Have You Heard The New Bill Buckner Joke?

"Mookie," the voice hailed the New York Mets' first base coach, "what do you say you hit me a few grounders?"

Forgive Mookie Wilson if at first he had to retrieve his jaw from the Shea Stadium grass, before flashing his familiar, almost satchelmouthed grin. Not everyone gets the honour of hearing the newest Bill Buckner joke, especially when it's cracked by Bill Buckner himself. And especially when he cracks it at the bloody crossroads where Buckner and Wilson collided too profoundly to leave each other strangers.

It was almost sixteen years after Buckner's exemplary enough career was poisoned by the most toxic among a century of Boston Red Sox clouds. But there he was, on 26 July, greeting the man who had chunked the skittery grounder heard 'round the world, even in China.

Exaggeration? Among a group of touring American journalists that winter was then-Boston Globe managing editor Jack Driscoll. The Chinese official serving as their tour guide, introduced to Driscoll directly, and told where Driscoll worked, replied, "Ah, Boston Red Sox" - spreading his legs and bending as if to watch a ball squirt between them.

Buckner revisiting the scene of the crime resembled a settled enough middle management type who tempers himself by leaving the wheeling and dealing at the office and braving the long drive home for nights and weekends on the rugged ranch. As it happens, that is his life these days. Except for tentative ties to baseball, Buckner makes his way as a residential real estate developer and lives with his wife and children on their ranch in Meridian, Idaho.

Sharing a chortle with Mookie Wilson, Buckner looked every inch the cool, earnest homebuilder negotiating with a clever landsman. The two shot the proverbial breeze and posed arm in arm for a few pictures. If you see one of them, read nothing into Buckner's compact smile. Next to Mookie Wilson, even Louis Armstrong would have looked depressed.

In the Shea seats, Buckner was accosted frequently enough by Mets fans once they recognised him. "They're good," he said later. "Some of them look at me like, 'You're not really him, are you?'"

You can only imagine the quiet gratification. Buckner has probably known too many hours in which he might have wished he was anyone but him.

A decade earlier, while he still lived in New England, Buckner may finally have hit the end of his tolerance levels. He was approached at a Pawtucket minor league game by a fan asking for his autograph, when a second fan butted in, snorting, "Don't give him a ball, he'll just drop it anyway." Buckner put his bag in his truck, then picked the wisecracker up by his shirt collar. "That got his attention," he recalled subsequently.

"There's no place in America better than New England to be a hero," Thomas Boswell has written. "And maybe no place worse to be a goat." Buckner, a man whose fortitude had endeared him to Red Sox fans from his arrival in a 1984 trade (from the Cubs, for Dennis Eckersley) through his night of the long knives in 1986, knew that truth only too well.

But maybe the saddest of the several thousand hours in which he might have wished he was anyone but him came around the time of the Pawtucket incident, playing catch with his youngest son, until one of the little boy's grounding throws skipped past the father.

"That's okay, Dad," the boy said innocently, "I know you have trouble with ground balls."

The kid wasn't even alive when Dad had his rendezvous with destiny's bad seed. Some adult, it turned out, had told the boy about Buckner's trouble with one World Series grounder.

Buckner, humanly enough, packed up his family and got the hell out of Massachussetts. "I don't want to hear it anymore," he said, perhaps with as much sorrow as chagrin. "My kids are getting older now and they're hearing about it. I don't want my kids hearing about it all the time...I don't like having to react to people. For the most part, they've supported me. But I don't want to be a part of it anymore."

There were those who actually thought Buckner would be allowed to live it down at first. "Buckner's saving grace," Boswell wrote, three months after the 1986 Series, "is that he was already America's Wounded Warrior - the Red Sox Badge of Courage."

Maybe Buckner was made to pay for standing athwart the Red Sox gods, yelling "Now, wait a minute, fer crissakes." Walking off the field, after That Error sent Ray Knight home with the Game Six-winning Met run, Billy Buck was a profile in paradox. Like a suddenly fractured Janus, he wore one face looking as though the world's weight had just flattened him like the Titanic settling at last atop a sand dollar, and another face suggesting unfinished business yet to tend.

"When the play happened," he remembered years later, "I'm thinking to myself, 'Oh, blankety-blank.' I was upset we lost but I was thinking, 'We're going to win tomorrow and I'm going to get to play in the seventh game of the World Series.' I had no idea. I didn't have the feeling that a lot of other people did."

