Tony Armas was born on July 2, 1953, in Puerto Piritu, Anzoátegui state, a town in eastern Venezuela, 235 kilometers (about 150 miles) from Caracas. His father, Jose Rafael Armas, was an electrician, while his mother, Julieta Machado de Armas, was engaged in household chores, taking care at home Antonio and his 12 brothers.

“My parents were able to keep me on track,” Armas said. “We were a very poor family, and lived on what was achieved. My dad was a farmer too.”

In a place having beautiful beaches, the Armas family also had land that they worked. “We used to plant all kinds of beans, all kinds of fruits. We were poor and planted all kinds of fruit for the sustenance of the house,” Armas said. “As the oldest I was the one who was in charge of that, to load sacks of corn, pumpkin, watermelon, everything that was harvested. I think my strength came from there.”

There was no Little League or the Criollitos of Venezuela in those days, no organized movements that help children and young people today to start polishing their skills. Armas began to imitate his idols playing baseball in the street with older people in his neighborhood.

“There were no baseball schools, no little– league baseball. You become a baseball player through hard work,” he said. “I played caimaneras (baseball in the street) with adults, as everyone did in those days. I played since I was a boy, since I was in school. It is not like today, when children are born with a uniform. Right now they have coaches, all benefits that a little boy may have from birth until (he) reaches his youth. At that time, no, at that time you had to make yourself as a player.”

At 17, Tony played for the first time on a team in an organized league, Deportivo Pachaquito, and began to develop his skills on defense. 

“I ended up not playing the tournament,” he recalled. “I started the championship, but didn’t finish it, because there was a National Youth Championship, to be played in Cumaná city and as I was 17, I was called from the Double A to the youth team to go play.”

Armas had an outstanding performance, starring as his team won the Anzoátegui state title.  He was called to the national team to play for the World Youth Championship in Maracaibo. That was where he caught the attention of the former major leaguer Pompeyo “Yo– Yo” Davalillo, a scout for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Davalillo, brother of the former All– Star Vic Davalillo, played in the majors in 1953 with the Washington Senators, but a broken leg shortened his career and he devoted his life to trying to recruit players from Venezuela to play in the United States.

“Pompeyo Davalillo had checked me in both the national junior and youth world championships. I also went to a worldwide Double– A championship, in Cartagena, Colombia. I didn’t have much chance to play, because I was very young and we had players who were better prepared than me at that time. I did not play, but I had a pretty good time. I kept playing and in 1971 Pompeyo Davalillo arrived at my house, talked to me, said he thought I could make it to the majors, that I could go far in baseball. He spoke with my parents and that’s how I started my career.”

On January 18, 1971, Armas signed as a free agent with the Pittsburgh Pirates for $5,000. At the same time he signed for 30,000 bolivars to play Venezuelan winter ball with the Caracas Lions, a club that had previously featured two of his idols, Vic Davalillo and Cesar Tovar. Tovar played in the majors from 1965 to 1976 with the Twins, A’s, Rangers, Phillies, and Yankees, with a lifetime average of .278; Davalillo batted .279 between 1963 and 1980 with the Indians, Angels, Cardinals, Pirates, Dodgers, and Athletics.

“I was a fan of Caracas and my favorite players were Cesar Tovar and Vic Davalillo. I also admired Joe Ferguson, a power hitter who came as a foreign player.” Ferguson, who played 14 seasons in the majors with Dodgers, Cardinals, Astros, and Angels, played with the Lions in Armas’s rookie year in Venezuela and batted .294 with 15 homers and 51 RBIs, an inspiration for the young prospect.

“I think they signed me because I was a good outfielder. I was not a good hitter,” he said. “You learn to hit with constant work.”

Pittsburgh assigned Armas to play with Monroe and with Bradenton in 1971, dividing his time between rookie ball and Class A, where he combined for a .230 batting average; it was clear he had to work harder to improve his offense.

“I was a good outfielder and I realized I had to work twice (as hard as) the Americans to keep my job. That’s the way it was at that time, not like now, when someone comes to the majors with a lot of money and have to call you up. Plus there are more teams now. That is the reality of my career.”

In 1972 Armas batted .266 with 9 homers and 51 RBIs in Class– A Gastonia, and in 1973 he got the opportunity to play at Double A in an unusual way, after being a batboy for almost two weeks.

“Not that I was happy with what they were doing, but actually they had a lot of players in spring training. There were about 80 players in camp and on the field there were nine. I had no chance to play,” he said. “The manager of Class A needed a batboy and from among those 80 players they called my name. So I spent a week doing that. It bothered me a little bit, because I didn’t go up there to collect bats. I went to earn a spot. There was a Mexican named Mario Mendoza who helped me a lot; what I did was thanks to him, because I told him I wanted to go home, I was not up there to collect bats. He told me to stay calm, that I was being observed to see what kind of character I had, whether I was spoiled. I followed his advice and stayed. The next week was all the same. We arrived on Monday and started the game the same, ‘Armas, you’re the batboy.’ It turns out that on Wednesday, in a game between Double A and Triple A, the Double– A center fielder got injured. The manager shouted that they needed an outfielder and then he said, ‘Armas, get in there.’  I went in, and I stayed.”

His bat began to speak for him with Sherbrooke in the Double– A Eastern League; he hit .301 with 11 homers and 45 RBIs in 84 games, despite suffering a broken arm that had him away from action several days.

The young prospect continued his rise in the organization and, after another season in Double A in 1974, he was promoted to the Charleston (West Virginia) Charlies (Triple A) in 1975. With Charleston again the next season he showed some power, hitting 21 homers, and earned a call– up to the Pirates. Armas debuted on September 6, 1976, against the Philadelphia Phillies at Three Rivers Stadium. He replaced Richie Zisk in left field in the ninth inning. He played in four games during his call– up. On October 3, in the last game of the season (the second game of a doubleheader), Armas got his first start, in the lineup as the center fielder and batting sixth. He got his first major– league hit off Pete Falcone of the St. Louis Cardinals, a single to center field to lead off the bottom of the fifth.

Falcone was locked in a pitching duel with Jerry Reuss, and the game went into the bottom of the ninth scoreless. Armas came up with a runner on second base and two outs in the bottom of the ninth and singled to right field to give the Pirates a 1– 0 walk– off victory to end the season.

Still, Armas faced trying to break in to an outfield populated by Al Oliver, Omar Moreno, and Dave Parker.

“I had no chance to play, because the Pirates had many good players,” he said. “At the time I was in that organization was (Roberto) Clemente, Al Oliver, Willie Stargell, Dave Parker, Richie Zisk, and I had no opportunity to climb. In 1977 (I was out of options), so they had to keep me on the roster or trade me. At the last minute, they traded me to the A’s. It was there that I got the chance to show my full potential.”

Armas was sent to Oakland on March 15, 1977, along with pitchers Dave Giusti, Doc Medich, Doug Bair, and Rick Langford, and outfielder Mitchell Page, for pitcher Chris Batton and infielders Tommy Helms and Phil Garner.

Oakland, a rebuilding team, relied on the talents of Armas, who hit 13 homers and drove in 53 runs in 118 games. The next two seasons, he played in only 171 games because of injuries.

“In Oakland I obviously had to work hard, because no Latin at that time had a safety spot in the big leagues,” he said. “Thanks to Oakland I received the opportunity to play every day and I was able to prove myself.”

In 1980 Armas was healthy and able to deploy his strength to become one of the most feared sluggers in the American League. That year he hit 35 homers and drove in 109 runs, with a respectable .279 average.

The following year, in a strike– shortened season, Armas tied three other players for the American League lead in home runs with 22. (The others were Dwight Evans, Eddie Murray, and Bobby Grich. Armas drove in 76 runs, took part in his first All– Star Game, and finished fourth in the voting for the MVP award. He was chosen by The Sporting News as the Player of the Year.

Thanks to Armas and Rickey Henderson, the Athletics advanced to the playoffs and swept the Kansas City Royals in the Division Series. Armas was 6– for– 11 with two doubles and three RBIs. His bat cooled off in the ALCS against the New York Yankees (2– for– 12 with five strikeouts); Oakland was eliminated in three games.

Armas’s power caught the attention of the Boston Red Sox. He hit 28 homers for the A’s in 1982 and set an AL record for the most putouts in a game by a right fielder (11, on June 12 against the Toronto Blue Jays). After the season the Red Sox acquired Armas and catcher Jeff Newman in exchange for third baseman Carney Lansford, outfielder Garry Hancock, and Jerry King.

“They wanted a player who would protect Jim Rice and they made the deal,” said Armas, who was surprised by his departure from Oakland. For Boston, Armas played center field, although he wasn’t a particularly fast fielder, but with Rice and Dwight Evans he helped form one of the most powerful outfields in Red Sox history. 

“It was a good team,” Armas said. He hit a career– high 36 homers, with 107 RBIs, topping 100 for the second time in his career, finishing with 107. Rice led the club with 39 homers and 126 RBIs, but Evans fell short with 22 homers and 58 RBIs, playing only 126 games in the final season of future Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski.

“It was a real experience to play with a superstar like Carl Yastrzemski was,” Armas said. “I met Ted Williams in spring training, and it was a great experience to meet those two legends.”

Despite his power, Armas heard some boos from Red Sox fans because of his anemic .218 average and 131 strikeouts in 145 games. “At that time, Latinos and black people were not beloved in Boston. I came to Boston and they started to boo me. I spoke with my lawyer and told him to get them to trade me. I didn’t want to play in Boston anymore. There was a pressure in playing for that team. They talked with me and said, ‘Hey, you came over here to help Jim Rice and Dwight Evans.’ ‘Yes, but I can’t, this way. It is very difficult to play like this.’ At that time it was different from the way it would be now – if I had been signed to a $120 million contract, I wouldn’t have cared if they shouted at me and booed me. But at that time you had to earn your place and play hard.” 

A year later the Venezuelan, led by his power, changed those boos into ovations. Injury– free, Armas played 157 of the team’s 162 games and home runs steadily found their way into the stands. He finished as the American League leader in both home runs and RBIs (43 and 123). He dominated the circuit with 77 extra– base hits and 339 total bases.

“You never have those goals. Your goal is having a good year, but I never thought I would be the home– run king or the RBI champion when there were many superstars in the majors – Reggie Jackson, Jim Rice, Dave Kingman, Lance Parrish, Dwight Evans, many good players. That I could compete with these superstars made me proud, and that year, thank God, I was able to play an almost full season.”

Armas’s remarkable season earned him his second All– Star Game and his only Silver Slugger Award, and he placed seventh in the MVP voting. 

Injuries cropped up again in 1985 and Armas was limited to 103 games; his production declined sharply to 23 homers and 64 RBIs.

In 1986 Armas got into 121 games as the Red Sox advanced to their first World Series since 1975. And if the defeat in 1975 was painful, after the famous Carlton Fisk homer in Game Six forced a deciding seventh game, the loss to the New York Mets was even worse.

“These were frustrating days for me,” admitted Armas, who was the greatest home– run hitter in the American League from 1980 through 1985, with 187 round– trippers, but he hit only 11 in 1986. “In the ALCS I hurt and I couldn’t play anymore, because my right ankle was swollen.”

If Armas’s home runs had seemed to become a constant in Boston, so had injuries. During his career he spent 12 stints on the disabled list, but no injury was as painful as the one in the fifth game of the ALCS against the California Angels at Anaheim Stadium.

In the second inning, Armas chased down a long fly ball hit by Doug DeCinces. “Many of my leg injuries were from running, but the one in the ankle was because I was hooked in the center– field fence,” he recalled. “Now they are cushioned but back then, the walls were all concrete.” Dave Henderson took over for Armas for the rest of the playoffs. Henderson had an immediate impact.

“I tried to play, but I couldn’t anymore,” Armas said. “And that’s when Dave Henderson replaced me and he did a good job.” Henderson’s ninth– inning homer in Game Five against Anaheim spared the Red Sox a loss, and he drove in the winning run with a sacrifice fly in the 11th.  Though Armas’s ankle improved, Henderson made the most of his opportunity; Armas was sentenced to the bench.

In the World Series, Armas was limited to one pinch– hitting appearance in Game Seven, after 15 days without playing.

“The ankle still bothered me, but I could pinch– hit. I could not run at 100 percent,” he recalled. “It was difficult, but I had a strong desire to appear in the World Series. Even if it was just an at– bat, it doesn’t matter, and I appeared in the World Series, which is what anyone wants.”

Armas pinch– hit for pitcher Bruce Hurst in the seventh inning with the game tied 3– 3. The Venezuelan struck out swinging in what it was his last at– bat in a Red Sox uniform. 

About Game Six, he was philosophical. “What happened is what happens so often in baseball. We were winning an easy game. At the end we felt champions but Bill Buckner‘s error left us without the victory. Then we lost the World Series,” said Armas. “We lost by an error that cost us the Series. These are things that happen in baseball.”

“The pitching also faltered. Roger Clemens couldn’t do the job, Dennis Boyd couldn’t do the job, many players didn’t do the job,” he said. “For me it was frustrating because I was playing every day, but then I couldn’t help the team in the World Series because of an injured ankle. That’s not easy for any baseball player.”

After the season Armas became a free agent and, a likely victim of collusion, signed with the Angels but not until July 1, 1987. “The team owners got together and agreed to not sign free agents that year and I was one of those affected,” he recalled. “I had offers from Mexico, but spent all that time practicing in Caracas with Pompeyo Davalillo, who was working with the Angels at the time. That’s where I signed.”

After so much downtime, Armas was sent to Triple A for the first time in more than a decade. He played in 29 games for Edmonton before returning to the majors for the last month and a half of the season. He batted.198 in 28 games.

Armas’s days as a regular came to an end in California, where he was used primarily against left– handed pitchers by manager Cookie Rojas, with whom he had a difficult relationship in 1988. “I started to play against left– handed pitchers and that was hard,” he said. “There was a time when I began to play every day and in a week I hit like five homers – but that’s when I had the mishap with Cookie Rojas.”

“One day we went to Oakland to play and Chili Davis, who was the regular, did not want to play; people were booing him, because he’d played the year before with San Francisco. Oakland was going to start Dave Stewart and they said I was not going to play because I was playing against lefties only. Then I got a chance to start playing against some righties, and I hit two home runs in that game (August 14). Rojas didn’t put me to play anymore and there came all the controversy with the journalists, saying that if I was hitting well, why I did not play. He said it was because he was the manager, and I told them to talk to the manager, that if they did not play me, it was a matter of him.”

From July 28 to August 14, Armas hit.440 with 4 homers and 12 RBIs over a 16– game stretch, including 11 starts, so some sportswriters suggested more playing time for the Venezuelan, even against righties.

“There was this controversy with journalists and Cookie Rojas blamed me because I spoke with the press. Once a newspaper did an article and it was sent to him in Boston and I was called to his office and he asked me why I had told the newspapers that I wasn’t playing. ‘Look, Cookie, I haven’t talked to the press in a long time. They just are realizing what you’re doing to me.’ ‘So you want to play?’ And I got to play against Roger Clemens in Boston. I said, ‘Cookie, if you think you’re going to intimidate me because it is Roger Clemens, you’re wrong. If he was going to give me four strikeouts, I’ll get four strikeouts. If I’m going to hit him, I’ll hit him.’”

And Armas homered against Clemens (two days earlier he had hit one off Bruce Hurst), and then he hit another the next day, on his return to California, against the Yankees. It was Armas’s most explosive month of the year and his last major production in the majors:.386 with 8 homers and 19 RBIs in 24 games in August. Nevertheless, his differences with Rojas continued.

“It came out another article in California, after he took me out in a game for a pinch– hitter, even when I had a hit and a home run. I showered and went to the hotel. I did not talk to any journalist. When we got to California he called me to his office, and we hadn’t an argument, because I’m not used to that, but he said why I had talked again to the press. ‘No, no. I have not spoken to the press.’ But they were already realizing who he was.”

The relationship ended on September 24, when Rojas was fired as the manager of the Angels. Armas returned to the Angels the following year, his last in the major leagues.

“My third year in California was in the same role, as a pinch– hitter and playing against lefties, and because my knee was bothering me and I couldn’t take it anymore, I retired. I could have played for three more years, but unfortunately the knees did not allow it.”

Armas remained active in the Venezuelan Winter League, where he was already a legend for his power. He was the first Venezuelan to lead the majors in homers and RBIs, but his 251 career home runs led all Venezuelans. He was also the home– run king in Venezuelan winter ball, after hitting his 97th home run in the last at– bat of his career in the 1991– 1992 season. (His mark was surpassed by Robert Perez in 2008.)

Armas played a few more seasons in Venezuela, but the knee hampered him badly and he’d have to take off a week now and again. “I thought it was better to retire than continue to suffer, but I thank God for giving me the opportunity to get where I got. Thanks to baseball I am who I am.”

The home run was always Armas’s calling card; it also happened to be his farewell letter. He was an investor in the Caribes de Oriente club and he was able to fulfill another dream there, playing with his brothers Marcos and Julio, all three taking up positions as outfielders. 

“That was a great thing,” Armas said. “It’s never been written in any book. I was with the right team on the right day.”

Both brothers followed in the footsteps of his older brother, but only Marcos managed to make the majors, with the Athletics for a brief period in 1993.

Tony and his wife, Luisa de Armas, had six children. The third was their son Tony Armas Jr., who played 10 major– league seasons with the Expos, Nationals, Pirates, and Mets, between 1999 and 2008. 

“I have much to thank my dad for. Since my childhood he always took me to the stadiums. When you are a child you are like a sponge, absorbing all the information and always trying to imitate someone,” said Armas Jr. “When I decided to play baseball, he said to me, ‘I was a hitter, but if you don’t want to be a hitter, don’t do it.’ He told me, ‘Son, do what you want to do. I support you.’ That was important. My parents, at that time, supported me the most.”

After he stopped playing, Armas remained active in baseball, mainly in winter ball, as coach of the Caracas Lions. Tony Armas Jr. also played with the Lions. “That was special,” said Armas Jr. “It was one of the most special times. I grew up in the Caracas stadium of Caracas, because he always took me there when he played. He felt the same way.”

In 1998 Armas was inducted into the Caribbean Baseball Hall of Fame, thanks to his all– time home– run leadership in the Caribbean Series, with 11. In 2005 he was inducted into the Venezuelan Baseball Hall of Fame and in 2013 into the Latino Baseball Hall of Fame. In 2009 Armas was the hitting coach for the Venezuelan team in the World Baseball Classic, working next to Andres Galarraga, who eclipsed all his home– run records in the majors. (In 1996 Galarraga hit 47 homers and drove in 150 runs with the Colorado Rockies to set the single– season marks for a Venezuelan.)

“Tony was a role model for all the boys that had power,” Galarraga said. “I was fortunate to sign with the Lions and privileged to play with him in Venezuela. He taught me many things, gave me some batting tips and that kind of thing.”

“I always knew that many good players would follow, because in Venezuela we had many academies and we had many players out there,” said Armas. “After Galarraga came Bob Abreu, who was a complete player, Magglio Ordonez, and now Miguel Cabrera, who is even more complete. There is always someone who opens the doors.”

And Armas, 62 in 2015, continued to share his knowledge with the younger generation in Venezuela, as a coach of Leones del Caracas (the Caracas Lions) in winter ball. “He loves to teach, because baseball is his life,” said Armas Jr. That’s never going to change with him. He ends a winter season and during the break goes directly to become a manager in the Bolivarian League with Deportivo Anzoátegui. He is always working with the boys and never stops. He’s always traveling; he is never in one place. That is what he likes to do.”

“Baseball has given me a lot. Now I’m giving to baseball, trying to help young people,” said Armas, who still lives in his native Puerto Píritu. “I am very proud of my career, proud of baseball, and proud of what I do right now, because in my time there were no hitting coaches and I’m proud to work with so many young boys to help them become better players.”

Sources

Author interviews with Tony Armas on November 12, 2014, and August 5, 2015. All quotations attributed to Armas come from these interviews.

Author interview with Andrés Galarraga on July 30, 2015. All quotations attributed to Galarraga come from this interview.

Author interview with Tony Armas Jr. on July 28, 2015. All quotations attributed to Armas Jr. come from this interview.

articles.latimes.com/1987– 08– 19/sports/sp– 773_1_tony– armas

articles.latimes.com/1988– 08– 25/sports/sp– 1345_1_tony– armas

articles.latimes.com/1988– 09– 01/sports/sp– 4439_1_home– run

articles.latimes.com/1988– 09– 24/sports/sp– 2381_1_interim– manager

el– nacional.com/deportes/lvbp/Antonio– Armas– puesto– acepte– recogebates_0_289171243.html

vidaydeportes.com/entrevista– exclusiva– antonio– armas

Cárdenas, Augusto. “El jonronero de Venezuela,” Diario Panorama, December 18, 2005.

Cárdenas Lares, Carlos Daniel. Venezolanos en las Grandes Ligas (Fundación Cárdenas Lares, 1994).

Marty Barrett was born on June 23, 1958, in Arcadia, California, a Los Angeles suburb, one of seven children of Charlotte and Randy Barrett. Of his five brothers, four played college or professional baseball: Charlie (born in 1955) played in the Los Angeles Dodgers farm system; Tommy (1960) played with the Phillies and Red Sox; Joe (1964) played at the University of Nevada Las Vegas; Andy (1966) played at Mesa (Arizona) Community College. John, born in 1954, did not play in college or the pros. Their sister, Susie (born in 1962) was a cheerleader.

Randy Barrett, who was a firefighter, moved the family to Las Vegas to find work when Marty was very young. Marty would play “ball” in the living room with his two older brothers and his brother Tommy. When Marty was 10 years old, he was playing on a 10-11-year-old team, and continued to play, often with boys a year or two older. By the time he was 15, he was playing on the Rancho High School varsity team, which won the state championship in 1974 and 1976. On the Rancho American Legion team, his coach was Manny Guerra, a longtime scout for the St. Louis Cardinals. Nine of his players made it to professional baseball, including Marty and Tommy, Mike Maddux, and Mike Morgan.1

Undrafted out of high school, Marty Barrett enrolled at Mesa Junior College, where he played baseball from 1976 to 1978. In 1979 he attended Arizona State University, where among his teammates was future major leaguer Hubie Brooks. During his college years, he played for Rod Dedeaux, the legendary coach of the University of Southern California, in a baseball tour of Japan. He also played summer ball in Anchorage, Alaska, with future major leaguers Tim Wallach and Mike Boddicker.

Barrett was selected by the Red Sox as the first pick of the first round of the now defunct secondary draft in June 1979. Red Sox scout Ray Boone is credited with the signing.2 Barrett’s first minor-league stop was at Winter Haven in the Class-A Florida State League in 1979, hitting .298 with a .719 OPS. The next season at Double-A Bristol, he batted .274 with a .677 OPS, and stole 22 bases.

In 1981 Barrett moved up to the Triple-A Pawtucket Red Sox, where he hit a home run in his first at-bat.  The team, managed by Joe Morgan, included a number of players who went on to star in the majors – Wade Boggs, Rich Gedman, Bruce Hurst, and Bobby Ojeda. 

Early in his time in Pawtucket, Barrett participated in the longest game in the annals of Organized Baseball. It began on April 18, 1981. The night was cold in Pawtucket, a 12-to-20-degree chill factor as the game wore on, and to keep warm players started fires in trash cans. Pawtucket trailed 1-0 in the bottom of the ninth inning, but tied the score on a sacrifice fly by Russ Laribee. Barrett remembered the Rochester relief pitcher throwing nine no-hit innings and the umpires having difficulty reaching the league president. (The Rochester pitcher, Jim Umbarger, actually pitched 10 no-run innings, the 23rd through the 32nd, giving up four hits.) Barrett had two hits in 12 at-bats.

Finally, at 4:00 A.M. the game was suspended.  It was completed on June 23 while major-league baseball players were on strike. Media people were on hand in Pawtucket from as far away as Japan on the 23rd, as this was the “only interesting game in town.” Barrett remembered this as a “neat atmosphere” with a “nice spread” of food.3 Rich Gedman, Bruce Hurst, Luis Aponte, Mike Smithson, and Julio Valdéz were other future major leaguers who played in the game. Rochester pitcher Steve Grilli hit Barrett with the first pitch in the bottom of the 33rd inning. Future major leaguer Chico Walker executed a hit-and-run play that moved Barrett to third base, and Dave Koza singled him in for the winning run,

In 1982 Barrett spent his first spring training with Boston but with Jerry Remy as the starting second baseman for the Red Sox, Barrett spent the season with the PawSox again. After batting a team-leading .300, he was called up to the Red Sox on September 6. He got into eight games, with his first major-league hit coming off Mike Caldwell on September 22, but it was his only hit that season, as he finished 1-for-18.  In the season’s final series, against the Yankees, he went 0-for-14.

In 1983 Barrett started the season in Boston, mostly playing as a defensive replacement, then was sent down to Pawtucket again. He was recalled near the end of June, ultimately appearing in 33 games and going 10-for-44 at the plate. He spent the entire 1984 season with Boston, taking over from Jerry Remy at second base and getting into 139 games for manager Ralph Houk.  He batted .303 with 45 RBIs. His first career homer came on May 11, 1984, off Larry Gura of the Kansas City Royals.

Barrett was a right-hander, 5-feet-10 and listed at 175 pounds. The hidden-ball trick is one of his claims to fame. Joe Morgan, his manager at Pawtucket, taught him the trick. As an example: In 1981 he pulled off the hidden-ball trick on Bobby Bonner of the Rochester Red Wings. Barrett made the putout at first on a sacrifice bunt, and kept the ball. (This is where the ball is hidden.) The pitcher stood off the rubber with his back to first, and Barrett said to the runner, now at second, “Let me clean off the base.”

Barrett said he executed the hidden-ball trick about five to seven times in the minor leagues.4 He pulled it off three times in the major leagues with Red Sox, doing it twice in two weeks against the California Angels in 1985. In Anaheim on July 7, he tricked Bobby Grich, who was on first base, by pantomiming a throw to Glenn Hoffman, the Red Sox shortstop. On the 21st, in Boston, he pulled the same trick on Doug DeCinces, the Angels’ third baseman. (DeCinces had been needling Bobby Grich on the plane ride to Boston about how Grich had fallen for the hidden-ball trick. Naturally, Grich took a little satisfaction when DeCinces himself became a victim.) After Barrett performed the trick one more time, the umpires started to call time outs after the play was considered to be finished. Barrett felt that if he attempted to pull off the trick, again, he would make the umpires “look bad.”

By 1984 Barrett was already being favorably described as being an Eddie Stanky type of player, with more ability, by Detroit Tigers manager Sparky Anderson. Bill Buckner, who came to the Red Sox from the Chicago Cubs, in a May 1984 deal for Dennis Eckersley, gave Barrett the moniker of “Dekemaster” for his ability to pull off the hidden-ball trick, as well as fooling some baserunners into believing that a pitch had been fouled off.5

By 1985 Barrett was already receiving accolades as a player who got the most out of his physical and mental capabilities. Teammate and keystone partner Glenn Hoffman called him very smart and cagey.6 Coach Tony Torchia said Barrett understood that in a hit-and-run situation, he had to manipulate the bat to somehow meet the ball to protect the runner.7  In 1985 Barrett’s batting average dipped to .266 but he had a .987 fielding percentage and 56 RBIs to his credit. His lifetime fielding percentage was .986.

Everything went right in 1986. Barrett batted .286, the Red Sox with a career-high 15 stolen bases, and led the American League with 18 sacrifice bunts. He was “hot” for two to three weeks during the American League Championship Series and the World Series, against the New York Mets. In Game Six of the World Series, with the Red Sox up three games to two, Barrett’s single drove in a 10th-inning run that put the Red Sox ahead 5-3 and seemed to ice their Series triumph. But with two outs in the bottom of the 10th and the Series seemingly over, there came three or four bloop hits in a row. Future Hall of Famer Gary Carter flipped a hit into left field. Kevin Mitchell hit a bloop to center. Ray Knight fisted a pitch over Barrett’s head. Then, of course, there came the sinker away and the Mookie Wilson groundball the skittered under Bill Buckner’s glove. The Mets won the World Series in the next game.

In October 2014, Barrett reflected on Game Six of the 1986 World Series. He said it was manager John McNamara’s call to remove pitcher Roger Clemens for a pinch-hitter in the top of the eighth with the Red Sox leading 3-2. Most Red Sox players were upset with the wild pitch that allowed Mitchell to score the tying run in the bottom of the 10th. Prior to Mookie Wilson’s groundball, Barrett was trying to position himself to attempt a pickoff play on the runner at second base. Commenting on Mookie Wilson’s grounder, Barrett said, “What goes around comes around, but I didn’t think it would come around this quick.” He was referring to the fact that the Red Sox had advanced to the World Series on similar dramatics – Dave Henderson’s home run that pulled the Red Sox back from defeat in the ALCS.  

Interestingly, in 1986, Barrett had not hit well against the Angels, hitting .188 (9-for-48). What made him so valuable in the American Championship Series? He watched videotapes of the season before the ALCS. He indicated that he had learned a lot from those tapes.8 Sure enough, with five RBIS and a .367 average, Barrett was named the MVP for that unforgettable series against the Angels. (He donated the Chevrolet Sportsvan he received as the MVP to the Childhood Cancer Association of Southern Nevada.)

Barrett hit a solid .293 in 1987, and then .283 with a career-high 65 RBIs in 1988. On June 16, 1988, he stole home in a game at Baltimore. In the fourth inning of a scoreless game, Barrett singled leading off the inning against Jeff Ballard. He was on third base with two outs. Mike Greenwell was the Red Sox batter. At an opportune moment Barrett dashed home. His steal of home gave the Red Sox the early lead, but Baltimore eventually won, 8-4. The Red Sox made the postseason again in 1988 but were swept in four games by Oakland; Barrett was just 1-for-15.

In 1989 Barrett signed a big contract with the Red Sox but suffered his first serious injury when he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee on June 4. He missed 55 games after the injury and, for the season, played in only 86 games. The next season, 1990, was his last with the Red Sox. He played in only 62 games, batting .226. He was ejected from Game Four of the American League Championship Series, against Oakland. Roger Clemens had been ejected in the bottom of the second by umpire Terry Cooney. After a pitch that Cooney called a ball, Clemens erupted and shouted expletives. Cooney promptly tossed him. Barrett was so incensed that he started to throw things on the field, so he was ejected as well.

After the season Barrett was released by the Red Sox. He signed on with the San Diego Padres, but played in only 12 games (3-for-16) before being released in June 1991. His time in the majors was complete. He played 16 games for Las Vegas, batting .319, but then retired from the game.

In 1992 Barrett sued Dr. Arthur Pappas, the Red Sox’ team physician and a limited partner in the Red Sox ownership, for malpractice. This stemmed from the torn ACL that he had endured in the summer of 1989. Dr. Pappas advised Barrett to do physical therapy and rehabilitation. This had allowed him to return to the field in six weeks, but in 1995, when the verdict was read, it was concluded that he should have had surgical reconstruction of the knee. He received $1.7 million in back salary.9

Barrett spent some time in 1995 managing Rancho Cucamonga in the Class-A California League, but despite opportunities to manage elsewhere, elected to stay at home with his family. Interestingly, in an interview in the spring of 1987 discussing his three-year, $2 million contract, he said he loved to spend time with his family. That may explain why he decided to get out of Organized Baseball in 1996 and help to coach Little League baseball back home in Las Vegas.10

In March 2014, in an appearance in West Hartford, Connecticut, Barrett opined on a number of subjects in an interview.

He told the interviewer, Alan Cohen, that he liked the idea of instant replay. It would keep the umpires focused and not allow game outcomes to be determined by “brutal calls.” Replay may cut down on arguments, shortening the length of games. He also noted, “As you look back, you realize how dumb you were when you first got big money at a young age.  Kids need more tutoring at handling money.”

