You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television (26 page)

Today, with the replay system, the call would have been overturned, and Whitey’s Cardinals would most likely have won the World Series.

In any event, as exciting as that 1985 Series was, it was eclipsed the very next year by another series—one that featured the most dramatic baseball game I’ve ever witnessed.

For years, ABC and NBC had shared coverage of the postseason—meaning in odd years, we would do the World Series, and NBC would do the League Championship Series, and in even years it was vice versa. So in the fall of 1986, just as I was only a few weeks into
Monday Night Football,
Jim Palmer and I called the American League Championship Series, featuring the Boston Red Sox and the California Angels, while Keith Jackson and Tim McCarver were paired for the New York Mets and Houston Astros in the National League. Both series ended up being epic, unforgettable chapters of one of the greatest postseasons in baseball history.

In the ALCS, you had the Red Sox back in postseason play for the first time since losing in 1975 to the Big Red Machine in an incredible World Series—and still chasing the franchise’s first World Series title since 1918. Meanwhile, for the Angels, one of the big subplots of this series would revolve around manager Gene Mauch. Mauch had been the manager of the 1964 Phillies team that had suffered one of the most infamous collapses in sports history, squandering a 6½-game lead with twelve games left in the season. Forever after that—with the Phillies, then the Expos, then the Twins, and then the Angels—Mauch was always labeled the best manager never to have won a pennant. That 1964 season would be a permanent albatross.

In 1982, Mauch’s Angels won the AL West, and then blew a two-games-to-none lead to the Brewers in the best-of-five ALCS. A few months later, after Mauch’s wife, Nina, passed away, he decided to retire. But he returned to the Angels in 1985. And there he was in 1986, with his team winning the division, and facing the Red Sox—managed, ironically, by John McNamara, who’d been Mauch’s third-base coach, and then his replacement in 1983 and ’84 as the Angels’ manager.

Stars abounded in both dugouts. A forty-year-old Reggie Jackson with the Angels, along with two ex-Orioles who’d been All-Stars—Bobby Grich and Doug DeCinces—and an All-Star rookie first baseman, Wally Joyner. The Sox had their own boldface roster—with a future Hall of Famer in Jim Rice, a former MVP in Don Baylor, a twenty-three-year-old 24-game winner in Roger Clemens, Tom Seaver at the end of his career, and a thirty-six-year-old first baseman who’d driven in 102 runs during the regular season despite being significantly hobbled by a bad ankle that would have put a few other guys on the disabled list. I’d first met him when I was in Hawaii, and he played for Tommy Lasorda’s Spokane Indians in the Pacific Coast League. His name was Bill Buckner.

The first two games of the series were in Boston. The Angels tattooed Clemens for eight runs in an easy Game 1 win. Then the Red Sox won Game 2 with a late onslaught, 9–2. A key play occurred in the second inning when the Angels starter, Kirk McCaskill, had lost sight of a chopper hit back to the mound by Wade Boggs. The game started in late afternoon, and the sun had clearly gotten into McCaskill’s eyes. “I don’t remember ever seeing a pitcher lose the ball in the sun,” he said afterward. But the questions—more and more ridiculous and repetitious—kept coming. Finally, the fourth or fifth wave of sportswriters arrived at his locker. How many times would McCaskill have to answer the exact same questions? Then, in an attempt to unearth the Hope Diamond of answers, one guy said, “Kirk, can you tell us
exactly
when you lost sight of the ball?” McCaskill was now exasperated and just wanted to get out of the clubhouse but he rubbed his chin, glanced toward the ceiling, took a deep breath, and slowly intoned—“
Exactly
one and seven-eighths inches below its apex.”

Hysterically perfect.

WITH THE SERIES SHIFTING
to Anaheim for Game 3, the Angels got to Oil Can Boyd for three runs in the seventh, and went on to win, 5–3. Then, in Game 4, the series was on the verge of being even again at two games apiece. Clemens took a 3–0 lead into the ninth, but then DeCinces led off with a homer. A couple of singles later, Clemens was out of the game and Calvin Schiraldi came in. He then gave up an RBI double to Gary Pettis and with two out and the bases loaded hit Brian Downing with a pitch to force in the tying run. And the Angels went on to win it in the eleventh inning on a Bobby Grich RBI single.