Umbilical Red Sox fans, renowned and mocked alike for what some believe is a nearly narcotic fatalism, must have thought: Boy, the wheel was turning but did his gerbil die. But so must enough Red Sox fans who believe not in fancy but in fact.

Game Six's implosion yet to dissipate fully into the toxic mist of mythology, and Buckner dared think toward the seventh game? Flagrant defiance of Red Sox preordination.

Everyone knows the Olde Towne spirits find no Red Sox fire they cannot douse with gasoline. Everyone knows the Red Sox are bred to be led up to the mountaintop, shown the view across the Jordan to the Promised Land, and then given a swift kick across the butt to the rocks below. Everyone knows the ball skip-darting through Buckner's all-but-eroded, too often injured legs in the bottom of the tenth was the latest kick to the most jagged of the rocks.

But does everyone know that, even had Buckner come up with Mookie Wilson's little roller, the best case scenario would have been Knight on third and Wilson on first with Howard Johnson coming up to hit? Boston reliever Bob (Steamer) Stanley had hustled to cover first on the play but Wilson had him beaten to the base.

Does everyone even remember that a 5-3 Red Sox lead, with two outs in the bottom of the tenth and the World Series practically in their pockets, turned into a tie ball game - because young reliever Calvin Schiraldi couldn't keep Gary Carter from singling on a 2-1 count or rookie pinch hitter Kevin Mitchell from turning strike three into another single; because Carter came home and Mitchell took third heads up on Knight's single; because an inside pitch from Stanley to Wilson turned into a passed ball that was scored a wild pitch, letting Knight get into scoring position; because Stanley, intent on containing and removing Wilson, never heard Boston second baseman Marty Barrett - with Knight taking a too-fat lead - holler for a pickoff throw that might have sent the game to the eleventh without Wilson getting another swing?

We do know what everyone forgot: there was yet a seventh game to play. The Red Sox tend to be very good at forgetting that detail. And the one who remembered is the one who has paid the heaviest spiritual price.

"There are people who view (Buckner) as worse than Sacco and Vanzetti put together, worse than Lizzie Borden and Albert DeSalvo, worse than any and all of the Brinks robbers, and worse than Marky Mark, the pride of Dorchester, Massachussetts, who now poses in his underpants," wrote Leigh Montville (formerly a Boston Globe sportswriter), of Sports Illustrated, after the news broke about Buckner moving his family from New England to Idaho. "This is serious stuff. Bill Buckner cost the Red Sox a World Series. This is personal."

Indeed. Ask the Boston Herald reader who commented thus when actor Hugh Grant was caught soliciting a Hollywood prostitute: "You screwed up real bad, boy. You had one of the most beautiful women in the world and you blew it on a fifty dollar hooker. Real smooth. That's a worse screwup than Bill Buckner."

It can be extremely humbling to learn you might be the only baseball player on earth who was deemed, with the straightest of faces, worse than the Boston Strangler but better than an oversexed English actor.

This is why Buckner, above so many others among baseball's most notorious goats, so deserves our kindness; why he deserves to know we appreciate his fortitude having borne a world's opprobrium for his dark collision with that least deflatable of sports customs - Red Sox demonology.

There may always be that contingency of Red Sox Nation for whom to err is human but to forgive is not New England common law. The rest of us, let us take a moment and remember an hour of pleasure, too long obscured. Bill Buckner, en route finishing his star-crossed career with 2,700+ hits, having earned a final fling with the Olde Towne Team (following three years' Kansas City limbo), stepped up in Fenway Park in mid-April 1990 and whacked his final major league home run.

Wow! the way this is written I almost feel like the major leaguers deserve their astronomical salaries! But I can't believe without press approbrium, one play could have such a long standing impact on a man's life...This is like the Thrill of Victory and agony of defeat ABC trailer from decades ago watching some unfortunate skier karom off a jump at the Olympics every Sunday on Wide World of Sports...
I've often wondered if the poor subject had blocked that channel from his TV or received so many royalties from the replays that he laughed all the way to the bank...Buckner
doesn't sound like he got any compensation for his momentary lapse, being reverbrated through the media for generations...What about all the other plays and pitches in the game? I agree with the author...Let the guy alone!!! SHEESH!!! Thanks BD!