Barrett said his favorite ballparks to hit in were Anaheim Stadium and Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium. On the subject of steroids, he said he felt that ownership turned a blind eye. Growing up, his favorite player was Pete Rose and he said Rose should be admitted to the Hall of Fame. His current favorites were Bryce Harper and Dustin Pedroia, who “dives for everything” and shows “unmatched drive and desire.”

The toughest pitcher during Barrett’s time in the majors was Jack Morris. Although he tipped his pitches, he had excellent control. Barrett spoke highly of his batting coach, Walter Hriniak, who stressed the importance of taking batting practice seriously, and stressed work ethic, even more than technique.11

Barrett and his wife, Robin, had three children: Eric, Katy, and Kyle. Katy, a fine athlete in her own right, is an assistant golf pro in the Las Vegas area. Robin Barrett sold real estate, and Marty owned rental properties. In 2014 he was still active with baseball in Las Vegas, where he coached a team of 14-year-olds. Barrett began coaching in 1996, when his son Kyle recognized him from his baseball cards more than in person. It was at that point that he decided to leave Organized Baseball; he had been with the Rancho Cucamonga Padres. There is still a Marty Barrett Little League in North Las Vegas. Marty had provided his name to the Little League, in the 1990s, because it was dying at the time in North Las Vegas.

Barrett said he played golf as much as possible, and at one time had a 3-handcap. He said he considered former teammate Jim Rice the best golfer among baseball players.12

Sources

Marty Barrett was a pleasure to talk with in October of 2014. He gave an hour and a half of his time to talk with me. He and I had never met before. My friend Kevin Hunt, an anthropology professor at Indiana University, helped arrange the interview. SABR member Alan Cohen provided much help, as well. His article “Marty Barrett at World Series Club” was a great help and is cited in this article.

Notes

1 lasvegassun.com/news/2008/jan/24/rancho-high-alums/.

2 Nick Cafardo, Lewiston (Maine) Daily Sun, June 24, 1988.

3 Marty Barrett interview with author, October 14, 2014. 

4 Barrett interview.

5 Associated Press, Bangor Daily News, March 4, 1985, 12.

6 Mike Fine, Lewiston (Maine) Daily Sun, June 26, 1985.

7 Ibid.

8 Associated Press, Bangor (Maine) Daily News, October 9, 1986, 17.

9 Associated Press, Lewiston (Maine) Sun Journal, October 26, 1995, 4C.

10 Nick Cafardo (Patriot Ledger Sports Service), “Barrett is cautious, conservative – and totally dependable,” The Telegraph, Nashua, New Hampshire, March 24, 1987, 11. news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2209&dat=19870324&id=U09KAAAAIBAJ&sjid=zJMMAAAAIBAJ&pg=2824,8086749. Accessed February 10, 2015.

11 Alan Cohen, “Marty Barrett at World Series Club,” December 11, 2014. linkedin.com/pulse/marty-barrett-world-series-club-alan-cohen.

12 Todd Dewey, “Marty Barrett remembers the  Sox’  last streak  and talks Vegas golf,” lasvegasgolf.com/departments/features/marty-barrett-profile.htm, October 12, 2003. Accessed January 12, 2015.

Don Baylor was a hustling player who ran the bases aggressively and stood fearlessly close to home plate as if he were daring the pitcher to hit him. Quite often they did, as Baylor was plunked by more pitches (267) than any other player in the 20th century, leading the American League eight times in that department and retiring as the category’s modern record-holder (though he’s since been passed by Craig Biggio). Notoriously tough, Baylor wouldn’t even acknowledge the pain of being hit, refusing to rub his bruises when he took his base. “Getting hit is my way of saying I’m not going to back off,” he explained. “My first goal when I go to the plate is to get a hit. My second goal is to get hit.”1

Baylor played for seven first-place teams in his 19 seasons and was a respected clubhouse leader, earning Manager-of-the-Year recognition in his post-playing career. The powerfully built 6-foot-1, 195-pounder hit 338 home runs and drove in 1,276 runs, and clicked on all cylinders when he claimed the AL Most Valuable Player award in 1979. Not only did he lead the California Angels to their first-ever playoff appearance by pacing both leagues in both runs scored and RBIs, he proved unafraid to kick 30 or so reporters out of the clubhouse. After a critical loss in Kansas City late in that season’s pennant race, the press corps made the mistake of asking losing pitcher Chris Knapp about a “choke” within earshot of Baylor, who promptly ordered them to leave.

Baylor broke into the majors with the Baltimore Orioles when the Birds were in the midst of winning three straight pennants. The Baltimore players policed their own clubhouse with a “kangaroo court” that handed down a stinging but good-natured brand of justice for a variety of on- and off-field infractions. Before he’d even played in the majors, a 20-year-old Baylor ran afoul of the court by predicting — even though the Orioles had a trio of All-Star outfielders plus skilled reserve Merv Rettenmund — “If I get into my groove, I’m gonna play every day.” Court leader Frank Robinson read the quote aloud in the Baltimore clubhouse, and shortstop Mark Belanger warned Baylor, “That’s going to stick for a long time.” Indeed, Baylor was known as Groove in baseball circles even after he retired.2

Don Edward Baylor was born on June 28, 1949, in the Clarksville section of Austin, Texas. His father, George Baylor, worked as a baggage handler for the Missouri Pacific Railroad for 25 years, and his mother, Lillian, was a pastry cook at a local white high school. Don had two siblings, Doug and Connie, and going to church on Sundays was a must in the Baylor family.

Baylor was one of just three African-American students enrolled at O. Henry Junior High School when Austin’s public schools integrated in 1962. One of the friends he made was Sharon Connally, the daughter of Governor John Connally, and Baylor would never forget hearing her screams from two classrooms away when Sharon learned over the school’s public-address system that her father had been shot along with President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

At Stephen F. Austin High School, Baylor had to ask the football coach three times for a tryout, but by his senior year he had made honorable mention all-state and got a half-dozen scholarship offers, including ones from powerhouses like Texas and Oklahoma. Baylor also played baseball, as a sophomore becoming the first African-American to wear the school’s uniform, and being named team captain for his senior season. After a tough first year under a coach who wasn’t accustomed to dealing with blacks, Baylor benefited when a strict disciplinarian named Frank Seale, who believed in playing the game the right way, took over the program for his last two seasons. “Frank was not only my coach, but my friend,” said Baylor. “He looked after me and made me feel like I was part of his family.”3 When Baylor finally got to the World Series two decades later, Frank Seale was there.

After suffering a shoulder injury serious enough to inhibit his throwing for the rest of his career, Baylor decided to spurn the gridiron scholarship offers and pursue a career in professional baseball. Some teams, like the Houston Astros (who opted to draft John Mayberry instead), were scared off by Baylor’s bum shoulder, but the Baltimore Orioles selected him with their second choice in the 1967 amateur draft. Scout Dee Phillips signed Baylor for $7,500.

Baylor reported immediately to Bluefield, West Virginia, where he wasted no time earning Appalachian League player-of-the-year honors after leading the circuit in hitting (.346), runs, stolen bases, and triples under manager Joe Altobelli. “Alto taught me the importance of good work habits,” Baylor recalled. “He was a tireless worker himself, serving as manager, batting-practice pitcher, third-base coach, and, when you got right down to it, a baby sitter.”4

The 1968 season started with a lot of promise. In 68 games for the Class-A Stockton Ports, Baylor smashed California League pitching at a .346 clip to earn a promotion to the Double-A Elmira Pioneers of the Eastern League. He stayed there only six games, batting .333, before moving up to the Triple-A Rochester Red Wings. In 15 games against International League pitchers, Baylor batted only .217 and was benched for the first time in his life by manager Billy DeMars. “I felt frustration for the first time in my career,” Baylor admitted. “Maybe DeMars hated young players, period. I also noticed that his favorite targets were blacks like Chet Trail, Mickey McGuire, and a guy from Puerto Rico named Rick Delgado. I felt that DeMars did not have my best interests at heart. I was trying very hard to learn, but I got nothing from him.”5

Nonetheless, the Orioles invited Baylor to his first big-league spring training in 1969, and he got to meet his role model, Frank Robinson. Soon, Baylor was even using the same R161 bat (taking its model number from Robinson’s first MVP season in 1961) that the Orioles right fielder did so much damage with. With it, Baylor began the season by hitting .375 in 17 games for the Class A Florida Marlins of the Florida State League. He spent the bulk of the year with the Double-A Dallas-Fort Worth Spurs, hitting .300 in 109 games to earn a Texas League All-Star selection.

After a strong spring training with the Orioles in 1970, Baylor returned to Rochester to bat third and play center field every day. Midway through the season, he reluctantly moved to left field because manager Cal Ripken believed Baylor’s weak arm would prevent him from handling center in the majors. Baltimore’s Merv Rettenmund insisted that Baylor remained a triple threat. “He can hit, run, and lob,” quipped the Orioles outfielder.6 Pretty much everything else that happened that season, however, couldn’t have been scripted more perfectly for Baylor. He was married before a summer doubleheader, and tore through the International League by leading all players in runs, doubles, triples, and total bases. The Sporting News recognized Baylor as its Minor League Player of the Year. He batted .327 with 22 home runs and 107 RBIs, and was called up to the Orioles on September 8. Ten days later, Baylor made his major-league debut at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore, batting fifth and playing center field against the Cleveland Indians. The bases were loaded for his first at-bat, against right-hander Steve Hargan, and Baylor admitted feeling “scared to death.”7 He didn’t show it, though, driving the first pitch into right field for a two-run single. In 17 at-bats over eight games, Baylor batted .235.

After the 1970 season Baylor went to Puerto Rico to play for the Santurce Crabbers in the winter league. The manager was Frank Robinson. “There I would get to know Frank even better because he was my manager and hitting guru,” Baylor remembered. “Mostly he taught me to think while hitting. He would say, ‘A guy pitches inside, hit that ball right down the line. Look for certain pitches on certain counts.’ Frank also wanted me to start using my strength more. Frank knew there was a pull hitter buried somewhere inside me and fought to develop that power. In Santurce, Frank worked with me to strengthen my defense and throwing. I wound up hitting .290.”8

With nothing left to prove in Triple-A but no room on the star-studded Orioles roster, Baylor returned to Rochester in 1971 and made another International League All-Star team. He put up strong all-around numbers, hitting .313 with 31 doubles, 10 triples, 20 homers, 95 RBIs, 104 runs scored, 79 walks, and 25 steals as the Red Wings won the Little World Series. The Triple-A playoffs went on so long that Baylor got into just one major-league game after they finished.

He returned to Santurce with the island still celebrating Roberto Clemente’s MVP performance in the 1971 World Series, in which he helped the Pittsburgh Pirates dethrone the Orioles. “When Roberto played in Puerto Rico that winter I got a chance to witness up close what a great player he was,” Baylor recalled. “In a game against Roberto’s San Juan team, I tried to score from second base on a hit to right. I know I had the play beat. I ran the bases the right way; made the proper turn, cut the corner well. But by the time I started my fadeaway slide catcher Manny Sanguillén had the ball. I couldn’t believe it. I was out.”9

Baylor wound up hitting .329 to win the Puerto Rican League batting title. He was confident that he’d be on some team’s major-league roster in 1972, but was shocked when the Orioles cleared a spot for him by dealing away Frank Robinson before Baylor returned from Latin America. The Orioles effectively had four regular outfielders in 1971 (Robinson, Merv Rettenmund, Paul Blair, and Don Buford), so Baylor still had some competition in front of him.

Baylor got into 102 games with an Orioles team that missed the playoffs for the first time in four years. By hitting .253 with 11 home runs and 24 steals, he was named to the Topps Rookie Major League All-Star Team. He became a father when Don Jr. was born shortly after the season ended. Baylor came back from Puerto Rico to get his son, before the family returned to the island together to help him get ready for the next season.

Much like the Orioles, Baylor started slowly in 1973, but heated up when it mattered most. Baltimore was in third place in mid-July, and Baylor was batting just .219 with four homers in 219 at-bats. Starting on July 17, though, he mashed at a .366 clip the rest of the way, contributing seven home runs and 30 RBIs as the Orioles played .658 ball and won the American League East title going away. Baylor batted .273 in his first taste of playoff action before sitting out a shutout loss to Catfish Hunter in the Series’ decisive Game Five.

He played enough to qualify for the batting title for the first time in 1974, batting a solid .272 when the average American Leaguer hit 14 points less. The Orioles were eight games out on August 28, in fourth place, when Baylor and the team caught fire again for another furious finish. Baylor batted .381 as the Birds went 28-6 to finish two games ahead of the Yankees before losing in four games to the Oakland A’s in the American League Championship Series.

Baylor joined the Venezuelan League Magallanes Navigators that winter, displaying good patience and power with seven homers, 32 RBIs, and 29 walks in 56 games while batting .271. When major-league action got underway in 1975, Baylor’s talents continued to blossom. He hammered three home runs in a game at Detroit on July 2, and smacked 25 overall. That made the league’s top 10, and his .489 slugging percentage was also among the leaders. With 32 stolen bases, Baylor cracked the AL leader board for the fourth of what would eventually be six consecutive seasons. Though the Orioles finished second to the Red Sox, Baylor’s name appeared towards the bottom of some writers’ MVP ballots. He was only 26 and going places, just not where he imagined.

Just a week before Opening Day in 1976, Orioles manager Earl Weaver pulled Baylor out of an exhibition game unexpectedly. “When he told me to sit beside him I knew something was wrong, Baylor recalled. ‘I hate to tell you this,’ Earl said quietly, ‘but we just traded you to Oakland for Reggie Jackson.’ I looked at Earl but he couldn’t look at me. I was stunned. I started to cry right there on the bench. ‘Earl,’ I sobbed. ‘I don’t want to go anywhere.’”10 Weaver believed Groove would one day be an MVP, but the Orioles sent him packing in a six-player deal to land a guy who’d already won the trophy. Other than a career-high four stolen bases on May 17, and his best season overall for swipes with 52, the highlights were few and far between for Baylor in 1976. He didn’t hit well at the Oakland Coliseum, and batted just .247 with 15 homers overall. On November 1, Baylor became part of the first class of free agents after the arbitrator’s landmark decision invalidated baseball’s reserve clause.

Just over two weeks later, Baylor signed a six-year, $1.6 million deal with the California Angels, but he struggled to justify his salary for the first half of 1977. When manager Norm Sherry got the axe midway through the season, Baylor was hitting a paltry .223 with nine home runs and 30 RBIs. Dave Garcia took over as skipper, and hired Baylor’s ex-teammate Frank Robinson as his hitting instructor. Under the Hall of Famer’s tutelage, Baylor broke out to bat .281 with 16 homers and 75 RBIs the rest of the way. He never looked back.

Baylor finished seventh in American League MVP voting in 1978 after a breakout season that saw him smash 34 home runs, drive in 99 runs, and score 103. The surprising Angels logged their first winning season in eight years and remained in the West Division hunt until the final week, but Baylor will always remember that September for one of his saddest days as a ballplayer. Teammate Lyman Bostock made the last out of a critical one-run loss on September 23 in Chicago, then stormed by Baylor ranting and raving before exiting the clubhouse after a fast shower. “Veterans know enough to leave other veterans alone,” Baylor said. “So when Lyman walked by, I didn’t say a thing. I didn’t know there would be no next time for him.”11 Bostock was shot to death that night in Gary, Indiana. The career .311 hitter was only 27.

Baylor propelled the Angels to their first playoff appearance in franchise history in 1979, batting cleanup in all 162 games and earning 20 of a possible 28 first-place votes to claim MVP honors. His totals of 139 RBIs and 120 runs scored led the major leagues, and he added career bests in home runs (36), on-base percentage (.371), slugging percentage (.530), and walks (71) while striking out just 51 times. He batted .330 with runners in scoring position. Baylor struggled while battling tendinitis in his left wrist in June, but sandwiched that down spell with player-of-the-month performances in May and July. He earned his only All-Star selection, starting in left field, batting third, and getting two hits with a pair of runs scored. In his first at-bat, he pulled a run-scoring double off Phillies southpaw Steve Carlton. On August 25 at Toronto, Baylor logged a personal-best eight RBIs in one game as the Angels romped, 24-2.

In the 1979 playoffs, Baylor and the Angels met the same Baltimore Orioles club that developed him, but a storybook ending was not in the cards. Though Baylor went deep against Dennis Martinez in California’s Game Three victory, he batted just .188 as the Angels lost three games to one.

As wonderful as 1979 played out, the 1980 season was a nightmare. The Angels started slowly, and were buried by a 12-28 stretch during which Baylor missed nearly seven weeks with an injured left wrist. He struggled mightily when he returned, batted just .250 with five homers in 90 games, and missed most of the last month with an injured right foot. The Angels went from division champions to losers of 95 games. The next season, 1981, Baylor became almost exclusively a designated hitter, and remained one for the balance of his career. Though he batted a career low (to that point) .239, his totals of 17 homers and 66 RBIs each cracked the American League’s top 10 in the strike-shortened season.

In 1982 Baylor homered 24 times and drove in 93 runs as the Angels made their second postseason appearance in what proved to be his last season with California. After beating the Brewers in the first two games of the best-of-five Championship Series, the Angels dropped three straight and were eliminated. It certainly wasn’t Baylor’s fault; he batted .294 and knocked in 10 runs in the series.

Baylor became a free agent for the second time in November 1982, and signed a lucrative deal to join the New York Yankees. In three seasons with the Bronx Bombers, he was twice named the designated hitter on The Sporting News’ Silver Slugger team (1983 and 1985), and averaged 24 home runs and 88 RBIs. His batting average declined from a career-best .303 to .262 to .231, however, and they were not particularly happy years as Baylor feuded with Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. In 1985 Baylor was selected as the winner of the prestigious Roberto Clemente Award, presented annually to a major leaguer of exceptional character who contributes a lot to his community. He was recognized for his work with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and the 65 Roses (so-named for the way one child pronounced Cystic Fibrosis) club.

The Yankees traded Baylor to the Boston Red Sox shortly before Opening Day in 1986 for left-handed-hitting designated hitter Mike Easler. Though Baylor struck out a career-high 111 times and managed to bat just .238 in ’86, his 31 home runs and 94 RBIs were his best since his MVP year. He also established a single-season record by getting hit by pitches 35 times. The Red Sox won 95 games to beat out the New York for the American League East title, with Baylor operating a kangaroo court as his mentor Frank Robinson had done in Baltimore. On the night Roger Clemens set a major-league record by striking out 20 Seattle Mariners, Baylor fined him $5 for giving up a single to light-hitting Spike Owen on an 0-2 pitch. In the American League Championship Series, against the Angels, Boston was two outs from elimination in Game Five when Baylor smashed a game-tying, two-run home run off 18-game winner Mike Witt to spark an amazing comeback. Baylor batted .346 in the seven ALCS games, but started only three of seven World Series contests against the New York Mets as designated hitters were not used in the National League ballpark. This time the Red Sox let a Series clincher slip away, losing to New York in seven games.

Baylor turned 38 in 1987, and he posted the lowest power totals since his injury-plagued 1980 campaign, declining to 16 homers and 63 RBIs. He did reach a milestone on June 28, his 38th birthday, when he was hit by a pitch for a record 244th time. “Change-ups and slow curves feel like a butterfly, a light sting,” he said. “Fastballs and sliders feel like piercing bullets, like they’re going to come out the other side.”12 He added that getting hit in the wrist by a Nolan Ryan heater in 1973 was the worst feeling of all.

The Minnesota Twins, making a surprising playoff run, craved Baylor’s right-handed bat and presence and acquired him from the Red Sox for the final month of the 1987 season. Baylor batted .286 to help Minnesota reach the postseason for the first time in 17 years, and his eighth-inning pinch-hit single drove in the go-ahead run in Game One of the ALCS against the Tigers. Baylor batted .385 in the World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals, including a game-tying two-run homer off John Tudor in Game Six, helping the Twins to a comeback victory en route to the title.

Baylor wrapped up his playing career with a return to the Oakland Athletics in 1988. Though he batted just .220 in 92 games, the club won 104 regular-season contests and became the third American League pennant winner in a row to feature Baylor on its roster. Oakland defeated the Red Sox in the ALCS but lost the World Series to the Los Angeles Dodgers in an upset, and Baylor struck out against National League Cy Young winner Orel Hershiser in his only at-bat. In the offseason Baylor called it a career after 2,135 hits with a .260 batting average, 338 home runs, and 1,276 RBIs. He stole 285 bases and was hit by a pitch 267 times.

Baylor returned to the big leagues for a two-year stint as the Milwaukee Brewers’ hitting coach beginning in 1990, and spent 1992 in the same role with the Cardinals. In 1993 he was named the inaugural manager of the expansion Colorado Rockies, and earned Manager-of-the-Year honors in 1995 when he led the third-year club to a playoff berth faster than any previous expansion club. Pitching coach Larry Bearnarth observed, “He doesn’t lose his cool very often. On the other hand, he can be intolerant sometimes of people who don’t give their best. He is very direct and he never varies from that, so players are never surprised. If he has something to say, he just says it like he’s still a player, like players used to do to each other.”13

Baylor’s Rockies played winning baseball for two more years, but he was fired after the club fell under .500 and slipped to fourth place in the five-team division in 1998. He turned down an offer to become a club vice president, instead opting to become a hitting coach again with the Atlanta Braves. After earning rave reviews for helping Chipper Jones develop into an MVP candidate, Baylor got another chance to manage in 2000 with the Chicago Cubs. Despite 88 wins and a surprising third-place finish in his second year in Chicago, Baylor was fired after a Fourth of July loss in 2002 with a disappointing, highly-paid club sputtering in fifth place. Overall, he went 627-689 as a major-league manager.

Baylor resurfaced with the Mets the next two seasons, serving as a bench coach and hitting instructor under Art Howe, while battling a diagnosis of multiple myeloma. When the Mets changed managers, Baylor moved to Seattle in 2005 to work with Mariners batters. In 2007 he worked part time as an analyst on Washington Nationals telecasts. After three years out of a major-league uniform, Baylor returned to the Rockies in 2009 as their hitting coach, before moving on to hold the same role with the Arizona Diamondbacks (2011-12).

The Angels brought him back in 2014, but he suffered a freak fracture of his right femur on Opening Day catching the ceremonial first pitch from Vladimir Guerrero, at the time the only other Angels player to win a MVP award.  Baylor came back to serve through the end of the 2015 season before settling into retirement with his second wife, Becky, who he’d married in 1987.

On August 7, 2017, Baylor died from complications in his 14-year battle with multiple myeloma. He was 68. Frank Robinson, Bobby Grich and writer Tracy Ringolsby spoke at his funeral before he was laid to rest at Texas State Cemetery in Austin. 

This biography originally appeared in “Pitching, Defense, and Three-Run Homers: The 1970 Baltimore Orioles” (University of Nebraska Press, 2012), edited by Mark Armour and Malcolm Allen. An updated version appears in “The 1986 Boston Red Sox: There Was More Than Game Six” (SABR, 2016), edited by Bill Nowlin and Leslie Heaphy, and “Major League Baseball A Mile High: The First Quarter Century of the Colorado Rockies” (SABR, 2018), edited by Bill Nowlin and Paul T. Parker.

Last revised: October 3, 2022 (zp)

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author also consulted:

Daniel Gutiérrez, Efraim Alvarez, and Daniel Gutiérrez hijo, La Enciclopedia del Béisbol en Venezuela (Caracas, 2006).

Craig Neff, “His Honor, Don Baylor,” Sports Illustrated, June 16, 1986.

Notes

1 Jack Friedman, “For Don Baylor, Baseball Is a Hit or Be Hit Proposition,” People, August 24, 1987. 

2 Don Baylor, Nothing But The Truth: A Baseball Life (New York: St. Martins Press, 1990), 47.

3 Baylor, Nothing But The Truth, 32.

4 Baylor, Nothing But The Truth, 38-39.

5 Baylor, Nothing But The Truth, 44-45.

6 Detroit Free Press, March 4, 1980: 42.

7 Baylor, Nothing But The Truth, 52.

8 Baylor, Nothing But The Truth, 60.

9 Baylor, Nothing But The Truth, 68.

10 Baylor, Nothing But The Truth, 80.

11 Baylor, Nothing But The Truth, 125.

12 Friedman, “For Don Baylor.”

13 Howard Blatt, “Ultimate Player’s Manager Baylor is Tough But Fair With Rockies,” New York Daily News, July 15, 1995.

Winfield “Win” Boggs was a Marine during World War II, and met Susan Graham, a mail-plane pilot, in 1945, marrying her just two weeks later. Win stayed in the military, serving as a pilot in the Air Force during the Korean War and moving his family around as military people often do. The couple had a son, Wayne, and daughter, Ann, and their third child, Wade Anthony Boggs, was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on June 15, 1958.

Wade loved the idea of being in a military family and having a regimented routine every day. This is something that would carry over to his entire baseball career, in which he would become known for doing set things at set times every day before a game.

Wade began playing baseball in Little League, receiving instruction from his father and several coaches. Win Boggs had retired from the military in 1967, and moved the family to Tampa, Florida, where he opened a fishing camp. At Henry B. Plant High School in Tampa, Wade played baseball and football. After he hit .522 as a junior, scouts began watching him play, and he switched from quarterback to kicker on the football team to avoid injury. He was good enough to become All-State in football and get a scholarship offer from the University of South Carolina.

In baseball Boggs had earned a reputation as a hitter, and pitchers wouldn’t throw strikes to him. When he tried to hit balls out of the strike zone he struggled, until his father got him the book The Science of Hitting by Ted Williams. After reading the book he realized he had lost some of his patience at the plate, and took Williams’s advice about not swinging at pitches out of the strike zone.2 When this forced pitchers to throw strikes he hit everything, finishing the season hitting .485.

Scouts had seen Boggs struggle, and even when he hit they weren’t sure if he had the necessary talent to play professional baseball. He didn’t have much speed or range, and was rated poorly in most areas. The Major League Scouting Bureau called him a nonprospect. One scout wrote, “needs a lot of help with bat,” and thought it would take more money than he was worth to persuade him to turn down the football scholarship. But that scout hadn’t seen the drive that Boggs had to play baseball. Boston Red Sox scout George Digby had seen him play, and persuaded the team to select Boggs in the seventh round of the 1976 amateur draft. When the Red Sox offered $7,500, Boggs’s father said “You’re going to have to make a choice, son, college ball or pro ball.”3 An easy choice for the young baseball fan, Boggs signed and went to the minor leagues.

Boggs was assigned to Elmira (New York) of the Class-A (rookie season) New York-Penn League, where he hit .263 and was below team average in almost every category. But the Red Sox saw enough in him to promote him to Winston-Salem of the Class-A Carolina League in 1977. Boggs proceeded to hit .332 that year, and showed an excellent batting eye by walking much more often than he struck out, something he would do every year until he was 40 years old.

Boggs still moved slowly through the Red Sox system. He was slow and he didn’t have much power; all he was showing was that batting average and the ability to earn bases on balls. “I was told in the minor leagues that I’ll never play third in the big leagues. That I don’t hit for power so I’m not going to play in the big leagues. I’m not fast enough. I was told so many different things.”4 What he did have was drive. “The only thing I ever wanted to do was play professional baseball and in the minors I was getting paid to play so I didn’t get discouraged.”5

He spent the 1978 and 1979 seasons at Bristol (Connecticut) of the Double-A Eastern League, followed by the 1980 and 1981 seasons at Pawtucket in the Triple-A International League. An event in baseball history that Boggs played in was the longest-ever professional baseball game, a 33-inning affair in 1981 between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings that began on April 18 and, after being suspended in the wee hours of Easter morning, was finished on June 23. “When I doubled in the tying run in the 21st inning, I didn’t know if the guys wanted to hug me or slug me,” he said.6 In 1981 he led the International League in hitting with a .335 average, and still didn’t get called up in September. On the last day of the season, his manager, Joe Morgan, suggested that Boggs play first base in winter ball. He went to Puerto Rico to play, but because of injuries to others he ended up playing third base again. This time he hit .354, and the Red Sox couldn’t ignore him any longer, adding him to the 40-man roster.

Boggs knew Debbie Bertucelli in high school, and they began dating. Shortly after his debut in the minor leagues he proposed, and they were married in December 1976. Two years later they had a daughter, Meagann, and eight years later a son, Brett (named for George Brett).

In 1982 Boggs was trapped behind reigning American League batting champion Carney Lansford, the Red Sox third baseman, but he had a good spring and manager Ralph Houk kept him as a utility infielder. It took a couple of extra days due to rainouts, but he made his major-league debut in the second game of a doubleheader at Baltimore on April 10, 1982. Boggs played first base and hit ninth, and didn’t show anything against Orioles starter Dennis Martinez or reliever Sammy Stewart. “I hit four dribblers in the infield, all off changeups,” he said.7 He had a pinch-hit flyout a few days later, then sat for almost two weeks before again playing first base and batting ninth in the first game of a twi-night doubleheader in Chicago. This time, after a couple more groundouts, he came up and led off the eighth inning with a single off White Sox starting pitcher Richard Dotson. Boggs eventually came round to score, on Jim Rice’s single, what proved to be the winning run in a 3-2 game.

Before the June 23 night game versus Detroit, and hitting only .258, Boggs had played in just 15 of the team’s first 66 games. During that evening, Lansford tried for an inside-the-park home run, and suffered a severe ankle sprain in a collision with Tigers catcher Lance Parrish. Coming off the bench to replace Lansford, Boggs was hitless in two at-bats. his batting average dropping to .242. Houk said, “We’ll find out about Boggs,”8 and Boggs took the opportunity with both hands, playing in 89 of the team’s last 96 games, hitting .358 while filling in for Lansford and playing first base when Carney returned a month later. That was enough to convince the Red Sox that he could do the job, and they traded Lansford to the Oakland Athletics after the season, giving Boggs the third-base job full-time. He would keep the job for the next 10 years.

Boggs finished a distant third behind Cal Ripken Jr. and Kent Hrbek for the American League Rookie of the Year award. But he knew he would be starting in the major leagues, and he would take the opportunity he had been given.

The comfort of being set as the everyday third baseman in 1983 gave Boggs a great deal of confidence. He spent the first month primarily in the leadoff position for the Red Sox, moved to fifth in the order for a couple of months, and spent the second half of the year hitting second. These moves never fazed him; he hit wherever he was put. Boggs was 6-feet-2 and weighed 190 pounds. He threw right-handed, but was a left-handed batter. He hit .397 in Fenway Park, hitting to the opposite field and taking advantage of the Green Monster, and hit .321 everywhere else. Boggs was consistent no matter what happened, and he was rewarded by comfortably winning his first American League batting title with a .361 average, which was 22 points better than runner-up Rod Carew (.339) of the California Angels. Boggs’s .444 on-base percentage led both leagues.

He followed up in 1984 by hitting .325, which placed him third in the American League, then began a streak of four batting titles in a row, 1985 through 1988. Consistency was again the watchword, as in those four seasons Boggs’s highest average was .368 and lowest was .357. His 240 hits in 1985 were the most in a major-league season since 1930. He led all of baseball in on-base percentage for five years in a row, through 1989. In 1985 he got his first of 12 consecutive All-Star selections, as the league recognized his hitting talent.

Boggs hit 24 home runs in 1987, more than double his total of any other years, seeming to indicate that he had more power potential than he usually employed, focused as he was on getting base hits and getting on base.

For all his efforts, and before Boggs arrived in Boston, the Red Sox had meandered around the middle or bottom of the AL East Division since 1980, until it all came together in 1986. Pitcher Roger Clemens came into his own, starting 14-0 as the Red Sox climbed to the top of the division. On May 14 they moved into a tie for first place in the division, and two days later they had the lead by themselves and never relinquished it for the rest of the season.

But a terrible disruption to the season occurred for Boggs on June 17, when his mother was killed by the driver of a cement truck who ran a red light. That driver was on work release from jail, and wasn’t supposed to be there, and got off with a charge of running a red light. Boggs was devastated. It took him years to let the incident go.9

Boggs returned to baseball six days after his mother’s death, and baseball gave him a relief from it. He had his routines, embracing everything he did on game day, and that helped keep him from thinking about his mother. He resumed hitting, the Red Sox kept winning, and they ended up back in the postseason for the first time since losing the 1975 World Series. A tough best-of-seven American League Championship Series with the California Angels ensued, the Red Sox trailing three games to one before rallying to win three in a row. Boggs hit just .233 in the series.

