The Greatest Postseason: Part 2

Now for the AL side of things.

I loved watching Hendu in the postseason with the A’s, but the 1986 ALCS may have been his crowning achievement. (Image: Jim Gerberich/AP)

Last week, I wrote about the 1986 NLCS. If you haven’t read it, you can find it here. You will also find my rationale on why I chose 1986, and why I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time on the World Series itself, as it is one of the most written about subjects in all of sports. The buildup to the Fall Classic, on the other hand, often gets glossed over, which is a crime, because it was every bit as dramatic as the conclusion.

While the Mets were facing down Mike Scott’s icy stare and an existential crisis, clawing like hell to avoid one final showdown with the Astros’ ace by winning an epic sixteen-inning marathon in the Astrodome, Boston and California were more than holding their own on the AL side of the bracket.

Admittedly, the ALCS was a bit under the radar, compared to the circus that followed the Mets. This might feel a bit surprising to us now, when Boston holds such a stranglehold over the pro sports landscape, a state of affairs that began when Tom Brady won his first Super Bowl in January of 2002, but really took off when the Red Sox finally broke the Curse of the Bambino in 2004. The Red Sox have won four championships in the twenty-first century (2004, 2007, 2013, & 2018), and if you told that to the average Sox fan in the ‘80s, their head might have exploded.

The Red Sox have always been an iconic franchise, but the ‘80s were a strange time for the blue-bloods of baseball. The Mets were the toast of New York, and the Yankees were kind of an afterthought following their loss in the 1981 World Series. The guys in pinstripes wouldn’t get back to the postseason until the mid-‘90s, and on the other coast, the Dodgers remained relevant and nearly bookended the decade with title, while the A’s finished it with a flourish. But it was a great decade for non-traditional powers and Midwestern powerhouses like the Cardinals.

Eleven years had passed since Boston’s last trip to the World Series. They lost to the Reds, despite Carlton Fisk’s legendary home run in Game 6, only adding to the shadow of the curse looming over them. Their last championship came in 1918. Eighty-six years went by before they won their next title, but in the year 1986, sixty-eight years* after they traded Babe Ruth, Boston was on the verge of making history.

*A lot going on with the number 8 and 6 there. I don’t know if there’s any real significance to it, but you have to admit it’s kind of weird.

The team they assembled wasn’t nearly as flashy as the Mets’ roster, but neither were they a group of blue-collar players with little star power, who just so happened to work together extremely well, which is how I would characterize the Astros. No, the Red Sox had some dudes.

Roger Clemens won the first of his seven Cy Young awards that season, and he did it in dominant fashion, posting a 24-4 record with a 2.48 ERA. His performance was good enough to snag him the AL MVP as well. Behind him, they also had Bruce Hurst, who did his best Mike Scott impersonation against the Mets in the World Series, and Oil Can Boyd, a volatile, but talented pitcher having arguably his best season.

The lineup was no joke either. Bill Buckner’s knees were shot, severely impeding his defense, which the Red Sox knew and would ignore to their detriment in the World Series, but he could still hit. Wade Boggs was their best hitter though. He won the third of his five AL batting titles that season, and he was flanked by Jim Rice, Dwight Evans, and Don Baylor, the latter of whom was basically a rabbit’s foot for the playoff aspirations of any team he played for in the ‘80s.

Standing in their way was an Angels team loaded with veteran talent. Led by Bob Boone, Reggie Jackson, Bobby Grich, and Doug DeCinces, the Halo’s most exciting hitter was the baby-faced rookie, Wally Joyner. The young first baseman never became the superstar many predicted he would be, but those expectations were mostly set in place by his outstanding 1986 season, in which he finished second in the AL ROY race.

The Angels also boasted a talented starting rotation with Mike Witt, Kirk McCaskill, and veteran Don Sutton. California had been in the thick of the AL West race the previous season, until they dropped three out of four against Kansas City in a crucial series during the last week of the season. In 1986, however, they were determined to finish the job. They won the division by five games over the Texas Rangers, and bested the disappointing defending champ Royals by sixteen.

This set the stage for an electric series that quite frankly didn’t get off to a great start. Mike Witt dominated the Red Sox in Game 1, pitching a five-hit complete game, and California won, 8-1. Boston returned the favor in Game 2, blowing the Angels out 9-2.

The series finally got interesting when it moved to Anaheim. With the game tied at one after six innings, Boyd gave up home runs to Dick Schofield and Gary Pettis, spotting the Angels a 4-1 lead. Angels reliever Donnie Moore let the Red Sox back into it in the eighth when he allowed two runs. Moore is a name many of you are familiar with, for all the wrong reasons, unfortunately, and he would play significant role in this series. In this case, however, he was able to hang on to the lead, and the Angels added an insurance run to salt away a 5-3 victory.

