by Ron Darling
Next time up, a runner on base, Ryan and the Rangers trying to hold on to a three-run lead and set the tone for the middle innings, Baines stroked a home run to bring us within one.
When he got back to the dugout, I went over to him and asked, “Was that a change?”
He smiled and said, “Knew I’d get one.” He said he knew there’d a be a spot in the game where Ryan felt he needed to get him out, and that he would try to get him out with a changeup. “That’s his third-best pitch,” Baines explained. “And if I’m sitting on his third best pitch, I’m not gonna miss.”
No, he was not—a classic example of a veteran hitter going up against a veteran pitcher, knowing that in a tough spot he would try to trick him, not beat him.
* * *
Billy Beane was one of my favorite teammates and running buddies. We didn’t log a whole lot of time together in the bigs, but we were minor league teammates for a stretch. Billy and I expended an inordinate amount of energy trying to catch the attention of the prettiest girls we could find when we were out and about. It was like a challenge for him, to test his charms against the local talent. For some reason, Billy liked to do his sweet-talking in character—meaning, he would adopt some persona for the evening and pretend to be someone else. From time to time, he’d rope me into one of his charades, like the time we went out as two doctors from Cincinnati. Or, one night in Tampa, when he decided we would be two Canadian football players. He had our back stories all worked out in his head, and I’d have to remember my part.
I spoke a little French, so Billy decided I would be a defensive back on the Montreal Alouettes. He cast himself as a defensive back, too—from the Toronto Argonauts, I think. He even went so far as to cover where we went to college, and since most Canadian Football League players played college ball in the States, he decided he went to Alabama. He made me rehearse the whole thing, wanted to keep our stories straight.
Later that night, he was chatting up a lovely young lady in a bar, and he mentioned he’d played ball at Alabama and was now playing in the CFL. He threw in the part about being a defensive back—you know, for authenticity.
Well, Billy wasn’t expecting any follow-up questions, but it turned out the girl he was charming happened to be the estranged wife of a former college football player, who was then playing for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. This three-hundred-pound lineman had played ball at Alabama, so naturally the young lady asked Billy what years he went to school there. Billy was quick on his feet, so he threw out a year that kept him clear of the lineman’s tenure, but he was terrified of being found out—terrified, too, of somehow winding up on the shit list of a bona fide NFL defensive end, so instead of sticking around to see where the conversation might take him, he high-tailed it out of there—me, a couple steps behind, trying not to laugh.
The moral of that story? I’ll have to get back to you on that, but it’s worth noting that the two of us were so young and arrogant and cocky we thought we could fool anyone—and, really, the only people we were fooling were ourselves.
* * *
Mike Bordick was a young shortstop on those great Oakland A’s teams of the early 1990s. He went on to have an excellent career, enjoying his best seasons with the Baltimore Orioles, where he set a record for the most consecutive errorless games by a shortstop—110. I know this because I looked up his stats, not because it was one of those stop-the-game, check-out-the-highlights-on-SportsCenter moments we fans tend to burn into our collective memories—like, say, the way we all stopped what we were doing to watch Mike’s teammate Cal Ripken Jr. break Lou Gehrig’s famous “Iron Man” consecutive games streak.
(Remember, it was Mike who replaced Cal full-time at short, when Cal famously slid over to third base at the end of his long run as one of the premier shortstops in the history of the game.)
These days, Mike does color commentary for the Orioles telecasts on MASN, but I knew him as a young ballplayer—another fellow New Englander!—who wasn’t exactly the best dresser. In those days, we all had to travel in a jacket and tie when we were on the road, and it was Mike’s misfortune to have to ride the team plane with Dennis Eckersley, who was by far the best dresser in the bigs at the time. If everyone had suits off the rack that cost a couple hundred dollars, Dennis was wearing a tailored suit that might have run him over a thousand bucks. In today’s dollars, he’d be wearing custom five-thousand-dollar suits, so poor Mike Bordick was looking a little threadbare next to Eck. And it wasn’t just the quality of Eck’s suits that put the rest of us to shame—it was the fit. Dennis had the perfect body for a 44-long, was movie- star handsome, and walked like all eyes were on him—which, typically, they were.