In the 1986 World Series, the Red Sox faced the New York Mets. Boggs fared a little better, hitting .290, but was not much of a factor until the 10th inning in Game Six, when he doubled and later scored to give the Red Sox a 5-3 lead. But in perhaps the most famous ending to a World Series game ever, Boggs was playing third base when the ball was hit to Bill Buckner, and watched it travel through his legs to lose the game. Boggs said, “The ball could’ve easily been hit to me and gone through my legs. Nobody is blaming anybody. It’s fate.”10

In Game Seven Boggs singled with two outs in the second inning to push the Red Sox to a 3-0 lead. But they couldn’t hold the lead and the Mets took over in the late innings and won the World Series. Boggs sat in the dugout and cried, the world thinking he was crying because his team had lost. But Boggs later said that wasn’t the case, that he had buried himself in baseball to forget about his mother’s death, and now that baseball was over his mother had come flooding back in. “When it was over, I was thinking, ‘Now I’ve got to go home and when I walk in the house, she’s not going to be there.’”11

Boggs went home and commiserated with his father. Wade had decided that he would retire from baseball, because he wanted to spend more time with his family. Win persuaded him to carry on in baseball. “I told him life goes on, that he had to face up to his loss,” Win said.12

Boggs returned to baseball and the Red Sox, and resumed hitting. He hit over .300 every year from 1982 to 1991, and in 1988 and 1990 the Red Sox won the AL East again, but both times they were swept by Oakland in the ALCS. Boggs hit .385 and .438 in the two series, but that wasn’t enough to get his team to a single win.

Scandal began for the Boggs family in 1988, when it was revealed that Wade had a four-year affair with a woman named Margo Adams. She had sued him for millions of dollars in a palimony lawsuit, and began telling her story to anyone who would listen, including Penthouse magazine and the Phil Donahue daytime television show. She said she had traveled with Boggs on Red Sox road trips, and that the whole team knew about her. Any time he would be away from home he would try to arrange for her to be there; even when he left spring training (with permission) for a couple of days to record his voice for an episode of the TV show The Simpsons, he took her with him to Los Angeles.

As the scandal broke around the team, Boggs told his wife, Debbie, everything. It was his honesty that made her want them to stay together. “I never had that feeling (of wanting to leave him) because of the way Wade handled it. We had an agreement that he would tell me everything.” The lawsuit was settled out of court and Boggs moved on, but to this day his name is always entwined with that of Adams.

In 1992 everything changed for Boggs. It was the worst year of his career; he hit only .259. He later blamed the Red Sox front office, saying that they had betrayed him in contract negotiations. He had a promise from Jean Yawkey, the Red Sox owner, for a five-year contract, because she wanted him to follow in the footsteps of Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski as career-long Red Sox legends. But she died before the contract was signed, and when Boggs talked to the new management, all they were offering was a year and an option. Boggs felt slighted, lost his legendary focus, and struggled in his last season with the Red Sox before the team decided not to re-sign him and let him become a free agent.

Despite his carefully regimented lifestyle, Boggs managed to find himself in the headlines for odd reasons over the years. In 1988 he received a minor cut on the neck from a knife after an altercation outside a bar in Gainesville, Florida. Two men, possibly attempting to rob Boggs and his friends, threatened them with the knife and a gun. Boggs said that he “willed himself invisible” during the fight.13 In another incident, Boggs fell out of the family Jeep and was run over by his wife, Debbie. Although he was not seriously injured, his arm had scrapes and bruises. Comedians across the country suggested that Debbie was getting payback for the Margo Adams situation.14 Red Sox fans tended to love Boggs more for his many quirks.

The last line on Boggs’s Hall of Fame plaque is “Legendary for his superstitions,” and he was. Numerous stories tell of his different superstitions, whether it was wearing the same socks for every game, or fielding exactly 150 groundballs in practice each day. Every time he batted, he drew the Jewish word “chai,” meaning good luck and life, in the dirt, to wish himself luck. Perhaps the best-known superstition Boggs had was eating chicken before each game every day, and he became known as “Chicken Man” because of it. Boggs even authored a book titled Fowl Tips, which presented various chicken recipes. He readily acknowledged his superstitions, saying in his Hall of Fame induction speech, “Believe me, I have a few superstitions, and they work.”

In a surprising move, after so many years with the Red Sox, Boggs signed a three-year, $11-million contract to play for their archrivals, the New York Yankees. From being a Boston hero, he found himself returning to boos every game. His focus meant he was able to block it out, and resume his hitting. Again Boggs was back over .300 for his first four years with the Yankees.

The Yankees were on the rise, and Boggs wanted to be part of it. He enjoyed some good seasons with New York, and won a Gold Glove in both 1994 and 1995, but they missed the playoffs his first season, the entire 1994 postseason was wiped out by the players strike, and in 1995 they lost a classic best-of-five ALDS to the Seattle Mariners.

In 1996 the Yankees again made the playoffs, and Boggs struggled. He hit just .158 that postseason, losing playing time for hitting so poorly. His biggest moment was as a 10th-inning pinch-hitter in Game Four of the World Series, when he walked with two outs and the bases loaded to give the Yankees the go-ahead run. But the rest of the Yankees did well during the Series, coming back against the Atlanta Braves, and Boggs got his first World Series ring. In yet another iconic moment, he rode around Yankee Stadium on the back of a police horse as he celebrated.

In 1997 Boggs hit .292, split time, and ultimately lost his third-base job to Charlie Hayes. Boggs hit .429 in seven postseason at-bats, but New York again lost in the ALDS, this time to the Cleveland Indians, and his time with the Yankees was over.

Boggs returned home to Tampa, to play in his hometown for the expansion Tampa Bay Devil Rays. As a 40-year-old his time was over; he hit an anemic (for him) .280 in 1998 and finished out his career hitting .301 in 1999. He had been hanging on long enough to get his 3,000th hit, which came on August 7, and was ironically, given his lack of power throughout his career, a home run off Chris Haney of the Indians. A couple of weeks later he was done, ending his career with 3,010 hits and a career batting average of .328.

Boggs spent some time in the front office of the Devil Rays, acting as assistant general manager in 2000, then returning to the field as hitting instructor for the team in 2001. After that he took off the uniform for good.

Boggs was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2005, his first year of eligibility, receiving 91.9 percent of the votes. Speaking about being elected, he said, “The only time the Hall of Fame ever came into my mind was probably the time I was rounding first going into second when I hit my home run for my 3,000th hit. I thought, ‘Well, there’s my ticket. If anybody wants to vote for me for Cooperstown then I’ve got the credentials to get in.’”15

There was controversy before Boggs’s induction when it was reported that the Devil Rays had a part of his contract written so that when he went into the Hall of Fame his plaque would have a Devil Rays cap on it. Boggs denied that had happened, and noted that the Hall of Fame had the choice of what cap he would wear. As it happened, given his five batting titles with Boston, they put him in a Red Sox cap.

Boggs was widely known as a beer drinker, and in retirement undertook promotional tours for the Miller brewing company. His teammates have told stories about his drinking prowess, including stories of Boggs downing dozens of cans of beer on cross-country flights. Boggs did not downplay these stories, and it is fair to say that the stories of his consumption of beer have now reached legendary status.

After retiring from professional baseball, Boggs didn’t stay unemployed for long. His son, Brett, was playing high-school baseball, and Wade became an assistant coach for the team while Brett was there. Brett moved on to play at the University of South Florida, where Wade would watch him play. As of 2015, Wade and Debbie lived in Tampa, where they both grew up.

Last revised: March 7, 2021 (ghw)

This biography is included in “Nuclear Powered Baseball: Articles Inspired by The Simpsons Episode ‘Homer At the Bat'” (SABR, 2016), edited by Emily Hawks and Bill Nowlin.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Dana Berry for getting this biography under way.

Notes

Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd starts his autobiography recalling back in 1964 when he was 5 years old, and his uncle Frank Boyd brought three civil-rights workers by the family home. Later that same year, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were discovered murdered. Dennis believes they were killed just after they left the Boyd home to head for Memphis.1

The home was in Meridian, Mississippi, where he had been born on October 6, 1959, to parents known as Skeeter and Sweetie. Skeeter was Willie James Boyd and Sweetie was his wife, Girtharee (McCoy) Boyd. Willie Boyd worked in Meridian as a landscaper and Peter Gammons, in the speech he gave on being honored with the J.G. Taylor Spink Award at the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2005, recounted a 1985 meeting with Mr. Boyd, who himself said he was literally “landscaping the yard of the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan” when he saw the cars heading out “to take care” of the three civil-rights workers. Then Mr. Boyd looked at Gammons and talked about the Klansman: “Today that man is destitute and crippled with arthritis, and my boy, Dennis Boyd, is pitching in the major leagues for the Boston Red Sox.”2

That he was. Dennis won 15 games that year, and in 1986 pitched in the World Series. Willie Boyd himself had been a baseball player, as had his father before him. And Willie’s work in Meridian included maintaining the baseball field in town.

Dennis was African American, but he also had Choctaw lineage on his father’s side, and his great-grandfather on his mother’s side was “as white as snow.”3 It was a complicated heritage, one great-grandfather Irish and another a slave.

The Boyd family also had a baseball pedigree. As Boyd himself said, “My father played just a little bit of a while in Negro League baseball. My two uncles played. K.T. Boyd, my dad’s brother – Kansas City Monarchs.  And Robert Boyd – he played for the Kansas City Athletics but he also came out of Negro League baseball. He played for the Memphis Red Sox. 

“And my great-great-uncle played, Benjamin Boyd. He played for the Memphis Red Sox and the Homestead Grays.”4 

Robert Boyd – Bob Boyd – was the first African American to sign with the Chicago White Sox, in 1950, and broke in with them the following year. He played for the Orioles, Kansas City, and Milwaukee over parts of nine seasons.

With [at least] five older brothers, Dennis played a lot of baseball and often with boys older than him. Dennis even played in games himself with former Negro Leaguer Early Moore. Three houses away from the Boyds lived former Negro League pitcher Roy Dawson.5

Family ties didn’t end there. “I’ve had a few cousins, too – Barry Larkin. My dad’s first cousin. Troy Boyd played for the Chicago Cubs and San Diego Padres. And in minor-league baseball, Brian Cole and Popeye Cole – Robert Cole. Brian Cole is the one that Sports Illustrated did an article on two years ago. He got killed. He was in the Mets organization. Bob Stanley coached him in the minor leagues. He got killed in 2001 in a car accident coming from spring training. It was called ‘The Best Player You Never Saw.’6 Albert Pujols and a lot of them made comments about him. They saw him in the minor leagues and they didn’t believe what they was seeing.”7

Dennis played ball in Meridian; in 1972, he was named MVP of the little league all-star game held in Hattiesburg.8 The next year – 1973 – two of his brothers were drafted, Mike by the Dodgers (he was a pitcher and his team had won the Mississippi state championship, but he was never offered a contract because of the negativity coming from his getting a white girl pregnant), and Don by the Cardinals. A 15th-round pick, he was a second baseman who played one season at rookie ball in the Gulf Coast League.

Dennis was fortunate to have a high-school coach, Bill Marchant, who taught him baseball strategy, the mental side of the game. As a white man coaching an integrated team in Mississippi at the time, Boyd wrote, Marchant “could have been killed … not harmed, not threatened, but literally killed for putting my brothers on the team.”9 It was Marchant who bought spikes for Dennis and his brother Neal. The Meridian team went on to the state playoffs, and Dennis got a scholarship to Jackson State University, where he was coached by Robert Braddy. He said his record at Jackson State was 20-5 and he’s in the school’s hall of fame. The Boston Red Sox drafted Dennis Boyd in the 16th round of the 1980 draft and he was signed by Red Sox scout Ed Scott.

Boyd was assigned to Elmira in the New York-Penn League and was 7-1 in 1980 with a 2.48 earned-run average. In 1981 he pitched in Class A for the Winter Haven Red Sox of the Florida State League and was 14-8 (3.63). That winter he went to Colombia to play some winter ball and, he writes, was first introduced to cocaine.10

Boyd advanced to Double A in 1982, pitching in Connecticut for the Eastern League’s Bristol Red Sox, and recorded an identical 14-8 mark, but with an improved 2.81 ERA even at the higher level of play. He was dubbed “the hottest pitching prospect in the Red Sox farm system.”11 An Associated Press story at the end of August explained his nickname, dating it back to high-school days when he would drink beer with his friends: “They called it ‘oil’ then, and Boyd sure could put away a few cans.”12 His 191 strikeouts (in 205 innings) led the Eastern League. At the very end of the 1982 season, Boyd was a September call-up and was given a look at the majors, debuting at Fenway Park with a start against the Cleveland Indians on September 13. He gave up one run in the first inning and one more in the fourth, but that was enough to cost him the game. He worked 5⅓ innings, giving up just the two runs, but the Red Sox offense scored only one run, in the bottom of the ninth, and lost the game, 3-1. 

Manager Ralph Houk used Boyd twice more in relief, both times against the Yankees, and he gave up three more runs in three innings of work. But he’d gotten his feet wet. He’d made the big leagues.

The 1983 season was spent in Triple-A with Pawtucket, with a couple of call-ups to Boston, once in June and then again at the beginning of August. Boyd picked up his first major-league win, against Minnesota, on June 3 and worked a total of 98⅔ innings in 15 games, 13 of them starts. His best outing was a September 2 complete-game 5-1 win over the White Sox. His record for the season was 4-8, but he had a solid 3.28 ERA.

Part of 1984 was also spent in Pawtucket, after he’d begun the season 0-3 (with a 7.36 ERA) for Boston and had an argument with Houk that resulted in his being sent back down, though Houk was generous in his praise of Boyd at the time and the argument could be made that he’d been “much too easy” on the young pitcher.13 After spending a month back in Triple-A, Boyd was summoned back to the Red Sox and won 12 games for a 12-12 season with an overall 4.37 ERA. He spent the full 1985 and 1986 seasons with the big-league club, working both seasons under new manager John McNamara. Boyd won a club-leading 15 games in ’85 with 13 losses and won 16 games in ’86, against 10 losses. He worked 13 complete games in 1985 and 10 in 1986. The game Oil Can thought was his best was the June 19, 1986, complete-game three-hit shutout he pitched against the Orioles at Memorial Stadium, working with Dave Sax behind the plate.14

The Red Sox won the pennant and went to the seventh game of the World Series in 1986. Boyd’s 16 wins were second only to Roger Clemens, whose 24-4 record won him both the Cy Young Award and the American League MVP. Bruce Hurst was 13-8 (2.99).

Boyd was a right-hander, standing 6-feet-1 and listed at a lean and wiry 155 pounds. He pitched the pennant-clinching game, a 12-3 complete-game win over the Toronto Blue Jays on September 28. When it came to the postseason, Clemens was hammered by the Angels’ offense in the first game of the ALCS, giving up eight runs (seven earned) in 7⅓ innings. The Red Sox lost, 9-1. Hurst won Game Two, a complete-game 9-2 win. Just one of California’s runs was earned. Boyd pitched Game Three, in Anaheim, and the two teams were tied, 1-1, after six, the Angels having scored once that inning. After getting two outs in the bottom of the seventh, however, Boyd gave up a solo home run to Dick Schofield, a single to Bob Boone, and a two-run homer to Gary Pettis. McNamara pulled his pitcher, but the damage was done, and Boyd took a 5-3 loss. After Dave Henderson‘s heroics saved the Red Sox from elimination in Game Five, Boyd was the starting pitcher in Game Six back home in Boston. He worked seven full innings, giving up three runs, and left with a comfortable 10-3 lead that wound up a win.

After Boston won World Series Games One and Two at Shea Stadium, Oil Can Boyd was asked to start Game Three at Fenway. It didn’t go well. Leadoff batter Lenny Dykstra homered. Two singles and a Gary Carter double produced a second run and saw runners on second and third with still not an out. With one out, Danny Heep singled in two more. It was 4-0 Mets before the Red Sox came to bat. Boyd worked seven innings, giving up only two more runs over the next six, but Boston scored just one run all evening. The way it worked out, he wasn’t called upon to pitch again at any point in the remaining four games. Naturally, like any competitive athlete, he wished he’d been given the opportunity. He didn’t think the Mets would be able to beat him twice in a row. “We had an opportunity to win Game Seven. I pitched very well in Game Three; after the first inning, I pitched overly well. If I came out with that same momentum, knowing the hitters like I did, facing the same guys … no, no, no. I’ve got too good a stuff. I’m too good a pitcher. I can’t see myself giving up more than two or three runs and getting into the seventh or eighth inning, no question.”15

Though 1985 and 1986 were his best seasons, “Can” (as he was called) acknowledges he had a serious problem with cocaine. He was hospitalized before the ’86 campaign began. “I had the whole cover story about hepatitis,” he wrote, “but it was flat-out me smoking crack every damn day. I was smoking cocaine, freebasing, doing crack; they had all kind of names for it back then. But whatever you call it, that’s what I was doing.”16 Helping counsel him through this was team physician and co-owner Dr. Arthur Pappas. “He was almost like a father figure to me at that time.”17

Because he had pitched so well both in 1985 and 1986, Boyd felt he should have been selected for the All-Star Game. He took being passed over the first time, but in 1986 when he clearly was having an exceptional year and was second in the league in victories, he snapped at what he took as a snub (Mike Boddicker had the same number of wins as Boyd and was also passed over) – and Boyd bolted. He quit the team. It didn’t go over well with him teammates; Don Baylor said, “No one player is bigger than the team.”18  It also wasn’t the first time his volatile behavior had resulted in disciplinary action; he’d been fined a day’s pay after an August 21 loss to the Texas Rangers and a locker-room run-in with Jim Rice.19 In spring training 1987, he’d “exploded” at a writer who questioned him regarding videotapes he had not returned; that became known as “Can’s Film Festival.”20

This time Boyd was suspended for 21 days but eventually came back in early August. While he was out, though, he had gotten into a tussle with some police and his arm had gotten wrenched. He says he never fully recovered. Indeed, though one wouldn’t know looking at his pitching record, he was pitching in pain and subpar for the rest of the season and into 1987. He said he didn’t give up even one run in spring training 1987, but the pain remained. He was able to pitch in only seven games all year, until surgery in August when it was discovered he had a hairline fracture.

The problem finally fixed, Boyd was able to start 23 games in 1988 (9-7, with a 5.34 ERA) but though the Red Sox reached the postseason once more, Boyd had developed blood clots and wasn’t able to pitch after August 26. He started the 1989 season with the Red Sox but had an even poorer start and from the beginning of May to the start of September, all he could manage was to get into three games in the minors for a total of 12 innings.

After becoming a free agent, Boyd signed with the Montreal Expos in early December 1989, and he enjoyed his time with the Expos: “It was the best time I ever had playing baseball.”21 And he had a very good year in 1990, 31 starts and a 2.93 earned-run average – the best of his career. His record was 10-6, reflecting the fact that many of the games were resolved in the late innings. He pitched most of the 1991 season with Montreal, his 3.52 ERA not reflected in his 6-8 record, but he was traded to the Texas Rangers on July 21, for three players. He took it personally that he’d been traded, an indication to him that the Expos didn’t want him.22 Texas didn’t suit Boyd at all and it showed in his work, 2-7 with a 6.68 ERA the rest of the season.

As it happened, Oil Can never got back to the big leagues. His final stats show him 78-77 with a 4.04 ERA over 10 seasons in the majors.

The Pirates organization signed Boyd to a minor-league contract for 1992, but he came to understand that as somewhat of a difficult personality, “I knew I’d been blackballed out of the game.”23 When Indians manager Mike Hargrove gave him a look in the spring of 1994, Boyd quotes him as saying, “If it was my choice and I was in control of this, you would be in my rotation. You wouldn’t just be on my pitching staff, you’d be in my five-man rotation. But your personality is bigger than your right arm.”24

In 1993 Boyd played in the Mexican League for Industriales of Monterrey (at one point earning 11 consecutive saves in 11 consecutive days), and in the first part of 1994 he pitched for the Yucatán Leones. He finished the year with the Sioux City Explorers in the independent Northern League, where pitched again in 1995. There were occasional problems that cropped up off the field, but Boyd played some independent ball in Maine and Massachusetts, in 1996 and 1997.

He also tried to become a developer in Meridian that year, building homes on spec, but lost it all when none of the black families who were interested could get financing from local banks. When he moved back north to rejoin his wife and family, a woman he’d been seeing in Meridian was upset and said she was going to burn his things. He responded heatedly, and she recorded the conversations. “I threatened to beat her ass if she burned my stuff.”25 It was the kind of thing people might understandably say in what they thought was private. Boyd’s words, uttered across state lines, led to his arrest by the FBI. After some twists and turns, he wound up in the Fort Dix Federal Penitentiary for 120 days.

At age 45, Can pitched again, in 2005, in the independent Canadian-American League for the Brockton Rox. He worked in 17 games and was 4-5 with a 3.83 ERA.

The year 2005 was, as Boyd puts it, “my last year of professional baseball.”  He’s kept busy since then, living in East Providence, Rhode Island.  “I’ve been doing a lot teaching up here.  A lot of lessons from the beginning of January through May. I got a book out. I’m working on a minor-league baseball project down in Mississippi, to bring minor-league baseball to my hometown of Meridian, Mississippi. It’s a project I started on years ago but it’s finally in the last stages of actually materializing in the next year or so. And I’m getting ready to do a reality TV show. It’s called Second Chance. They’re going to do 12 episodes, over 24 months.

“I do a lot of charity things. I do a lot of stuff with the Red Sox over the summer.  Some cameo appearances, motivating speaking, autograph signing.”26

Boyd has two children – Dennis, and his daughter Tala – in their 20s as of this writing in 2015. “And I’m a granddad. Looking forward to that part of my life, too.”

Sources

In addition to the sources noted in this biography, the author also consulted the Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball, Retrosheet.org, Baseball-Reference.com, and the SABR Minor Leagues Database, accessed online at Baseball-Reference.com.

Notes

1 Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd with Mike Shalin, They Call Me Oil Can (Chicago: Triumph Books, 2012), 9-11. Chaney was a native of Meridian and a “close friend” of Frank Boyd. See p. 13.

2 Ibid., v.

3 Ibid., 16.

4 Author interview with Dennis Boyd, January 6, 2015.

5 They Call Me Oil Can, 27.

6 Sports Illustrated, April 1, 2013.

7 Author interview with Dennis Boyd, January 6, 2015.

8 Photograph and caption in the photo insert in They Call Me Oil Can.

9 Ibid., 46, 47.

10 In his autobiography, Boyd devotes a full chapter to cocaine and its effect on him. See Ibid., 59-74.

11 Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican, August 14, 1982.

12 Boston Herald, August 29, 1982.

13 Boston Herald, May 20, 1984. The assessment was Joe Giuliotti’s.

14 Boyd, They Call Me Oil Can, 136.

15 Author interview with Dennis Boyd, January 6, 2015.

16 In the Boston Globe, March 13, 1986, Pappas explained Boyd’s prolonged illness and six-day hospital stay as due to a noncontagious form of hepatitis.”  In They Call Me Oil Can, Boyd told about the time he was pitching in Oakland and had a few rocks of crack in his baseball cap, which scattered on the mound when his cap flew off of his head after one energetic pitch. See page 71.

17 Ibid., 70.

18 Boston Globe, July 11, 1986.

19 “Boyd, Rice in clubhouse tiff,” Boston Herald, August 22, 1985.

20 Boston Globe, February 28, 1989.

21 Boyd, They Call Me Oil Can, 89.

22 Ibid., 90-91.

23 Ibid., 95.

24 Ibid., 97.

25 Ibid., 117. The story of his experiences as a developer is on pages 112ff.

26 Author interview with Dennis Boyd, January 6, 2015.

Michael Gary Brown was born on March 24, 1959, in Camden County, New Jersey. In 1977, when he pitched for Marshall High School in Vienna, Virginia, he was drafted in the 20th round by the Atlanta Braves, but chose to attend Clemson University. 

Pitching for Clemson, Brown had a 23-9 record with a 3.25 ERA, mostly as a starter. He was second-team All Atlantic Coast Conference in his first year (1978) and first-team All ACC his last year (1980). In the latter year he pitched a seven-inning perfect game in 1980 against UNC-Wilmington. Among his teammates was future major leaguer Jimmy Key. Brown led the Tigers in victories in 1978 and 1980 with nine wins each season. These high marks led the Red Sox to draft Brown in the second round in 1980, the 48th overall selection.

Brown got his feet wet in professional baseball by pitching in 17 games for the Winter Haven Red Sox of the Class-A Florida State League in 1980. He was 3-4 with a 4.31 ERA. Perhaps Brown’s best year in professional baseball was 1981; in 21 starts he was 14-4 with a 1.49 ERA for the Winston-Salem Red Sox of the Carolina League. Brown led the team in wins, ERA, complete games, shutouts (6), innings pitched (145.0), strikeouts (144), WHIP (0.917), and strikeout/walk ratio (3.69). That earned him a promotion to Bristol of the Double-A Eastern League for 1982. There, Brown made 15 starts, going 9-6 with a 2.45 ERA, and earned a September call-up (along with teammate Oil Can Boyd) to the third-place Red Sox.  

Brown debuted on September 16, 1982, in Detroit, throwing the final inning in a 4-2 loss to the Tigers. He gave up a single but no runs. Eleven days later, on the 27th, he pitched the final inning against the New York Yankees at Fenway Park. Dave Winfield doubled to lead off the inning but tried to stretch it to a triple and was thrown out. Brown retired the next two batters. His third and final appearance came against the Yankees in New York. He came into a game tied 3-3. Brown worked four innings, allowed five hits and a base on balls, but no runs, and picked up the win when the Red Sox scored twice in the top of the 11th.

The Red Sox liked what they saw, and gave Brown a rotation spot in 1983 along with his Bristol teammate Boyd. Manager Ralph Houk believed Brown would make the rotation based on his short stint in 1982. “I had him penciled in after the last day of last season. He knows how to pitch. … This kid is really a good pitcher,” Houk said.2 Brown was a bit more modest about his minor-league stats, including 307 strikeouts in 326 innings to that point. “The strikeouts are deceptive,” he said. “I’m not going to be a big strikeout pitcher in the big leagues. I struck out all those in A and Double A with my slider, like the night I punched out 17 in Hagerstown in ’81. Major-league hitters hit that slider.”3 

Brown’s first major-league start came in the Red Sox’ third game of the season, against the Texas Rangers. He pitched six innings, giving up two runs while striking out seven. He got a no-decision, as the Red Sox won 8-5. Brown ended April 1-2 with a 6.00 ERA. His strikeout-to-walk ratio was less than one. May was a bounce-back month, though. He was 3-1 with a 2.75 ERA in six starts (three complete games, including a shutout of the Seattle Mariners, his future team). Brown continued his hot pitching through mid-June, but cooled off at the very end. He was shut down for the entire month of September due to a sore arm, which was a lingering effect of a pulled groin muscle he suffered in Toronto on May 28. He ended the year 6-6 with a 4.67 ERA.

Houk went into the offseason with high hopes for Brown. “If Mike Brown can throw a lot during the winter and get his arm in good shape before we get to spring training, he can be a winner,” the manager said.4 Brown did rehab during the offseason,5 and broke camp with the Red Sox after spring training in 1984. The rough end to the 1983 season continued. 

In the last spring-training game, Brown was drilled in the shin by a Steve Garvey line drive. Initial reports indicated Brown would not be ready for his first start of the regular season.6 Brown defied the odds and returned to action a week later. This return might have been premature, as he was roughed up in his first start, lasting only a third of an inning in Oakland and giving up six runs. May was once again his best month of the year, when he brought down his ERA by over a run to 5.40. Boston sent him to Pawtucket for some additional work. Brown started 12 games for Pawtucket, going 6-3 with a 3.40 ERA, but this success did not translate to the major leagues when he was recalled. Over his last four outings, Brown had an ERA of over 10.00, and wound up with a record of 1-8.

Brown did not make the Red Sox out of spring training in 1985, but was called up after three starts at Pawtucket. After two starts totaling 3⅓ innings, with eight runs given up. Brown was sent back to Pawtucket in mid-May to pitch mostly out of the bullpen. Brown’s time with Pawtucket was not much better than with Boston, as he had a 2-5 record with a 5.60 ERA in 20 games. 

Brown came to spring training in 1986 with a purpose. “It’s time for me to either be in the big leagues or be with another team,” he said. “I don’t have any arm problems; I just need the chance to throw. Nothing against the Red Sox, but if I don’t get a chance to pitch, I should move on. I know I can pitch. The thing I don’t understand is why I got filed away last year.”7 He carried that attitude over to the regular season. His first start for Boston was a seven-inning two-run win over the White Sox. Brown was a mainstay in the rotation in May and June, but was replaced when the Red Sox traded for veteran Tom Seaver. Brown was moved to the bullpen, where he struggled. In four relief appearances, he gave up eight runs in 4⅓ innings, and he was sent back to Pawtucket in July. 

In August Brown got his wish of being on another team when he was traded to Seattle on the 22nd in a five-player deal, a momentous one as it turned out. While Boston was gearing up for its eventual pennant, the Mariners were mired in last place. The trade netted the Red Sox Spike Owen and the star of the 1986 ALCS, Dave Henderson. It was a two-part trade; on the 19th, Rey Quiñones and cash went to the Mariners with players to be named later. Three days later, the two players named were Mike Brown and Mike Trujillo.

Brown was given two starts by Seattle in August; his first was a disaster, while his second showed promise. The September call-ups again pushed Brown to the bullpen, where he continued to struggle in four relief appearances. 

The last year Brown wore a major-league uniform as a player was 1987. He spent the entire season in Triple A except for one mid-August outing for Seattle at Minnesota. He lasted only a third of an inning, giving up three hits and two runs. He was returned to Triple-A Calgary, and sent to Baltimore in a trade for fellow minor leaguer Nelson Simmons a week later. Brown made one start for Triple-A Rochester.

Brown signed a minor-league deal with the Cleveland Indians in the offseason, and played the entire season at Triple-A Colorado Springs. As primarily a starter, he went 10-9 with a 6.12 ERA. That was his last season as a player in Organized Baseball.

For the next three seasons Brown managed Cleveland’s Class-A affiliate in Columbus, Georgia. In 1992 he was named pitching coach for the Yankees’ Triple-A affiliate, the Columbus (Ohio) Clippers. During those two years, Brown worked with many future major leaguers, including Sterling Hitchcock and Bob Wickman. Brown was promoted to the Yankees as a major-league bullpen coach in 1994.

Brown returned to the Indians organization in 1995 as the pitching coordinator. He also held the titles of assistant director of minor leagues and special assistant to the GM until he was named pitching coach in 2002. Brown helped the development of CC Sabathia, Jake Westbrook, and Cliff Lee. Brown was let go at the end of the season, and moved on to Japan for four seasons, including a stint as the pitching coach for the 2006 Japan Series champion Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters.

Brown returned to the United States and joined the Arizona Diamondbacks as a scout in 2007. In 2015 he completed his ninth year in the position. That same year his son MJ Brown was an infielder on the baseball team at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the notes, the author also consulted:

2015 Arizona Diamondbacks Media Guide

Clemson University 2015 Baseball Media Guide

Notes

1 Peter Gammons, “The Go-All-Out All-Star Team,” Boston Globe, June 13, 1980.

2 Peter Gammons, “Head Start for Sox; Mike Brown Is Thinking Man’s Pitcher,” Boston Globe, March 31, 1983.

3 Ibid.

4 Peter Gammons, “Houk Makes His Pitch for the ’84 Season,” Boston Globe, October 4, 1983.

5 Lewiston (Maine) Journal, February 27, 1984: 11.

6 Peter Gammons, “Brown Hit in Leg, Will Miss At Least 1 Start with Bruise,” Boston Globe, April 2, 1984.

7 Dan Shaughnessy, “Order Is Maintained,” Boston Globe, March 06, 1986.

Bill Buckner was a gamer. He played the game of baseball as hard as any player of his generation. Los Angeles Dodgers manager Walter Alston once said of Buckner, “He gets the red neck a lot, but I sort of like that.”2 Alston was referring to the fiery temper and intensity that fueled Buckner’s approach at the plate and in the field. Buckner detested strikeouts, which he considered failure. In nine different seasons he ranked either first or second in his league in at-bats per strikeout.

