambino.

  Years later, Buckner said, “This is the honest-to-God’s truth. My first thought was, ‘We lost the game.’ The second thought was, ‘Oh man, we get to play the seventh game of the World Series.’ There was no doubt in my mind we were going to win the last game.”

  The Sox lost the last game to the Mets, of course, and Buckner was vilified, made the butt of hundreds of bad jokes. He played half of the 1987 season for the Red Sox, and played the final 22 games of his career in Boston in 1990, but then he moved far away, to Boise, Idaho, and for a long time he stayed away, including when the 1986 Sox team was honored in 2006.