I've often wondered if the poor subject had blocked that channel from his TV or received so many royalties from the replays that he laughed all the way to the bank...Buckner doesn't sound like he got any compensation for his momentary lapse, being reverbrated through the media for generations...What about all the other plays and pitches in the game? I agree with the author...Let the guy alone!!! SHEESH!!! Thanks BD!

To my knowledge, Bill Buckner only once tried a cash-in on his infamous hour: when Michael Jordan was making his attempt to play pro baseball, Nike arranged a round of television spots featuring Willie Mays, Spike Lee, Stan Musial, Jordan, and Buckner. In the spot, Jordan at one point tries and fails to field a grounder. Says Lee: "He's no Bill Buckner." Answers Buckner: "But he's trying." The spots never saw the light of say, though Buckner was paid handsomely enough for his work, because Jordan decided shortly after filming them to return to the NBA with the Chicago Bulls. After that, he returned to his out-of-spotlight life, until he finally agreed to sit for an ESPN Classic Sports Century installment on the infamous play.

billy doesnt get all the blame stanley's performance in that game was horrendous but that is often overlooked bill buckner should never have been in that situation in the first place

You are more right about the second half of that equation (Buckner should have been out of the game - as had been the pattern throughout that postseason). But it isn't Bob Stanley who got or gets mimicked, ridiculed, dissected, redissected, and done in mime in China in the years since. Comic careers weren't made on Bob Stanley jokes (though, in fairness, they should have been hammering Rich Gedman - the wild pitch to Mookie Wilson should have been called a passed ball.) For better or worse, whatever brickbats and razzberries the other 1986 Red Sox bore were nothing compared to what Buckner did - and sometimes still does.

Here is how I would probably call the Red Sox's next World Series win, if I were fortunate enough to be in the booth (as if!) on the final play of the Series...

Fenway Park is on its feet...Red Sox Nation is standing at attention...the Olde Towne Team is one out away from driving the ghosts back into the Phantom Zone... Here comes the pitch...and there's a grounder to shortstop. Nomar picks it up...throws it on the run...and the impossible dream is the improbable truth at long enough last!....Look down across the garden called Fenway Park in Boston, ladies and gentlemen! Enos Slaughter is out at the plate...Ellis Kinder has stayed in the game...Little Looie has crossed the plate...Tony Perez has swung on the sharp slider and missed...Jim Willoughby will bat for himself and stay in as the hot hand...Luis Tiant has stopped the Yankees...Dent reaches outside and lofts it to left center and Yastrzemski glides over to haul it in...Calvin Schiraldi throws it just beyond Gary Carter's reach for strike two...There is but joy in Hubville - the Curse of the Bambino has grounded out to short...and for the first time since 1918, the Boston Red Sox are sitting on top of the world...

While I'm at it, why don't I just wish it could happen against the Red Sox's 1918 Series opponent: the Chicago Cubs...

But I can't believe without press approbrium, one play could have such a long standing impact on a man's life...

You don't know Red Sox Nation. Especially on the home turf in New England. Granted that Boston has had, historically, a particularly carnivorous sports press which some believe even more so than New York's or Philadelphia's can be (Ted Williams could tell you only too much about the cannibals in the Boston sports press in his day...), but in too many ways you could make a case that in Boston, as also in Philadelphia, you could have a completely press-less town and Bill Buckner would still have been turned overnight into Beelzebub incarnate for his mistake.

Believe it or not, though, there was a World Series goat, not of Boston, who received almost comparable treatment to Buckner that could have been so without his city's sportswriters: Ernie Lombardi, the huge, powerfully-built, tank of a catcher for the Cincinnati Reds, was made the goat of a 1939 World Series that was a complete mismatch - the Reds, winning their first pennant in exactly twenty years, were all but annihilated by a very powerful club of Yankees, but the play that received the most opprobrium was Yankee outfielder Charlie (King Kong) Keller plowing into Lombardi on a play at the plate which knocked Lombardi out cold. It was the presumed unlikelihood of that kind of knockout - Lombardi was, by standards of his era, a huge and powerful man - that heaped the abuse on Lombardi's head. "Ernie's Sit -Down Strike," "Schnozz's Snooze" were some of the milder nicknames attached.

