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.

Excellent article. I can remember that tragic October night as clear as a bell. I was at my fiance's house (soon to be my wife) with a group of friends. We were so sure of the win that we started popping champagne corks. In fact, they were popping champagne corks in the Red Sox clubhouse too. We were ecstatic and some of my friends were making long distance calls.

Then the grounder between the legs. It was devastating, I tell you! On the way home that night, some kids through a rock through my car window at a stoplight. They were pissed too. It was an ugly night in Boston. And we just knew that they weren't going to win in Game 7. In fact, I don't even remember watching that game. I'm sure I did but I don't remember anything about it.

It was a horrible feeling that night. The only other time I had that feeling was on a November night just a year and a half ago. That was the night that George Bush was declared the winner of the presidential election. I woke my son up and we opened a bottle of champagne. No sooner than I took the first sip then the networks switched to Al Gore taking back his concession. It was the '86 Sox all over again! Fortunately, Bush was able to win "Game 7."

Bill Buckner: I forgive you dude!

We were so sure of the win that we started popping champagne corks. In fact, they were popping champagne corks in the Red Sox clubhouse too. We were ecstatic and some of my friends were making long distance calls.

I have a videotape of Games Six and Seven by way of ESPN Classic. (The network edited out a few too many things but left most of the guts of the games intact.) In between are some comments from various players in the drama, including Boston Globe columnist Bob Ryan saying that people had actually gone to the nurseries in the tenth inning to hold up their infants in front of the set "so that they could say, their parents could say, 'You saw the Red Sox break the curse of the Bambino and win the 1986 World Series.' People did this, people really did this, this is Boston, you won't find that anywhere else in the world," Ryan said.

Trivia unknown until now: The champagne in the Red Sox clubhouse in the tenth inning of Game Six was actually the Mets' champagne - the Red Sox equipment managers had forgotten to pack the Red Sox's champagne before leaving for the final rounds in New York!

I agree. He was a good ballplayer, hard nosed without careening over the line to recklessness, and was actually one of the better clutch hitters of the first half of the 1980s. (The only man in baseball to hit for a higher average with men on base or in scoring position, or both, than Bill Buckner hit from 1980-86: Eddie Murray. Both men also hit higher in those situations than they did all around; Buckner's batting averages with men on base/in scoring position was always higher than his standard batting averages.) He seems also a nice, unpretentious man.

I wonder, now, if people remember that when Henry Aaron finally whacked his 715th career homer, in old Fulton County Stadium in Atlanta, the Dodger left fielder with an idea of trying to climb the bullpen fence to catch the ball was Bill Buckner...

Given the pace of the Mutts Season this year Billy Buck is one of MY all time Heroes..lol

*sigh* The Mets have been disappointing me as often as endearing me since the day they were born, alas.

I watched the aforesaid Sports Century profile of Buckner and the ESPN Classic replays of Games Six and Seven, which were interspersed with comments from various Mets and Red Sox. Those Mets who were asked - outfielder/reserve Lee Mazzilli, outfielder Len Dysktra, infielder Wally Backman, outfielder Mookie Wilson - said they were stunned to see Buckner still in the field as the bottom of the tenth started. In another interview, Backman has said that to a man the Mets expected Buckner to be out of the game for the bottom of the tenth. "Are you expecting Buckner to be out there?" Mazzilli commented. "Because I know I'm not."

They also expected manager John McNamara to make another move and bring in his only lefthanded relief pitcher, Sammy Stewart - who never showed up in the Series. The Mets didn't know that Stewart was a victim of McNamara's propensity to both play favourite and hold grudges: Stewart was two minutes late boarding the team bus after saying goodbye to his family before a long road trip, and he'd been with pitcher Bruce Hurst and his family. Stewart squawked at the club traveling secretary over it (both Stewart and Hurst were known to be strong family men) and got fined for the outburst, and McNamara held it against him...all season long, even though Stewart had a lifetime 0.00 ERA in twelve postseason appearances prior to 1986 and even though the 1986 Mets' only real weakness was that they didn't do well against lefthanded pitching compared to righthanded pitching. As the years have gone by, no matter the jokes and gags about Bill Buckner, I notice that John McNamara looks more and more and more to have been part and parcel of the Red Sox's real (and saddest) tradition: bonehead decisionmaking.

Another point illustrated by your pointing out of those facts, is the intellectual laziness of what passes for sports journalism these days. How come, for instance I am only hearing of this...Now....lol

Probably because you may not have read some of the books I have read which address the 1986 World Series - like The Curse of the Bambino and At Fenway: Dispatches from Red Sox Nation, by Dan Shaughnessy, who has covered the Red Sox for the Boston Globe for about seventeen years or thereabout; like Sports Illustrated: Baseball, an anthology which includes Peter Gammons's excellent review (it appeared in the magazine in February 1987) of Games Six and Seven; like Fenway: An Unexpurgated History of the Boston Red Sox, by Peter Golenbock (he who has done lovely oral histories of the 1949-64 Yankees, the Brooklyn Dodgers, the St. Louis Cardinals, the Chicago Cubs, and, most recently, the Mets); like The Heart of the Order, Thomas Boswell's third anthology of his baseball columns and features, which includes a section of columns from his Washington Post coverage of the 1986 postseason called "1986: Ultimate Red Sox", and, like Roger Angell's Season Ticket, which includes his original New Yorker article, "Not So, Boston," about the 1986 pennant races and postseason. These books are well enough within the reach of those who want to know.

On my tombstone it is going to read: CAUSE OF DEATH - BOSTON RED SOX. - Ray Goulding (Bob and Ray)

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