So that put the Angels—and Gene Mauch—up three games to one, and on the brink of a trip to the World Series, with Game 5 the next day—a Sunday early afternoon start in Anaheim. The Red Sox scored twice in the second inning, but the Angels would take a 3–2 lead in the sixth, and then made it 5–2 with two more in the seventh. The Angels’ ace, Mike Witt—apart from giving up a two-run homer to Rich Gedman in the second—had been outstanding. Then, in the top of the ninth, he yielded a leadoff single to Buckner, struck out Jim Rice, and then gave up a two-run homer to Don Baylor. Score 5–4, Angels. But next he got Dwight Evans to pop out, and the Angels were one out away from the World Series. Gene Autry, the fabled singing cowboy, had been granted an expansion franchise in 1961. So here was his club in its twenty-sixth season of existence trying to get to the World Series for the first time in its history. The crowd was going wild. Security personnel were stationed every few feet in front of the box seat railings. There were even a few cops on horseback positioned out by the foul poles. At which point Mauch decided to take out Witt and bring in the lefty Gary Lucas to face the left-handed-hitting Gedman. Mauch will be second-guessed forever for taking out Witt, but in his defense, Gedman had been 3-for-3 against Witt with a single, double, and homer. The crowd gasps when Lucas hits Gedman with a pitch. So now Mauch goes to his closer, Donnie Moore, who’d been dealing with a sore shoulder and receiving cortisone shots for weeks. In Moore’s only other appearance in the series, he’d been shaky—giving up two runs and four hits in a two-inning save in Game 3. Now facing Dave Henderson, who’d been acquired from the Mariners a couple of months before, Moore ran the count to 2–2, and Henderson barely foul-tipped the next pitch to stay alive. Then he fouls off another. And then Moore delivers a slow, flat slider, knee high, over the outside corner that Henderson manages to pull to left. “To left field and deep and Downing goes back,” I say, my voice, in disbelief, heading into a much higher octave. “And it’s
gone
! Unbelievable! You’re looking at one for the ages here.” 6–5 Red Sox.

But now the Boston bullpen has to get three outs to send the series back to Fenway. And McNamara brings in Bob Stanley, who gives up a leadoff single to Bob Boone. Ruppert Jones comes in to pinch run and moves to second on a Gary Pettis sacrifice bunt. Joe Sambito, a lefty, comes in to face second baseman Rob Wilfong. Base hit to right field, Jones scores from second barely beating Dwight Evans’s perfect throw. Now the game is tied, 6–6. McNamara removes Sambito and calls in Steve Crawford, the eighth or ninth guy on a ten-man staff, not a pitcher he’d usually rely on in a pressure situation. His ace reliever, Schiraldi, was available but had been lit up the night before and had not pitched well in recent weeks. And sure enough, Crawford gives up a single to Dick Schofield, sending Wilfong to third. Brian Downing is walked intentionally. Bases loaded, one out, pennant standing on third base. Despite everything that’s just happened—blowing a three-run lead in the ninth—a relatively deep fly ball will get the Angels and Gene Mauch to the World Series. But Doug DeCinces lifts one to Evans in short right field. Evans has one of the best arms, if not the best arm in baseball, and the Angels can’t send Wilfong home. Bobby Grich then hits a broken-bat soft liner back to the mound that Crawford snatches. Afterward, in the clubhouse, the media will ask Crawford to describe those moments in the ninth. “If there was a toilet on the mound,” he says, “I would have used it.”

In the top of the tenth, Moore is still out there, and gets Jim Rice to ground into a double play to get out of the inning unscathed. In the bottom of the inning, with two out and Jerry Narron at first base and Crawford still on the mound, the count went to 3-and-2 on Gary Pettis. Narron, representing the pennant-winning run, would be going on the pitch. Pettis was a switch-hitter with very little power—he’d hit five home runs in more than six hundred plate appearances during the regular season. With Narron off and running, Pettis drives the pitch to the opposite field, all the way to the warning track in left. Jim Rice is able to reel it in. Rice bangs into the wall as he makes the catch and has to look down into his glove to make sure he’s actually caught it. There was the Angels’ pennant, sitting in his webbing. Then in the eleventh, Moore, still in the game, gets into trouble, and with the bases loaded, it’s Dave Henderson again, this time hitting a sacrifice fly to drive in Don Baylor to give the Red Sox a 7–6 lead. The Angels go down one-two-three in the bottom of the eleventh, with the final out a foul pop to first base, where Dave Stapleton—who came in to pinch-run for Buckner in the ninth—makes the catch. “Popped up, here comes Stapleton . . . Next plane to Boston.”

