Angel Fans Can’t 86 This From Their Memories

There has never been a baseball postseason like 1986, and if polled, four out of five Orange Countians would vote to keep it that way, from here to eternity.

One pitch away. Three words that still cut and twist like a knife in the heart of every Angel fan who remembers wincing when Gene Mauch dispatched Marcel Lachemann to the mound to bring back Mike Witt with him, who remembers flinching when Gary Lucas nicked Rich Gedman’s forearm with his very first pitch, who remembers screaming when Dave Henderson turned on Donnie Moore’s poor, shuddering, woebegone forkball.

And then the light on the night stand flicks on, and the spouse shakes you out of it, and you are told, one more time, “It’s 3:30 in the morning! You’re having that dream again.”

It never really goes away, not for very long.

It is impossible to forget.

And now, just as the American League West standings are beginning to provide pleasant diversion, comes a new book, Mike Sowell’s “One Pitch Away,” which reopens all the old wounds of ’86 by recounting what the book jacket calls “undeniably one of the best postseasons in baseball history.”

A New York Mets fan might agree, but try finding a second for that opinion in Houston (“Knepper’s 1-2 pitch to Lenny Dykstra . . .”), Boston (“Bounding ball to Buckner . . .”) or Anaheim, which has been pretty much a baseball wasteland since the final out of Game 5.

Sowell tracks down several of the principles from Game 5--Witt, the Angel ace pulled from the biggest game of his career one out from the threshold; Henderson, the Boston reserve outfielder in the game only because of a freak injury to Tony Armas; Tonya Moore, Donnie Moore’s widow, still embittered over the fans’ treatment of Moore after the home run pitch, and Doug DeCinces, the Angel third baseman who drove in 96 runs in 1986 but failed to bring home the winning run in the bottom of the ninth. Sowell went in search of Mauch, too, only to have none of his phone calls returned and a former Angel coach tell him, “Leave Gene alone. He deserves a rest.”

The book presents a strong indictment against Mauch’s decision to replace Witt with a 5-4 lead and two outs in the top of the ninth. DeCinces’ recollections are the most damning.

Lucas was the pitcher Mauch brought on to face Gedman, who’d gone three for three against Witt that day. Lucas had struck out Gedman the previous night but “wasn’t even warmed up,” according to DeCinces. “He was sitting there just watching like everybody else.”

After Lucas hit Gedman with his first pitch, Mauch sent for Moore, who had received a cortisone injection in his rib cage the previous night. “He wasn’t supposed to pitch,” DeCinces tells Sowell. “He was NOT supposed to pitch. So, when we see [Moore] coming in, all the players on the team went, ‘Oh my gosh. What are we doing here?’ ”

DeCinces believes Witt should have been given the chance to close the game out. He says catcher Bob Boone “and I just jumped on Lachemann. We said, ‘What?! WHAT?! You can’t do this! What’s going on?’ Lachemann turned around and said, ‘It’s not my move. Gene’s already making the move. Now just calm down.’ Boone and I looked at each other. . . . Mike Witt was so disgusted. He walked off the mound and stared into center field. I mean, here’s a guy who had carried us all the way, and he was so prepared mentally and physically to get this next out.”

But in the book, Witt absolves Mauch, saying, “I always got along with Gene. He treated me real good. He thought a lot of me, I know that. And he taught me a lot, so I probably wouldn’t have been in that situation if it weren’t for him. . . .

“I don’t hold anything against him for doing what he did. That was just his style. That was his way, and that’s how he wanted to win that game that day. . . . He just thought that was the best move to make at that particular time. I can’t fault him for that.”

In his chapter on Moore, who committed suicide on July 18, 1989, immediately after firing six .45-caliber slugs into his wife, Tonya, Sowell avoids the knee-jerk trap of blaming Moore’s death on his pitch to Henderson. As Sowell correctly assesses, Moore had serious problems long before Game 5; the pitcher was a wife-beater and a heavy drinker prone to uncontrollable fits of rage after a few bottles were emptied.

When Moore turned his gun on Tonya, and then himself, he had just been released by the Kansas City Royals, he and Tonya were separated, and his dream house in Peralta Hills was about to be sold to make ends meet. That was Donnie Moore’s world was falling apart, not the ninth inning of a three-year-old playoff game. It’s doubtful any 1986 World Series ring would have prevented Moore’s hand from pulling the trigger that day.

Five years after the shooting, Tonya says she has forgiven Moore but not the fans who booed him during his final seasons as an Angel.

“All those people who booed him,” she says, “I wonder how they feel. Do you think that they had anything to do with my husband being dead? Is that bothering their conscience? . . . Can they live with theirself,, knowing each and every day that Donnie Moore might be dead because they didn’t have enough courage to give him a hand?”

Henderson found himself drawn into the periphery of the Moore shooting, having been asked far too many times, “Do you feel responsible for Donnie Moore’s death?”

Henderson dismisses such talk as ludicrous.

“This is a game,” he tells Sowell. “It’s not life and death. This should be fun.”

That was the intent, once upon a time. But in “One Pitch Away,” Henderson’s is the minority view. Here, the losers of ’86 are lined up--Witt, Mauch and DeCinces; Knepper, Mike Scott and Billy Hatcher; Buckner, Bob Stanley, Calvin Schiraldi and Dave Stapleton--and are asked, “Are we having fun yet?”

No one seems to be nodding.