WINTER OF DISCONTENT : Red Sox Experience Long Offseason That’s Filled With Painful Memories

For weeks, I would wake up in the middle of the night and that’s all I would see. . . . I don’t think I will ever watch those last two ball games again. Once was enough. --JOHN McNAMARA, a Red Sox goat

It hurts a lot more to lose than it feels good to win. --BRUCE HURST, a Red Sox hero

Filene’s is a big store. But when you put a couple of Boston Red Sox players on a pedestal in the lobby, it gets small in a hurry. You could wait an hour and not get Marty Barrett’s autograph.

Marty Barrett? When a pint-sized second baseman bats .433 in the World Series for the Red Sox, he has to be careful. He could wake up and find out he’s governor of Massachusetts.

There’s no place in America better than New England to be a hero. And maybe no place on earth worse to be a goat.

For men like Barrett, Wade Boggs, Roger Clemens, Dave Henderson, Don Baylor, Dwight Evans and Bruce Hurst, this has been a winter of glory and solicitude.

Picked fifth, they won a pennant and came within one strike of the first world title for Fenway Park since 1918. In the phrase “near miss,” they stand for the “near.”

That they came so close, did such deeds, then still had their prize ripped from them, makes them twice as sympathetic to the public mind. Though guiltless, they’ve been denied. The fan knows his own level of pain and disgust and imagines that theirs must be 10 times as great.

“Everywhere you go, ever since the parade the day after the Series, people say, ‘Great. Wish you could’ve gone all the way but you had a wonderful year,’ ” said Barrett, who set a record with 24 postseason hits. “I’ll be in Burger King and a guy’ll say, ‘Hey, aren’t you . . . ‘ He may not know my name, but he’ll say, ‘We feel for you. You had some tough luck. We’re with you.’ ”

If Hurst goes into the 7-Eleven in his hometown of St. George, Utah, for a five-minute errand, he ends up spending an hour. It’s not so much the autographs as it is the reliving. Tell us again how you almost beat the Mets three times all by yourself. Not your fault, Bruce. You just ran out of gas in that last game.

If Boggs is out on his boat fishing near Tampa, he’ll hear a motor and know what it means. You can spot his rusty hair a long way off. In the middle of a lake it’s “Sign this” for the American League batting champion who became Mr. Leather in the World Series.

“I’m not going to complain. I love the exposure. It’s made Wade Boggs a lot more popular . . . Fame can make monsters of people. But sometimes it turns them into nicer people, too,” said Boggs.

The Red Sox mouths taste bitter and their stomachs are hungry. “The way it ended makes you wanna go back,” said Boggs. On the surface, their heads are held high and their competitive juices are still at the flood. Their appraisals of what may well have been the harshest defeat in World Series history are defiantly upbeat--all for the best.

“I’ve gotten recognition, but not as much as if we’d won,” said Barrett. “If I’m still underrated, if I keep seeing 3-1 fastballs, that’s fine with me . . . I like to lay back in the weeds.”

Even whimsy has crept in. “Think what Hindu Henderson’s life would be like if we’d won the sixth game,” said reliever Joe Sambito. “He doesn’t become a Red Sox until August. Then, he saves the season with a home run when we’re down to our last strike in the playoffs and hits the homer that wins the Series. When we lost, it was like a voice from above saying that they’re not ready just yet for a statue of Dave Henderson in the Boston Common.”

You must stand close to the Red Sox a little longer if you want to hear the other currents flowing underground, beneath the wisecracks and square shoulders. What is more complex than coping with great success or great failure?

Coping with both at once.

Most of the Red Sox gathered recently at a downtown banquet. Black tie. Sellout crowd of 1,200 at ticket prices worthy of a World Series. Pride, disgrace, testiness, impatience, worry for the future--all were mixed.

There was Clemens, the happiest of men, you’d imagine. Yet he was fanning a feud with Hank Aaron who’d said that, as a pitcher, Clemens didn’t deserve the MVP award as much as every-day player Don Mattingly of the Yankees. “If that opinion came from a classy person like Reggie Jackson, I’d take note. My idol was Reggie,” said Clemens. “But some people will do anything for some cheap publicity.”