To say Buckner played hurt is an understatement. He suffered a severe ankle injury in 1975 and never fully recovered. For the remainder of his career, he was forced to rely on a series of elaborate pregame rituals in order to force his body onto the baseball field. Chicago Cubs manager Herman Franks once remarked, “You should see this guy getting ready for a game. He rides that bike in there and does all kind of exercises. Then he goes in, and Tony (trainer Garofalo) tapes him from here to here.”3

A selfless player in an age of big salaries and bigger egos, Buckner was willing to switch positions when it meant improving the lineup and the club’s chances of winning. Before the ankle injury, he was a speedy outfielder capable of making outstanding catches. After the injury he gradually evolved into a full-time first baseman, making his last appearance as an outfielder in 1984. Over the course of his career, he played well over 600 games in the outfield and more than 1,500 games at first base. At the plate he possessed a compact swing capable of generating extra-base power to all fields. He won the National League batting title in 1980 and twice led the league in doubles. That he managed to do so despite lingering effects from the ankle injury is a tribute to his toughness.

His hustle and determination on the field brought with it the admiration and respect of teammates, opponents and those who merely watched him play. Columnist Dick Young once called Buckner “one of the guttiest players around today. He plays with a bad ankle, takes an aspirin and steals a base.”4 Buckner once cited Pete Rose’s style of play as an inspiration for his own and, like Rose, exuded immense confidence on the field. He set an example for his teammates to follow and sacrificed his body for the opportunity to play winning baseball. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that, were it not for the ankle injury, it might be easy to imagine Buckner having fashioned a career worthy of enshrinement in Cooperstown. He was one of the purest hitters of his generation, topping the .300 mark in seven different seasons.

William Joseph Buckner was born on December 14, 1949, in Vallejo, California. He was raised by his parents, Leonard and Marie Katherine Buckner, in American Canyon, California. His father died when Bill was a teenager. His mother worked for more than 20 years as a captain’s stenographer for the California Highway Patrol. In 1971 she remarried, to Harold Eugene McCall, a California Highway Patrol officer. Bill was raised with his three siblings, brothers Bob and Jim, and Jim’s twin sister, Jan. It was Marie who saw to it that the Buckner kids found their way into organized baseball. While attending a Cub Scout mothers meeting, she signed her boys up for Little League. “I thought it would keep them busy and out of trouble,” she recalled. “So they signed up. Their father was active in Little League with them, and they all used to practice in the living room. Even my daughter, Jan played softball in Napa and won a trophy to keep up with her brothers.”5 Bill was a natural athlete, and advanced for his age. As a seven-year-old, Marie falsified Bill’s birth certificate in order to get him into Little League a year early.6 He excelled from the beginning. His brother Bob, recalling Bill’s days in Little League, has said, “Pretty soon he was telling everyone what to do. Nobody could play the sun field, so he told the coach to put him out there. Here was this little kid with freckles showing everyone how to do it.”7 Even as a seven-year-old, Bill Buckner was intense. He probably got the “red neck” from time to time, back then, too.

Buckner was an A-minus student in high school who excelled on the gridiron as well as the baseball diamond. As a pass-catching end for the Napa High Indians, he compiled 963 receiving yards on 61 total catches, good enough to be named to the Coaches All-American team two years in a row. As a first baseman on the baseball team, he hit a whopping .667 in 1967 and .529 in ’68. Recalling high school, Buckner stated, “I was very goal-oriented. I was going to go to school and college, play sports, and go on to professional baseball. I didn’t spend a lot of time doing nothing.”8 He narrowed his college choices down to USC and Stanford. But his reputation as a hitter caught the attention of big-league scouts. Former New York Yankees second baseman and California Angels scout Joe Gordon recalled that Buckner “had the finest swing I saw anywhere on the West Coast, and probably is one of the best young hitters in baseball with his compact swing and power to all fields. He seems to have complete control of his bat and his body.”9 For the goal-oriented Buckner, college would have to wait.

The Los Angeles Dodgers selected Buckner in the second round with the 25th overall pick of the June 1968 amateur draft. That was a historically great draft class for the Dodgers, who managed to acquire 15 future major leaguers from among the four draft phases that existed in 1968. Bobby Valentine, Davey Lopes, Tom Paciorek, Doyle Alexander, Steve Garvey, and Ron Cey were among the young players who joined Buckner as new members of the Dodgers organization.

Buckner was assigned to the Ogden Dodgers in the rookie-class Pioneer League. His manager was Tommy Lasorda. Buckner played every game at first base, and recorded a .344 average in 275 plate appearances while swiping 15 bases in 16 tries. Paciorek, Buckner, and Garvey finished 1-2-3 in the batting race, propelling Ogden to the best won-loss record in the league. After the season ended, Buckner attended the University of Southern California, where he roomed with his Ogden teammate and roommate, Bobby Valentine.

Buckner began the 1969 season at Double-A Albuquerque, where he batted .307 in 70 games. On July 24 he was promoted to Triple-A Spokane to replace first baseman Tommy Hutton, who had been called up by the Dodgers to fill in for the injured Wes Parker. His .315 mark in 36 games led to a September promotion to Los Angeles. On September 21 Buckner pinch-hit for pitcher Jim Brewer and popped out to second base in a 4-3 loss to Gaylord Perry and the San Francisco Giants, his lone appearance for the Dodgers that season. After the season, Buckner batted .350 with 10 stolen bases in 46 games in the Arizona Instructional League. He played 38 games in the outfield, improving his chances to gain more playing time with the big club the following season.

Buckner was expected to compete for a roster spot on the Dodgers in 1970. Dodgers manager Walter Alston suggested, “It’s possible Bill could be our starting left fielder. He’ll certainly get a good look in the spring.”10 Buckner, not lacking for confidence, responded by saying, “I think I can hit .300 in the majors. I know I’m a better hitter right now than some who have been playing there.”11 Some within the Dodgers organization were urging Alston to commit to playing Buckner. Scout Goldie Holt told club vice president Al Campanis, “Buckner has so much ability and is so far advanced that I would put him in left field and leave him there against all kinds of pitching.”12 Holt was not the only one who predicted big things for Buckner. When the Dodgers traveled to Pompano Beach to play the Washington Senators in a spring training match-up, the Dodgers’ batting practice turned into a hitting clinic of sorts as players and coaches gathered around Washington manager Ted Williams, who discussed hitting techniques. After watching Buckner take some swings in the batting cage, Williams remarked, “You don’t have to worry. You’re going to be an excellent hitter one of these days.”13 He predicted Buckner would eventually win a batting title.

Buckner received the Dearie Mulvey Memorial Award as the Dodgers’ outstanding rookie of the spring after batting .303 in 19 games with a club-leading five doubles and five stolen bases. He didn’t commit an error in the field or strike out at the plate. His performance earned him a place on the big-league roster, and he opened the regular season as the starting left fielder. He recorded his first major-league hit on April 8 against the Cincinnati Reds, but struggled to a .121 average in 14 games. In early May he was optioned along with Steve Garvey to Spokane. Buckner opted not to immediately report to Spokane in order to complete his semester of college courses at Southern California. He was given permission by the Dodgers to remain in Los Angeles to complete the courses and reported roughly three weeks later to Spokane. Dodgers general manager Al Campanis, who approved Buckner’s request, said he didn’t “understand what Billy was doing about his schooling when we were on the road. If he was making up the courses through correspondence, why can’t he continue to do so from Spokane? He certainly has our permission to return for tests.”14 Once Buckner arrived at Spokane, he wasted little time. He recorded seven hits in nine at-bats before suffering a broken jaw in a collision with teammates Davey Lopes and Bobby Valentine. He played two games before x-rays revealed the fracture. Recalling the injury, Spokane manager Tommy Lasorda said, “Buck broke his jaw and the front office told me to sit him out for five weeks. Buckner missed only one game and wound up hitting .335 and learned to spit and swear with his jaw wired shut.”15 He strung together a 12-game hitting streak in July, and wound up as one of seven Spokane batters to hit at or above .300. The club’s .299 team average established a modern Pacific Coast League record. Buckner, who played 65 games at first base and 57 in the outfield, was one of six Spokane players named to the PCL All-Star Team. He was recalled by the Dodgers in September and batted .257 in 14 games to raise his overall major-league season average to .191.

Buckner stuck with the Dodgers as an outfielder out of spring training in 1971. He liked playing for the Dodgers, confidently declaring, “I know I can play in the big leagues and hit .300, and I hope it’s with the Dodgers because this club has a good chance to win, and that means a lot of money. In fact, it means more than my entire season’s salary. This club gives you something to shoot for.”16 He hit his first big-league home run in the second game of the season and went on a tear in June and July. He hit his first career grand slam on July 27 in an 8-5 win over Pittsburgh, his second five-RBI game of the month. San Francisco Giants manager Charlie Fox observed of Buckner, “I think his position eventually will be first base, and I’d like to have him right now to fill in there when we needed him. He’s going to be quite a hitter.”17 Buckner and some of the other young Dodgers batters faded late in the season. He finished at .277 in 108 games as the Dodgers placed second in the National League West behind the Giants. He was selected as an outfielder on the Topps Rookie All-Star Team. Since the previous season, Buckner had been the subject of frequent trade rumors, as other teams coveted the Dodgers’ young talent. While speaking at a banquet in Southern California, Buckner said of the trade rumors, “The Dodgers may now have Frank Robinson and Tommy John, but they won’t have a chance at the pennant if they trade me.”18 He and the club expected big things in 1972.

Buckner caught fire at the plate in July 1972 to move into the top 10 among National League batting leaders (though lacking enough at-bats to qualify) while earning starting opportunities against righties and lefties. He hit in 13 of 16 games, going 25-for-57 with two home runs, three stolen bases, and 15 RBIs. In all, he played in 105 games, splitting time between first base and the outfield, while improving his batting average to .319. Many felt that Buckner was a good bet to replace the retiring Wes Parker at first base in 1973. After the season he enrolled for the fall semester at the University of Southern California as a junior in the School of Business Administration.

Buckner once again split time at first and in the outfield in 1973. He finished the season batting .275 with 12 stolen bases in 14 attempts, while scoring 68 runs. The Dodgers managed their fourth straight second-place finish in the division, this time 3½ games behind the Cincinnati Reds.

Before the 1974 season began, several Dodgers went Hollywood. Buckner, Tom Paciorek, and Tommy Lasorda agreed to shaves and haircuts for the opportunity to serve as extras in scenes filmed for The Godfather Part II in Santa Domingo, Dominican Republic, in January 1974. As Paciorek recalled it, “After we spent all day there getting fitted for uniforms and getting our hair cut, they called and told us that our parts had been canceled. Later, Tommy, Buck, and I were going deep-sea fishing. Buck wanted to get in the film and they were filming that night, so we went back. The scene they were filming is when Michael Corleone finds out it was Fredo. We are in that scene. We didn’t actually get our faces in the scene, but my right arm is!”19

Buckner enjoyed his best season to date in 1974. He hit in 17 straight games before going hitless in the second game of a doubleheader on May 15 against Houston. He had four hits in his next game, against Atlanta. He also made play after play in the outfield, including several highlight-reel-quality catches, prompting The Sporting News to note, “Even more impressive than Buckner’s hitting has been his fielding. The left fielder has made five brilliant catches.”20 Buckner finished the regular season batting .314, and with his stellar defensive play received some modest consideration for National League MVP. Dodgers pitcher Don Sutton said, “And Buckner. Wow! If he doesn’t get some votes – I mean a lot of votes – it’s an injustice. He’s made so many unbelievable catches out in left field we’re starting to take him for granted.”21 Buckner finished 25th in the voting.

The Dodgers won 102 games and the division, and beat the Pittsburgh Pirates three games to one to advance to the 1974 World Series against the two-time defending World Series champion Oakland A’s. The clubs split the first two games, and Oakland took Game Three despite an eighth-inning home run by Buckner off ace Catfish Hunter. As motivation prior to the start of Game Four, A’s owner Charlie Finley called a team meeting and read a San Francisco Examiner article that quoted Buckner as suggesting the A’s were an inferior ballclub. The article quoted Buckner as saying, “I definitely think we have a better ballclub than they do. The A’s have only a couple of players who could play on our club. Reggie Jackson is outstanding. Sal Bando and Joe Rudi are good and they have a good pitching staff. Other than that … I think if we played them 162 times, we could beat them 100.”22 Oakland won Game Four by a score of 5-2. In the top of the eighth inning of the decisive Game Five, Buckner laced a hit to center, but was thrown out trying to stretch it all the way to third base, ending any threat to mount a late-inning scoring opportunity. He made no apologies for the play, noting, “It was something I did all year and I’ll do it again. I can’t stop taking chances because I got caught once.”23 Dodgers manager Walter Alston agreed, calling it “one of those plays. If you make it, it’s a great play. If you don’t, it’s a bad play. We let our players go all season. We want them to play aggressively. Bill just ran into two great throws, a perfect throw from the outfield and a perfect throw from the relay man.”24 The A’s, the club with only “a couple of players” who could play on the Dodgers, clinched their third straight World Series title with a 3-2 victory.

Buckner hoped to build upon his successful 1974 campaign the following season. But it was not meant to be. The 1975 season proved trying for Buckner, who suffered a severely sprained left ankle sliding into second base against the Giants on April 18. Forced to wear a cast, he did not return to the playing field until May 16, and he went hitless in eight of his first nine games back. His ankle never healed. Suffering from a pulled thigh muscle as well, he remained in the lineup, saying, “Every game is critical now, so I’ve got to keep playing. Between that and the bad ankle, I must be carrying three pounds of tape around every night. I can’t be as aggressive as I want to be. I can’t bunt. If I hit grounders on the infield I can’t beat ’em out. That’s probably 35 or 40 hits over the whole season.”25 Managing a meager .243 batting average in just 92 games, Buckner was finally shelved in late August and had ankle surgery on September 1.

With his season over, Buckner believed himself to be a trade option for the Dodgers, offering, “I definitely think I’m available. It all depends on what the Dodgers decide that they need. I’ve been hurt and I think the Dodger management is the best in baseball. But you have to remember that there’s no sentiment in baseball.”26 Nevertheless, he opened the 1976 season as the Dodgers’ starting left fielder and rebounded to play 154 games, bat .301 and set a new career high with 60 runs driven in. He sat out three games in late April/early May with a sprained left ankle, but returned on May 2 to beat out a pinch-bunt single to beat the St. Louis Cardinals. “I figured I could hold my breath four seconds,” Buckner said of the surprise bunt.27 He once again underwent surgery on his left ankle at the conclusion of the season.

On January 11, 1977, The Dodgers traded Buckner, shortstop Iván de Jesús, and minor-league pitcher Jeff Albert to the Chicago Cubs for outfielder Rick Monday and pitcher Mike Garman. Initially Buckner was furious and bitter, but eventually warmed to the idea. Of the trade, he said, “Sure, I’ll miss the Dodgers. And I’ll miss Tommy Lasorda. Lasorda raised me up. I even played for him when he was managing in the minors. I was looking forward to playing for him in his first year as the Dodger manager. At least I know this: The Cubs wanted me. The Dodgers didn’t.”28 The Cubs intended to make Buckner their everyday first baseman.

Buckner’s Cubs debut was placed on hold, as he began the season on the disabled list, still recovering from ankle surgery and a fractured left index finger suffered the first week of spring training. He delivered a pinch-hit single in his first game, on April 19, and proceeded to hit safely in eight of his first 10 games. He was relegated to pinch-hitting duties for most of May after re-injuring his left ankle while trying to go from first to third in a game on May 4. Buckner returned to the starting lineup on June 6, but struggled at the plate before catching fire in August. He exacted a sort of revenge on the Dodgers on August 19, recording four hits, including a pair of home runs, to go along with five RBIs in a 6-2 win in Chicago.

Years later Buckner fondly recalled, “I felt better than I had that game and my ankle didn’t seem to bother me at all. The Dodgers were going good – they had something like a 12-game lead in their division – and we were struggling. I seldom had as good a stretch in my career. Altogether I had eight hits, eight runs batted in and three homers in three games. I don’t think any other achievement in baseball has given me as much satisfaction. I’d shown the Dodgers I could still play.”29

Buckner’s August included one six-game stretch in which he went 14-for-28 with two home runs, two doubles, and seven RBIs. He was voted NL Player of the Week for the period ended August 21. He did so while playing hurt every day. Cubs manager Herman Franks lamented, “Lord knows where we’d be if we had him healthy all season. He’s probably playing at no more than 50 percent. I’d just like to have him at 90 percent next year.”30 The Cubs played .500 ball in 1977 and finished fourth in the NL East Division, 20 games behind the Philadelphia Phillies. As the season drew to a close, Buckner was considered among the leading candidates for the annual Hutch award, given to a player “who best exemplifies the character, fighting spirit, and competitive desire” of Fred Hutchinson, who died of cancer. He finished the 1977 season with a .284 average and a career-high 11 home runs.

Despite his initial misgivings about the trade, Buckner embraced the city of Chicago. His gritty hustle on the field made him a fan favorite. With the acquisition of free-agent slugger Dave Kingman, optimism ran high going into the 1978 season. Buckner, often hobbling on his bad left ankle, turned in a .323 average and 74 runs batted in. But the Cubs finished in third place, four games under .500. In the offseason, Buckner utilized ballet techniques in an effort to stay fit and improve his legs and ankle. He decided to stay the winter in Chicago. No one on the club made more personal appearances. General manager Bob Kennedy remarked of Buckner, “He’s the one guy we can count on to get out and represent us. He’s our Steady Eddie, just like he is at the plate.”31 In the winter, Buckner accepted the Player of the Year Award from Chicago’s baseball writers at their annual Diamond Dinner.

The following spring, Buckner was one of 17 players under consideration for the annual Roberto Clemente Award, given to the man who “best exemplifies baseball on and off the field.” He agreed to a contract extension through 1984 for an estimated $1.3 million. The deal was applauded by the fan base. Chicago baseball writer Dave Nightingale described Buckner’s place in the hearts and minds of Cubs fans by writing, “He created an image that was totally foreign to the Cubs last year by running out grounders to second base with his leg dragging behind him. He didn’t peel off to the dugout at the 45-foot mark.”32 The 1979 Cubs were a disappointment, despite a career year from Kingman and a Cy Young season from reliever Bruce Sutter. In one of the season’s strangest games, Buckner had four hits, including a grand slam, and seven RBIs in a 23-22 10-inning loss to the Phillies on May 17. He finished the season with a .284 average and 14 home runs. The club finished a disappointing fifth place with an 80-82 record.

Cubs manager Herman Franks announced his retirement at season’s end, but sparked controversy on his way out when an article by Bob Nightengale appeared in the Chicago Tribune headlined, “Franks Blasts Cubs ‘Whiners.’” Franks criticized several players including Buckner, of whom he is quoted as saying, “I thought he was the All-American boy. I thought he was the kind of guy who’d dive in the dirt to save ballgames for you. What I found out after being around him for a while is that he’s nuts. … He doesn’t care about the team. All he cares about is Bill Buckner.”33 Upon reading the comments, Buckner was furious. In an interview with the Tribune, he said, “Have you ever seen a rip job like that? He’d better come down here and give me an apology before the whole team. I’ve been busting my tail for three years. I’ve played when I shouldn’t be playing. The fans have appreciated me in the past. I don’t know how many millions read that paper and it’s really making me look like an idiot.”34 Franks ultimately refused to apologize for the comments, but stated that he wished they had not been printed.

Buckner married flight attendant Jody Schenck on Long Island on February 16, 1980. They planned to move to Chicago from a northwest suburb. Buckner found an old church that was being converted into condominiums and bought the tower apartment. As is the case every spring, the Cubs began the 1980 season hoping to compete. For his part, Buckner went to the plate 114 times before finally striking out against Joe Beckwith of the Dodgers on May 14. When the Cubs acquired slugging first baseman Cliff Johnson from the Cleveland Indians in June, Buckner volunteered to go the outfield to make room for Johnson’s bat in the lineup. Asked about the move, he responded simply, “I’d rather not, but if it will help the club, I’ll do it.”35 Despite a bad ankle, bad feet, and bad legs, a 10-game hitting streak that ended on September 14 saw him push to the lead in the batting race. He went 0-for-4 on the final day of the season, but finished ahead of the St. Louis Cardinals’ Keith Hernandez, .324 to .321, for the batting title. As the end of the season neared, articles started appearing suggesting that Buckner wanted out of Chicago. Commenting on the club’s season, he confessed, “I’ve never been this depressed ever in baseball.”36 After the season he asked general manager Bob Kennedy for a trade. “I feel maybe it’s time to make a move,” he said. “I’m in my prime, but it doesn’t seem like they’re going to put a winning club on the field. If I thought we had a chance to be competitive, I’d stay.”37 Buckner was once again honored as the Chicago Player of the Year by the Chicago chapter of the Baseball Writers Association of America.

With four seasons remaining on his contract, Buckner threatened to sit out the 1981 season on his cattle ranch in Idaho if the Cubs did not renegotiate his $310,000-a-year contract. He was the frequent subject of trade rumors, and was nearly dealt to the Yankees for pitcher Dave Righetti in the spring. For season he batted .311, led the league with 35 doubles, made his first All-Star Team, and finished 10th in MVP voting. But Buckner’s dissatisfaction with losing and his desire to leave Chicago became a constant issue for the remainder of his time with the Cubs. Before the 1982 season, the Cubs renegotiated his contract and he responded by establishing new personal bests with 201 hits, 15 home runs, and 105 runs batted in. He again finished 10th in MVP voting. When offseason rumors swirled around the possibility of Steve Garvey becoming a Cub, Buckner was more than receptive if it improved the team. “I want to be on a winning club more than anyone. If that’s the way they feel they can improve the most, I’ll give it my best shot.” said Buckner, who even volunteered to go back to playing left field.38

Though he batted .280 with a league-leading 38 doubles in 1983, Buckner’s role on the club in 1984 was uncertain. He opened the season as the first baseman, with trade rumors swirling around him, but was quickly benched in favor of Leon Durham. Cubs fans gave Buckner a standing ovation during introductions at the home opener at Wrigley Field. Durham was booed. After the game Cubs manager Jim Frey praised Buckner, saying he “has handled this about as well as a player as good as he is can. I’m proud he hasn’t initiated any problems. … He’s had the chance, with the media around, to go the other way. It would be easy for him to say a lot of negative things. But the only thing he has said is that he wants to play, and I can’t fault him for that.”39 On May 25 Buckner was traded to the Boston Red Sox for pitcher Dennis Eckersley and outfielder Mike Brumley. Buckner was ecstatic, announcing, “It’s a new league and a new park. I’m excited about the deal. You never know how good you have it in baseball until you’re not playing. Trades are part of the game. I was treated very well in Chicago. I have no complaints. But now I’m in Boston, and I just want to get off to a good start and make a good impression.”40 He suited up and started at first base for the Red Sox on May 26 against the Kansas City Royals.

Buckner sparked his new club, batting .321 with nine runs batted in as the Red Sox won 12 of the first 15 games he started. He got his 2,000th hit against the Baltimore Orioles in June, as he quickly acclimated himself to his new surroundings with the Red Sox. Discussing Boston, Buckner declared, “I couldn’t have picked a better place to go. I love the city. I love the ballpark and I like everybody on the team. It’s something to motivate me to do as well as I can so I can play as long as I can.”41 The Red Sox finished the season in fourth place, as Buckner contributed a .278 average, 11 home runs, and 67 runs batted in in 114 games. At the conclusion of the season, he underwent surgery to remove bone fragments from his left elbow.

Boston dropped to fifth place in 1985 with an 81-81 record. Buckner batted .299 with a career-high 110 runs batted in. He finished the season strongly, getting 16 hits and three home runs while driving in 11 runs in his last six games. His 201 hits for the season broke Jimmie Foxx’s 49-year-old franchise record for hits in a season by a first baseman. Reflecting on his performance, Buckner regretted the club’s fortunes, noting, “Personally, it is a very satisfying season. But there is no substitute for winning, and we didn’t win. I thought we were going to do something when we left spring training, but it wasn’t to be. The injuries hurt, and we didn’t play well.”42 The Red Sox and their fans were disappointed, but the pieces were in place for a more successful campaign in 1986.

The 1986 Boston Red Sox finished the season fifth in the American League in runs scored. But the team’s real strength was its pitching staff. Starter Roger Clemens emerged to win 24 games and claim the title of the game’s best pitcher. The entire staff finished second in the league in strikeouts and tied for the third-highest saves total in the league. Buckner recognized the staff’s value and spoke highly of Clemens, saying, “I’ve never played behind a pitcher who I felt so confident behind, so sure that we would win.”43 In July Buckner announced his intention to address painful bone spurs in his left ankle with offseason surgery. Even in constant discomfort, he managed 18 home runs, a new season high, and his third and final 100-plus-RBI season. The Red Sox won the AL East by 5½ games over the Yankees. They beat the California Angels in dramatic fashion to advance to the World Series against the New York Mets. Buckner had batted a disappointing .214 against the Angels, but hobbled into the Series against the Mets confident in his team’s chances.

The Mets won the 1986 World Series. Game Six is now legendary, and widely regarded as one of the greatest games ever played. The Mets won the game in 10 innings, by a score of 6-5. Bill Buckner’s role in the loss is well-known. On the game’s final play, a groundball off the bat of Mets outfielder Mookie Wilson rolled between his legs at first base, allowing Ray Knight to score the winning run and push the series to a decisive Game Seven. The headline in the Boston Herald the next morning read, “Buckner Boots Big Grounder.” Boston went on to lose Game Seven, 8-5, failing to end the organization’s 68-year championship drought known by some as “The Curse of the Bambino.” For many Boston fans and observers, Buckner’s error was the reason the curse remained intact. For Buckner, it marked the beginning of near-constant criticism, heckling, and abuse. His name became synonymous with the derisive term “goat,” and the error was destined to be replayed on television ad nauseam. More than a decade later, Buckner remarked, “I’ll be seeing clips of this thing until the day I die. I accept that. On the other hand, I’ll never understand why.”44 Most experts acknowledged that the error was only one of several mistakes and blunders that contributed to the loss to the Mets. But for many there was little question the bulk of the blame was placed on Buckner’s shoulders. It would prove a heavy burden.

Buckner had offseason surgery on his feet and ankles, but faced a slow rehabilitation process. He started the 1987 season at first base, but after batting .273 with two home runs through 75 games, he was released. The decision, not made easily, prompted Red Sox manager John McNamara to say, “He has been one of the most competitive people I’ve ever been associated with. It wasn’t easy for him to get ready to play, but he had a tolerance for pain and did a great job for us. It was a difficult decision. There was a lot of sentiment involved.”45 For his part, Buckner confidently declared, “I think I can help somebody. I just hope I get the chance to prove it.”46 On July 28 he signed with the California Angels. He batted .306 in 194 plate appearances, and was the club’s top hitter after his signing.

Buckner was released by the Angels on May 9, 1988, while sporting a meager .209 batting average. Four days later he signed with the Kansas City Royals. He remained with the Royals through 1989, primarily serving as a pinch-hitter. He was granted free agency on November 13 and in February 1990 reached agreement to return to the Red Sox. But after batting just .186 in 48 plate appearances, he was released on June 5. Acknowledging that it was the end of the line, Buckner said, “I’m disappointed. I would have liked to finish the last year here. It’s the end of the line and I wanted to be on a winning team. It would have been nice, but…”47 He retired with a .289 career batting average, 2,715 hits, and 498 doubles.

In the summer of 1993, Bill and his wife moved their three children, daughters Brittany and Christen and a son, Bobby, to a ranch in Meridian, Idaho. Buckner’s wife, Jody, described one of the primary benefits of the location, pointing out that Meridian “isn’t a sports town. Nobody in this town would talk about Willie in a derogatory way.”48

Buckner invested in real estate in the Boise area, and worked briefly in the Toronto Blue Jays organization as a hitting instructor. In 1996 he was hired as hitting coach by the Chicago White Sox, replacing his own former hitting tutor, Walt Hriniak. He was fired in August 1997, despite the fact that the club was batting .271, good enough for eighth in the league. Other coaching stops included serving as manager for the Brockton Rox of the independent Can-Am Association in 2011, and as hitting coach for the Boise Hawks, the Chicago Cubs’ short-season affiliate, from 2012 until his announced retirement in March 2014. Stating his desire to spend more time with his family, Buckner said, “Just too much time away. My wife has put up with it for 30-something years. I know that Jody would want me to be home. It was just the right thing to do. I’ve been doing it a long time, and it’s been great. I will miss it. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed working with the kids. Some of them I worked with the last couple years are getting at-bats in spring training now. That’s fun to watch.”49 Buckner worked with several of the young players in the Cubs’ organization who contributed to the club’s appearance in the 2015 postseason.

On April 8, 2008, Bill Buckner returned to Fenway Park to throw out the first pitch at Boston’s home opener. The club was celebrating its 2007 World Series title, and Buckner received a four-minute standing ovation. After the game, an emotional Buckner reflected on the day’s events, saying “[It was] probably about as emotional as it could get. A lot of thoughts [were] going through my mind. I wish I didn’t have to walk all the way from left field, too many things. But just good thoughts, which is a nice thing. I really had to forgive, not the fans of Boston, per se, but in my heart, I had to forgive the media for what they put me and my family through. I’ve done that, and I’m over that and I’m just happy.”50 The Boston fans not only forgave Buckner, but accepted him back with open arms.

On September 17, 2015, President Barack Obama spoke to a friendly crowd of supporters in Boston, where he criticized congressional Republicans for failing to pass a budget and risking a government shutdown. Using sports analogies to make his point, he was quoted saying, “So a shutdown would be completely irresponsible. It’d be an unforced error. A fumble on the goal line. It’d be like a ground ball slippin’ through somebody’s legs.”51 The obvious reference to Bill Buckner and the 1986 World Series drew sharp boos and groans from the crowd. For Bostonians, Buckner was back to being family and that carries with it an allegiance that transcends everything, even politics.

Postscript

Buckner died at the age of 69 on May 27, 2019, after battling Lewy Body Dementia for some time.

This biography was originally published in “The 1986 Boston Red Sox: There Was More Than Game Six” (SABR, 2016), edited by Bill Nowlin and Leslie Heaphy.

Sources

Photo credits: The Topps Company and Boston Red Sox

Notes

1 Paul Dickson. The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1989), 215.

2 The Sporting News, March 25, 1972: 29.

3 The Sporting News, August 27, 1977: 13.

4 The Sporting News, July 16, 1977: 15.

5 Vallejo Times-Herald, October 20, 1974.

6 Jim Kaplan, “He’s Off in a Zone of His Own,” Sports Illustrated, September 13, 1982.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 The Sporting News, October 4, 1969: 10.

10 The Sporting News, January 10, 1970: 51.

11 Ibid.

12 The Sporting News, February 28, 1970: 21.

13 The Sporting News, April 4, 1970: 14.

14 The Sporting News, May 23, 1970: 47.

15 Peter Gammons, “The Hub Hails Its Hobbling Hero,” Sports Illustrated, November 10, 1986.

16 The Sporting News, April 10, 1971: 28.

17 The Sporting News, July 31, 1971: 21.

18 The Sporting News, December 25, 1971: 28.

19 Colin Gunderson, Tommy Lasorda: My Way (Chicago: Triumph Books, 2015), 164.

20 The Sporting News, June 8, 1974: 7.

21 The Sporting News, October 12, 1974: 11.

22 The Sporting News, November 2, 1974: 10.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 The Sporting News, August 9, 1975: 25.

