INTRODUCTION
BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR
Like a lot of former ballplayers’ time in the sun, mine was marked by a moment, a game, a streak, a season. For me, those sun-drenched benchmarks found me as a member of the 1986 New York Mets, a championship team that stamped my time in the game, and yet I was never much interested in writing about that one wondrous season, mainly because I wasn’t much interested in telling the wild stories people seemed to want to hear.
We made a lot of headlines that year, and in all the years since. Some of the noise we made had to do with baseball, but a lot of it was just noise. When you’re young and stupid and on top of your game, you find ways of convincing yourself you’ll always be young and stupid and on top of your game. You stick your chest out, you strut, because you’ve been conditioned to stick your chest out, to strut. You move without thinking, make a lot of decisions you’d like to take back, tell yourself the baseball part can be switched to autopilot while you and your teammates find a bunch of new ways to enjoy the ride.
And so the “bad boy” image that attached to that team wasn’t something I cared to perpetuate. I’d lived it—I didn’t need to revisit it. Whatever happened outside the lines that year was for me and my teammates—youthful misadventures to file away and maybe even forget—but what happened inside the lines was certainly something special, something to be cherished and considered.
So I did—privately.
Lately, as the thirtieth anniversary of the 1986 World Series approached, I began to look back on that time in my life through a wistful lens, and it occurred to me that I was uniquely positioned to shine a particular light on that summer, on those postseason games that have been etched into baseball lore … even on some of those bad boy–type shenanigans that, taken in context, helped to shape the personality of that championship team. I started to realize that what most people remember when they think of the 1986 Mets is Game 6 of the World Series, which has by now taken on the hue of a Bernard Malamud novel on steroids. What they remember, specifically, was just one play—and they remember it with brushstrokes keyed to their allegiance.
Recall, the Sox had been up by two runs going into the bottom of the tenth inning, leading the series three games to two, before three straight two-out singles and a wild pitch tied the game, setting the stage for an unlikely sequence of events that would emerge as one of the Game’s iconic moments—and here I deliberately capitalize the G in Game to refer not to this one Game 6 but to the game of baseball itself.
To this day, Red Sox fans remember the excruciating, slowly unfolding scene as a dribbler half scooted through the legs of Boston’s hobbled first baseman Bill Buckner and into right field, allowing Ray Knight to score from second with the winning run. The picture was particularly painful, alas, because the beloved Sox had been so famously disappointed for so long—a history of frustration and doggedness that has only been partially erased by the franchise’s recent run of World Series successes.
Mets fans carry the picture of a joyous Mookie Wilson, the fleet-footed center fielder who’d hit the dribbler and smiled on our legacy, bounding toward first base like a kid who’d been let out of school early and wanted to make it through the front doors before the principal called him back inside.
In my house, ever after, the memory was attached to Vin Scully’s iconic call, which I’d taken the time to teach my baseball-mad son Jordan back in 2000, when he was just a kid. To this day, he can recite it word-for-word, cadence-for-cadence: a little roller up along first … behind the bag!… it gets through Buckner!… here comes Knight!… and the Mets win it! And in Jordan’s enthusiasm there was also my own—an astonishment that only seemed to deepen with the years, as we took turns reveling in the game’s unlikely turn.
Baseball fans in general flash back on a careening roller-coaster ride that came to symbolize the emotional highs and lows of postseason play. For many, this one play fairly defined the 1986 World Series. Indeed, many will tell you it decided the series, which of course was hardly the case. There was still another game to be played.
Game 7—the deciding game.
And, as it turned out, I would get the start.
* * *
What happens when the stuff of your dreams is at hand? Do you rise to the occasion, step to it, grab on? Do you dig deep and discover new layers of grit and resolve to see you through? Do you harness your talents and have at it? Or do you shrink from the moment and wonder what might have been?
I grew up in Millbury, Massachusetts, just outside Worcester, in a sports-crazed family, with three brothers. Let the record show, I was born in Hawaii, but I was raised in the hardworking, hard-cheering heart of New England. We lived and died with our Boston teams. Their victories became ours—their losses, ours as well. We filled our days with imagined moments of triumph, greatness, transcendence. Always, these moments had to do with snatching victory from the clutches of defeat, finding glory in the specter of gloom. Always, it was about hitting a buzzer-beater shot or a walk-off home run (before the terms were even coined!) or trying to trip each other in the crease with the game on the line—à la Barclay Plager and Robert Gordon Orr. (Gump Worsley never had a chance.)