I imagine a lot of the young players were intimidated by the way Eck dressed, the way he carried himself. Bordy certainly was. He went out one day and got himself what he thought was a nice suit, just to keep pace. In fact, Mike was so pleased with how he looked in his new suit he stopped Dennis on the plane to get his opinion.
He said, “Hey Eck, what do you think of the suit I got today?”
Eck looked at Mike and said, “What do I think of that suit? That’s one of the ugliest suits I’ve ever seen in my life.” Then he went off on an epic rant: “Matter of fact, Bordy, who cares what fucking suit you have on? Do you know how hard it is to look like this every day? The suit’s got to be perfect. I’ve got to have the perfect tie. The fit has to be just right. Who gives a shit about your piece-of-shit suit?”
Poor Bordy did one of these retreat-into-your-shell moves, looking away from the aisle, trying to make himself invisible.
Everyone in the couple rows next to Mike was laughing, hard, but what made it so funny was that Eck wasn’t messing with Mike to be funny. No, he was messing with Mike because that was just Eck. He wasn’t trying to belittle a young player or put him in place; he was just saying, “Who gives a shit what the rest of you wear? I’m a superstar. I have to look like a superstar every single day. Try that on for size, motherfuckers.”
* * *
Larry Bowa signed with the Mets as a free agent late in the 1985 season, and it’s fair to say that every single player on our roster, to a man, let out a groan when the news hit our clubhouse. I’d always hated Larry as an opposing player. I think everyone did—that’s probably a badge of honor Larry loved. He was feisty, in-your-face, did whatever he could to try and beat you. Plus, he was an awkward-looking player, not at all smooth—but, boy, could he play. Over 2,000 hits, a couple Gold Gloves, a bunch of All-Star teams. But such a scrappy thorn in the sides of his opponents. I think I actually threw up in my mouth, a little, when I heard he signed with us—but then, as soon as he put on a Mets uniform, my opinion changed. Right away, I saw he was one of the smartest players I’d ever seen, knew the game inside out, upside down, all around.
And yet I include Larry here because he’s the kind of player who might not get a chance in today’s game. He didn’t hit for power, wasn’t a high-average guy, wasn’t a classically gifted athlete … but the man could play. You could just tell he’d be a successful big league manager someday—he saw things way before they happened, and he thought about them way after.
He wasn’t with us long enough to make any kind of impact on the field, never really had much of a role, and he hung it up after ’85. But he made an impact just the same.
* * *
I only played a few hot minutes with Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd, the momentarily great Red Sox pitcher who featured significantly in the team’s turnaround in the late 1980s. We were teammates on the Montreal Expos for a couple weeks in 1991—but we had a history before that, of course. Dennis was one of the workhorse stars of the Red Sox 1986 pitching staff. He’d won 16 games that year for Boston, and was slated to start Game 7 of the World Series against yours truly, before a rainout pushed the game back another day and left-hander Bruce Hurst, on closer-to-full-rest, was tabbed instead—here again, against yours truly.
In Game 3 of the 1986 World Series, though, Oil Can was
on the receiving end of the ugliest piece of vitriol I’ve ever heard—in a bar, on a baseball diamond … anywhere. It was right up there with one of the worst, most shameful moments I ever experienced in the game, and one of the great shames of the exchange was that I sat there with my teammates and didn’t do a damn thing about it. In fact, it resulted in a momentum shift that probably turned the Series around for us, and like most of the other guys on the bench I stood and cheered at the positive outcome.
Recall, the Mets had dropped the first two games at home in that Series—a nail-biter and a laugher. Going into Game 3 at Fenway Park, on the heels of that lopsided loss at Shea, we were feeling the pressure. I was tempted to write that we were really feeling the pressure, but this team wasn’t like that. This team was arrogant, always believed it would win it all, never mind what it said on the scoreboard or in the box score. Still and all, it was a must-win for the good guys, only we didn’t exactly come across as good guys on this.