A year ago, Clemens was an unproven youngster coming off shoulder surgery. Now, he’s calling a man with 755 home runs a cheap publicity hound.

Boggs used the banquet to make sure everybody knew he had demands to make. “I don’t want to bat leadoff anymore,” he announced. “I’ve always been knocked for not driving in runs. I just haven’t had a chance. It’s time for Wade Boggs to move on and that means hitting third. If I can hit .370 with 10 homers and drive in 100 runs, I’ll think it’s a pretty good year. . . .

“I’ve got weapons to pull out of the arsenal next year that are going to surprise a few people,” said Boggs, who’s famous for worshipping the Ted Williams theory of never swinging at the first pitch. “I went 16 for 22 on first pitches last year.”

One of the people who’s surprised already is Manager John McNamara who, until Boggs’ proclamation, thought that Bill Buckner, who had 102 RBIs last year, was his No. 3 hitter. But then McNamara has had one surprise after another all winter. In late January, he learned that center fielder Henderson had gotten a knee checkup (after waiting two months) and would need arthroscopic surgery.

That was nothing compared to the Rich Gedman Surprise. On Jan. 7 at 11:20 p.m., McNamara turned on his hotel TV in New York to make sure that his all-star catcher--and the most irreplaceable regular on the team--had come to contract terms before the midnight deadline for free agents. “They mentioned all the ones, like (Yankees pitcher Ron) Guidry, who were not signed. They didn’t mention Gedman. I assumed, going to bed, everything was OK. I called the office the next morning and found out.”

Found out Gedman was probably lost and, at the least, could not negotiate with Boston again until May 1.

To this day, Gedman’s defection is a mystery. “Nobody understands it,” said Don Baylor.

“They didn’t negotiate all season. Then, they didn’t really get down to business until four days before the deadline,” said Sambito, one of Gedman’s closer friends. “I think it backfired on Geddy. There was just no time left to hammer it out.”

“They were very close at 6 p.m.,” said a disgusted Baylor. “Then, neither side picked up the phone for six hours. Then it was midnight. Too late.”

“I’m sorry they waited so long to get started,” said McNamara.

New England opinion in polls was four to one on management’s side. What’s so bad about a two-year contract for $1.65 million? With each week, the shock at Gedman’s loss sinks deeper. Will the son of owner Haywood Sullivan inherit the job? That’s 28-year-old Marc Sullivan--career average .200, credentials nil.

“I want Rich Gedman back,” said McNamara. “The only club that ever won a pennant in April was the ’84 Tigers. He can come back in May, far as I care.”

One reason for Gedman’s strange departure is never mentioned. Maybe he just can’t stand it. Maybe he has to escape. Born in Worcester, Mass. Lives in Framingham.

Gedman is the Red Sox player most in touch with Red Sox history, Red Sox suffering, Red Sox jinxes. And, although the public considers him blameless, he knows that, within the game’s dugouts, he’s the man most blamed for the Red Sox’ Series defeat.

We take you back to Game 6 in Shea Stadium, Boston ahead, 5-3, in the bottom of the 10th with two men out, nobody on base and relief ace Calvin Schiraldi on the mound. Three singles make it 5-4, Mets at the corners. Mookie Wilson fouls off a pair of two-strike pitches.

Then, a run-scoring wild pitch by Bob Stanley ties the score and a routine grounder by Wilson, right at Buckner, goes untouched between his feet for a game-losing error. That final Met rally, aided and abetted by the Red Sox, will be remembered a hundred times more than the heartbreak of Game 7, which Boston led, 3-0, as late as the sixth inning.

Those are the 15 minutes that will make New Englanders wake up in a sweat for generations.

“I can accept it all . . . the (Mets’) hits, all right, fine,” said McNamara. “And errors remain part of the game. But to tie the (sixth game) on a wild pitch-that’s what remains vivid. If they’d just earned that run.” Then he added, “Or a passed ball, whichever it was.”