Game 7 of the 1986 World Series was my be careful what you wish for moment—and my heart climbed into my throat as Ray Knight came around to score on the back of that crazy play down the first-base line. It was thrilling and terrifying, both. Understand, it was a glorious team moment, an unlikely, unwieldy rally that lifted us from the ash heap of World Series wannabes and kept us in the running—an exultant, collaborative victory all around. But as my guys went nuts in celebration, as Shea Stadium rocked in mass pandemonium, as long-suffering Mets fans across the New York metropolitan area jumped up and down in shock and awe and dumbstruckedness, I held back, because I knew that all of that positive energy would now flow back to me.
I should note here that one of the reasons I held back was because I wasn’t in the dugout as these unlikely moments unfolded. For a time, I wasn’t even in the ballpark—as I will explain in the pages ahead. But by the time Ray Knight went barreling down that third-base line, by the time Red Sox fans had filled the air with every known expletive (and, undoubtedly, with a whole bunch of new ones, too), I was huddled over a small television screen in the clubhouse (rabbit-eared, in romantic memory), not quite sure how to process what I was seeing. Whatever was happening out there on the field, however it was happening, it meant the series would now rest on my arm, in my head.
On my shoulders … that’s the tired sports cliché that told me the weight of this one win might have been the city’s to celebrate but it was mine to carry. Frankly, I didn’t do such a good job of it, and I’ve had half a lifetime to figure out why. I don’t set this out in a tough-luck sort of way—that’s not my thing. But what is my thing is reassessing, reevaluating, revisiting my performance on the field, the same way I now do for other players when I’m calling a game in the broadcast booth, only with me I tend to be a little harder on myself in my analysis than I am on any of today’s players.
So what went wrong on that crisp-cool October night in Shea Stadium? A night that, by the lights of my boyhood dreams, should have been the highlight of my baseball career? Well, I’ll try to answer that as I take a look at the game, pitch-by-pitch, ache-by-ache, but for now I believe it’s helpful to think about the mind-set I carried onto the field that night—a mind-set I carried for the whole of my career. Best way to describe it is a line of thought pinched from a good friend, who back around this time went for an interview for a bond-trading position with a top Wall Street firm. My buddy reported that the interview had gone well. He’d answered all the standard questions in the standard way. He’d hit the highlights of his story—his mom was a teacher, his dad a mail-carrier—and somehow he’d worked his way through Wharton and built an impressive résumé. But in the end he didn’t get the job. The Wall Streeters hadn’t exactly asked him any tough questions, so he pressed them on it, said it would be helpful to know what he might have missed so he could get it right the next time. Finally, he was told that he’d come from a place of blue-collar dreams. This one firm, my friend was told, wasn’t much interested in that type of thinking—for the one-percenters of the day, nothing less than a white-collar mind-set would do.
In time, this term and the thinking behind it have come to explain my falling short in Game 7 and the cap on my career—to me, anyway. And now, all these years later, here’s my take: I was good enough to dream, to borrow a phrase from the sportswriter Roger Kahn. I was good enough to be recruited by the baseball and football coaches at Yale, good enough to make it to the bigs, good enough to make it to this Game 7. This, alone, was something to celebrate—but this was where it ended for me. Why? Because, at bottom, I was a blue-collar kid. Because there was a limit to my dreaming.
This cap on my thinking was brought home for me in a compelling way by the great slugger Richie Allen, who was working as a coach for the Texas Rangers during my first spring training with the team. (The rest of the baseball world had taken to calling the former slugger Dick Allen, but I knew him as Richie—that’s how he introduced himself to me.) I was fresh out of Yale, my head filled with possibilities—with no room in those nooks and crannies for the harsh realities of the game, not just yet. I had it in mind that if I pitched well I could earn a spot in the rotation, but Richie Allen set me straight. He spent a lot of time with me that spring, helped me to see how ugly and tough it was to be a black ballplayer in the ’60s and ’70s—and, still, how ugly and tough it could be for a young ballplayer looking to crack an Opening Day roster. Remember, this was a guy who’d had a big impact on the game—he was the National League Rookie of the Year in 1964 and the American League Most Valuable Player in 1972, so he’d clearly made his mark. But the game left its mark on him, too, and by the time I met him in 1982, he came across as this beautifully angry individual who’d put the game in its place. He was the first person I met in baseball who gave it to me straight.
He said, “So what is it you’d like to take out of spring training here, youngster?”
(Yep—he called me youngster.)
I said, “Mr. Allen, I’d like to win the fifth spot in the rotation.”
(Yep—I called him Mr. Allen.)
He looked at me and laughed. It took me down a couple of pegs, after I’d put it out there that I thought I had a shot to make the team, but at the same time I couldn’t help but join in. He was laughing so hard, I started laughing, too. Finally he said, “Motherfucker, Jon Matlack is making over a half million dollars. You, you’re making nothing.”