The Red Sox were alive. The Angels were deflated. This was baseball at its drama-filled best. In the ninth inning, I had said that Anaheim Stadium was one strike away from Fantasyland. Now in the space of about an hour, the series had been transformed. And the players who were thrust into the forefront were guys like Dave Henderson and Steve Crawford, supporting actors who would play the greatest roles of their careers.

A couple of other postscripts to an incredible game: I’d known that Reggie Jackson and John McNamara had a great relationship dating back almost two decades. McNamara had been Reggie’s manager with Birmingham in the Southern League in 1967. Now here they were on opposite sides. I knew Reggie well, going back to our days at Arizona State and having worked with him on a number of ABC shows, including the old
Superstars
and
Superteams
series. I had asked him about McNamara. Reggie told me that John was his favorite manager ever. And in the tenth inning of Game 5, when Reggie was leading off, I related Reggie’s feelings—noting that in a tie game, with one swing of the bat, Reggie had a chance to end his old favorite manager’s season. As I’m finishing up the anecdote, the cameraman next to the third-base dugout—Roy Hutchings—was in sync with where I was going and widened out his shot from Reggie in the batter’s box to include McNamara in the first-base dugout. It was such a stunning visual touch that it would take a top Hollywood director fifteen takes to re-create it. In my mind, the framing was so spectacular that, on the air, to acknowledge what I’d seen, I blurted out a television term—“great pullback.”

Cameramen and women are the unsung heroes of this business. After the game, Hutchings raced up to me in the production compound parking lot. “I can’t thank you enough for saying that,” he said. “Roy, that was fabulous,” I responded. But he kept going. “No, you don’t know the whole story,” he said. “I’m listening to you tell the story. I did that move on my own, and as I’m doing it, Chet started screaming at me. ‘What the fuck are you doing!!?? I’m gonna get your ass out of here.’ Then you say, ‘Great pullback,’ and he shut up. You saved my job.”

Chet was Chet Forte, the director. He’d been the incessantly self-aggrandizing director of
Monday Night Football
since its debut in 1970. He’d generally be lionized in the press but they didn’t know better. He could ride coattails with the best of them and the Hutchings gem was just the latest example. Hutchings might have even won him an Emmy. Forte was also notoriously abusive to most everyone on the crew and always considered himself
the
focal point of the telecast—not the game itself, not the players, certainly not the announcers or anyone or anything else. He had a huge gambling problem, too, but Roone Arledge had always turned a blind eye toward him. He was one of the “old guard.” A few months later, he would be gone from ABC Sports. The new boss, Dennis Swanson, wanted only team players and had a keen eye and disdain for egomaniacal naked emperors.

I also remember driving home with Linda on the Santa Ana Freeway and thinking that that was the best baseball game I’d ever seen. I was very happy with the telecast and felt that Jim Palmer and I were pretty much on top of everything. And then it hit me as downtown Los Angeles came into view—how and why was Jim Rice playing Pettis so deep in left field in the tenth inning? Pettis had no power to the opposite field. But only now, in the car, did it dawn on me that the night before, Pettis had doubled over Rice’s head.
That
was the reason. It was never mentioned on the air. And I didn’t think about it until we were transitioning to the Santa Monica Freeway.

It was just another reminder. I’ll never pitch that elusive perfect game.

WHEN THE SERIES RESUMED
in Boston, Steve Hirdt—the Maestro of Information from the Elias Sports Bureau who’d become not only absolutely essential to every baseball and football telecast I was a part of, but one of my great, great pals as well—had discovered that in the 83-year history of postseason baseball, no team had ever trailed by three or more runs in the ninth inning and won a game. Now, something that had not happened in 648 games had occurred twice within 19 hours.

In Game 6, the Angels scored two runs off Oil Can Boyd in the top of the first inning, but with the bases loaded and two out, Boyd was able to retire Wilfong to keep it close. I remember thinking—and saying—right then what a huge moment that was. The Angels were, after all, still up 3–2 in the series. If Wilfong had gotten a hit, McNamara might have had to go to his bullpen two outs into the game. A huge inning might have turned the monumental Red Sox comeback of Game 5 into just a footnote. Instead, the Sox got those two runs right back in their half of the first, and then knocked out McCaskill with a five-run third. The final score of Game 6 was Boston 10, California 4.

One night later, the Angels went down with a whimper against Roger Clemens. Boston scored three in the second and four more in the fourth. In the ninth inning, we took a shot of the visitors’ dugout, with the Angels in a state of total dejection. “As far as I know,” I said, “the longest nonstop flight in the world is San Francisco to Hong Kong. But tonight, an even longer flight will be the Angels’ trip home to Southern California.”