Baseball insiders say passed ball. They say that Stanley will spend decades living down Gedman’s mistake and an official-scoring misjudgment. A million replays show the pitch didn’t miss being a strike on the low-inside corner by more than six inches.

“Everyone tried to have me blame Gedman,” Stanley has said this winter. “I would never do that. They might as well blame me. They did all season.”

All career, Stanley might have added. Only his wife has blurted out stronger feelings: “Geddy blew it.”

If Gedman leaves Boston, the passed ball he never made will be forgotten in his new town. In the Back Bay, never.

Discontent would not touch what this winter has meant to many Red Sox. This is a team that both feels for each other and fears for each other. Oh, they worry about Stanley, who threw The Pitch and even about Gedman some. But Stanley’s a wealthy veteran used to the unfair abuse of Boston jock life and Gedman has skipped town. You don’t fret over Jim Rice (.161 playoff batting average, zero Series RBIs) because his ego could survive an 0-for-1987--and he has that glare.

It’s Schiraldi, who lost both the sixth and seven games, old Buckner who made The Error and McNamara, who will be second-guessed until Doomsday, who concern them most.

“It’s tough to talk about what happened (to them). Heck, you don’t even want to think about it,” said Barrett. “You know when you’re in that kind of showcase if you do good, you’ll be great forever. Do bad and that’ll be remembered forever. Somebody told me about a guy who made a bad play and, when he died 50 years later, that’s all anybody mentioned.”

Fred Merkle? Merkle’s Boner in 1912?

“That’s right,” said Barrett. “There’s a good chance Bill Buckner will be like that. And after all he’s accomplished . . . a batting champion.”

What if it had been you? What if Wilson’s evil, twisting but dead-simple dribbler that went between Buckner’s legs had come to Barrett?

“If it had come to me, I’d have caught it,” said Barrett, grimly. End of discussion.

“Buckner is going to be remembered for one thing. And it shouldn’t be that,” said Baylor. “He’s not the type of player that should have happened to.

“It’s bothered me,” added Baylor, almost insulted that his game would have shown such poor judgment in picking its victim. “Pressure, like that last out, is what you train for. When Henderson came over from Seattle, I told him, ‘Welcome to the big leagues.’ Until you get in a pennant race, the playoffs, you’re not playing baseball . . . The real players rise. It comes out . . . They say the Fall Classic is a spotlight. It can be. Or that light can get very dim.”

Buckner’s saving grace is that he was already America’s Wounded Warrior-the Red Sox’ Badge of Courage. “Buck’s going to come out OK,” said Sambito, remembering the ovations for him on parade day. “Fans sympathized with him all Series long. People in their chairs felt the pain with him. That’ll help.

“It’s Schiraldi who got so down on himself that it worried me. After he lost in the playoffs (on an awful, changeup-curve hit batsman in Game 4), I told him, ‘Calvin, you’re the best we have. Put it out of your mind. Come back in the morning. You can be the hero tommorrow.’ And he was.”

So, what happened after Schiraldi’s defeat in Game 6? He came back the next day ready to redeem himself. And it rained.

He had a day to sit in a New York hotel room and think.

When Schiraldi took the mound in the seventh inning of the seventh game, score tied, he was a wreck. Ray Knight, the first batter, hit a home run.

Perhaps a measure of the offseason agony of Buckner, Stanley and Schiraldi is that, as the winter has lengthened, they have all gone underground, refusing interview requests and avoiding Red Sox public functions. The man who grasps their feelings best may be Baylor, The Judge, whose Kangaroo Court helped turn the Red Sox into a cohesive and truly committed team in 1986. “I’ve checked the pulse around Boston 10 or 15 times. Well, maybe 200 times,” he said. “Ninty-five percent say, ‘Great year.’

“I can’t agree.”

The blessing and curse of artists, and many ballplayers, too, is that the best of them are so inner-directed, so accustomed to living by their own arrogant self-judgments, that they are incapable of forgiveness by popular vote. Baylor and McNamara have talked several times, once a whole afternoon, trying to work out their feelings.

