If you’re not a New York Mets fan, you’re probably unaware of the hard-partying 1986 championship team that was notorious for having one of the craziest clubhouses in Major League Baseball history. But, how far would their insanity go? Former Mets pitcher and current Mets broadcaster Ron Darling revealed some of the rituals from that squad in a Wall Street Journal article to promote his upcoming book, “Game 7, 1986: Failure and Triumph in the Biggest Game of My Life”.
Darling notes when he first made it to “The Show”, there was a jar in plain sight that contained different doses of amphetamine pills called “white crosses” and “black beauties”.
“The five-milligram amphetamines were known as white crosses—and these were passed around like candy, if that was your bag. The heavier doses were black beauties.”
Ron went on to state that even though the jar was hidden away when the magical 1986 season rolled around, the usage was still very prevalent.
“You’d see guys toward the end of a game, maybe getting ready for their final at bat, double-back into the locker room to chug a beer to “re-kick the bean” so they could step to the plate completely wired and focused and dialed in.”
If you don’t use “re-kick the bean” at least once a day for the rest of your life, you’re not playing like a champion. Reminds me of Parents Weekend senior year when you rip through every ounce of booze in the building on Friday night only to wake up, gulp a borderline safe amount of Advil and shotgun Saturday morning to be presentable for Ma, Pa, and the Sibs.
Apparently, this level of performance-enhancing (or reducing, in Darling’s eyes) has been going on for decades.
“In the era of Mays and Aaron, the heroes of my growing up, it was all about red juice or Cuban coffee—the brews found in virtually every clubhouse, spiked with amphetamines and whatever else the prevailing “wisdom” suggested.”
Hold on, I just have to add “red juice” and “Cuban coffee” to my Amazon cart real quick.
Ron Darling has officially re-confirmed for the umpteenth time that baseball players can out-party any other professional athlete on this planet. Hell, I pitched more games drunk than sober as a middle reliever in a D-3 program. Another pitcher on the team would smoke a J before taking the bump. And then he’d take the mound.
“We marvel, really, at the s— some of our teammates put into their bodies…into our bodies. We run the numbers in our head, try to calculate how many milligrams of amphetamines were actually in play during that great World Series run.”
As if the 1986 Mets weren’t already the most extreme championship team ever, now they’ve added yet another chapter in their lengthy ledger of ballsy antics. Now, if only the 2016 Mets could take a page or five from that book, maybe they’d avoid getting mocked like they did after the 2015 World Series and kick their celebrations up a notch.
via WSJ