Just finished Ron Darling’s new book, 108 Stitches: Loose Threads, Ripping Yarns, and the Darndest Characters from My Time in the Game (with Daniel Paisner, who also worked on Darling’s 2016 book, Game 7, 1986: Failure and Triumph in the Biggest Game of My Life).
It’s fairly standard fare. Darling relates stories about memorable players, managers, and other sorts he encountered during his playing career and afterwards. So, to be honest, there’s nothing really special here. But then again, I have literally read dozens of books like this. You might feel otherwise.
Normally when a book written by a famous athlete comes out, the media focuses on the most salacious item. In this case — again, to me — it was his section on Lenny Dykstra. “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 generally was a s****y human being…” (I’ve taken the liberty of censoring the expletives. After all, this is a family blog.)
Don’t hold back, Ron; tell us how you really feel.
Don’t worry, he does. Recalling the third game of the 1986 World Series, Darling writes
Lenny was leading off for us that night, as he did most nights when he was in the lineup, and as Oil Can Boyd was taking his final warm-ups on the mound, Lenny was in the on-deck circle shouting every imaginable and unimaginable insult and expletive in his direction — foul, racist, hateful, hurtful stuff. I don’t want to be too specific here, because I don’t want to commemorate this dark, low moment in Mets history in that way, but I will say that it was the worst collection of taunts and insults I’d ever heard — worse, I’m betting than anything Jackie Robinson might have heard, his first couple of times around the league. Way worse than the Hollywood version of opposing layers’ mistreatment of Jackie that was on display in The Jackie Robinson Story….
It’s amazing to me, looking back, that there’s no footage from the game revealing Lenny’s treachery. He was out there … in earshot of anyone in the front rows, and certainly in range of the cameras and microphones that had been set up to record the game, but I guess the attention was elsewhere.
Darling does a mea cupla of sorts. After Dykstra slammed a home run off an apparently rattled Boyd, he “came back to the dugout and collected the high-fives and huzzahs that came his way, and for all I know I was right there with my teammates, thrilled to be back in this thing. It’s only in retrospect that I started to feel somewhat complicit, and that by accepting the gifts that fell Lenny’s way as a result of his ugly treatment of the opposing pitcher, I was an accomplice, of a kind.”
Okay, here we go.
Let me start off by saying that I’m no fan of Dykstra. I believe Darling when he calls him out as a criminal. That’s a fact. However, I have doubts events transpired as described.
This was the 1980s, not the 1940s. If Dykstra had indeed mouthed off like that, I can’t imagine Boyd would have just stood there and taken such abuse. At the very least, he should have thrown a beanball. And would Doc Gooden, Darryl Strawberry, or Kevin Mitchell want to win that badly that they would ignore their teammate’s diatribe?
And what about the umpires? During the 1935 World Series, the Chicago Cubs unleashed a barrage of anti-Semitic insults at the Detroit Tigers’ superstar, Hank Greenberg. Umpire George Moriarty warned the offenders to cease and desist. According to Michael Beschloss’ 2014 New York Times article, “Hank Greenberg’s Triumph Over Hate Speech,”
A few weeks after the commotion that followed when the umpire tried to get them to stop, the baseball commissioner, the ex-judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, fined three Cubs players $200 (about $3,480 today) each for using “vile, unprintable language.”
So I also can’t conceive that the umpires wouldn’t have told Dykstra to can it.
As far as Robinson, I’m betting he did hear worse. The movie reference is to the 1950 “biopic” in which Robinson played himself. Regardless of the era, I doubt such foul language would appear in the script; it would never get by the censors. Consider instead the 2013 release, 42. Now that was a no-holds-barred depiction of what Robinson had to endure.
Again, I wasn’t there so I don’t know for a fact whether Darling’s accusation are true or not. Dykstra, however, is suing for defamation and libel.
is available on Amazon.com,
Comments on this entry are closed.