"I feel like the kid that didn't study for his test until the last night. I'm so uptight about this. It's going to be difficult because when you revere something like this, it's emotional, and I'm a very emotional guy. But I'm going to try to keep it together. It's amazing what a speech will do to you. I'd better get it done so I can have fun."
- Dennis Eckersley, preparing his Hall of Fame induction speech, to SI.
The closer we come to Sunday, the more we hear strains of a sublanguage that some think as familiar, or at least as unforgettable, as Stengelese. But DialEck did not mean tripletalk, whether its inventor stood on the mountaintop or had taken a swift kick to the bottom. When Dennis Eckersley showed them the high cheese before punching out them with the yakker, he was being just as straightforward as he was when he barked at reporters to lay off Frank Duffy or told the world the lesson Kirk Gibson taught him in 1988.
September 9, 1978. A pop fly drops among five Boston Red Sox including second baseman Duffy, handing the Yankees a five-run inning and handing Eckersley a 7-1 loss, bringing the Yankees to within a game of the Red Sox, after the Empire was once as down as 14. Eckersley showered while the rest of the team disappeared deep in the clubhouse. Except Duffy. Then Eckersley popped out of the shower, bailing out Duffy without a syllable of DialEck.
"Frank Duffy's not the reason we lost this game," he hollered. "Leave him alone. I pitched (expletive) and we didn't hit (Ron) Guidry. Frank Duffy didn't put the three guys on base before that popup, I did. Frank Duffy didn't hang the 0-2 slider that Bucky Dent hit for two more runs. I'm the one who should face the music, not him. The L goes next to my name."
That was one thing that never changed about the man no matter how many other changes -- from starter to closer, from partyboy alcoholic to sober gunslinger -- he made, survived, and transcended. The 1990 Oakland Athletics got rolled by the Cincinnati Reds in maybe the single greatest World Series flop since a Cleveland Indians team that won 111 -- and left the Yankees in second place with 103 wins -- got rolled in four straight by the New York Giants.
Only a couple of the 1990 A's were willing to stand up and admit what everyone with eyes had just seen: the A's were a lot more error-prone than their swagger let on, and the Reds were about as shy about exploiting such D.A. attacks as a mongoose exploiting a cobra.
You almost didn't need your hand to count how many of those A's were willing to stand up and be counted out. Dennis the Menace, what a surprise, was one of them. "I said before in September if we didn't win the whole thing, we choked," he said, after the Reds finished what the A's let them start.
"So we choked. Now that it's over, I'm relieved because it was killing us. It was killing me. I felt responsible and I feel embarrassed. Nobody wants to feel like that. It's a bomb in the first inning of Game One and it was domination in every game. They crushed us twice and they beat us at our own game twice."
Except that it wasn't exactly his fault. It wasn't Eckersley's idea to take a lead into the eighth inning twice and not bring him in. It wasn't his idea to blow both those eighth-inning leads. And it wasn't his idea to warm himself up, sit himself down, warm himself up again, sit himself down again, then warm himself up again, come in for the 10th inning of Game 2, and lose when a .231 hitter with a .304 on-base percentage during the season grounds one that nicks the foul line edge.
But you don't expect an incredible shrinking man act from a fellow who got hit, two years earlier, for one of the most indelible walkoff homeruns in World Series history and proclaimed the lesson he'd just been taught: "Never throw a strike to a cripple."
Eckersley today looks ... about the same as he looked all those years on the mound, the lithe winger who adapted boyhood idol Juan Marichal's high kick to a sidearmer's use, and who liked to fan an imaginary pistol hammer after punching a strikeout card. The slim, tapered face; the trimmed outlaw mustache; the look that says six parts pistols at sundown, and half a dozen parts Gerald S. Kookson III, minus the constant comb in the forelock, in the event anyone is fool enough to think of cutting a film version of 77 Sunset Strip. (And why the hell not? They cut film revivals of just about any lamebrain faux crime drama from the past, why not go for the great-grandpops of them all?)
Which makes some wonder, surely, just what is liable to rock and roll through his lips come Sunday, whether in pigeon English or DialEck, or both, when he stands at Cooperstown as one of two new Hall of Famers, with an old occasional nemesis named Paul Molitor joining him.
"I know he pointed at me at least a dozen times," said Molitor, who actually struck-out 11 times at Eckersley's hands -- when he wasn't hitting .333 with three dongs and nine ribs off The Eckermaster, that is. One of them was a ninth-inning double to blow what might have been Eckersley's 52nd save at the end of 1992. "I also know," Molitor said, "that there were a couple of days when I got mine off on him, too."
Especially the last time they squared off, when Molitor (playing with the Twins) measured Eckersley (finishing off with the Red Sox) , with the bases loaded and two out in the ninth ... and dropped a bunt.
"He's probably still mad at me," laughed Molitor when he learned the pair would land in Cooperstown together. "He was profane with me as he left the field."
"I'm 43-years-old, they're 25 games out of first place," remembered Eckersley, "and he drops down a bunt. But guess what? It worked. What Molitor is, is a little weasel."
Molitor's self-resurrection is almost obscure by comparison to Eckersley's. As composed and as unspectacular as Eckersley was shake-'em-on-down jive, Molitor overcame his own early cocaine addiction. Analogise them to cars and Molitor would be a 1949 stock Hudson to Eckersley's chopped and hopped 1966 GTO.
They swapped addictions to oil (DialEck for brewski and booze) and candy (okay, I have no idea what might be the DialEck for cocaine) for addictions to getting into and staying in shape, but Eckersley's was practically a mania. You can see it now. He's still in shape enough that, watching him on television (he's a Red Sox game analyst for New England Sports Network), ignoring the still-stylish suits he wears on the air, you might expect him, still, to just go from there to the ballpark, swagger out to the mound, then show a hitter or three the cheese before punching them out with the yakker.
Unless The Weasel drops one down with the pads padded.
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