26 The Sporting News, August 30, 1975: 5.

27 The Sporting News, May 22, 1976: 16.

28 The Sporting News, February 5, 1977: 36.

29 Baseball Digest, April 1981.

30 The Sporting News, August 27, 1977: 13.

31 The Sporting News, December 23, 1978: 46.

32 Baseball Digest, August, 1979.

33 Chicago Tribune, September 25, 1979.

34 Chicago Tribune, September 26, 1979.

35 The Sporting News, July 26, 1980: 25.

36 The Sporting News, September 20, 1980: 14.

37 The Sporting News, November 29, 1980: 45.

38 The Sporting News, November 22, 1982: 42.

39 The Sporting News, April 30, 1984: 12.

40 The Sporting News, June 4, 1984: 19, 20.

41 The Sporting News, July 16, 1984: 27.

42 The Sporting News, November 18, 1985: 48.

43 The Sporting News, October 13, 1986: 16.

44 Wall Street Journal, July 24, 1998.

45 The Sporting News, August 3, 1987: 18.

46 Ibid.

47 The Sporting News, June 18, 1990: 15.

48 Wall Street Journal, July 24, 1998.

49 https://baseballthinkfactory.org/newsstand/discussion/bill_buckner_retires_from_baseball.

50 https://m.mlb.com/news/article/2504342/.

51 politico.com/story/2015/09/obama-boston-buckner-labor-baseball-red-sox-213383.

Curt Gowdy was the Cowboy behind the mike. Ned Martin quoted Ted Williams and Eudora Welty. Ken Coleman meant the Jimmy Fund. Bob Starr had a gentle lummox William Bendix kind of charm. In evaluating the Red Sox during the mid-to late 20th century, all helped baseball bewitch. Ken Harrelson was the Red Sox’ Southern-fried television analyst. Jon Miller mimed Vin Scully in English, Spanish, and Japanese. Don Orsillo left his father’s farm for Fenway Park. Jerry Remy fled the Red Sox infield to “talk a good game,” said the Boston Globe. Dave O’Brien traded the Mets for the Sox and ESPN. All treated losing like Starr’s partner after an Olde Towne Team loss. “Joe Castiglione is sitting here, looking like he’s been harpooned.” In New England the Red Sox are required study; thus, their Voices take defeat hard.

In 2015 Castiglione set a record for consecutive years broadcasting Red Sox radio and/or TV: 33 since 1983, topping Martin’s 32 (1961-92). On July 20, 2024, he received the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasting excellence – arguably sport’s most prestigious individual radio/TV honor.

Long ago Joe left a Hamden, Connecticut, youth to make Sox wireless his baseball leitmotif. “I’ve never met a man more comfortable in his own skin,” mused club president Larry Lucchino. Joe’s warmth is a reason why soldiers of Red Sox Nation in pink and red shirts, pants, and hats fill parks wherever the Townies play. “We travel well,” Joe describes their Diaspora, packing Camden Yards, Safeco Field, and Anaheim’s Big A. O’Brien adds: “There may be somewhere without Sox fans, but I haven’t found it.”

In 2010, Forbes magazine wrote, “[They] are so devoted they top our list of ‘America’s Best Sports Fans.’” Under extreme makeover, Castiglione evolved into everything Red Sox from a boyhood that was “all Yankees,” he said, there being little 1950s and early ’60s Sox interest west of the Naugatuck River. “Later, the area swung Boston’s way, but back then Mel Allen was the globe.” Once the Yankees’ radio/TV Voice hailed a taxi at night in Omaha, the driver not seeing who it was, and said, “Sheraton, please.” The cabbie swiveled his head, almost driving off the road. Variety termed Allen among “the world’s 25 most recognizable voices.”

Yogi Berra said, “If you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him.” Emulating Mel, Joe called backyard fungos like the 1940-64 Yankees announcer, asked Santa for a beer glass to pour sponsor Ballantine Ale, and half a century later confessed that “Allen’s the reason I’m in broadcasting today.” A “great vocabulary and greater pipes” sustained rout and rain. “He’d weave stories, so tough to master, never caught short” on a two-strike tale. “A Gowdy was great on nuts, bolts, and action.” Mel was the nation’s ultimate celebrity sportscaster, a thespian, not technician, whose 1964 pinstriped firing stunned.

“Allen was almost bigger than the product. I wonder how he’d have handled the Yankees’ fall” – no 1965-75 pennants after 14 in the prior 16 years. “As it was, they lost their identity,” harder to accept than the banal 1950s and early ’60s Sox having none. At Colgate University, Joe aired football and basketball, was a campus disc jockey, and hitchhiked 23 miles each Sunday to a commercial outlet to “spin records and read news.” He called the best part of college “Cooperstown being down the road,” his priorities sure. In 1967 he interned at Yanks affiliate WDEW in Westfield, Massachusetts, for the first time visiting Fenway. “It knocked me out,” said Castig, seeing the light. No Evil Empire could match the Sox’ Impossible Dream.

Castiglione graduated in 1968, then, “hating it,” moonlighted as a part-time salesman before getting a master’s at Syracuse. To pay tuition and “bolster my résumé,” Joe also worked at NBC-TV’s local WSYR as voiceover, Hollywood Matinee fill-in, and The Today Show cut-in. In 1970, at Youngstown, Ohio, his “one-man band” played football, hoops, sports at 6 and 11 P.M., and “six radio shows a day for very little money.” He spent the next decade in Cleveland news and sports, covered the Edmund Fitzgerald’s 1976 sinking in Lake Superior, and aired another wreck, the 1979 Indians. In 1981, Joe called the Brewers’ split-season title, paraphrasing Russ Hodges: “The Brewers win the second half! The Brewers win the second half!” Cheeseheads still chant it among bowling, brats, and beer.

A year later Joe returned to Cleveland’s struggling The Sports Exchange, TV’s first regional network, headed by Ted Stepien. By January 1983, all staff but Castig had been canned. One day mikeman Casey Coleman, Ken’s son, sent Joe’s tape to Sox flagship WPLM, looking to replace Jon Miller. Brewers broadcast guru Bill Haig gave a thumbs-up: “especially good on word-pictures.” What wasn’t good was timing. Joe was scheduled to meet Monday with Stepien – “my assignment, to bring doughnuts.” Instead, he flew to Boston four days earlier to interview, meet WPLM head Jack Campbell, and visit Coleman pėre Friday night.

Next morning Campbell cautioned, “You’ve got the job, but don’t tell anybody. We’ll announce you Monday.” In Ohio, neither doughnuts nor Joe arrived; Stepien refused later to talk to him on the phone. The ex-college DJ – “Give me the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, and my favorite, Motown Sounds” – found Ken caught between Bing Crosby and Patti Page. “Sort of like the Red Sox fan, likes things as they were.” On the field, 1983 sixth-place things were dismal. “People ask, ‘How do you sound excited working when your team is down 20 games?’” said Joe. “They don’t understand that no two games are the same. It’s like a lousy long-playing record. You look for a good song to play.”

Jim Rice‘s song played a league-high 39 homers and 126 runs batted in. Boston’s purest hitter post-Kid played another melody. Wade Boggs was superstitious, “eating chicken at all his meals,” said Marty Barrett, “and running sprints at the same time each night.” He was experimental, as girlfriend Margo Adams showed, and a Merlin at bat, taking the 1983 and 1985-88 AL titles (.361, .368, .357, .363, and .366, respectively). The most abiding tune, “Yastrzemski Song,” by Hub radio/TV’s Jess Cain, to the melody of the Hallelujah Chorus, hailed a man who retired in 1983, running around the field in his final game, handshaking everywhere, and playing left field for the first time since cracking his ribs in 1980: “The love-in complete,” said Ned. To Peter Gammons, it “passionately explain[ed] that he understood what makes the Olde Towne Team what it is.”

Yastrzemski played every inning in a Boston uniform. In 1981 George Steinbrenner and Ted Turner offered to pay him “three times what I could make here. But I didn’t want to leave,” Yaz said. “I liked it here. I liked … what the [Red Sox] are.” No. 8 ranked first lifetime in AL games (3,308) and third in total at-bats (11,998), major-league baseball games, and walks (1,845), sixth in total bases (5,539) in the league, and ninth in AL RBIs (1,844). At 43, he was also the oldest to play center field. “I saw the sign that read, ‘Say It Ain’t So, Yaz,’ and I wish it wasn’t,” he had said, thanking the Nation, ownership’s Jean and Tom Yawkey, and third-year manager Ralph Houk in his 1983 farewell. “I wish we could have been together for [all] 23 years, “cause I know we’d have won more pennants.”

None of this reassured Joe as a rookie – “part of Jack Campbell’s cost-cutting program,” he joked, living the whole season at Boston’s Susse Chalet, his family in Cleveland because it couldn’t sell the house. “Twenty-six dollars a night,” he said. “But the worst part was packing my trunk and taking it to the basement each time we went on a road trip so I wouldn’t be charged for the room while I was away.” Meanwhile, Hub print treated him, as Ring Lardner once wrote, like a side dish it declined to order. Why was Miller in Baltimore? Why wasn’t Martin on the wireless? The Boston Herald’s Jim Baker had Joe fired. “I got ripped a lot that first year,” said Castig, “and it hurt.”

By 2000 the Globe’s Bob Ryan wrote, “It’s time someone finally said it: Joe Castiglione is the official ‘Voice of the Boston Red Sox.’” Typically, Joe demurred. “It’s different today,” he said, “with the proliferation of media. There’s [cable], over-the-air TV, and radio – not like the good old days. To call one person that would be misleading.” In turn, Ryan cried tommyrot: “The No. 1 radio man will always be the essential link between a … team and its fans.” In New England “that voice belongs to Joe Castiglione.” Ryan conceded Joe’s “voice ripe for parody – comparatively thin and reedy and nasally.” Offsetting it were traits undervalued in 1983, including decency, credibility, precision – writer Jack Craig said that if a ground ball took three hops, Castiglione would say three, not two or four – and encyclopedic baseball knowledge.

“I’ve always been blessed with good recall,” he told Ryan. “But I have a system. I start a file card on every player. I still do them in longhand because it helps the recall process.” His freshman year, Joe recalled growing up and watching on New York Channel 11 the Mantle–Maris Yankees, managed by Ralph Houk, once decorated in the Battle of the Bulge, The Major’s pinstripes made the 1961-63 World Series. “You assumed the Yanks’d make it every year,” said Joe. In late 1983, the now-Sox skipper asked how he was.

“I don’t know, Ralph,” said Castiglione. “I’m not sure I’m coming back.” His boyhood manager then put an arm around the rookie. “Everybody’s happy,” Houk said. “You’re doing a hell of a job.” At that moment, Joe likely mourned being too young to have served the Major at Bastogne.

The 1984-85 Red Sox finished fourth and fifth, respectively. John McNamara, a baseball lifer, succeeded the retired Houk as manager. March 1986’s Sport magazine wrote, “The Red Sox are the most boring team in baseball.” On April 29 they hosted Seattle on a “chilly, misty night,” said Joe, “the kind of game that brings out only the diehards – and the announcers.” In 1984 Roger Clemens went 9-4; in 1985, had shoulder surgery; in 1986, needed a van to move his hardware. “This night the basketball Celtics played a playoff set at Boston Garden – a big game,” said Martin. “So our [WSBK] TV audience was limited, and so was the crowd” – 13,414.

Before the game, Castiglione had a premonition. “I knew Roger was on his game that night, because batters usually hit a lot of fouls off him.” That evening, the Mariners mostly swung and missed. “Something’s going to happen,” Joe said. What did: “the most memorable game of the most memorable season of my life.” (He spoke before 2004.) Clemens had 12 K’s by the fifth inning. Word filtered to the Garden, which began emptying: The Rocket was on a roll. Steve Carlton, Nolan Ryan, and Tom Seaver held the bigs’ nine-inning mark of 19 strikeouts. Roger K’d the last two batters in the seventh inning, the side in the eighth, and the first two in the ninth – 19 total. After the final man fanned, TV’s Martin spoke as if still on radio: “And here they come up at Fenway! A new record! Clemens has set a major-league record for strikeouts in a game! Twenty! What a performance by the kid from the University of Texas!” Joe gulped, “One after another – and I felt a thrill like I’ve never known in baseball.” Clemens added: “The strikeouts just came on coming.” He finished 24-4, had a league-low 2.48 ERA, and won the Cy Young and MVP.

“We weren’t a powerful club, not a lot of homers, but fate seemed to like us,” said Joe, ironically, as fate later showed. One ninth inning Boston trailed Texas, 1-0, as Barrett and Steve Lyons each slid into second base – “me from one direction,” Lyons said, “Marty the other.” Outfielder George Wright’s throw took a wrong turn into the Rangers’ dugout. Both scored: Sox win. Another day, down, 2-1, in the 12th, Don Baylor popped between home plate and third base to ex-Townie Rick Burleson, “of all people,” laughed Castiglione, “playing for the Angels at the end of his career.” The Rooster’s dropped pop and a balk helped Boston win, but masked a flaw. On CBS Radio’s “Home Town Inning,” Joe called Dave Henderson the fastest Sox runner. Analyst Sparky Anderson was amazed: “If you think that guy’s fast, that shows how slow your team is.”

Despite being station-to-station, the Red Sox rallied from a 3-1 game deficit to win the LCS. Then, 13 times they needed only one pitch in the 10th inning of Game Six to take the World Series against the Mets. Michael Dukakis had just finished a gubernatorial debate with his GOP foe “when I saw the ball go through Bill Buckner’s legs.” Waiting to interview the imminent champion Sox in their clubhouse, Joe heard a clubhouse security agent turn on his radio. Finding the score tied, Castig raced for the booth, reached the runway, and heard a roar. “I never saw the play, but my heart sank. I knew it was over.” In 2001, former US Senator George Mitchell, hoping that life “lasts long enough to see the Red Sox win a World Series,” said that 1986 still made him ask: Was he dreaming, “kidding himself once more?”

In California, a Bostonian called by The Wall Street Journal “America’s greatest thinker on crime, punishment, and historical order” had been at a meeting “at the worst possible time.” Adjourning, James Q. Wilson raced to his Los Angeles hotel. “No longer would Red Sox fans have to bear the crushing hex put on them by the sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees, a sale that seemed to end forever any chance of the Sox owning the baseball world.” In his room, the Harvard professor watched “the most famous, agonizing, gut-wrenching [10th] inning of baseball that I ever watched.” One more out – and “the Sox would own the world. I would be ecstatic, emotionally young forever.”

Meantime, Bob Stanley and Mookie Wilson staged an extraordinary battle. Even after the Boston reliever’s seventh pitch was wild, scoring the tying run, “all was [still] not lost. If Mookie were put away, the Sox could score again in the 11th. One more strike and Red Sox fans could breathe.” James Q. Wilson picked up the telephone, dialed the area code of his home and first six digits of his number, and readied to press the last digit on Mookie’s out: “My wife and I could celebrate at least staying alive.” Instead, he put the phone back in its cradle. “My youth was over. I was now, at least for baseball, an old man. The Curse lived on.” Back east, a friend asked if he knew that Buckner, so depressed at missing the ground ball, had leapt in front of a speeding bus. “Oh, no,” Wilson said. “Not to worry,” the friend replied. “It went between his legs.”

Half a million graced a Sox post-Game Seven parade through Boston. “For me it took away some sting,” said Castiglione. “Not for McNamara.” Entering skip’s office to say goodbye, Joe found Mac disconsolate. “Why me, why me?” John said. “I go to church, have my whole life. I don’t understand why this had to happen.” Neither did Wilson, ultimately teaching at Boston College near children and grandchildren. Said The Wiser but Sadder Man prior to his death in 2013: “They have a legal obligation to be within 30 minutes of Fenway Park.”

American dramatist and humorist George Ade said, “The time to enjoy a European tour is about three weeks after you unpack.” It took a long time to unpack 1986’s baggage. In 1987, Joel Krakow of the Newton, Massachusetts, Captain Video Store knew where to put the 1986 Series highlight film: the horror/science fiction section. That fall McNamara sat in the dugout before the last regular-season game: “You know, I sit here thinking and I still can’t believe we lost the [Series] sixth game. … There’s a part of me that just doesn’t believe it: one f – ing out. That’s all we needed was one f – ing out.”

Retiring, Reggie Jackson batted a last time in 1987 in Boston. Sherm Feller, 69, had been Sox P.A. announcer since 1967, mixing beloved understatement and exacting prose. Each game began, “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to Fenway Park.” Feller’s drip-drop cadence kept it simple – “Number 23, Luis Tiant. Pitching, Tiant” – due to calling a game without his dentures. On Jackson’s adieu, Feller, who died in 1994, said memorably: “Number 44, Mr. October.” Reggie’s pending absence was not Boston’s sole change. In 1988, Margo Adams, a former mortgage broker, filed a $6 million suit for breach of oral contract against Boggs, charging that he reneged on repaying her for time and wages lost traveling with him on the road. The media went kablooey. On TV’s Donahue, Margo described the married Wade crashing teammates’ rooms and shooting compromising photos of them with other women – maneuvers aka “Delta Force.” No force could save the skipper, radio talk crying “Knife the Mac!”

Mrs. Yawkey convened a meeting, Mac leaving July 14 – Bastille Day – with his head, if not job. Coach Joe Morgan – Castiglione’s best friend, Walpole native, and Massachusetts Turnpike worker – became “interim manager.” One Joe loved the other’s line: “Interim is not in my vocabulary. I am the manager until they tell me otherwise.” Morgan Magic began with a 12-game win streak and AL record 24 straight wins at home. Rice and Dwight Evans had defied Mac. This skipper didn’t cower. When Morgan inserted a pinch-hitter to bunt, Rice yanked him into the dugout runway. Joe traded shoves, emulating Studs Terkel: “I’m the manager of this nine.” Margo’s squeeze hit .366. Clemens’ eight shutouts were Boston’s most since Ruth. The Townies hailed Oakland’s LCS sweep by uncorking a bender on their flight home. On Hub TV, Rocket mourned having to carry his luggage and how “there are … things that are a disadvantage to a family here.” To Castig, the Sox were making the Bronx Zoo look like Mayberry.

Joe thought Morgan “the most colorful-ever” Sox skipper” – the “original Honest Abe.” By 1989, Boston platooned catchers: lefty-swinging Rich Gedman, “a great guy,” and righty Rick Cerone, “not a great guy.” One night Chicago started righty Shawn Hillegas. After the pre-game show, Joe said, “Maybe I should have asked this on air, but why is Cerone, not Gedman, catching?” Morgan said: “Hillegas is left-handed. Therefore, Cerone’s going to catch.” Castiglione shook his head. “Hillegas is right-handed” “Oh, gees, I screwed up,” said Morgan, not saying gees. “What am I going to tell Gedman?” Joe went to find him and confess. Naturally, Cerone homered to win the game, and Castig mused, “Should I give the background, or not? No, Joe’s my friend. What good would it do to say, ‘Here’s why Cerone’s playing’? I let it go, we’ll see what happens.” Since Morgan played the racetrack, writers asked, “Did you have a hunch, like a horse, playing Cerone?” Joe said, “No, I screwed up. I thought Hillegas was a lefty. That’s why Cerone played, and why I apologized to Gedman.” On second thought, said Castig, “Maybe Morgan is George Washington, who never told a lie.”

By turn, Adams posed nude in Penthouse magazine. Boggs confessed he was addicted to sex, Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd called him “a sex fiend,” and in Tampa a bomb threat forced a change in planes. Around the league, fans chanted “Mar-go!” GM Lou Gorman, trying to trade Wade, whiffed. “You’d think the law of averages would even out – that they would win one,” said the club’s greatest second baseman, Bobby Doerr. You’d think. In August, the Sox added Yaz’s retired number 8 on the right-field façade to Williams’ No. 9 and Joe Cronin’s 4 (from 1984) and Doerr’s No. 1 (1988). The list scrawled half-taunt and half-lament: 9-4-1-8, the month of the last Red Sox world title. Seeking less to forget than redeem himself, Bill Buckner made the 1990 Sox: cheered Opening Day, but retired by June. The year ended aptly: Boston won its third AL East title in five years, lost LCS Games One-Three, then imploded. Clemens argued a call, shoved one umpire, and threatened another. Players scuffled, reliever Larry Andersen leaving the pen to restrain Rocket’s rage. Oakland swept. A Herald cartoon drew Clemens as a baby on the mound, a bottle in one hand, shouting “Bleep!”

“Some Okie I am,” Sooner-born and ex-Angels Voice Bob Starr said, succeeding Coleman on 1990 Sox radio. Joe recalled “his wearing plaid dotted shirts, loving golf, and Ken-like vintage music.” Three years later Starr returned to Anaheim, dying in 1998 from a lifetime of chain smoking. He missed 1995: New flagship WEEI aired the LCS first “wild card” preamble – best-of-five Division Series (DS). 1996: Boston fired a Kennedy – skipper Kevin – unthinkable by ballot. In a designated hitter’s league, Rocket singled “up the middle,” said Joe. “Can you believe it?” – a phrase to use again. Jimy Williams became manager, speaking “Jimy-wocky”: e.g., “If a frog had wings, it wouldn’t bump its booty.” 1998: Slugger Mo Vaughn, arrested for drunk driving, braved a withdrawn Sox contract and mandatory psychological test for alcoholism. Acquitted, he felt insulted. “You can’t ignore the human equation,” said Joe of Mo’s exit. GM Dan Duquette, staff explained, was not a people person.

In 1998 Montreal’s Pedro Martinez joined the Sox, proceeding to throw a 1-0 complete game – “First at Fenway in a decade!” chorused Joe. 1999: Before Fenway Park’s first All-Star Game since 1961, Ted Williams rode a golf cart through a hole in the center-field bleachers down the warning track, along the boxes, around the plate, and toward the mound, All-Stars circling The Kid. The crowd went over the moon. “Do you ever smell the wood burn?” Ted asked Mark McGwire of bat on ball. Rafael Palmeiro refused to leave: “That’s the chance of a lifetime.” MVP Martinez K’d five of his first six batters. The sport had seldom seemed more certain of its place. Boston rallied against Cleveland to win the Division Series, three games to two, the final 12-8 “on the best pitcher in baseball’s … six no-hit innings in relief coming off an injury,” Joe said of Pedro.

In 2000 Ned Martin entered the Red Sox Hall of Fame, whose room shook on his introduction. The ovation stunned him, bringing tears. In 2002 Teddy Ballgame, 83, died of cardiac arrest. That July 22, Ned attended the Ted Williams Tribute at Fenway Park – his first trip back since a 1992 firing. “He’d had a bad back and knee and hip replacement, but wouldn’t miss it,” said son Roley. “He just enjoyed the whole night, especially the videos at the end, the Field of Dreams song, [and] ‘Taps.’” Martin, Yaz, and Gammons reminisced in an on-field ceremony. Ned saw longtime employees, inevitably treating them like royalty, and spoke to Remy, Pesky, Gowdy, and Coleman, who said, “He had a style all his own. He loved the game, and the history of the game.”

Castiglione called next morning by cell phone, finding Martin, 78, “very chipper.” Ned flew to Raleigh-Durham Airport, caught a shuttle bus, and had a massive heart attack. The Sox were playing when news of his death reached Fenway. Red-eyed, Remy reported it on the New England Sports Network (NESN), later saying, “I think what made it tougher is that I’d just seen him the day before.” A moment of silence and a video screen goodbye preceded the next game. “Those who always feel the ‘good old days’ were better than the present might … this time … be right,” wrote the Globe’s Bill Griffith. Said daughter Caroline: “[Papa’s] love was his family [wife Barbara, of 51 years, three children, and nine grandchildren], and his dogs and cat, Emily, and the country.” Mercy! Martin was the cat’s meow.

Ned would have nodded as USA Today called Fenway Park “a cathedral,” daily filled pew by pew. Even on the road the Red Sox were SRO. Baltimore’s color scheme skewed red. Castig met a man who had seen every Boston game in Kansas City since it got the A’s in 1955. In Anaheim, the Nation filled seats of many leaving after the seventh inning to miss traffic. “We’re the home team,” Joe laughed, “for at least half of our games away.”

In 1914 British Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey lamented World War I: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” New England’s lamps went on in late 2001, when new ownership bought the franchise. That December 20, the Yawkey Trust accepted an estimated $660 million offer, plus $40 million in assumed debt, for Fenway Park, the Red Sox, and 80 percent of NESN from a group led by former Orioles head Larry Lucchino, Hollywood producer Tom Werner, hedge-fund manager John Henry, and other partners. The sale saved Fenway, though that was not then clear. Within a decade the Red Sox became baseball’s model franchise, selling out a big-league record 820 straight games.

Boston won a wild-card spot in 1998-99 and 2003, but again dropped the Division Series or League Championship Series. Defeat obscured Sox building blocks. Knuckleballer Tim Wakefield seven times won 10 or more games starting and relieving, his ERA and record as good as 2.81 and 17-8, respectively. Jason Varitek became the regular catcher, three-time All-Star, and “our rock,” said Joe. Another block arrived in 2001 already having driven in 165 runs in a year – baseball’s most since Jimmie Foxx. Manny being Manny in later years meant loafing, faking injury, and huffing “Boston doesn’t deserve me” – teammates, sick of him, agreed. Then, Manny Ramirez meant awesome strength, plate discipline, and hand-eye skill. He could spray the ball, pull 400 feet with one hand, and hit best when it counted most: e.g., a record 29 postseason homers. In 2004 Manny hit 44 doubles; in 2005, he parked 45 dingers; in 2006, Ramirez batted .321. His real au revoir was 2007’s LCS, with nine walks and 10 RBIs.

Four straight years Johnny Damon topped the Red Sox in steals. Boston had two 20-win pitchers for the first time since 1949: Derek Lowe 21-8, Pedro 20-4. In 2003 David Ortiz, a 6-foot-4, 230-pound Dominican who greeted people as “bro” or “papi” – hence, Big Papi – left Minnesota for the Fens. The worst of his next five years combined .288, 31 homers, and 101 RBIs. The 2003 Sox hit a franchise-record 238 homers, scored a second-best-to-1950 961 runs, beat Oakland in a five-game Division Series, then went forth to the LCS – the usual rival, with the usual result. “I’ll never forget Martinez jabbing a finger into the side of his head,” said Castiglione of Game Three at Fenway. “Some [like Yankees coach Don Zimmer] thought it meant a beanball coming.”

Next inning Manny protested a high strike call. As benches cleared, Zim charged Pedro, who, confused by role reversal, threw the ex-Sox manager, 72, to the ground. On air, Sox radio’s Jerry Trupiano did a double-take: “Nobody does this, beating up a guy: This can’t be happening.” Castiglione took a longer view: “Look at Zimmer, Clemens, changing teams: in one fight, the Red Sox-Yankees intersection.” New York’s 4-3 decision ended with reliever Jeff Nelson and a groundskeeper scuffling in the bullpen. Down 6-4 and in games, 3 to 2, Boston rallied to tie the series, 9-6, Trot Nixon homering in the ninth. “His second of the game!” Joe ooh-ahed. “What a game!” You ain’t seen nothing’ yet.

The final threatened to cast the Curse in perpetuity. Pedro led, 4-0, then 5-2. In his book, Now I Can Die in Peace, Bill Simmons claims that general manager Theo Epstein and ownership told second-year skipper Grady Little to yank Martinez when he a) threw 100 pitches or b) finished the seventh inning, whichever came first. In the eighth, Pedro yielded another run, had two men on, and looked up to see his skipper. “Let me stay in,” said Martinez. “No, out,” Little said. “I feel good. I can get through it,” Pedro replied, the Sox pen kaput. “OK,” Little said, guessing wrong. Two hits tied the score at 5-5. “Here we go again!” Castiglione chorused. Few remember Nixon’s, Ortiz’s, Kevin Millar’s, or Jason Giambi’s two homers: only Aaron Boone, past midnight at The Stadium, arcing Wakefield’s 11th-inning pitch. “Swing, a long drive to left field! Down the line! Deep toward the corner! If it’s fair, it’s gone! And it is – gone!” said Joe. “A home run! The New York Yankees have won the pennant!” The Pinstripes’ Charley Steiner bellowed, “And the Yankees are going to the World Series for the 39th time in their remarkable history!” Sox history was remarkable, too, if you could look past the pain.

Regard postseason as a TV cliffhanger – “cliff-dweller,” Mets manager Wes Westrum malapropped – like Dallas’s “Who Shot J.R.?” Ought-three’s seguéd to 2004 like two veins from a common mine. Terry Francona replaced Little as manager. Curt Schilling led the AL in victories (21-6), second in ERA (3.26), and third in innings (226⅔); he and Pedro the first Sox teammates with 200 K’s in a year. “We need guys who save runs,” said Epstein, trading Nomar Garciaparra for first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz and shortstop Orlando Cabrera. Papi and Manny meant runs: first post-1931 AL mates to tie .300, 30 homers, and 100 RBIs.

By then, Castiglione taught broadcast journalism at Northeastern and Franklin Pierce Universities, was Jimmy Fund charity-club liaison, and grasped retired Jesuit priest Boston College historian John Day terming radio an apostolate to the shut-in, disabled, and elderly. “That showed me I was freeloading for life,” he said, writing 2004’s Broadcast Rites and Sites, advice for the road. It was not required reading. The October of its release is. Boston swept the Division Series from the Halos. Schilling lost the LCS opener – the Yanks again – 10-7. Next night Pedro pitched, having said, “They beat me. I just tip my hat and call the Yankees my daddy.” The Bronx crowd unloosed a Bronx cheer: “Who’s Your Daddy?” – Stripes, 3-1. A change of scenery further unhosed the Sox, 19-8, Joe thinking, “The ’04 Red Sox are better than this” – just not good enough to pivot a 0-3 game deficit, since no postseason team had.

What happened next helped redeem the past 86 years. Game Four took 5 hours and 2 minutes and had “the single most important steal in Red Sox history,” said Castiglione, conceding little competition. In the ninth inning, up, 4-3, reliever Mariano Rivera walked Millar, thrice threw to first base, then tossed outside as the pinch-runner tried to steal. “Here is the throw! Roberts dives, and he is safe!” said Joe. “Stolen base, Dave Roberts the hand tag. [Derek] Jeter took the throw. It was close – very close at second.” Bill Mueller then singled to tie the score. In the 12th, Papi channeled the right-field seats, 6-4. A night later Ortiz’s 14th-inning bloop gave the Sox another win, 5-4. “And a little flare, center field!” Trupiano crowed. “Here comes Johnny Damon with the winning run!”

The Townies’ history flaunts tales in which the Red Sox have been rich. 1941, Williams’ .406 average; 1948, Lou Boudreau, clubbing journeyman Denny Galehouse in the first AL playoff; 1960, The Kid’s Final Swing; 1975, Carlton Fisk’s Game Six sock hop; 1978, Jim Woods’ crying of Bucky Dent, “Suddenly the whole thing is turned around”; 1986, Vin Scully’s “gets through Buckner” call. Few top the Bloody Sock. Doctors had vainly tried to stabilize Schilling’s ankle tendon, which kept popping out of place. Before Game Six, team doctor Bill Morgan’s new procedure – “three sutures forming a wall to keep it intact” – helped Curt pitch seven innings, his stirrup soaked in blood. In the eighth, up, 4-2, Boston’s Bronson Arroyo got tying run Alex Rodriguez to dribble near the mound, tagged him near the line, then had A-Rod dislodge the ball: “It rolls down the right-field line!” said Joe. “Jeter hits third, and he’s going to score! A-Rod at second! He should have been out!” It seemed “a mental ‘Not another Red Sox tragic moment!’”

