Speaking of the the ‘86 series, did you hear, like a week ago former Red Sox pitcher Oil Can Boyd admitted he was coked out of his mind during most of his starts.
The Sox totally would have won game 7 if John McNamara had started Boyd instead of going back to Bruce Hurst on short rest!
Yes, I read that. “The Can”...animal!
There were many things that could have been done different that would have produced a RS win. Of course, I was (and still am) a Mets fan, so I was happy. I still have my Game 4 ticket stub with Daryl Strawberry’s (drugs, anyone?) autograph on it.
The Sox totally would have won game 7 if John McNamara had started Boyd instead of going back to Bruce Hurst on short rest!Not necessarily.
* For one thing, the Mets literally played kick the can against Boyd in Boston, in Game Three. It only began in the top of the first, when Len Dykstra hit a 1-1 pitch over the right field fence, Gary Carter swatted an RBI double (still nobody out), and Danny Heep (the Mets' DH in the AL park) hit a two-out, two-run single to open 4-0.
* For another, Bruce Hurst wasn't on short rest---he'd pitched Game Five in Boston on a Thursday, the following day was an off/travel day, and the originally scheduled Sunday Game Seven was rained out, moving the game to a Monday and thus enabling both McNamara and Davey Johnson to use their best postseason starters, Hurst and Ron Darling (who'd pitched almost as well as Hurst in Game One and beat surprise starter Al Nipper in Game Four, in Boston), on near-regular rest.
McNamara made quite a number of mistakes in that Series, as did Johnson, but there were reasons why he lost confidence in Boyd in that Series. Boyd may have thrown zeroes from the second through two-thirds of the seventh (Gary Carter drove in the Mets' fifth and sixth runs with a single but got thrown out trying to advance as Dykstra was scoring the second of the two to end the inning), but the Mets made contact outs on all but three at-bats in their entire turn with Boyd and hit their balls hard enough that McNamara, weighing that with the first inning, feared Boyd had less than his best stuff while the Mets were reading him too well.
So if you get the opportunity with the extra day of rest, you go with your best Series starter one more time. Hurst had his best stuff that night and the Mets simply figured out how to hit him just enough to make it count when they needed it the most. And, of course, once they were in that Boston bullpen it was no contest.