The hero of Game 3 for us was also the asshole of the game—Lenny Dykstra, one of baseball’s all-time thugs. You know how there always seems to be a guy in every organization, in every walk of life, who gets away with murder—murder being a figurative term in this case? That was Lenny. He was a criminal in every sense, although during his playing days his crimes were mostly of an interpersonal nature. He treated people like shit, walked around like his shit didn’t stink, and was generally a shitty human being—and, just maybe, the most confident, cockiest player I would ever encounter. It was after he left the game, though, that his behavior took a truly criminal turn; he ended up being sentenced to house arrest on a bankruptcy fraud indictment, and he was also up on drug possession and grand theft auto charges, for which he received a three-year prison sentence.
Not exactly the poster boy for America’s game, huh?
Lenny was leading off for us that night, as he did most nights when he was in the lineup, and as Oil Can was taking his final warm-ups on the mound, Lenny was in the on-deck circle shouting every imaginable and unimaginable insult and expletive in his direction—foul, racist, hateful, hurtful stuff. I don’t want to be too specific here, because I don’t want to commemorate this dark, low moment in Mets history in that way, but I will say that it was the worst collection of taunts and insults I’d ever heard—worse, I’m betting, than anything Jackie Robinson might have heard, his first couple times around the league. Way worse than the Hollywood version of opposing players’ mistreatment of Jackie that was on display in The Jackie Robinson Story. Way worse than whatever Kevin Garnett had famously said to get under Carmelo Anthony’s skin the night Melo went looking for KG in the locker room after a Celtics-Knicks game in 2013.
And yet whatever Lenny shouted at Oil Can out there on the mound that night might have had the desired effect, because Dennis looked rattled. It’s amazing to me, looking back, that there’s no footage from the game revealing Lenny’s treachery. He was out there shouting this stream-of-unconscionable shit in plain sight, in earshot of anyone in one of the front rows, and certainly in range of the cameras and microphones that had been set up to record the game, but I guess the attention was elsewhere.
To be clear, bench-jockeying has a long and fine tradition in the game, and there’s a fine art to it, but there are lines that are not meant to be crossed. Wives and girlfriends are usually off-limits, except if a taunt is offered in a benign, nonspecific way—as in, “Tell your wife to stop calling my room!” (In popular usage, offered by a beer-soaked fan taunting you from the stands.) Racial or religious or sexual slurs are typically out-of-bounds as well. For the most part, the razzing is limited to the target’s physical appearance, or his skills as a ballplayer—as in, “You can’t even run to first without getting gassed.” Or, on an attempted bunt: “Who’s gonna run for you?” Or, apropos of pretty much anything: “You ain’t got shit today.”
But this stuff coming out of Lenny’s mouth was beyond the pale. Unprintable, unmentionable, unforgettable. And, like I said, he was landing his punches: first at-bat of the game, Lenny smoked a 1–1 pitch deep down the right field line for a home run, igniting a four-run rally, and setting us up to take back some of the momentum we’d lost in the opening games at Shea.
Lenny came back to the dugout and collected the high-fives and huzzahs that came his way, and for all I know I was right there with my teammates, thrilled to be back in this thing. It’s only in retrospect that I started to feel somewhat complicit, and that by accepting the gifts that fell Lenny’s way as a result of his ugly treatment of the opposing pitcher I was an accomplice, of a kind.
A curious side note: going into this game, the Mets had a history of momentum-shifting home runs to lead off Game 3s in World Series. In 1969, the Series tied at 1–1, Tommie Agee got things started with a lead-off home run off the Orioles’ Jim Palmer. In 1973, the Series tied at 1–1, Wayne Garrett took Catfish Hunter deep to start the game. I’ve often wondered, looking back, if Lenny Dykstra was somehow aware of this coincidental connection and didn’t want to be the one to break the string, and so he looked to give himself whatever edge he could find before stepping to the plate and taking his licks.