Instead, umpire-in-chief Joe West called Rodriguez out for obstruction, leading bad apples to throw debris, Boston to leave the field, and Big Apple police to wear riot gear. That night, the series tied, Castig previewed his LCS-ending call – “Before, why would I? The Yankees had history on their side.” Joe found that Boston’s last “significant victory” over them had been in 1904 – “then-Highlander Jack Chesbro’s wild pitch scoring Boston’s pennant-clinching run” – one hundred years earlier! Since then, the Stripes had won every crucial set. Next night Ortiz “hammered a [first-inning] drive deep to right field!” said Joe. “And this ball is gone!” – 2-0. Next inning Damon lined “back toward the corner! [Gary] Sheffield looking up! Grand slam!” He later went deep again. An 8-1 lead gave Joe more time to think. “My call had to mention this unparalleled comeback, and how it beat the Yankees.”

Boston’s heart of darkness was not so easily assuaged. In suburban Brookline, ex-presidential nominee Michael Dukakis turned to wife Kitty and said, “You know, we could still lose.” At almost the same time, he later learned, Lucchino turned to Werner at The Stadium and said, “You know, we could still lose.” At 12:01 A.M. October 21, pinch-hitter Ruben Sierra grounded to second base. “Pokey Reese has it!” whooped Castiglione. “He throws to first! And the Red Sox have won the American League pennant [10-3]! Their greatest victory in team history! In the 104 years of the Boston Red Sox, this is the most important of them all” – beating “their archrival. Move over, Babe, the Red Sox are American League champions!” Later, Joe termed his view fact, not opinion, “for without that victory what happened next doesn’t happen.”

Like the 1963 Dodgers, 1966 Orioles, and 1989 Athletics, the 2004 Red Sox never trailed in the World Series. Still, Joe mocked the thought of letdown, since “beating the Yankees would have meant less if the Sox had lost the Classic” – another what-if. Instead, the Series versus St. Louis scripted what John Henry called “the biggest story in New England since the Revolutionary War.” Not wishing to contradict, Castiglione mused, “I think he understates.” Unlike the LCS, Boston’s 3-0 game edge let Joe anticipate Game Four’s finish. This presumed a Series-ending victory, Boston leading, 3-0, in the fifth inning. That morning Castig decided the script must write itself: “I just hoped the final out would be definitive, no checked swing, did he or didn’t he trap the ball?” In the seventh inning, he went to a restroom to change, expecting a postgame bath.

By the ninth, Trupiano was in the clubhouse, Joe alone, so focused “I wouldn’t have heard a firecracker go off under me.” Reliever Keith Foulke got Scott Rolen to fly out and Jim Edmonds to fan, Busch Stadium oozing Red Sox caps and shirts, non-ticket-holders admitted late by gracious ballpark brass. A lunar eclipse hung above the yard – a World Series first. Light bulbs resembled a phalanx of fireflies. Before now, Joe said, his greatest call “hasn’t happened yet.” It did Wednesday, October 27, at 10:40 P.M. Central Time. “Swing [by Edgar Renteria] and a ground ball, stabbed by Foulke! He has it! He underhands to first! And the Red Sox have won baseball’s world championship for the first time in 86 years! The Red Sox have won baseball’s world championship! Can you believe it?” The question was rhetorical.

“The Boston Red Sox have forever put that 1918 chant to rest as this band of characters who showed great character all season have won the world championship for New England!” said Castiglione, who recited, “And there’s pandemonium on the field!” – Martin’s 1967 encomium – and Bart Giamatti’s essay Green Fields of the Mind: Baseball “breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart,” except that now it sounded, as Fitzgerald wrote, “like a tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star.” In 1975 a then-record 124 million people viewed all or part of the Red Sox-Reds World Series. Game Six of the 1986 Mets-Sox fall classic wooed 81 million, still baseball’s most-watched-ever match. In our cable-fractured age, the 2004 Townies lured the highest Series TV audience since 1996. The Boston Globe swelled its daily press run from 500,000 to 1.2 million, selling out.

The Saturday after the Series, a rolling rally of 17 amphibious vehicles began at Fenway, turned onto Boylston Street, then Tremont Street and Storrow Drive, before entering the Charles River. It passed under the Harvard Bridge, a mass above and upon each bank – Boston’s largest-ever event drawing three million of the devoted and crazed. Offseason the Red Sox took the Commissioner’s World Series trophy to the far outposts of New England and beyond, Castiglione’s signet now “Can you believe it?” In New Haven, Lucchino, the Yale Law alum, asked Joe to repeat it, rapture all around. By phone, mail, in person, and by Internet, the Nation hailed, as fife and drum had at Yorktown, “The World Turned Upside Down.” The getting that was good got even better as the Sox also won the 2007, 2013, and 2018 Series. Such a makeover is hard to find.

On Opening Day 2005 in the Fens – Sox 8, Yanks 1 – Castiglione got a World Series ring, each Townie’s presented by soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. Watching was Joe’s son Duke: a New York Fox 5 sports anchor and Sports Extra and WWOR Yankees postgame host. Formerly, Duke had been WHDH Hub anchor, ESPN SportsCenter and Around the Horn guest host, and Sunday Night Baseball, World Baseball Classic, and WCBS New York reporter. (Joe’s and wife Jean’s other children were son Tom and daughter Kate.) The ’05ers looked to Wakefield: Sox-best in wins, ERA, innings, complete games, and strikeouts. A year later, Schilling got his 200th victory and 3,000th K. “Unbelievable control,” said Joe, “could be a prima donna, but ice cold under pressure.” An old cigarette ad puffed, “I’d walk a mile for a Camel.” Schilling would walk that long for a camera.

Boston won the 2005 wild card, losing the Division Series to Chicago. In the offseason the team obtained Josh Beckett and Mike Lowell. Reliever Jonathan Papelbon had a 0.92 ERA in 2006. That September a Papi home run broke Jimmie Foxx’s 1938 franchise-high 50. “There’s a fly ball! Right-center field deep! Back by the bullpen!” said Joe. “And David Ortiz has set a Red Sox record,” leading in homers (54) and RBIs (137). The Sox finished third, their worst standing since 1997. In 2007, they swept the Division Series against California, edged Cleveland in a taut seven-game LCS, and swept Colorado in the Series. To Joe, 2004 was “for dead relatives and friends who hadn’t lived to see a title,” many putting balls and caps and pennants on a gravesite, including his brother-in-law on Joe’s late dad’s. Signs at the rolling rally cited a college mate, Uncle Fred, “You won for my grandma” – catharsis. Ought-seven hailed success. “We were baseball’s best team,” said Castig, not certain in 2004. Beckett’s 20-7 record topped the AL. Japanese pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka – aka “Dice-K” – finished 15-12. Lowell led in RBIs (120), played a Fort Knox third base, and was a model citizen: to Castiglione, “maybe the most popular Red Sox since Yaz.”

Papi had a fifth straight season of at least 31 homers (35) and 101 RBIs (117) or more. Dustin Pedroia (.317) had a dirty uniform by batting practice. The Sox stole 96 bases in 120 tries. Jacoby Ellsbury, 23, stole nine in 33 games while hitting .353,

The Series was as one-sided as 2004’s. Boston’s .333 Series average, trailing only 1960 New York’s record .338. In Game Four, the team’s best fireman since Dick Radatz faced Seth Smith in the ninth. “Got him!” Joe said of Papelbon. “The Boston Red Sox become the first team in the [new] century to win two world championships!” Lucchino reminded you, “We won. They lost,” the rivalry still going yard. Another duck boat ride through downtown ensued. One feature was Ellsbury, who’d quickly become a teen heartthrob. “Some signs at our rolling rally proposed marriage [to him],” said Joe. Others would once have made mama wash out her daughter’s mouth with soap.

Joe would win the Dick Young Award for excellence, enter the Italian-American Sports Hall of Fame, air New England College and Northeastern hoops, and have part of Franklin Pierce University’s ballpark named in his honor. The New Englander knew that objectivity was in a listener’s ears. “We don’t openly root, but we pull, for the Sox.” The history major knew how they “are a historical team in a region filled with history.” Joe realized, as one-time baseball broadcaster Ronald Reagan said, that if a person hears 15 facts and one story “told well, it’s the story he recalls.” Daily, people met in Castig’s “office” – Fenway Park – an usher, groundskeeper, vacationer from Canada; a “peanut vendor and a sausage guy across the street.” Inside, “fans never see the passageways and shortcuts”: grounds equipment behind the Monster, door behind the scoreboard, staircase leading to an interview room, batting cage, or pen. Joe felt Fenway ideal for hide-and-seek – as mysterious as Stephen King and unpredictable as Poe.

Personae helped fill baseball’s dead air. In a three-hour game, the ball may be in play eight minutes. In 1960, another Joe, Garagiola, wrote the seminal Baseball Is a Funny Game. Boston’s Joe especially liked to call “gotcha” on himself. One night in 2007 Dave O’Brien addressed how Castig was no techie: retexting past messages, making an accidental 3 A.M. phone call, and a song about Joe somehow appearing on his iPod next to Marvin Gaye’s. He liked high-definition TV – assuming he could turn it on. “I could really use a permanent Geek Squad,” Joe confessed. “You need a personal assistant,” Dave agreed. “That’s going to be my Christmas gift for you. A full-time PA.” Castiglione: “I’ll take it.” After a commercial break, O’Brien praised his partner’s “good-naturedness” about being technically challenged. Joe replied, “I know my limitations.” No high-tech could save an especially slow game. “So we’ve played two really quick innings here,” said Castig. Dave: “Yeah, moving right along.” Joe: “You were clean shaven when this game began.”

In 2011, Castig covered Epstein’s “Dream Team” that by September 2 had leapfrogged the American League East, nine games ahead of the Tampa Bay Rays. Boston then braved an epochal 7-20 year-end collapse: a fold even worse than 1978’s 3-14 September apocalypse. The Townies blew a last regular-season playoff spot, then finished last in the next year’s 2012 train wreck. Worst to first: Stunningly, the poor-on-paper 2013ers won the franchise’s third World Series in a decade. First to worst: The 2014 Sox went down the up staircase, placing last. In 2019, the year after their most recent title, they began another period of malaise on the diamond.

In 2015, the franchise feted Joe’s record 33rd straight season on the air, passing the beloved Martin. Daily Sox co-flagships WEEI and WEEI FM “made sure,” said Castig, “you can get us anywhere on the dial.” Their eight-state radio network boasted 65 outlets, including 15 in New Hampshire and Massachusetts and 13 in Maine: also Vermont (9), Connecticut (5), Rhode Island (1), and New York (6). The Empire State presence numbered three in the author’s home city of Rochester – Red Sox Nation’s westernmost fort save Wyoming’s one affiliate. The network is among baseball’s largest in states and outlets. Fittingly, in 2022, the team named Fenway’s radio booth in Joe’s honor.

From time to time some wonder why the Townies so matter. Tell them to visit New England in the summer before the wind turns harsh and the trees turn bare and a day matches night’s jaw-dropping chill. Read the Boston Globe and Herald. At a diner, hear Sox TV mikemen trade baseball patter. On a beach, listen to the wireless, as ubiquitous as body oil. Have a clergyman ask, “How about those Sawx?” Thanks largely to Joe Castiglione, you will understand what the religion of the Red Sox means.

Throughout, two constants have animated baseball’s unaverage Joe. The first is the Jimmy Fund, the Red Sox official charity to fight childhood cancer. Patients at its clinic are often visited by Castiglione and Boston players. Without a second constant, the Sox would not be the Sox – Fenway itself. No one described a ball hit toward left field’s Green Wall like Castig, “never knowing if it might scrape the paint coming down.” Want a drive to carry? “Pray the wind blows out,” he said. Want a fielder disrobed? “Hit to the Triangle.” Hope a bouncer over first becomes an inside-the-parker? “You’ve found the right place.”

To Joe, The Wall’s “nooks and crannies” – Fenway’s “eccentric angularities,” said Bart Giamatti – seemed especially magical when the Sox returned from the road in Sinatra’s “wee small hours of the morning.” It was empty as Castig “looked out on the field,” he said, making the yard “almost mystical. Imagine a fabled ballpark to yourself. You walk alone up a gangway, view the field lit only by the clock, see lights on Ted Williams Way, and watch Fenway just before dawn – well, it’s breathtaking.”  

In late 2024, Castiglione retired as Boston’s lead Voice, saddening its vast audience, most of whom have never met him, yet deem Joe part of an extended family: honest, an encyclopedia of baseball lore, and unerringly precise. Should the need arise, Castig may even call some Sox games next year, showing how baseball play-by-play prizes conversation, evoking wearability and easy listening.

Through good years and bad, writes David J. Halberstam, Joe Castiglione has “wafted softly through New England summers, a steady soundtrack on the radio. No nicknames, no hype and no gloom.” He became the region’s personality of the pastime in the flesh, reaching the pinnacle at Cooperstown in his last full big-league season. “Can you believe it?” You bet.

Author’s Note

This biography was originally published in The 1986 Boston Red Sox: There Was More Than Game Six (SABR, 2016). It has been updated at various points since then, most recently in November 2024.

Acknowledgments and Sources

I am indebted to several sources for the radio play-by-play and analysis contained herein: WEEI Radio executive sports producer Jon Albanese; noted major-league archivist John Miley; and Tom Shaer, former WITS Boston wireless reporter, now head, Tom Shaer Media in Chicago.

Virtually all other material, including quotes, is derived from my books:

America’s Dizzy Dean (St. Louis: The Bethany Press, 1978)

Voices of The Game: The Acclaimed Chronicle of Baseball Radio & Television Broadcasting – From 1921 to the Present (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992)

The Storytellers: From Mel Allen to Bob Costas: Sixty Years of Baseball Tales from the Broadcast Booth (New York: Macmillan,1995)

Of Mikes and Men: From Ray Scott to Curt Gowdy: Broadcast Tales from the Pro Football Booth (South Bend, Indiana: Diamond Communications, 1998)

Our House: A Tribute to Fenway Park (Chicago: NTC/Contemporary, 1999)

Voices of Summer: Ranking Baseball’s 101 All-Time Best Announcers (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005)

The Voice: Mel Allen’s Untold Story (Guilford, Connecticut: The Lyons Press, 2007)

A Talk in the Park: Nine Decades of Baseball Tales from the Broadcast Booth (Washington D.C.: Potomac Books, 2011) 

Mercy! A Celebration of Fenway Park’s Centennial Told Through Red Sox Radio and TV (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2012)

The Presidents and the Pastime: The History of Baseball and the White House (University of Nebraska Press, updated version, 2024)

In spite of the abrupt end to Clemens’ evening and career, as he left the mound, it seemed a certainty that he would be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, as soon as he passed the five-year waiting period for eligibility. Few pitchers in the history of baseball could boast anything near to his accomplishments: a record seven Cy Young Awards, 354 victories, 4,672 strikeouts, seven-time ERA leader with a career 3.12 ERA, six-time 20-game winner, five-time strikeout leader, 46 shutouts in the era of relief specialists and closers, and two-time World Series champion. He was too much of a polarizing figure in his career to exceed Tom Seaver’s record of being named on 98.8 percent of the Hall of Fame ballots, but he seemed certain to be a first-ballot selectee.

On December 13, 2007, little more than two months after Clemens’ final Yankees start, doubt was cast over his future enshrinement among baseball’s immortals when he was mentioned repeatedly in the Mitchell Report on the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. In the years following the report, Clemens spent almost as much time in courtrooms as he spent on pitcher’s mounds during his career. By the time his first year of eligibility for the Hall of Fame arrived in January 2013, he was named on only 37.6 percent of the ballots and, in his second year, that number declined to 35.4 percent while two of his contemporaries and fellow members of the 300-win club, Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine, were elected.

Clemens’ life is the tale of a fanatically driven man who worked hard to achieve his dream of stardom and attained the pinnacle of success. Jorge Posada, Clemens’ catcher with the Yankees, was complimentary when he said, “The only thing he wants to do is just win.”1 Cito Gaston, Clemens’ manager with the Toronto Blue Jays until he was fired toward the end of the 1997 season, intended no such praise when he commented, “It’s all about him, nobody else but him.”2 Clemens’ ambition gained him both fans and detractors, helped him to achieve massive success, and ultimately contributed to his fall from grace.

William Roger Clemens was born on August 4, 1962, in Dayton, Ohio, the fifth child of Bill and Bess Clemens. He was only 5 months old when his mother took her children and left his father, with whom he claims to have spoken only once in his life, when he was 10 years old. Less than two years later, Bess married Woody Booher, whom Roger looked up to as a real father. But he became fatherless again at the age of 8 when Booher died of a heart attack.

While his mother provided Roger with an example of the work ethic he would adopt by laboring at several jobs to support her children, he came under the tutelage of his older brother Randy, whom he idolized. In high school Randy was a shortstop on the baseball team, the star shooting guard for the basketball team, and the king of his senior prom, leading Clemens to admit, “While I was growing up, Randy was the star as far as I was concerned.”3 Though the two brothers have become estranged, Randy’s influence was immense as he “instill[ed] in his brother a simple philosophy: Either you’re a winner or you’re a failure.”4 It was a mantra that caused Clemens to question at times whether he was good enough to become the star athlete that both of them wanted him to be.

While Clemens’ baseball career dwarfs his brother Randy’s high-school athletic exploits, his initial attempts to emulate his elder sibling were less than encouraging. He played baseball, basketball, and football, but distinguished himself in none of these sports. In fact, the only notable event from his youth baseball exploits was that he split starts for his 1977 squad with Kelly Krzan, who was the first girl in Ohio to play on a boys’ Little League team.

By the time Clemens was 15 and a high-school sophomore, Randy had married and moved to Sugar Land, Texas, a suburb 20 miles southwest of downtown Houston. Randy had failed to achieve athletic stardom of his own largely due to the development of a substance-abuse problem, but he now wanted to guide his younger brother’s athletic career. After the two brothers received their mother’s permission, Ohio-born-and-raised Roger Clemens made the sojourn to Texas, the state with which he has become identified.

Clemens enjoyed initial success by amassing a 12-1 record and helping Sugar Land’s Dulles High School win a district title, but Randy was plotting a move to more competitive fields. After watching a tournament game between two of the Houston area’s premier high-school teams, Bellaire and Spring Woods, Clemens decided that he wanted to play for the latter team. Bess Clemens had moved to Houston now as well, and she made sure that her son’s wish was granted.

The time spent at Spring Woods High School was a mixed blessing: Clemens played for a coach, Charlie Maiorana, whom he credits for much of his knowledge about mechanics and conditioning, but he spent his junior year seeing little action on a team with two of the state’s best pitching prospects. His determination showed as he became known for his workout regimen, especially his running, and he had his turn as Spring Woods’ number one starting pitcher during his senior year. Still, at that point in his life, the player who came to sit at number three on the major-league strikeout list still threw too softly to draw any notice from either professional or college scouts.

As a favor to Clemens, Maiorana called a colleague, Wayne Graham, the new coach at San Jacinto Junior College, to ask if he could pull any strings to get Clemens to his desired destination, the University of Texas in Austin. Graham could not accomplish that feat, but he did offer Clemens a scholarship to San Jacinto, which is where Clemens’ fortunes were reversed. The failure to achieve high-school stardom resulted in the season that launched Clemens on the path to professional greatness.

The year 1981 was Wayne Graham’s first season to coach at any college level, but he has become a legend by guiding San Jacinto to five national junior-college championships in six years (1985-1990) – a feat that earned him Collegiate Baseball Magazine’s Junior College Coach of the Century Award – and leading Houston’s Rice University to the NCAA College World Series Championship in 2003. What Graham did with Clemens – turning a soft-tossing youth into a flamethrower – was an equally impressive accomplishment. He preached to Clemens that he needed to finish hard on his pitches or he would never have a chance to realize his dream of pitching in the major leagues, a message Clemens took to heart as he finished his sole season at San Jacinto with a 9-2 record while the college won the Texas Junior College Athletic Association championship. His coach’s assessment was that “Roger began the year as one of the guys, and he ended it as an ace.”5

Graham anticipated that Clemens would remain at San Jacinto for a second year, an expectation that was buoyed when Clemens turned down an offer from the New York Mets, who had selected him in the 12th round of the 1981 draft. Clemens went through the motions of throwing for Mets manager Joe Torre and pitching coach/legend Bob Gibson at Houston’s Astrodome, but he had other plans in mind. He had been contacted by University of Texas Longhorns coach Cliff Gustafson, who was now interested in the improved pitcher. The opportunity to play at Texas had been Clemens’ dream, and he pounced on it; however, he failed to contact Graham about his decision and alienated the man who had placed him on the road to stardom.

Clemens fulfilled expectations at Texas, although there were some hiccups along the way. The 1982 Longhorns began their season with a 33-game winning streak that was one win shy of tying the NCAA record. Clemens, who had begun the campaign 7-0, pitched in game number 34 but lost 4-3 to the University of Houston. It was later revealed that he had bursitis while pitching that game, and he missed the next two weeks of the season. He finished 12-2 with a 1.99 ERA, but Texas was eliminated from the College World Series by Wichita State.

The Longhorns suffered under the burden of high expectations in 1983 and plodded through an up-and down season. At one point, the driven Clemens became so frustrated by his personal mound setbacks that he was ready to quit the team, an example of the toll that the insecurity caused by Randy Clemens’ “winner or failure” mentality took on him. While he was not yet a polished pitcher, he still demonstrated great potential. Houston Astros scout Gordon Lakey reported that Clemens’ delivery was not compact enough, but he believed it could be helped and that Clemens would develop more leg drive and become a power pitcher.6 Chicago White Sox scout Larry Monroe’s report echoed that of Lakey as he wrote of Clemens: “Delivery is fluid but does not use body at all. Should be easily improved and no reason why he shouldn’t be in low 90’s. I’m surprised he doesn’t have shoulder problems from standing up and just throwing. Some bend in legs and drive to plate would help velocity, life, and location.”7 Both scouts projected Clemens as a likely second-round draft pick. Owing to rare encouragement from the usually gruff Gustafson, Clemens persevered – he went 13-5 with a 3.04 ERA – and the Longhorns survived their inconsistency to make a return trip to the College World Series.

Before Clemens took the mound for his start against Oklahoma State in the College World Series on June 6, the Boston Red Sox selected him as the 19th player chosen in the major-league draft, a circumstance about which he said, “I was completely surprised. As far as I was concerned, Boston was a foreign country.”8 Five days after defeating Oklahoma State, Clemens capped his Texas career with a complete-game 4-3 victory over Alabama in the College World Series Championship Game to put himself and his team on top of the collegiate baseball world before he departed Austin for Boston, having now been signed by Red Sox scout Danny Doyle. Of course, Clemens did not make it to the parent club straight out of college, but he did take the fast track through the Red Sox’ minor-league system where he already exhibited character traits that became hallmarks of his career.

His first stop was with the Winter Haven Red Sox of the Class-A Florida State League, for whom he went 3-1 with a 1.24 ERA in four starts and where he established his reputation for pitching inside to hitters. Two days before his final Winter Haven start, Clemens had taken umbrage at the Lakeland Tigers’ Ronald Davis taking out his Red Sox (and ex-University of Texas) teammate Mike Brumley at second base, a play on which Brumley was injured. Clemens pitched a 15-strikeout shutout against Lakeland in which he also retaliated for Brumley’s injury by hitting Davis in the head in his first at-bat. Clemens claimed – as most pitchers do – that he had only wanted to brush Davis back and that the pitch had gotten away from him; however, he also claimed that he was prepared to fight, something for which Davis was in no condition as he collapsed and was taken to a hospital.

The split opinion among baseball observers as to whether Clemens merely pitched inside or was a headhunter mirrors the split in opinion about his character in general. Few players thought poorly of Don Drysdale or Nolan Ryan for pitching close inside, but these two pitchers were held in high regard while Clemens was often considered arrogant. Clemens fanned the flames of this negative reputation by both his actions and his words, never more infamously so than after winning the 1986 American League MVP Award. When informed that no less a luminary than Hank Aaron had asserted that pitchers should not receive the MVP, he retorted, “I wish he was still playing. I’d probably crack his head open to show him how valuable I was.”9

After his debacle-marred gem, Clemens was promoted to the New Britain (Connecticut) Red Sox of the Double-A Eastern League and amassed a 4-1 record with a 1.38 ERA in seven starts, but he also continued to draw controversy. In the team’s first-round playoff series, Reading Phillies manager Bill Dancy protested that Clemens was using a glove that had writing all over it and claimed that it was distracting. The home-plate umpire ordered Clemens to use a different glove – an order the pitcher complied with – but he began to curse at Clemens due to the grief he was getting from New Britain’s bench. Clemens charged the umpire but stopped short of any physical contact. Instead, he calmed down, borrowed a teammate’s glove, and proceeded to dominate Reading. Charging umpires became another Clemens trait as his career progressed, but calming down did not. As he accumulated successes, his “winner or failure” mentality and its resultant insecurity morphed into hypercompetitive intensity on and off the mound.

New Britain dispatched the Phillies and faced the Lynn Sailors for the championship, which they won when Clemens pitched a 10-strikeout shutout in Game Four. After he had breezed through two levels of the minor leagues and won his second championship in three months, Clemens’ baseball future looked bright. His personal life became equally so when he began to date Debra Lynn Godfrey, whom he had known in passing at Spring Woods High School, in the offseason. Godfrey was a fellow fitness fanatic who twice auditioned for the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders squad, and the two of them worked out together regularly. They became engaged in May 1984 and were married in November of that year.

Before his engagement to Godfrey, Clemens made one final stop on his way to Boston. He took part in spring training with the parent club in the familiar surroundings of Winter Haven, Florida, but ended up being assigned to Pawtucket of the Triple-A International League to begin the season after posting a 6.60 ERA in Grapefruit League games. Clemens did not allow his disappointment to keep him from excelling at yet another level as he posted a 1.93 ERA in 46⅔ innings for Pawtucket. Enough was enough and, on May 11, 1984, Roger Clemens was officially called up by the Boston Red Sox.

On Tuesday, May 15, 1984, Clemens made his major-league debut against the Indians before a mere 4,004 fans at chilly Cleveland Stadium and learned that minor-league success does not always carry over instantly to the majors. He received no decision after surrendering 11 hits, three walks, and five runs (four earned) in 5⅔ innings, but what was alarming was that Indians baserunners had swiped six bases against him because, in the words of his catcher, Gary Allenson, “(a)t that point, he had no real concept of keeping opposing runners in check.”10 In his next start, against the Minnesota Twins on May 20, he pitched seven strong innings to earn his first major-league victory.

The remainder of Clemens’ rookie season was not as memorable as the one put together by his National League counterpart, Dwight Gooden of the New York Mets, who finished with a 17-9 record and easily won the NL Rookie of the Year award. Clemens was up and down from start to start and later conceded that some people were beginning to question whether he might fall into the same category as David Clyde, the 1970s poster boy for young pitchers who had been rushed to the major leagues too quickly. That fear was put to rest by a 15-strikeout performance against the Kansas City Royals on August 21, but soon a new specter – that of injury – arrived to haunt the Red Sox and their fans. In his final start of the season, on August 31 against the Indians, Clemens registered seven of 11 outs by strikeout and then exited the game with a strained tendon in his right forearm. Though the injury was minor, Clemens was shut down for the year and finished a solid but unspectacular rookie campaign at 9-4 with a 4.32 ERA.

Clemens endured nagging injuries on his way to a 7-5/3.29 sophomore campaign in 1985. The low point of his season came on July 7 when he could not make his scheduled start against the California Angels due to what he described as “[. . .] an intensely sharp pain, as if someone stuck a knife in the back of my shoulder.”11 Clemens’ early-career insecurity came to the fore again as he engaged in a clubhouse meltdown in Anaheim that day, and his fear of failure caused him to break down in tears while repeatedly asking, “Why me?” The next day he was placed on the 15-day disabled list due to shoulder inflammation and, though he returned to the rotation, he never recovered fully that year. On August 30 surgeon James Andrews removed a small piece of cartilage from Clemens’ right shoulder in a 20-minute procedure. Clemens spent the offseason learning new exercises to strengthen his shoulder and waited for the 1986 season to come around.

The Red Sox started out slowly in 1986, but Clemens overcame his spring-training fears about his rehabilitated shoulder and charged out to a 3-0 record with a 1.85 ERA. His fourth start provided the harbinger of things to come as April 29, 1986, became the night on which Roger Clemens vaulted himself to stardom. Facing a free-swinging Seattle Mariners team that had struck out 166 times in 19 games, he turned in a record-setting performance by striking out 20 batters in a nine-inning, complete-game effort at Fenway Park. Clemens began the game in form by brushing back his former college teammate and role model Spike Owen with his second and third pitches of the night. Afterward, he denied throwing at Owen, but a conflicting account exists in which former Longhorns teammate Mike Capel dared him to plunk Owen on the day before the game.

Whatever the truth about Clemens’ intent, the tone for the game was set and the Mariners were baffled for all but one pitch. Gorman Thomas launched Clemens’ lone mistake for a solo home run and a 1-0 Mariners lead in the top of the seventh inning and, for a moment, it looked as though Clemens’ brilliance might be for naught. Fortunately for Clemens and the Red Sox, Dwight Evans hit a three-run homer in the bottom of the inning for the final 3-1 margin of victory. From that point on, Clemens struck out four more batters to reach the record-breaking total of 20. He became an instant superstar and fulfilled a dream he claimed to have had when he was 12 by making the cover of Sports Illustrated’s May 12, 1986 issue, which carried the headline “Lord of the K’s.”12

After an 11-strikeout victory at Baltimore on June 27, Clemens was only the fifth pitcher in major-league history to start a season 14-0. He suffered his first loss on July 2 against the Toronto Blue Jays, but his 15-2 first-half record led Kansas City manager Dick Howser to name him the American League’s starter in the All-Star Game, which would be held in his adopted hometown of Houston. The Red Sox, meanwhile, were in first place in the AL East with a 56-31 record and a seven-game lead at the break.

There was, however, a downside that accompanied all of this success, and it involved his relationship with the media and its burgeoning demands on his time. According to Clemens, “The attention I enjoyed and appreciated at first after breaking the strikeout record soon became stressful.” He claimed that the press did not realize “how I needed to stay on my program and work.”13 For their part, the reporters began to perceive Clemens as alternately aloof or difficult, depending upon whether or not they could get any worthwhile quotes from the new star. Clemens correctly conceded that this period was “the first time I experienced some problems with the media,”14 but it would not be the last.

The media crush of an All-Star Game that matched Clemens and fellow fireballer Dwight Gooden as the starters did not deter him from turning the event into yet another showcase for his talents. While Gooden surrendered two runs in three innings of work, Clemens retired all nine NL batters he faced, struck out two, and did not allow a single baserunner, a performance that earned him the game’s MVP award. His newfound stardom also birthed a new arrogance that surfaced in the second half of the 1986 season.

In his July 30 start against the Chicago White Sox at Comiskey Park, Clemens had a new manner of meltdown after first-base umpire Greg Kosc made a disputed call that went against him. With two outs in the fifth inning, Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner had flipped a Harold Baines grounder to Clemens, who thought he had beaten the runner to the bag. Instead, Kosc ruled that Clemens had missed first base and called Baines safe, which allowed what ended up being the winning run to score for the White Sox. Clemens charged at Kosc to argue the call and made incidental contact with the umpire, which resulted in his automatic ejection. Now he came completely unglued – he claimed to have hyperventilated twice during his rampage – and eventually was carried off the field by teammates Jim Rice and Don Baylor. Clemens was suspended for two games and fined, but his outlook on his punishment was revealing: In his autobiography, he stated, “As it turned out, all I lost was a day’s pay – little more than $1,000 – and $250” [for paying his teammates’ (Bruce Hurst and Al Nipper) minor fines].15 A fine was no great consequence to Clemens and, from this point on, he often alternated feats with fits over the course of his career.