Jon Matlack, in the great circle of baseball life, was part of that legendary New York Mets pitching staff in the early 1970s, and now he was finishing out his career with the Texas Rangers. He had a guaranteed contract. Me, I had no such thing, and Richie Allen had the economics of the game all figured out. He knew I could have had a lights-out spring training, I could have blown everyone away, and there wasn’t a chance in Arlington, Texas, that I would make it to the bigs. He laughed and laughed and said, “They’re gonna ship your ass to Triple A, brother. Just you wait and see.”
But all of that was a lifetime away. As a kid, my blue-collar dreams were still taking shape. Goofing around with my brothers in the backyard, I could see myself sink the winning putt at the U.S. Open. I could serve an ace in my head to end a fifth-set tiebreaker at Wimbledon. I could close my eyes and throw a last-second Hail Mary pass in the Super Bowl. But to achieve greatness, of course, you need to reach for something bigger than pulling out the win at the last possible moment. Absolutely, you need to connect on that desperation touchdown pass, but you also need to throw for 400 yards before going into your two-minute drill. No question, you’ve got to hit that last-second shot to win the ABA championship (with me, as a kid, it was all about the ABA), but not before you put 50 points up on the board to keep your team in the game. You need to get to Wimbledon, to the Super Bowl, to the World Series—and to do that you need to visualize a sustained and lasting greatness and not just focus on a fleeting victory.
My dreams were too small, I guess. I didn’t go into this Game 7 telling myself, Okay, I’m gonna stick it to these guys. I’m gonna throw a three-hitter tonight. I’m gonna shut them down and get it done. I was content to continue my fine pitching performance in the series, without really stopping to consider that fine might not cut it. See, for the whole of my baseball life, I’d been conditioned to think of the game as a team effort, which it certainly was. But underneath that team effort, there should have been a me gene on display. That beautiful anger I saw in Richie Allen, back in my first spring training? I could have used some of that. As a major league pitcher, you need to bring a certain arrogance with you out to the mound, a certain selfishness, and I guess I didn’t have that in me—not enough of it, anyway. That swagger, that confidence, that killer instinct … I’d been able to get by without these aspects of character on the game’s smaller stages. And here I was hoping to do okay, that’s all. I didn’t want to embarrass myself, my teammates, my family—and that’s no way to approach one of these big moments.
I know this now, and I suppose I knew it then, on some level—but I certainly didn’t appreciate it. As a young man, well into my major league career by this point, I should have known at least to keep it simple. To think, Hey, I did a good job against these Red Sox hitters in Game 1 and Game 4. My stuff’s better than their stuff. I’m good. We’re good. But that’s not how I played it. No, I let the game play me. I let the Red Sox play me, instead of the other way around. My mind drifted. I thought, This is a veteran team. I’ve shown them just about everything I’ve got. I’m gonna have to try something different.
If I’d had more inner confidence, if I’d had the kind of arrogant selfishness you see in our greatest athletes, I would have gone into the game thinking I would dictate the at bats. Thinking, I’ve owned these guys. Thinking, Bring it, Boston! But my mind didn’t go there. Instead, I worried I’d have to come up with a new bag of tricks, else I would be found out.
I hadn’t even thrown a pitch and already I was down in the count.
* * *
This book is not like other sports books. Certainly, it’s not like other books by former ballplayers. Athletes seem to want to write about the times they beat the odds, dominated their opponents, run the table. They write about their victories, just, and if they spend any time at all on their disappointments, it’s only to make their victories loom larger still. Nobody writes about the times they’ve fallen short, but to me that’s what’s most interesting about this one game, at the butt end of this long, sick, wondrous season.
For whatever reason, I didn’t have it that night at Shea, nearly thirty years ago. I’d had a solid year, and my two previous starts in the series had gone well enough, but there was nothing left. I’d written this story a thousand times in my head, but in the end my pitching line told the story instead:
As I consider these numbers, I’m torn. I was never the sort of athlete to congratulate myself on a job well done. I was the last person to revel in my accomplishments. Never once did I kick back and think, Hey, I pitched a great game! There was always something I could have done differently, something I could have done better, and on this night there were a whole lot of those somethings. I don’t mean to give away the story just yet, but there are no surprises here: I left the game in the top of the fourth, after hitting Dave Henderson to start the inning, coaxing Spike Owen to fly to right and allowing my opposite number, Bruce Hurst, to sacrifice Henderson to second. We were down 3-0 and it was as if I’d let the air out of the stadium. The contrast between the crowd I left and the crowd that greeted me as I took the mound for my warm-ups was startling. Top of the first, I’d never seen the Shea faithful so pumped. The place was rocking! But it didn’t take long for those savvy New York fans to see I wasn’t as sharp as I’d been earlier in the series, or for the ruckus to die down on the back of that shared realization. They were still with me in the end—I don’t think there was a single boo in those 50,032 tightened throats as I left the field—but the few cheers that came my way felt more like pity than appreciation. Those kind enough to cheer felt sorry for me, I think—glad to be rid of me, to be sure, but sorry just the same.