It turned out that the play and its result had a logical root: It was almost suffocatingly hot in Cincinnati that day and Lombardi subsequently revealed he'd been feeling a little dizziness as the inning in question began. Bulldog that he was, he stayed the course until Charlie Keller's train smashed into his platform. It is also forgotten that, though nothing close to Lombardi's physical bulk, Charlie Keller didn't earn the nickname King Kong because he was a wisp of a man. Lombardi took so much abuse over the play that, in later years, the combination of that abuse plus a possibility of guilt over backup catcher Will Hershberger's suicide the same season may have prodded Lombardi himself to attempt suicide.

Snatched up and thrown home? If you're referring to the Buckner/Wilson play, there wouldn't have been a throw home. Ray Knight was running from second base when Wilson whacked the grounder; kept in the infield (Buckner, remember, was in position to keep the ball in front of him, had it not skipped below his glove, and Wilson had covering pitcher Bob Stanley beaten to first base by a foot), Knight wouldn't have been able to score. It was only because the ball got past Buckner that Knight could score the run, since right fielder Dwight Evans was back too far to be able to try a peg home if he'd gotten to the ball. The best case scenario, I repeat, would have been Knight on third, Wilson on first, and Howard Johnson coming up to hit.

One question -- wasn't Buckner in the game that late only because the manager wanted to give him the honor of being on the field when the Red Sox won the World Series? If I remember correctly, he normally would have been taken out in late innings for a defensive replacement.

Normally? Bill Buckner, throughout the League Championship Series and the World Series to that point, was always taken out late in the game for defence. He had also been handled that way during the stretch drive in August and September. John McNamara did want to have Buckner on the field when the Series got nailed down, almost solely because he appreciated Buckner's gutsy play that season (105 RBIs, playing in pain). His heart was in the right place, but his brains had gone to bed in that hour, even if you allow that Buckner's error was actually the next best thing to a freak occurrence. (He could have let Buckner hit his turn, pinch hit Don Baylor for relief pitcher Calvin Schiraldi instead, and still sent Dave Stapleton (an impossibly weak hitter whose only legitimate major league ability was playing defence) to spell Buckner. For listening to his heart rather than trying to win the baseball game for dead last certain, John McNamara merely secured his reputation as a manager who couldn't get out of his own way, and who would prefer to resent the hell out of anyone who pointed it out than make any attempt to correct it - or to own up to his mistakes, rather than try blaming the victim of his mistake...as he tried to Roger Clemens, claiming Clemens had told him he couldn't go any more, a remark for which Clemens had to be restrained from taking him apart...)

Buckner's flaw as a fielder actually wasn't his hands so much as it was his badly limited range, after all those years of leg injuries. If you watch the play closely enough, you see the ball take a tiny weird skip on the infield dirt (Mookie Wilson had hit a chopping grounder pretty much up the first base line; Buckner was playing him back near the edge of the outfield grass, the proper way to defence a free-swinger with running speed whom you're trying to get to hit it on the ground), maybe hitting a small chunk enough to cause the weird skip; tiny and weird enough that Buckner actually had his glove down in proper position to pick it off on a scoop-up, or to block the ball in front of him should it have taken an odd hop upward, but he could only watch helplessly as that skip on the infield dirt slipped the ball under his glove like a limbo rocker. He looked as stunned as anyone else in the park that the ball had gotten through his legs; that told me he was prepared and expecting to have the ball in his glove and, at worst (since Wilson had pitcher Stanley beaten on the play), keep Wilson to an infield hit and the Mets to first and third with two outs.

I remember Wilson finishing his playing career with the Jays. I don't recall, though, whether Buckner as a Jays instructor was still with the team for their World Series triumphs - he worked similarly for the Chicago White Sox for a time after the Blue Jays, and I don't remember, honestly, when Buckner left the Jays and went with the White Sox. He would probably make a very good batting instructor; he was an intelligent hitter in hand with his good swing and ability to watch the whole field to hit. As I remember his batting style, he was very good at making quick adjustments at the plate until his leg troubles finally got to be too much and he had to learn to bat locked. (He must have done something right in that way, since he did drive in 105 runs in 1986.) And whenever I heard him talk about hitting, he did it in a way that was as instructive as revelatory, telling me he would probably have been very good at teaching hitters how to adjust spontaneously as the pitch is delivered.

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