Wouldn’t put it past him.
* * *
My time in Oakland introduced me to some of the game’s great characters. Cassanovas, too. High on both lists was Jose Canseco, who’d already been a perennial All-Star and an MVP by the time I joined the club. This was back before the taint of steroids tarnished Jose’s reputation—and with it the reputation of his fellow “Bash Brother,” Mark McGwire, who followed Jose’s 1986 Rookie of the Year campaign with one of his own in 1987. The two sluggers were like princes of the Bay Area in those days—they could do no wrong in the eyes of the A’s fans, who loved to watch them bash the shit out of the ball, and then bash the shit out of each other in celebration every time one of them bashed another one of their mammoth home runs.
What a lot of folks forget about Jose Canseco was that he had a twin brother named Ozzie, who briefly played for the A’s as well. I’ll never forget it, though—not just because Ozzie was still bouncing around the Oakland organization during my time with the club, but because of the particular ways he and his brother bounced … or, guess I should say, because of the particular ways they rolled.
My first wife, Toni, and I stepped into the elevator at the team hotel one evening, just as Jose and Ozzie were stepping off. We greeted each other on the fly. They were in some kind of hurry—off to paint the town Kelly green or gold, I guess.
As the elevator doors closed behind us, Toni looked at me and asked if those two guys were twins.
I said, “Yeah, they’re twins.”
She said, “Well, they both tried to pick me up.”
I said, “Welcome to the big leagues.”
* * *
I’ve written a lot about Gary Carter in my previous books, and the missing-piece–type impact he had on our team as we took championship shape. I’ve tried to be honest about his reputation before he joined the Mets ahead of the 1985 season, the ways we warmed to him in time and came to cherish him as a friend and teammate. But there’s no denying that “Kid” came to the Mets with some baggage, most of it having to do with the ways he was said to put himself front and center. In fact, there’s a subject line in the index to my last book, Game 7, 1986, that reads “Carter, Gary ‘Kid’—spotlight craved by.” His teammates in Montreal used to call him “Camera Carter,” and that pretty much gets to the heart of the baggage he carried to New York.
It’s one thing to crave the spotlight when you’re playing in the frozen tundra of the Great White North, where the fans were still kind of feeling their way around the game’s traditions and nuances, and where your teammates might dismiss you as a showboat or a camera hog. (Sacre bleu! He supposedly went out and learned French, just so he could give himself an edge in grabbing commercials and endorsement deals! Tres bien, Kid!) But in a winning environment, in a baseball-mad city like New York, those very same personality
traits can come across as positives. Being seen as competitive, pushing your teammates to be better, playing with flash and drive … these are good things, yes?
That said, it took us a while to warm to Kid, and here I want to share a story that could be taken as a knock but is offered in admiration, to illustrate the lengths he would go to come out on top. We were at Shea, a couple months into the season. I got to the ballpark early one day, because I was scheduled to pitch that night, and as I pulled into the players’ parking lot just beyond the right field fence I noticed Gary’s kids sitting on the back of his car. I was a little bit worried for their safety, because that lot was in the line of fire during batting practice. During games, too. Once, the Cardinals’ Terry Pendleton hit a game-tying homer into the lot that short-hopped the door of my English-drive Mercedes, leaving a dent I would never get around to fixing for the way it reminded me of the heartbreak of a game that fairly knocked us from the 1987 pennant race.
I walked over to Gary’s car, to check on his kids, make sure they were okay.
I said, “Your dad know you’re out here?”
They nodded, barely looked up from what they were doing—and what they were doing, I now saw, was punching out All-Star ballots. This was in the prehistoric days of fan voting, when you would fist a couple punch cards from bins stationed all around the stadium and push out the chad that corresponded to the name of the player you wanted to honor at each position. Gary’s kids had stacks and stacks of those ballots on the hood of his car.