Going in, I worried about my control. I’d walked five Sox batters in Game 4, so it felt to me like these veteran hitters were stalking me, waiting patiently at the plate like the cheetahs I’d watched on those Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom shows as a kid. Just lurking in the batter’s box, ready to pounce the moment I left the ball up in the strike zone, as if they were calling me out.
Even the elements messed with my head. We’d had all kinds of momentum, coming off that come-from-behind, extra-inning win in Game 6, but after a rainout on Sunday night, October 26, that momentum had leaked away. That extra day allowed the Red Sox to breathe and regroup, leaving me and my Mets teammates with a little too much time to consider how close we’d come to calling it a season.
Advantage: Boston.
And here’s another thing: the way we’d come from out of nowhere to win Game 6, the way the Red Sox collapsed when the game was in their grasp, it left a lot of people in our clubhouse thinking we were somehow meant to win this World Series. I didn’t feel that way—not one bit. But that’s a dangerous perspective, if you allow it to take hold.
That extra day left me with all that time to think, and by Monday night, after going through all my pregame rituals a second time, I was a bundle of restless energy—an agitated, unfocused mess. It was a mess of my own making, let’s be clear, but there it was, and even though I managed to pitch my way through the first inning allowing only a single to Bill Buckner, I knew this wasn’t going to be my night. The ball felt heavy in my hand.
Sure enough, when Dwight Evans and my old high school rival Rich Gedman led off the second with back-to-back home runs, you could see my shoulders sag and my false-swagger slip away. I felt like Charlie Brown out there on that mound—spinning ass-over-teakettle, my jersey torn from my back by the breeze of those balls off the bats of the Red Sox hitters, a KICK ME! sign stitched to where my name was meant to be.
I left the game with my head held low—the picture of defeat. But we were not done just yet. Somehow, as baseball fans will surely recall, my teammates kept battling. Sid Fernandez came on in relief and held the Red Sox scoreless for the next while, allowing us to catch our own few breaths and put Boston’s momentum on pause. We tied it in the sixth, and went ahead on a Ray Knight homer to lead off the seventh, and from there we scratched and clawed our way to another few runs and held off a Red Sox rally in the eighth and managed to win 8–5—erasing, for the moment, the sting of my early-innings failure.
Here again, I don’t mean to give away the ending, but I’m assuming most baseball fans know the outcome of that game. They know, as I now know, how the sweetness of that World Series victory would surely linger, but for me it became a bitter sweetness. Over time, the bitter could never quite detach itself from the sweet, leaving me to wonder, over and over, what might have been. Leaving me to think what it meant to dream only blue-collar dreams.
* * *
Game 7 of the 1986 World Series stands in my rearview mirror as a grand moment in time. A career-high (we were the World Champions, after all), intertwined with a career-low (because, let’s face it, I’d stumbled on that too-large stage). A reminder that even when you’re not on your game the game must be played, and that it’s how you move forward through these difficult moments that defines you as a player, a teammate, a person.
As Games 7 go, in baseball and in other sports, this one wasn’t much. There were no walk-off heroics, like we saw off the bat of the Pirates’ Bill Mazeroski in the 1960 series against the Yankees. This wasn’t the 1954 Red Wings skating to a 2–1 victory over the Canadians in overtime, or the 1994 Rangers putting the finishing touches on the Canucks in a Game 7 thriller that returned the Stanley Cup to New York for the first time in fifty-four years. There was no Willis Reed, limping onto the court to inspire his Knicks teammates in a Game 7 clash against the Lakers at Madison Square Garden in 1970.
No—this Game 7 was not that. This was just a seesaw battle between two tired, emotional, history-laden teams, but the enduring significance of this one game was in the strategy, in the gamesmanship, in the stories it left in its wake. It was in the grace notes it provided to a thrilling World Series. It was in the boisterous, celebrated season that led up to it, the epic showdown in the League Championship Series against the Houston Astros that punched our ticket to the World Series, and the frenetic Game 6 that took our Mets off life support and left us to fight another day. It was in the Curse of the Bambino that followed these Red Sox like a cloud—and in the so-called Mets “magic” that had our team and our fans thinking we were”amazing,” and telling us “you gotta believe” and leaving us to think we were somehow charmed. It was in the tension-filled chess match between two curious, colorful managers, and in the end-game strategies each put into play.
It was in the lessons it offered to a young, not-too-confident blue-collar player, at the front end of a lifetime in the game.
Copyright © 2016 by Ron Darling