The 1986 Red Sox rolled into the playoffs, with Clemens winning his last seven decisions, but Clemens’ own postseason hopes seemed jeopardized when John Stefero’s line drive hit his pitching elbow in his final regular season start, against Baltimore on October 1. X-rays were negative and the swelling went down in time for Clemens to make his Game One start in the ALCS against the California Angels at Fenway. Clemens made three starts in Boston’s hard-fought seven-game series against the Angels: Game One was forgettable as he surrendered eight runs (seven earned) in 7⅓ innings and Game Four resulted in a no-decision in 8⅓ innings during Boston’s extra-inning loss, but in the clinching Game Seven he dominated the Angels and allowed only one run in seven innings to help send the Red Sox to the World Series for the first time since 1975.

World Series Game Two was a Clemens-versus-Gooden rematch, but neither pitcher lasted longer than five innings; a flu-ridden Clemens gave up four walks and three runs in 4⅓ innings of a game that Boston won 9-3. His second start came in Game Six, with the Red Sox holding a 3-2 edge in games, and he struck out eight while surrendering only two runs (one earned) in seven innings. The Red Sox had a 3-2 lead when Clemens was lifted from the game for a pinch-hitter in the eighth inning, but there was controversy over the timing of his exit. Clemens had torn open a blister and had begun bleeding, and manager John McNamara later claimed that Clemens had asked out of the game as a result, a contention that Clemens and several of his teammates denied. Game Six went down in Red Sox infamy as Calvin Schiraldi combined with Bob Stanley, Bill Buckner, and fate to lose to the Mets 6-5 in 10 innings. The Mets’ 8-5 victory in Game Seven kept Clemens from putting the ultimate jewel in the crown of his 1986 season, a campaign during which he went 24-4 with a league-leading 2.48 ERA and became the first player to win the Cy Young Award, American League MVP Award, and All-Star Game MVP Award in the same season.

In addition to all of his on-field success, Roger and Debbie Clemens welcomed their first son, Koby, into the world on December 4, 1986. In what became a theme, Clemens gave all four of his sons names that begin with the letter “K” – Kory, Kacy, and Kody followed Koby – since it is the baseball scoring abbreviation for a strikeout.

The relationship between Clemens and the Red Sox took a downturn when Clemens walked out in the middle of spring training over a contract dispute. Commissioner Peter Ueberroth eventually negotiated an agreement between the team and its star, but the incident did not bode well for the future. The Red Sox had a miserable 1987 season, finishing at 78-84, though Clemens won his second consecutive Cy Young Award with a 20-9 record, 2.97 ERA, and seven shutouts.

In 1988 Clemens created a minor stir by deciding to pitch against the Angels in Anaheim rather than return to Houston for the birth of his second son, Kory. He earned a complete-game victory in that May 30 game on his way to an 18-12, 2.93, eight-shutout season. The Red Sox rebounded to win the AL East in 1988 but were swept in the ALCS by the Oakland Athletics, though Clemens pitched adequately in his Game Two start.

The biggest firestorm Clemens ignited that year came on December 5 when he gave an interview to a Boston television station in which he attacked anyone and everyone associated with the Red Sox, from management to teammates to fans. His complaint, “Travel, road trips and carrying your own luggage around isn’t all that fun and glory,”16 propagated the stereotype of the spoiled, pampered athlete and cast him in a negative light to fans.

Clemens did play for the Red Sox through the 1996 season, winning his third Cy Young in 1991 and leading the AL in ERA from 1990 to 1992, but he continued to be antagonistic with the media and, in turn, both the media and fans emphasized his shortcomings – real and perceived – more than his accomplishments.

One highly scrutinized event was a tantrum in Game Four of the 1990 ALCS in which the Athletics again swept the Red Sox. Clemens had pitched six shutout innings in Game One, but Boston had lost, and things were not going well at the outset of Game Four. With Oakland leading 1-0 and two outs in the second inning, Clemens began cursing from the mound at home-plate umpire Terry Cooney over balls and strikes and was ejected from the game. When Clemens realized that he had been tossed, he charged Cooney and pushed right-field umpire Jim Evans aside, an offense for which he was fined $10,000 and suspended for the first five games of the 1991 season.

Rather than lie low after such an ignominious end to the season, Clemens gained additional notoriety off the field when he and older brother Randy were arrested at a Houston nightclub on January 18, 1991. Randy had become involved in an altercation, and Roger was arrested for hindering the security guard – an off-duty police officer – who was attempting to arrest his brother. He was found “not guilty” of the charge, but his fame was now increasing for the wrong reasons.

In 1992 Clemens further strained his relationship with the Red Sox when he reported eight days late for spring training; however, he still registered another stellar campaign on the mound, finishing 18-11. After he posted his first losing record in 1993 – 11-14 with a 4.46 ERA – speculation renewed about how much longer Clemens would last. He pitched well in strike-shortened 1994, but in 1995 he had a bloated 4.18 ERA and again came up short in the postseason, though he received no decision in the Red Sox’ ALDS Game One extra-inning loss to the Cleveland Indians.

While Clemens was in an up-and-down phase of his career on the mound and was in the process of alienating Boston fans and management, he was still popular enough with fans nationwide that he made several guest appearances as himself on different television shows. Clemens even showed a sense of humor by taking a role in the animated The Simpsons episode titled “Homer at the Bat.” In the course of the story, Clemens – as himself – is hypnotized into thinking that he is a chicken and spends much of the episode squawking and clucking. His acting exploits also included the big screen, for which his most notable role was as an unnamed flamethrower who pitches to Ty Cobb in the 1994 film Cobb, based on Al Stump’s biography of the Georgia Peach.

In 1996 Clemens posted his second losing record, 10-13, but had a more respectable 3.63 ERA and led the AL with 257 strikeouts. He momentarily turned back the clock 10 years by registering his second career 20-strikeout game, against Detroit at Tiger Stadium on September 18; it was also his 192nd victory, which tied him with Cy Young atop the Red Sox’ all-time list. Nonetheless, Red Sox general manager Dan Duquette considered his 40-39 record for the team from 1993 through 1996 and questioned whether Clemens might be in the “twilight” of his career; he apparently did not see him as a player around whom to rebuild the team into a perennial contender. Clemens spurned Boston’s contract offer and signed for three years and $24.75 million with the Toronto Blue Jays.

Toronto was far removed from its consecutive World Series victories of 1992-1993 and was not a contender during Clemens’ stint with the team, but “Rocket” was not finished yet after all. Quite the contrary, the brief Blue Jays era of 1997-1998 was Clemens at his dominant best as he went a combined 41-13 with a 2.33 ERA and 563 strikeouts, winning the pitching Triple Crown – wins, ERA, strikeouts – in both years as well as his fourth and fifth Cy Young Awards. He also exacted revenge against the Red Sox in his first start as a Blue Jay at Fenway Park on July 12, 1997, when he pitched eight innings of one-run ball and struck out 16 batters.

In time, a cloud of suspicion gathered over this mid-30s pitching renaissance for two reasons: 1) The prevalence of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) in baseball by this time, and 2) the hiring of Brian McNamee as Toronto’s strength and conditioning coach after the 1997 season. Baseball was in the midst of its PED era and – as was the case with most players – no public accusations were made against Clemens at the time; however, McNamee later claimed that he injected Clemens with the steroid Winstrol in 1998.

Clemens longed to pitch for a contender again and his trade request was granted on February 18, 1999, when Toronto traded him to the New York Yankees – an old adversary with whom he had engaged in numerous beanball wars – for starter David Wells, reliever Graeme Lloyd, and second baseman Homer Bush. As a Yankee, Clemens was back in the center of the baseball universe, but that was a mixed blessing as he turned in an inconsistent 14-10, 4.60 campaign.

The 1999 postseason began promisingly as Clemens pitched seven scoreless innings in the ALDS-clinching Game Three against the Texas Rangers, but the ALCS was another matter altogether as Clemens fizzled in his return to Fenway in a Game Three marquee matchup against Boston’s new ace, Pedro Martinez. While Martinez pitched seven shutout innings and struck out 12, Clemens suffered the Yankees’ only loss of the series and was battered for five runs in only two innings. As he left the mound in the bottom of the third, Boston fans taunted him by chanting “Where is Rog-er?” That game became a distant memory for Clemens after he won World Series Game Four against the Atlanta Braves with a 7⅔-inning, one-run performance that capped a Yankees sweep. The one prize, a World Series ring, that had eluded Clemens for his entire career was now his: “Tonight, I know what it’s like to be a Yankee. I am blessed,” he exulted.17

Prior to Game Two of the World Series at Atlanta’s Turner Field, Clemens had been named – along with 29 other players – as a member of the All-Century Team. The 100 nominees for the team had been chosen by a panel of experts and had been presented at that year’s All-Star Game, but it was the fans who had voted for the players. Clemens was the only active pitcher – and one of only four active players – voted onto the team, joining Cal Ripken Jr., Ken Griffey Jr., and Mark McGwire. This accolade and his first World Series championship appeared to validate Clemens’ tunnel-vision tenacity in pursuit of his goals.

On the heels of reaching the pinnacle of professional success, Clemens experienced one of the lowest points in his personal life. In May 2000 his ex-sister-in-law Kathy, who had been married to his brother Randy and had been like a mother to him when he had first moved to Texas, was murdered in a home-invasion robbery in Houston. Kathy’s son Marcus had adopted his father Randy’s drug habit, and the robbery was tied to money and drugs. Roger blamed Randy’s substance-abuse addiction for the couple’s divorce, his nephew’s drug addiction, and Kathy’s murder, and he became alienated from the brother who had exerted such tremendous influence on his life, his outlook on the world, and his early career.

On the mound in 2000, Clemens posted a pedestrian 13-8 record and lost his two starts against Oakland in the ALDS, but he experienced a reversal of fortune from the previous year’s ALCS in Boston in his Game Four start against the Seattle Mariners. In a game as dominant as any he had ever pitched, he set an ALCS record by striking out 15 batters in a one-hit shutout. It was an amazing performance for a 38-year old power pitcher that also served as an endorsement for Clemens’ now-legendary workout regimen – one that players half his age were unwilling to attempt – which again fell under the auspices of Brian McNamee, who had joined the Yankees as an assistant strength coach in 2000.

Clemens turned in another eight shutout innings in World Series Game Two against the crosstown Mets, a Series the Yankees won in five games. The focus of the game, though, was a bizarre incident that occurred in the top of the first inning. Mets catcher Mike Piazza, whom Clemens had hit in the head with a pitch in a regular-season game on July 8, shattered his bat hitting a soft liner that squibbed foul into the Yankees dugout. Clemens picked up the barrel piece of the bat and threw it in Piazza’s direction as he ran up the baseline. The shard almost hit Piazza, who was angered and exchanged words with Clemens as both benches emptied. Clemens was not ejected for his action and dominated the Mets with eight innings of shutout ball in which he allowed only two hits and no walks and struck out nine. After the game, Clemens offered the implausible excuse that he had thought he had the ball, rather than the barrel of Piazza’s bat, which still did not explain why he threw it toward Piazza rather than first baseman Tino Martinez. Nobody believed Clemens, and he was fined $50,000 for the incident.

In 2001, a season in which McNamee has claimed he injected Clemens with the steroids Sustanon 250 and Deca-Durabolin, Clemens raced out to a 12-1 record that garnered him his second career All-Star Game start. He took his record to 19-1 before his first attempt at win number 20 was placed on hold by the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001. After America regrouped, and MLB resumed play on September 17 at the behest of President George W. Bush, Clemens finished the season 20-3 with a 3.51 ERA and earned his sixth Cy Young Award. The Yankees again made it to the World Series, and Clemens registered a 1.35 ERA over 13⅓ innings in two starts against the Arizona Diamondbacks. In Game Three, he scattered three hits in seven innings in a 2-1 win. He engaged in a Game Seven duel against Curt Schilling that the Yankees lost when Luis Gonzalez looped an RBI single off Mariano Rivera to win the game in the bottom of the ninth inning.

Clemens was solid, though no longer spectacular, with the Yankees in 2002-03. He did reach both the 300-win and 4,000-strikeout milestones in a 5-2 victory over the St. Louis Cardinals at Yankee Stadium on June 13, 2003, becoming the first pitcher to hit both landmarks in the same game. He had said repeatedly that he was retiring after the 2003 season, so when he walked off the mound of Miami’s Pro Player Stadium after pitching seven innings of three-run ball in World Series Game Four on October 22, 2003, everyone assumed it was his swan song. There was no fairytale ending to his story, though, as the Yankees fell to the Florida Marlins in six games.

Clemens’ retirement lasted little more than 2½ months. Shortly after Yankees free agent, friend, and fellow Houstonian Andy Pettitte signed to play for the Houston Astros, Clemens joined him and the pair set Houston abuzz with the hope that they could help franchise icons Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio reach the promised land of the World Series before they too reached retirement age.

Although 2004 was his first year in the National League, Clemens registered the same results he had through most of his career: He posted an 18-4 record, 2.98 ERA, and 218 strikeouts for which he won his record-extending seventh Cy Young Award, joining Gaylord Perry, Randy Johnson, and Pedro Martinez as the only pitchers to win the award in both leagues. He also started his third All-Star Game – this time for the NL – in his adopted hometown of Houston, where he had started his first All-Star Game for the AL 18 years earlier.

The Astros were the NL wild-card team in 2004, and Clemens started the franchise toward its first-ever postseason-series victory in 43 seasons of existence by winning NLDS Game One against the Atlanta Braves. Against the St. Louis Cardinals in the NLCS, he won Game Three but lost the decisive Game Seven; however, he received none of the criticism he had often endured in Boston and New York when he had fallen short in the postseason. He could do no wrong in his hometown and was becoming a Texas legend on a par with his boyhood idol Nolan Ryan.

Clemens returned to the Astros in 2005 and added to his increasingly larger-than-life exploits. At the age of 43, he led the majors with a 1.87 ERA and might have won an eighth Cy Young Award had he received more run support to improve his 13-8 record. On September 14, in a decision reminiscent of his choice to pitch on the day of his son Kory’s birth, Clemens defeated the Florida Marlins after his mother, Bess, died that morning. In response to those who questioned his decision, Clemens replied that his mother had made him promise to pitch and that the game was important to the Astros’ playoff hopes. It was clear that he was still as driven to win as he had always been.

The Astros were the NL wild-card entry again in 2005 and faced the Atlanta Braves once more. Clemens lost Game Two, but for Houston fans his status grew to mythological proportions three days later in Game Four. On October 9, after the Astros had exhausted their bullpen by the 15th inning of their marathon contest against the Braves, Clemens came to the rescue and pitched three scoreless innings. He earned the win when Chris Burke ended the game with a solo homer in the bottom of the 18th, and the Astros advanced to the NLCS. As if pitching on short rest were not enough, Clemens had also demonstrated a bit of batting acumen when he laid down a perfect sacrifice bunt in the bottom of the 15th.

In the NLCS, the Astros met another familiar opponent – the Cardinals – whom they defeated in six games to reach their first World Series, with Clemens contributing a victory in Game Three. The magic ran out in the World Series, though, as he exited Game One with a sore hamstring after allowing three runs in only two innings. The Chicago White Sox swept the Astros, and Clemens seemed likely to retire permanently.

Alas, he could not stay away from the game, and he lost much of the goodwill he had engendered in 2005 by appearing willing to sell himself to the highest bidder as he engaged in talks with numerous teams. The so-called “family-friendly” clause that had allowed Clemens to remain home for road trips during which he was not scheduled to pitch – and which he insisted upon to the end of his career – now had some people questioning whether his true motive was team success or money. In the end, he signed with the Astros on May 31 and still posted a 2.30 ERA in 113⅓ innings over 19 starts, but the team failed to make the playoffs.

Clemens played the same “Will he or won’t he pitch?” game at the start of the 2007 season before announcing his return to the New York Yankees from owner George Steinbrenner’s luxury box during the seventh-inning stretch of a Yankees-Mariners game on May 6. He posted a mediocre 6-6, 4.18 line over 99 innings before limping off the Yankee Stadium mound with yet another hamstring injury in the Yankees’ October 7 ALDS game against Cleveland.

Once his career was finally over, the countdown to Clemens’ Hall of Fame induction began. Whether media members and fans liked him or not – and there were plenty of people in both camps – his statistics pointed to him being one of the best pitchers ever to play the game. Even so, the voters who cast ballots for players to gain entry into the National Baseball Hall of Fame are told to take a player’s character into account, and all sorts of skeletons fell out of Clemens’ closet upon the release of the Mitchell Report.

First, there were Brian McNamee’s allegations of steroid use. Clemens vehemently denied McNamee’s accusations and, under the advice and guidance of his lawyer Rusty Hardin, went on the offensive. On January 6, 2008, Clemens filed a defamation suit against McNamee. Though Clemens eventually dropped his suit, McNamee filed his own defamation suit against Clemens in 2008, which dragged on for almost seven years before McNamee received an out-of-court settlement to be paid by Clemens’ insurer – not Clemens himself – in March 2015.

The same day that Clemens filed his lawsuit in Houston, CBS-TV’s investigative news show 60 Minutes aired a Mike Wallace interview of Clemens. In the interview Clemens claimed that McNamee had only injected him with vitamin B12 and the painkiller Lidocaine, an assertion that was dubious to many viewers and which made him the butt of countless pain-in-the-butt jokes.

The next day Clemens and Hardin held a press conference in Houston and played a recording of a recent phone conversation between Clemens and McNamee that was to prove Clemens’ innocence. The tape proved nothing as McNamee sounded both too desperate and too cautious to say anything that might incriminate him. Clemens fielded questions from the media, but grew increasingly aggravated and angry as the conference continued. When asked if he thought McNamee’s allegations would affect his chances at being elected to the Hall of Fame, his retort, “I don’t give a rat’s ass about the Hall of Fame,”18 was another statement no one believed, and he soon stormed out of his own press conference.

On February 13, 2008, Clemens was called to testify before a congressional committee in Washington, where he continued to profess his innocence. Some of his testimony contradicted a sworn statement made by Andy Pettitte, who claimed Clemens had told him that McNamee injected him with human growth hormone (HGH). Clemens responded that Pettitte had “misremembered” [sic] their conversation and that he had told Pettitte it was his wife, Debbie, whom McNamee had injected with HGH. There were enough inconsistencies in Clemens’ testimony that a drawn-out legal process resulted in an August 19, 2010, grand-jury indictment for making false statements to Congress. His first trial, in July 2011, quickly resulted in a mistrial, while his second trial ended with his acquittal on June 18, 2012.

Along with the steroid allegations and their attendant legal troubles, Clemens was also accused of having extramarital affairs with numerous women. The two most notable names were those of the late country singer Mindy McCready and pro golfer John Daly’s ex-wife Paulette. Clemens denied these accusations as well, but McCready and Paulette Daly neither confirmed nor denied them, which gave them implicit affirmation in many people’s minds.

All of this dirty laundry was aired in the media in the immediate aftermath of the Mitchell Report, but two books contributed further to the decline of Clemens’ reputation: Jeff Pearlman’s unauthorized biography The Rocket That Fell to Earth, and New York Daily News’ Sports Investigative Team’s American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America’s Pastime. Pearlman’s book portrays Clemens in such a consistently negative light that it is easy to dismiss it as one-sided, but the Daily News team’s research into McNamee’s claims casts serious doubt on Clemens’ assertion of innocence. The facts remain, however, that Roger Clemens never tested positive for PEDs and that he was acquitted of all charges of lying to Congress.

Nonetheless, the repercussions of the allegations have resulted in a lack of support for Clemens’ Hall of Fame candidacy. If he is ultimately enshrined, it is entirely possible that a Veterans Committee will have determined his fate after his initial 10-year period of eligibility has passed. His new road to baseball immortality involves rehabilitation of his former reputation as a hard-working star, which will be an arduous process since everything he does now is greeted with suspicion and cynicism, a circumstance that was in evidence when he pitched two games with the independent Atlantic League’s Sugar Land Skeeters in 2012.

Sugar Land, where Clemens lived when he first moved to Texas, received a national publicity boost during the Skeeters’ inaugural season when Clemens pitched in two games in August and September 2012. His motive for doing so was suspect, however, as he had just been acquitted of lying to Congress in June and needed positive publicity during his first time on the Hall of Fame ballot. Some media members believed that Clemens was attempting a late-season MLB comeback to push back his Hall of Fame eligibility by five years in the hope his legal troubles would blow over and that he would be a first-ballot selectee. Clemens denied such claims, but his comment – “I probably overextended myself a little bit. I wanted to see where I was at”19 – after his August 25 start for the Skeeters was interpreted to mean that he was gauging his comeback status.

By his second start, on September 7, the Skeeters had signed Clemens’ oldest son, Koby, a catcher, and father and son formed the battery against the Long Island Ducks. This time, the 50-year-old Clemens clearly left open the possibility of a major-league comeback attempt when he said, “I would have to get ready. It would be fun. There’s no reason why I couldn’t do it next year.”20 Though he had pitched well in both games – and no doubt enjoyed being the center of attention for his pitching rather than his court appearances – this was unaffiliated minor-league ball and his fastball had topped out at 88 MPH, which was hardly the dominant stuff he had once had in his prime.

In the end, Clemens chose to go out as a hometown hero and a winner after his appearances for the Skeeters rather than to risk going out as a failure in one last major-league stint. As of 2015, he and Debbie reside in Houston, where they work to benefit children through the Roger Clemens Foundation and where he also serves as a special assistant to the Astros’ general manager.

Clemens’ work with the Astros and his induction into the Red Sox Hall of Fame at Fenway Park on August 14, 2014, prior to Boston’s game against the Astros, show that there is still a place for him in baseball. The March 2015 settlement in the McNamee case may eventually allow Clemens to move past constant discussion of the steroid allegations against him, though the court of public opinion is unlikely to change its judgment. Clemens did not attend the McNamee settlement, saying, “I was not present, nor would have I participated in paying one dime. Everyone knows my stance on the subject.”21 The fact that he had been named on only 37.5 percent of the Hall of Fame ballots in January 2015 demonstrated that the Hall of Fame voters have not changed their stance in regard to Clemens either.

Last revised: November 16, 2015

A version of this biography is included in “Nuclear Powered Baseball: Articles Inspired by The Simpsons Episode Homer At the Bat” (SABR, 2016), edited by Emily Hawks and Bill Nowlin. For more information, click here.

Sources

Baseballhall.org

Baseball-Reference.com

Boston Globe

CBC Sports

Chicago Tribune

Clemens, Roger, with Peter Gammons. Rocket Man (Lexington, Massachusetts: The Stephen Greene Press, 1987).

ESPN.com

Hartford Courant

Houston.astros.mlb.com

Houston Chronicle

Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader

New York Daily News

New York Times

Pearlman, Jeff. The Rocket That Fell to Earth (New York: Harper, 2009).

Riceowls.com

The Sporting News

Sports Illustrated

Sugarlandskeeters.com

Texassports.com

Thompson, Teri, et al. American Icon (New York: Knopf, 2009).

Yankeeography: Pinstripe Legends, “Roger Clemens,” (2011, A&E Home Video), DVD.

Notes

Segue to another thrill, which might have surpassed even 1967’s for Ken, had Dave Stapleton entered 1986 World Series Game Six to replace injured Bill Buckner and caught a routine ground ball that even most Little Leaguers nab. Stapleton didn’t, since he was on the bench. Buckner didn’t, since he misplayed the ball. For Coleman, 1967 and 1986 became baseball’s both sides now, its Paradise and Lower Room, respectively. Each was sung by his silken and restrained voice, which never split an infinitive or dangled a participle – “a beautiful horn,” said Boston Bruins mikeman Bob Wilson, “and, oh, Ken played it well.” Despite that, Coleman could not listen to his call of Buckner’s error until 1989.

Ken’s score began shortly upon his April 22, 1925, birth in Quincy, a Boston suburb, 15 minutes from Fenway Park, his childhood icon Jimmie Foxx. At age 12, a BB accident cost an eye, Coleman trading heroes: Double X for the Red Sox and Boston Braves first daily Voice, ex-sportswriter Fred Hoey. From 1926-38, Hoey knit New England “giving the play-by-play of the home games of both Boston clubs,” said The Sporting News. “He has one of the biggest daily followings of any announcer” due to the number of affiliates — a major-league then-high 22. In 1931, Ken, six, heard WNAC Boston hail “the first to work on a network [Yankee a.k.a. Colonial] covering the game,” TSN said of Hoey “Day”. By September, he had aired a record number of broadcast hours: 1,920, including that year’s 320.

“Fred was known – this was something then — as ‘The Man Who Does the Games’,” said Ken, the 1954-63 Cleveland Indians and 1966-74 and 1979-89 Red Sox Man. Hoey found text ads easy. By contrast, extempore material “requires concentration on the subject … severe strain on the eyes [and] nerves.” Fred tried to help the latter. In 1933, CBS Radio gave him a first network gig – the Pirates-Senators World Series. Grateful, he reached the booth before Game One, gassed. By the fourth inning, Hoey, incoherent, was yanked off the Classic. Unhorsed, Fred came home a conqueror. “In Boston, where people knew about his drinking, all was forgiven,” said Ken. “He was The First, and as in love or anything else, the first, you don’t forget.”

Coleman wanted to be a sans spirits Hoey, “having to fight not to talk like him,” Fred said. Coleman knew his region. He was also old-shoe, wearable. “His phrase was, ‘He throws to first and gets his man,’ which he said constantly,” said Ken, “and I think I … picked it up because I’d listen to past tapes and I’ve said it.” The Braves and Red Sox Voice was Boston’s two-headed Janus, coining a style used by virtually every Hub baseball Voice: just the facts, ma’am, trumped a wild and crazy guy. He also knew how to vend – “Mention Fred,” said Coleman, “and people remember Kentucky Club pipe tobacco and Mobil’s Flying Red Horse” – and instill Euripidean concern. Boston’s First couldn’t believe he was gone, until he was.

In late 1938, Socony Oil and General Mills became each Hub club’s sponsor, wanting their Voice, not a broadcaster identified with other goods. Fred paused a lot, lacking gloss. “Plus,” said Coleman, “booze affected him over time.” In 1939 Frank Frisch briefly succeeded him. Childless, unmarried, Hoey began a decade of last things and final bows. “On the air he was Boston baseball,” Ken mused, “and it wasn’t the same without him.” In Death of a Salesman, Willie Loman says: “And that’s the wonder of this country, that a man can end [up] with diamonds on the bases of being liked.” Liked, Hoey ended up alone, dying in 1949.

By then, Coleman’s father, William, a military man turned night watchman, had died, six years earlier, of a heart attack in Ken’s high school senior year. His wife Frances was a housewife. After graduation their son, 18, joined the Army in 1943, served in Burma, and aired Indian rugby, cricket, and soccer on Armed Forces Radio, jibing, “You try performing with twelve thousand troops listening.” Released, Ken took Oratory at Curry College, worked at a 250-watt Worcester affiliate, and then did golf, bowling, basketball, Boston University, Ohio State, and Harvard football, and Vermont’s Northern Baseball League, still fighting the “urge to say, ‘He throws to first and gets his man!’”

In The Federalist, Madison noted “leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence.” In 1952, Coleman and Lindsey Nelson contended for Cleveland Browns radio play-by-play until Nelson abruptly joined NBC TV. Ken inherited a 125-station four-State network. In the next 14 years, he aired seven champions, did eight network title games, and called each pro touchdown (126) by the greatest runner to ever touch a ball. Ken is the only man to see Jim Brown’s every pro game (1957-65). “What stands out is how with minutes left, the Browns are up by seven, have the ball, and Jim runs out the clock,” said Coleman. Raised in Cleveland, Jack Buck liked how Ken made time stand still: “People identify him with baseball, but he’s the best football announcer I ever heard.”

Each week at Cleveland Municipal Stadium, 80,000 filled the city’s lakefront bowl, the Browns increasingly en famille. As a child, Ken’s son Casey was a summer training camp water boy. Later, he became a Cleveland sportscaster: WTAM morning host; WJM four-time Emmy sports anchor; Indians host; and Browns play-by-play man. “The fifties were a time of football’s growth, each year more people following it on regional, then network, TV,” Coleman fils said. Virtually each Browns and Indians game telecast aired on WXEL, Channel 8, by Carling Brewing Co., at a time when “one company could afford to sponsor most, if not all, your coverage.”

Carling’s commercial signature was a belle named Mabel. Tribesmen of that generation can still sing “Mabel! Mabel! Black Label! Carling Black Label Beer!” In 1995, Ken said, “People come up, see me with my wife, and bellow, ‘‘Hey, Mabel!’” (His then-wife’s name was Ellen.) Coleman grasped baseball’s episodic rhythm. He neither screamed nor patronized, believing in “not telling the audience what it already saw.” A rookie should not be faulted for his club peaking too soon. Ken’s first wed Mike Garcia, Early Wynn, and two Bobs, Feller and Lemon, going 78-29. Larry Doby had 32 homers and 126 runs batted in. In August, Cleveland won a league-record-tying 26 games, its 111-43 record topping Murderers Row’s prior A.L.-best 110-44. “It seemed so easy,” Coleman felt of ’54. On September 12, a big-league record 86,563 jammed the oval, the Indians beating New York twice. Each year but 1954 the 1951-56ers placed second to the Yankees.

Improbably, Coleman aired the 1954-57ers with the post-Hoey play-by-playman of his youth, Jim Britt, voicing the 1940-42 and 1946-50 Red Sox and 1940-42 and 1946-52 Braves. “During the war both teams used fill-ins,” said Ken. “Coming back, Britt seemed so erudite – the greatest command of language of any broadcaster I’ve heard” — commanding, but not hyperbolic.” At 13, future TSN columnist Wells Twombly recalled “[Britt making] baseball sound better than red-haired girls with freckles.” It seemed pitch-perfect: baseball’s grammarian, in the Athens of America, each day signing off, “Remember, if you can’t take part in a sport, be one anyway, will ya’?”

Britt telecast the 1954-57 Indians with Coleman by necessity, not necessarily choice. By 1950 Narragansett Beer – “the beer,” ads said, “with the seedless hops” – had sponsored each Hub team on WHDH since 1945. Late that year, P. Ballantine & Sons Brewery inked a Braves-only pact on the Yankee Network, making Britt pick one club or the other. Jim chose the Braves over the Red Sox of Ted Williams, Johnny Pesky, and Bobby Doerr – to Coleman, “a terrible misjudgment as to the popularity of the teams.” Sox owner Tom Yawkey countered by naming Curt Gowdy Britt’s successor and — “He wanted to do it anyway,” Ken said — making all, not just home, coverage live.

The Wyoming-born and -educated Gowdy spent 1949-50 as Mel Allen’s Yankees aide. He became Voice of the Red Sox, then network TV sports’ paradigm for a generation: 15 All-Star Games, 12 World Series, seven Olympics, and two decades of The American Sportsman. From 1966-75, Curt called virtually every network baseball game. To Ken, “Britt made the Sox opening – thus, Gowdy’s rise — possible. He never recovered from what he’d done.” In 1953, the Braves absconded for Milwaukee, deserting him. “When they left, there was nothing left for Britt. He stumbled around a year, then came to Cleveland,” which Jim felt slumming after his reign on the Charles.

Indians second baseman Bobby Avila was a 1950s example of Britt refusing to go along to get along. Local dialect pronounced the All-Star’s last name Ah-VEE-la. Britt preferred AH-vee-la. “We got every kind of calls and letters,” said Coleman. “People didn’t like it.”

Carling Brewing’s chairman said, “You know, Jim, in view of the local colloquialism, we should probably call him Ah-VEE-la, like most fans want.”

The chairman’s name was Ian Bowie, as in row. Britt said, “All right with me, Mr. Bowie,” as in boo. In 1958, Britt returned to WHDH “haunted by the Red Sox’ ‘what if,’” said Boston broadcaster Leo Egan. Axed again, Britt moved to Detroit, St. Petersburg, and Sarasota, braving a divorce, unemployment, and arrests for drunkenness. He died in 1980, less tragic than forgotten, at home in Monterey, California. “In truth,” Globe columnist Ray Fitzgerald wrote, “life had turned its back on him a long time ago.”