“Hell, I hate to lose at gin rummy,” said the manager. “I’ll never get over it. To come that close . . . It’s going to keep coming up forever. It’s just something we’ll have to face. Unless it really gets shoved down my throat, I think I can be more patient in March than I was in October.”

Still, it’s not the world that tasks McNamara or invades his dreams.

“People tell me it made them become baseball fans,” he said. “It’d be nice--no, that’s not me--I wish I could be as satisfied as they are. It’s difficult to stomach.” And he’s off in a reverie, back in his mind to the 10th inning of Oct. 23, midnight approaching. “You’d think one of ‘em would hit a ball at somebody. Not one of their hits was very hard. Then those three pitches for the last strike . . . The decisions I made, I haven’t had trouble sleeping with ‘em. That’s not what bothers me. It’s . . . that it happened. How could that happen?

“Somebody told my wife it was 250,000-to-1 that could happen.”

With the months, McNamara has built his tactical defenses for all the moves for which he was second-guessed then, now and probably always. “If I felt I were wrong, I would have a tough time. But I’d do the same things. It didn’t work. But that’s not the point. Baseball people tell me, ‘What you did was right.’ But what good does that do?”

It does McNamara enormous good. He doesn’t want a lifetime of self-doubts.

Of all McNamara’s debatable or dubious decisions, and there were a dozen--Why didn’t Gedman sacrifice, why did Clemens come out with the blister, why use Al Nipper in relief in a one-run game?--two are already Big Time Lore.

First, should Dave Stapleton have replaced Buckner in the field in Game 6? No one will ever neglect to mention that Johnny Mac put him in for the final outs of all seven previous Boston postseason wins. That’s self-incrimination.

“If Buckner hadn’t gotten to the (Mookie Wilson ground) ball, that’s a different matter. But he did. Buckner has the better hands,” said McNamara, almost admitting that, although his decision may have been flawed, events did not expose it--Buckner’s limited range.

Next, should he have pinch-hit Baylor for Buckner in any of three different bases-loaded situations, including the 10th inning of Game 6. Buckner stranded all nine men. “I’ve never asked about that,” said Baylor. “And I hope he doesn’t bring it up.”

“Turn it around,” said McNamara. “Would I have pinch-hit Buckner for Baylor if the pitcher had been a righty? No. Because I had faith in both of ‘em . . . How about the time in Detroit when I pinch-hit Gedman (a lefty) against Willie Hernandez (a lefty). Grand slam.”

When all the logic-chopping and rehashing is done, McNamara knows he’ll no more be finished rolling his stone up the mountain than will Buckner when he explains for the millionth time how a grounder got between his legs.

It’s not what happened to McNamara, Buckner, Stanley and Schiraldi that matters--neither the ridiculous weight of importance put on such matters, nor the unfairness of being judged for a whole public lifetime by some ground ball or wild pitch. It’s what they do with it that is, and will be, of interest.

Each Red Sox must find his own ways to deal with what may have been, all factors considered, the most brutal team disappointment in baseball history.

“It took me until 10 days ago to get over it,” Baylor said recently. One day, he and Dwight Evans realized that neither had watched the replay of the Red Sox win over California in Game 5 of the American League Championship Series when they did to the Angels what the Mets did to them: Get down to their last strike of the season, then win by miracle.

“Watching it brought back the memory of sitting on that bench as we were being overrun by police,” said Baylor. “We were all crammed together in one-third of a dugout, on top of each other. All of a sudden, we were a real team, everybody screaming, ‘Make the last at-bat a good one.’ ”

Baylor picked a curve off his toes to light the fire. “I’m not supposed to touch that pitch ever. But I hit it out of the park,” he recalled, still incredulous.

Like every Red Sox, Baylor will have to make his peace someday with those old Series tapes of what may, in time, be the sport’s most famous defeat. Will he ever review those last two tortures?

“Eventually,” he said. “But they might go into the archives for a while. Right now, there are too many positive things to remember to relive that.”

No glass in sports has ever been more perfectly divided than the one from which the Red Sox now drink each day. Whether they view it as half empty or half full is their problem or their solution.