I only played a few hot minutes with Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd, the momentarily great Red Sox pitcher who featured significantly in the team's turnaround in the late 1980s. We were teammates on the Montreal Expos for a couple weeks in 1991 — but we had a history before that, of course.
Dennis was one of the workhorse stars of the Red Sox 1986 pitching staff. He'd won 16 games that year for Boston and was slated to start Game 7 of the World Series against yours truly, before a rainout pushed the game back another day and left-hander Bruce Hurst, on closer-to-full-rest, was tabbed instead — here again, against yours truly.
In Game 3 of the 1986 World Series, though, Oil Can was on the receiving end of the ugliest piece of vitriol I've ever heard — in a bar, on a baseball diamond … anywhere. It was right up there with one of the worst, most shameful moments I ever experienced in the game, and one of the great shames of the exchange was that I sat there with my teammates and didn't do a damn thing about it. In fact, it resulted in a momentum shift that probably turned the Series around for us, and like most of the other guys on the bench, I stood and cheered at the positive outcome.
Recall, the Mets had dropped the first two games at home in that Series — a nail-biter and a laugher. Going into Game 3 at Fenway Park, on the heels of that lopsided loss at Shea, we were feeling the pressure. I was tempted to write that we were really feeling the pressure, but this team wasn't like that. This team was arrogant, always believed it would win it all, never mind what it said on the scoreboard or in the box score. Still and all, it was a must-win for the good guys, only we didn't exactly come across as good guys on this.
The hero of Game 3 for us was also the a–hole of the game — Lenny Dykstra, one of baseball's all-time thugs. You know how there always seems to be a guy in every organization, in every walk of life, who gets away with murder — murder being a figurative term in this case? That was Lenny. He was a criminal in every sense, although during his playing days his crimes were mostly of an interpersonal nature. He treated people like s–t, walked around like his s–t didn't stink and was generally a s—-y human being — and, just maybe, the most confident, cocky player I would ever encounter. It was after he left the game, though, that his behavior took a truly criminal turn; he ended up being sentenced to house arrest on a bankruptcy fraud indictment, and he was also up on drug-possession and grand-theft-auto charges, for which he received a three-year prison sentence.
Not exactly the poster boy for America's game, huh?
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