Ken called himself “less mercurial, more serene” than Britt. “But we had this in common. Our first year we win 111 games, then afterward not much to tell.” Reticence began with the 1954 World Series, originally thought a Cleveland cinch. Instead, in the one-out and -on eighth inning of the 2-all opener at the Polo Grounds, the Indians’ Vic Wertz hit 460 feet to deep center field, whereupon Willie Mays made a catch with his back toward the plate, over his shoulder, to save a tie and become possibly baseball’s all-time most replayed out. In the 10th, the Giants’ Dusty Rhodes pinch-hit a fly 200 feet shorter than Wertz’s down the right-field line for a homer: New York, 5-2. A day later Rhodes again homered: Giants, 3-1. In Cleveland, New York completed a 6-2 and 7-4 sweep. “In many ways,” said Coleman, “the franchise was never quite the same.”

To protect network exclusivity, baseball has banned local-team Series TV. Coleman watched 1954’s on NBC. He felt the opener a metaphor for baseball’s DNA — anticipation. “Anything can happen, and here did – a pee-wee homer, a long-distance out.” Anticipation topped result for the rest of Ken’s Cleveland stay. 1956: Herb Score won 20 games. Next May Gil McDougald’s liner careened off his right eye, wrecking Herb’s career. 1959: Rocky Colavito slammed 42 homers, Ken having not yet coined “They usually show movies on a flight [long blast] like that.” The Indians’ second place marked their last contention till 1995. 1960: GM Frank Lane traded Colavito for Detroit’s Harvey Kuenn. “I’m getting steak for hamburger,” he bragged, having burned Cleveland’s best filet since Lou Boudreau. In the 1960s, even anticipation died. The Tribe never drew a million people, missed the pennant by fewer than 15 games, or hinted that faith might last past June.

Hating the bogus, Coleman found humor in reverse. Once the now-Tiger Rocky retreated to the wall. “Back goes Wally against the rock,” Ken said, “For those of you interested in statistics, that was my eleventh fluff of the year. It puts me in third place in the American League.” Finally, tired of ghosts in the stands, Ken left to focus full-time on football, his timing still sure: In December 1964 the Browns won the N.F.L. title, jolting Baltimore, 27-0. His last Brownscast was Jim Brown’s farewell on January 2, 1966, in another championship game: Green Bay 23, Cleveland 12. Straightaway Brown retired to make films. At his peak as an institution, Coleman revisited points of his past. Succeeding Gowdy, the new Voice of NBC TV’s Game of the Week, the Red Sox chose the Quincy scion, who told himself, “you lucky stiff, going back to my roots, taking Britt’s and Hoey’s job.”

In March 1966, Coleman was introduced as Boston’s new Voice. Pain: no pitcher won more than 10 games for that year’s ninth-place Red Sox. Progress: The Yawkeys drew 158,971 more than in 1965, ending the season 14 games nearer first. Jim Lonborg soon a/k/a Gentleman Jim, a future dentist, led in strikeouts and innings. Joe Foy, Mike Andrews, and George Scott debuted at third, second, and first base, respectively. Tony Conigliaro led in five team-high categories, including homers (28) and RBIs (93). Next year began with new manager Dick Williams vowing to: a) “have only one chief. All the rest are Indians”; and b) win more than he lost. The home opener drew 8,324. “In terms of interest,” Ken said, “the bottom had fallen out.” Out of nowhere, 1967 reached the heart, unforgettably reviving baseball in the Fens. On April 14, a rookie began his bigs career at Yankee Stadium. “A kid pitcher from [Triple-A] Toronto,” Ken said later, like liturgy. “That’s where this story starts.”

In a one-out ninth, “Billy Rohr [was] on the threshold,” Ken said on WHDH TV. “Eight hits in the game – all of them belong to Boston … Fly ball to left field! Yastrzemski is going hard — way back — way back! And he dives – and makes a tremendous catch! One of the greatest catches I’ve ever seen by Yastrzemski in left field! … Everybody in Yankee Stadium on their feet roaring as Yastrzemski went back and came down with that ball!” Two batters later Elston Howard singled, Tony C. catching “it on the first hop. No chance.” In late 1967, Fleetwood Recording repackaged WHDH’s The Impossible Dream, from Broadway’s The Man from La Mancha, as a must-Christmas gift. Coleman said of Rohr, “The fans began to sense it. This year was not quite the same.”

That year riot seared nearly 130 cities. Protestors fought police. Viet Nam was a horror house. The Sox took a fractured time and briefly made it whole. Boston trailed by six games at the All-Star break. It preceded a 10-game road trip, the team returning to Logan Airport 10 and 0 to find 10,000 greeters. Said the pilot: “They seem happy with what you’ve done.” As luminous were pilots from the Hub to Nova Scotia tracing a West Coast game by light in homes below. “It is late on a … night in 1967,” wrote the Herald’s Kevin Convey. “The house is dark except for the flashlight beside my bed. It is quiet except for my transistor. Ken Coleman didn’t just call baseball games. He called my summers” – also spring and fall. Jose Tartabull lined a 15th-inning “base hit to right! Here comes Tony! Here comes George! And the Red Sox have won it, 1-0!” Another batter lashed a “line drive to Foy! Over to second! And on to first! A triple play!” When rookie Smith hit a scoreless 10th-inning triple, a listener “refused to enter the Sumner Tunnel until he heard the outcome.” Hundreds of drivers backed up, hearing, too. By August 13, 2 1/2 games divided five teams. One Friday in late August Conigliaro hit against Jack Hamilton, whose pitch caused a wound around Tony’s left eye, ending his year.

That Saturday Game of the Week visited the Fens, Gowdy wending from a “fine young lefthander [Ruth] known for hitting ability” via Williams’ “moaning about the east wind that would blow off” the Charles to Mel Parnell, “a left-hander who [preferred] Fenway” to the road. Boston won on last-out ballet: “A chopper. Over the mound. May be tough,” Martin said. “Charged by Petrocelli. Throws to first! The ball game is over! A clutch play by Rico Petrocelli ends it all … in a wild and woolly ball game in a twelve to eleven win by the Red Sox!” Next day they trailed the second game of a doubleheader, 8-0, leading Yaz to navigate the dugout. “‘We’re going to win this game!’ he told each of us,” said Rico. “Man, by now we believed!” In the eight-all eighth, a Boston infielder lofted a “fly ball deep into left-center field and it is … a home run!” Ken cried. “Jerry Adair has hit his second home run of the 1967 season and the Red Sox, who trailed, 8 to 0, are now leading in the eighth inning, 9 to 8!” Adair’s poke sired “a sound wave – one crescendo after another” – from 100,000 at Revere Beach, most listening to Sox radio. “Ken’s attitude was beautiful,” said Petrocelli. “To his death, he thought that reaction symbolized the year.”

A week later Boston led, 4-3, in the ninth inning at Chicago, Duane Josephson batting. “Berry, a fast man on third,” Martin said. “And there’s a little looper to right field.” TV’s Coleman continued. “Caught by Tartabull! Runner tags! Here’s the throw home! And he is out at home plate!” Before 1967, Jose would not have nabbed Aunt Maude. In September, you could throw a blanket over the Red and White Sox, Twins, and Tigers. Boston trailed, 5-4, in the ninth inning at Detroit. “There’s a drive to deep right,” blared Ken, “and it’s tied up!” – Yaz again, five-all. Next inning reserve Dalton Jones went deep: Sox, 6-5. No. 8 won the 1967 Triple Crown [.326, 44 homers, 121 RBIs] with 23 hits in his last 44 at-bats. “One week left!” Coleman cried. “Four teams within 1 and ½ games.” By Thursday, the Twins led by a game with Saturday and Sunday left at Fenway. Stores closed. Churches opened. Boston must sweep to win or force a playoff. In Saturday’s 2-all sixth inning, “Scott hits one deep into center field!” said Coleman. “This one is back! This one is gone!” – 3-2. The bleachers soon were scene and actor: “Deep to right field! Number 44!” – Yaz’s last regular-season homer: 6-2, Red Sox – final, 6-4. Seconds later Martin supplied a coda. “If you’ve just turned your radio on” – pause – “it’s happened again. Yastrzemski’s hit a three-run homer, and it’s now 6-2, Red Sox” — final, 6-4.

On Sunday, Detroit had to twice beat California to tie the Sox or Twins. Minnesota led, 2-0, as Lonborg bunted safely to lead off the sixth. After two hits filled the sacks, Yaz “lines a base hit to center-field!” said Ken. “One run in, Adair’s around third, he will score. Going to third is Jones. It’s tied, 2-2!” Ken Harrelson hit to shortstop Zoilo Versalles, who hesitated and was lost: “No chance at a throw to the plate. Safe! Jones scores! The Red Sox lead, 3-2!” Two more runs scored before “the Red Sox are out in the sixth,” said Coleman. “But what a sixth inning it was!” Detroit won its home opener. Meantime, Minnesota’s Bob Allison lined to the corner with two out in the eighth, Tony Oliva on first base, and Harmon Killebrew on second. Yaz threw to second base, nabbing Allison: Sox, 5-3. Next inning Rich Rollins batted with two out. “The pitch . . . is looped” toward shortstop,” Martin said. “Petrocelli’s back, he’s got it! The Red Sox win!” – but what? No one knew: Detroit had to lose. “And there’s pandemonium on the field!”– the most immortal line Ned ever spoke. “Listen!” As the ball settled in Rico’s glove, students and workingmen and housewives became a wave, hundreds of bodies rocking. “I was terrified,” said Lonborg: Petrocelli, too. “It’s a miracle I’m even here,” he said, in 2009 joining MLB Network radio, where ’67 seldom wanders far away.

“[Afterward Sunday] the players came in from the field,” Ken said, “some crying or yelling.” A radio lit the background: “no ESPN, Ipod, or Internet, just [Detroit’s] Ernie Harwell in the nightcap.” The Angels led, 8-5, in a two-on and one-out ninth. The Tigers’ Dick McAuliffe promptly hit into his second double play all year – uncorking Wakefield and Woonsocket and Brattleboro and Blue Hill. In the clubhouse, Rico saw tears in Yawkey’s eyes: “spent so much money, all those near-misses, drinking champagne, more fan than owner.” The next-day Boston Record American cover blared: “CHAMPS!” above a drawing of two red socks. It was crewel, not cruel. Coleman styled other upsets “child’s play compared to 1967.” It was unthinkable then to call a Series anticlimactic. This was. Through the mid-’70s local-team Voices did the Classic. In ideal symmetry, Gowdy and his Sox successor telecast each NBC Series game in Boston: Cards, in seven.

Save Yaz and Lonborg, Coleman became the person most affixed to 1967. It was his, even more than Britt’s 1948, Martin’s 1975, or Castiglione’s 2004. A eulogy by the Herald’s Convey invoked the flashlight beside his bed. “There will be other summers. And I will listen to other announcers. But I will never stop hearing Ken Coleman.”

In 1972, Coleman shifted exclusively to TV, tying caption to picture. In 1974, replacing WHDH as Sox video flagship, WBZ “told me they wanted a new cast.” Next year Ken revisited Ohio to televise the Reds, his penny as lucky as the 1954 Indians and 1967 Townies. “Wherever Ken goes, fortune follows,” Craig wrote. Cincinnati took the 1975-76 Series, Coleman bypassed as Reds Voice — radio’s Marty Brennaman got the nod – on each Fall Classic. Then, in 1979, released from a last year in Cincy, Ken returned to Fenway, many expecting him to man Red Sox television, vacated when ball and striker Dick Stockton joined CBS. Instead, Coleman replaced Martin on radio, Ned strangely joining TV, where literacy was superfluous v. being radio’s job one.

Back home, Coleman increasingly let his “kinder, gentler” side lighten a formal on-air presence. Befriending easily, Coleman urged 1980-82 wireless partner Jon Miller to develop his mimicry: “Ken said, ‘You have something not many people have, and you should do it on the air.’ I’d just been goofing around, and soon I’m invited to banquets because of Ken. He was incredibly giving, saying be expressive, mimic.” Then: “Ken’s why I went to Boston.” In the 1981 big-league split season, they called the end of professional baseball’s longest game. It began April 18 at 8:25 p.m.: Triple-A Pawtucket’s Bruce Hurst starts at home v. Rochester. Things adjourn 2-all at 4:07 a.m. – Easter – morning before 19 of an original 1,740 paid crowd. They resume June 23 – “Dale Koza – line drive, base hit, left field, [Marty] Barrett scores, and Pawtucket wins it, 3 to 0, in 33 innings!” said Ken. Game time: 8:25.

In 1979, Coleman called Yaz’s three thousandth hit. “A ground ball base hit into right field! Just out of reach of Willie Randolph!” In 1983, No. 8 played his major-league record 3,308th and final last game. In the seventh inning, “The crowd is on its feet, everyone aware that very possibly this will be the last time he will ever step into that batting box,” Ken mused. The din was insupportable. “Waving to them all, and they’re all on their feet.” Yastrzemski popped up, was replaced in the field, and “walked over to a little boy and tossed him his cap.” Organist John Kiley played auld lang syne. As executive director of the Jimmy Fund, the Sox official charity, Ken spurred the Children’s Cancer Research Foundation – now Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Once he asked, “If you were paying your way today, who would you pay to see?” The Kid didn’t hesitate. “Reggie!” Williams boomed. Ken informed the object of No. 9’s respect. “‘The man said that about me?’ Jackson gaped. Later Reggie did a Jimmy Fund public service notice and gave “a considerable amount,” Ken said. “‘I know what the Jimmy Fund is about,’ he said, ‘and I want to put money where my money is.’”

Few people put money on the early-to-mid ’80s Sox, noting that their last world title preceded by 61 days the original Armistice Day ending World War I. In 1983, Joe Castiglione succeeded Miller, off to Baltimore. At Fenway, the ex-Colgate University student disc jockey found Coleman pining for big band dance music a quarter of a century earlier. On the field, the Sox were more fox trot than rock ’n’ roll; six place in 1983; little better in 1984-85. Once Cleveland scored twice in the eighth inning to lead, 3-2, Ken, almost asleep, saying, “Here comes the tying run and the winning run, and the Indians win!” Coleman then saw Bob Stanley pumping. “It was then that I realized that baseball is a nine-, not eight-, inning game.”

Thirteen times the Olde Towne Team lost a pennant or World Series on the next-to-last or final day from 1946 through 2003. All disproved the Law of Averages (things even out) and upheld Murphy’s Law (if things can go wrong, they will). Depending on your view, Johnny Pesky does or does not hold the ball. Luis Aparicio loses a division by falling down rounding third. Bucky Dent homers above the Monster. The worst was 1986’s Grounder Under Bill Buckner’s Glove. The Globe’s Peter Gammons had termed Yaz’s farewell “a two-day Easter celebration.” On Good Friday 1986, the parish team traded Mike “The Hit Man” Easler for 1979 A.L. Most Valuable Player Don Baylor – the first Sox-Yankees trade since reliever Sparky Lyle in 1972. “It was a great start to the season,” said Castiglione. Who knew its end would be so antipodal?

On April 7, Dwight Evans banged the year’s first pitch for a homer. Told no one had done it before, he jousted, “Big deal. We lost.” On April 29, 1986, Boston’s best mound prospect since World War II faced Seattle at home, setting a record for strikeouts in a game. “Strike three!” Ken gushed of Phil Bradley. “Roger Clemens has broken the major league record for strikeouts in one game! He has struck out twenty Mariners!” On May 15, the Sox took first place for good. Rocket began 14-0, not losing till July. Some baseball Voices don’t speak on or off the air. At Wrigley Field, locking a colleague out of the booth, Harry Caray once kept him off TV. By contrast, Ken, Ned, and Joe avoided spite or strife.

The night of Rocket’s launch, the Sox had just released their yearbook, listing players’ musicians. Soon each Mr. C. was perusing it, Ken thinking, Joe said, that music ended in 1953. “This is interesting. Roger’s favorite singer is Steve Nicks,” said Coleman. Joe paused, then said: “Ken, I believe that’s Stevie Nicks.” Ken was adamant: “Well, I know him well. I call him Steve.” Castiglione: “Uh, Ken, Stevie is a girl.” Next day Clemens sent a wall-sized Nicks poster to the booth. Till his death “Ken could break me up,” said Joe, “by saying, ‘Stevie is a girl.’” In 1967, Sox skipper Williams introduced Coleman and Martin to California’s Crescent – aka “Hard Bellies” – Beach, surf up, seals sunning. Later the Voices acquainted Joe, going daily when the Sox visited Anaheim: Ken snorkeling, Castiglione swimming, and Ned diving and taking pictures. A clubhouse manager said: “There they go – two sixty-year-olds and a forty-year-old, playing in the sand.”

On a flight, Ken read biography, planned a Jimmy Fund event, or heard pre-Bill Haley and the Comets. Ned put his Walkman on, used a headset plug, and channeled the Chairman of the Board. “He loved Sinatra,” said Joe. “Ken did, too, so he’d use the other plug – each listening to Ol’ Blue Eyes and breaking into song.” It was, he laughed, “not broadcast quality.” The Sinatra ballad “Summer Wind” took a lofter toward the Wall. If “Luck Be a Lady,” “Bewitched” was the Sox’s card. “It Was a Very Good Year” could mean 1912; “Fly Me to the Moon,” 1978. Liking “The Best Is Yet to Come,” the booth couldn’t know 1986’s worst lay just ahead. “That’s Life” was a favorite, the Sox having been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, but not since 1918 king.

On cue, the ’86ers slumped in July, one journal asking, “Poised for another El Foldo?” Instead, the Sox won 11 straight, traded for outfielder Dave Henderson and shortstop Spike Owen, and rebuilt its lead. A Boston TV Chronicle special hailed “Pennant Fever Grips Hub”: “Sox fans, knowing better, have put their skepticism on hold.” Baylor clubbed 31 homers. Buckner had 102 RBI – more irony: “fans,” Owen said, “loving how he gutted it out” — ankles hurt, taped, and gouged again. Clemens started the All-Star Game. Dennis (Oil Can) Boyd and Bruce Hurst finished 16-10 and 13-8, respectively. On September 28, Boston took its first title since 1975. “A high pop-up! Buckner is there! It’s all over! [Sox 12, Toronto 3]!” said Ned. The new divisional champion Townies hugged the man with the gimpy gait and high-topped shoes.

That fall, several friends in the Secret Service arranged lunch at the White House for a Red Sox party. “We’re told no photos, above all, recordings,” Joe smiled. “Someone forgot to tell Ken.” Vice-President George H.W. Bush entered to recount his good-field, no-hit time at Yale — “I batted eighth,” he said. “Second cleanup.” President Reagan then entered “at his theatrical best,” evoking the 1930s Cubs, re-creation, and film, especially 1952’s The Winning Team. Reagan had played the great epilectic and alcoholic pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander; Doris Day, his wife; Walter Brennan, a reporter. “Knowing the script by heart,” said Castiglione, Coleman “had a recorder, determined to tape the Gipper.” At lunch questions start, and “Ken’s is a doozie.”

In The Winning Team, Coleman noted, “[St. Louis’s] Alex in relief strikes out the Yankees’ Tony Lazzeri to save Game Seven” of the 1926 Series. “Right,” says the President. Ken asked, “How did Doris Day take a cab all the way from mid-Manhattan to Yankee Stadium” – even then, a lengthy ride – “while Alex trudges from the pen?” “Well, ah,” Reagan says. Next question. Lunch soon adjourns. “It was amazing,” said Joe. “The Secret Service must have seen the recorder, but didn’t say anything.” That night the taped President guested on Ken’s pre-game show. “With security, it could never happen today.” What did astounds, even now.

The 1986 Red Sox, Angels, Mets, and Astros easily won their division, then began a month as the game had rarely been played before – “at its summit,” Newsweek’s Pete Axthelm wrote. “It leaves you breathless.” The now-best-of-seven L.C.S. began at Fenway, Clemens losing, 8-1. A day later Rice homered and Angels pitcher Kirk McCaskill lost a grounder in the sun: Sox, 9-2. Game Three: The Halos took a two-games-to-one playoff lead. Four: Clemens led by a 3-0 score – till Doug DeCinces homered and two batters singled to start the ninth inning. Reliever Calvin Schiraldi got a routine fly – till Rice lost it in the lights, another run scoring. Schiraldi went 1-2 to Brian Downing. Future reference: One strike would win the game. Instead, the next pitch hit him, tying the score: Angels win, 4-3, in 11, lead three games to one. Enthused ABC’s Al Michaels: “This series is getting interesting.”

Next day Boston led, 2-1 – until Bobby Grich drove to center field. Dave Henderson egressed, leapt, and knocked the ball over the wall for a two-run homer. In the ninth inning, despite Baylor’s two-run dinger, one out would win Game Five, 5-4 – and the Angels’ first pennant. Manager Gene Mauch inserted reliever Gary Lucas, his last hit batter 1982. Lucas plunked Rich Gedman, yielding to Donnie Moore, who worked Henderson to a 2-2 count — Boston one strike from elimination. At “2:47 Pacific Coast time,” said Coleman. Moore threw a forkball. “There’s a fly ball to left field! Downing is going back … back … back! It’s gone! It is gone! Dave Henderson has homered! And the Boston Red Sox have taken the lead! Boston has come up” – Ken’s exact verbiage from 1967’s last-day sixth-inning fivespot – “with four runs and has a 6 to 5 lead in the ninth!”

In their ninth, the Halos tied the score. After DeCinces and Grich failed with the bases full, Boston, reprieved, scored an eleventh-inning run. In the bottom half, “Schiraldi throws, and it’s popped up down the first-base side!” said Ken. “[Dave] Stapleton in – he’s got it! And the Red Sox have won it! One of the most incredible victories in the history of the Boston Red Sox, 7 to 6!” Pause: “Joseph [Castiglione], two days ago I became a grandfather [a girl]. This was her gift – truly an incredible baseball game.” Back in Boston, the Townies took Game Six, 10-4, over and out behind Boyd. Next evening Clemens led, 4-0, when Rice homered deep to left. Boston won, 8-1: its first triumph in a winner-take-all game with a division title, pennant, or World Series at stake since 1912, and first seventh-game postseason victory since 1903.

The Sox were a 2 ½-to-1 underdog v. the 108-54 regular-season Mets, but won the first two Shuttle Series games, 1-0 and 9-3. Boston flew home “sitting pretty,” said Joe. Games Three-Four were ugly: Mets, 7-1 and 6-2. Ted Williams first-pitched before Game Five. Hurst then won his second match, 4-2. Ahead: a game that proved the proverb “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.” At Shea Stadium, the Mets, behind, 2-0, in Game Six, tied on a single and double play. Barrett scored on a force attempt: 3-2. As omen, Rice was thrown out trying to score, a blister on Clemens’ pitching hand made Schiraldi relieve, and Buckner stranded eight runners. In the eighth inning, Gary Carter’s sacrifice fly retied the score. “Everything to decide,” Ken said, “and nothing decided.” Due to air the 10th, Joe deferred to his senior partner. At 11:59, Henderson’s drive struck Newsday’s billboard. He reached the dugout as the clock struck midnight. Boston scored again: 5-3 insurance, having paid a 68-year premium. With two Mets out, the scoreboard read, “Congratulations Boston Red Sox.” The Series trophy and 20 cases of Great Western champagne entered the visiting clubhouse. Again one out would win – the Classic.

All year Stapleton had replaced Buckner with Boston ahead. Inexplicably, skipper John McNamara kept Billy Bucks at first. After two singles, Ray Knight went to 0-2. A strike would end the famine. Knight singled, Gary Carter scored, and Kevin Mitchell took third: 5-4. “They’re going to do it,” a friend told Gammons. The Sox were going to lose in a way unimaginable for even them. Sans wild pitch all year, Stanley, relieving Schiraldi, threw six pitches to Mookie Wilson. “He throws the [seventh] pitch inside, it gets away from Gedman!” Coleman said: the inning’s 13th pitch to win the Series. “And the tying run is home! The tying run scores! And down to second base goes Knight – 55,078 fans go wild, as the Mets, with two outs and the bases empty, in the last of the tenth, have tied it up!” Wilson fouled off two more pitches. “Knight at second. Three and two,” Ken resumed. “The pitch, ground ball to first base! Buckner – it goes by him! And here comes the winning run! The Mets have won it, 6 to 5, on a ground ball to Buckner that went through him!” At his Wellesley home, Martin rued the local-TV Series ban.

In one moment, Gammons wrote, “Forty-one years of Red Sox baseball flashed in front of my eyes.” Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill “didn’t sleep for three months. I’d wake up every night seeing that ball go through Buckner’s legs.” The wild pitch completed Stanley’s fall from 1970s comer to hard-luck oaf, a Hub driver trying to ram his car. Billy Bucks was threatened, Boston’s Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge a/k/a “Buckner Bridge” because cars passed through its Y-shaped “legs.” Released next year, Buckner said: “Things were good for me here until after the sixth game. After that, it just went down.” Finally, he moved to Idaho. Game Seven was postponed to Sunday, the Nation sensing what lay ahead. Monday night the Red Sox again led, 3-0. In the sixth inning, Keith Hernandez singled with the bases loaded to plate two Mets runs. As New York tied the score, reliever Sid Fernandez gleamed, and Knight hit in the seventh, the Sox faced a fourth straight seven-game Series loss.

“The pitch!” said CBS Radio’s Jack Buck. “Swing and a fly ball, left-center field, well-hit! May not be caught! It’s gone! It’s gone! Over the fence in left-center! A home run by Ray Knight to give the Mets their first lead of the evening, 4-3!” Final: 8-5. For the first time, the World Series final opposed ABC’s Monday Night Football, routing it in audience share (55 to 14 percent) and Nielsen ratings (38.9 to 8.8). In Los Angeles, New York, and Boston, the Series swaggered, 4-, 7-, and 19-to-1: “fourth-highest rating of all time for a World Series game,” said NBC sports research’s Greg Seamans, “and most-watched Series game of all time, with 34 million households.” The Classic averaged a 28.6 rating – about 25 million households per minute.

The Washington Post’s Shirley Povich hailed “baseball as Americans know and love it – a throbbing, good-God-what’s-next World Series.” Some recalled the Classic differently, like a car crash or a storm. Next season Clemens left training camp when his salary was renewed at $400,000 – half of Stanley’s. G.M. Lou Gorman said, “The sun will rise, the sun will set, and I’ll have lunch.” A year later the ’88ers took first place on Labor Day, lost six of the last seven, but won their second division or pennant in three years for the first time since World War I. Directly the L.C.S. went awry. Hurst dropped Game One, 2-1. Veteran Globe writer Clif Keane threw out next day’s first ball. “They’ve got to do it soon,” he said. “I’m running out of time.” Boston was, too, swept by the A’s. That offseason Ken had a heart attack, leaving Joe C. to do 1989 spring training radio alone. “Other teams’ announcers did an inning or two,” he said. “They got me through.”

In Florida, a Sox-Dodgers exhibition lasted 15 innings. “Before [1997] interleague play, you’d only see the other league’s guys at a Series or spring training,” said Joe. “Today Vin Scully called a couple innings, no airs.” Joe never forgot 1986’s Game Six, “feeling Shea shake.” Ken remembered, too. By 1989, he had founded the Bosox Club, was an eight-time Ohio Sportscaster of the Year and 12-time American Federation of Television and Radio Artists honoree, and hosted radio’s Ken’s Corner of poetry and inspiration. That year future Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum president Jeff Idelson was a Sox booth statistician intern. He left the Fens grasping why Voices become a beach bud, mountain messenger, and pillow pal: “A radio broadcaster has to remind you of sitting around a fire, hearing tales.” Ken did.

In mid-1989, Coleman announced his retirement, Fenway’s TV booth later named in his honor. He wrote variants of Take Me Out to the Ballgame, sung by Broadway’s and the Yankees’ Suzynn Waldman: “And if I can’t actually be there, then give me the action by Curt, Ned, and Ken.” He finished a fifth book — his favorite, The Impossible Dream – and again did Harvard football as he had 1968’s last-quarter Crimson miracle – “This, of course,” Coleman had marveled, “is The Play of The Game” – tying the score with seven seconds left. Half-an-hour later the student Crimson headlined: “Harvard Wins, 29 to 29.” In 2000, he made the Red Sox Hall of Fame.

Among those mourning Ken’s farewell was Pawtucket’s radio Voice Don Orsillo: born Melrose, Massachusetts, raised on a Madison, New Hampshire farm, watched the Sox on “one of our four TV stations, coverage not wall-to-wall like now,” and spent most nights by the kitchen radio, with Ken. “He was everywhere,” said Don of “1967, Clemens’ twenty-strikeout game, and Henderson’s playoff blast.” Growing up, Orsillo heard dad and mom insist he “reach for the stars.” At 12, he did, “vowing to air the Sox.” Ultimately, Don attended Northeastern University, majored in Communication Studies, took a class from Castiglione, and as an intern like Idelson also became Fens booth statistician, then 2001- Sox TV Voice.

In the late 1990s, Ken took special interest in Fenway Park. In 1925, it had become a teenager the very month that he was born. Now many increasingly deemed it old-timey: too few luxury boxes and concession stands, too little parking, above all, too small. Rebuilding would be prohibitive, some said. Suites couldn’t squeeze into a Wilsonian shoebox. The foundation was built to house one deck, not two. “Build a new park if you must. Get your new deck, loges, the better amenities,” Coleman said. “But keep the outfield exactly as it is from one pole to another. That’s how people know Fenway, what they see on the tube.”

In 2002, a new ownership group headed by John Henry, Tom Werner, and Larry Lucchino began saving baseball’s oldest park. The club kept the Green Monster, centerfield Triangle, and “field’s distance, look, feel,” said Coleman, exactly as they were. The real change came off the field, the Sox enlarging and renovating – staying put. Ken would have loved the decade-long preservation of “America’s Most Beloved Ballpark” to make it capable of remaining the Sox arcade, it was said, until at least near the new mid-century. Soon Fenway became baseball’s ATM machine.

On October 1, 1989, Coleman ended his final game behind the mike by thanking “the fans of New England for their support, their friendship, their patience and loyalty over the years” and for the Jimmy Fund, “which has been a most meaningful part of my professional life.” He concluded: “This is Ken Coleman, rounding third and heading home.” On August 21, 2003, Ken, 78, died, leaving sons Casey, since deceased, and William, daughters Kerry, Susan, and Kathleen, his wife Mary Sue, and former wife Ellen. He had long ago become “a most meaningful part” of Red Sox Nation’s life – manifestly, even now.

This biography is included in the book “Pitching to the Pennant: The 1954 Cleveland Indians” (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), edited by Joseph Wancho. It is also included in “The 1986 Boston Red Sox: There Was More Than Game Six” (SABR, 2016), edited by Bill Nowlin and Leslie Heaphy.

Sources

I am indebted to several sources for the radio play-by-play and analysis contained herein: WEEI Radio executive sports producer Jon Albanese; noted major-league archivist John Miley; and Tom Shaer, former WITS Boston wireless reporter, now head, Tom Shaer Media in Chicago. Virtually all other material, including quotes, is derived from my books Voices of The Game: The Acclaimed Chronicle of Baseball Radio & Television Broadcasting – From 1921 to the Present (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992); The Storytellers: From Mel Allen to Bob Costas: Sixty Years of Baseball Tales from the Broadcast Booth (New York: Macmillan, 1995); Of Mikes and Men: From Ray Scott to Curt Gowdy: Broadcast Tales from the Pro Football Booth (South Bend, Indiana: Diamond Communications, 1998); Our House: A Tribute to Fenway Park (Chicago: NTC/Contemporary, 1999); Voices of Summer: Ranking Baseball’s 101 All-Time Best Announcers (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005); The Voice: Mel Allen’s Untold Story (Guilford, Connecticut: The Lyons Press, 2007); A Talk in the Park: Nine Decades of Baseball Tales from the Broadcast Booth (Washington DC: Potomac Books, 2011); and Mercy! A Celebration of Fenway Park’s Centennial Told Through Red Sox Radio and TV (Washington DC: Potomac Books, 2012).