The atmosphere in the Angels’ clubhouse was not very celebratory though. Joyner, their young All-Star, busted open a staph infection on his foot during the game. No team wants staph infection running rampant through their locker room, but even worse, Joyner would not be available for the rest of the series. If California was going to advance to their first World Series, they were going to have to do it without their best player.

Spoiler alert: they weren’t going to do it. But it certainly looked like they might for a while. The Angels won Game 4, giving them a commanding 3-1 series lead. More often than not, that spells victory, but if the Angels were watching the previous fall when the Royals came back from 3-1 deficits in both the ALCS and World Series, they knew better than to feel like they had it sewn up.

The series turned in Anaheim in Game 5. This was the true classic, the game that holds its own with Game 6 of the NLCS and provides this series with the boost it needed for 1986 to hold the distinction of greatest postseason.* Let’s get to it.

*In this article, for whatever that’s worth.

Boston jumped out to an early 2-0 lead on a Rich Gedman homer in the top of the second. The catcher on the other side, Boone, homered in the third to cut the lead in half. The ball continued to fly out of the park when Bobby Grich gave the Angels the lead with a two-run dinger of his own in the sixth. The Angels added two more in the seventh to go up 5-2 heading into the ninth. They only needed three outs to advance.

They turned to Donnie Moore to get them, which turned out to be a mistake. Moore is mostly remembered for taking own his life after shooting his wife during a domestic dispute in 1989. Fortunately, she survived, but it’s an incredibly sad story, especially considering that all of it played out in front of their kids. Many people have tried to tie those tragic events back to what happened to Moore in Game 5, but that’s a gross oversimplification. Moore struggled from depression and substance abuse, and he was haunted by a lot more than one bad outing. I'm sure it didn’t help, but Moore handled the immediate aftermath well, answering questions after the game, and while it clearly bothered him, it’s unfair to tie his death to a baseball game.

In fact, the Sox did most of their rallying off Mike Witt before Moore even entered the game. Don Baylor hit a two-run home run to cut the lead to one, and after he was pulled, Gary Lucas hit Gedman to put the tying run on. The call was made to Moore, and he stepped onto the mound to face Dave Henderson.

Hendu has always been one of my favorite players. I was a big fan of his when he played for Oakland a few years later. Rickey Henderson was, of course, the top Henderson for the A’s, but Hendu was no slouch, even if he was often overshadowed by Rickey, Mark McGwire, and Jose Canseco. He was surprisingly athletic big man, covering center field for most of his career, and he had no lack of power. This was evident when he launched a two-strike pitch into the left field stands to give Boston the lead.

The game wasn’t over, however. And even though the image of Hendu rounding the bases is always associated with the Donnie Moore tragedy, it wasn’t even the last run the Angels reliever would give up that day. Moore got out of the inning without any further damage, and California scratched across the tying run in the bottom of the ninth. In fact, they had the bases loaded with one out, but Grich and DeCinces failed to come through.

How different things might have been if they had. Again, I’m not speaking in terms of Donnie Moore. There was a lot more going on with him, but the Angels would have made their first World Series appearance sixteen years earlier than they actually did if Grich had managed to get a sac fly in the air or either of them had found a hole. That’s not how it played out though.

Neither team scored in the tenth, and Moore went back to the mound in the eleventh. The Sox loaded the bases, and Moore must have cringed just a little when he saw Dave Henderson step into the box again. Hendu didn’t have to take him yard this time. All the Red Sox required was a sacrifice fly, and unlike Grich and DeCinces, Hendu delivered. Calvin Schiraldi, who would be one of the goats in the World Series, worked a scoreless bottom of the eleventh, and the Red Sox lived to play another day.

The series was a bit anticlimactic after that. Returning to Fenway, the Red Sox blew the demoralized Angels out in both Games 6 and 7, punching their ticket to the Fall Classic. The Angels never really recovered from the shock of losing Game 5.

The 1986 ALCS was certainly inconsistent, but it was memorable, and Game 5 was an all-time classic. That, combined with the NLCS and the now mythical World Series, was enough for me to tab it as the greatest postseason of my lifetime. But like I said, this is hardly an exact science, and is incredibly subjective. If you vehemently disagree with my choice, maybe I’ll make a case for another contender sometime down the road.

But that will be a story for another day.

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Thanks for reading Powder Blue Nostalgia. What are your thoughts about the 1986 ALCS? Or how about we play the what if game? What would an Astros-Angels World Series have looked like? The uniforms sure would have been a lot cooler. The Angels had some of the coolest under-the-radar uniforms of the ‘80s. I’m not sure how they haven’t found their way back to them, given that their fashion choices since then have been pretty uninspired. Anyway, those are a couple of options, but talk about whatever you like in the comments. Y’all know your stuff.