The Pittsburgh drug trials. The Steroid Era. The BALCO Scandal. The Biogenesis Scandal. And the pill-popping 1986 New York Mets.
It's been widely documented that the use of amphetamines was popular in baseball a few decades ago (and even more recently than many think), but former Mets' pitcher Ron Darling really went into description about how the use of such drugs consumed the team's clubhouse during their run to the World Series in 1986.
Darling, who pitched Game 7 of the World Series that year, released a new book titled "Game 7, 1986: Failure and Triumph in the Biggest Game of My Life," which shed further light on the team's drug and alcohol use and how it impacted their play over the short-term and long-term.
Take a look at some of these excerpts released by the Wall Street Journal earlier this week:
"When I first came up, there was a jar of pills that was kept in a prominent place-prominent, that is, if you knew where to look for it ... If someone was scrambling, trying to mask an ache or a pain, or maybe to recover from an injury, he'd say, 'I'm in the jar today.'
"Each pill had its own name. 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.
"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. They had it down to a science, with precision timing. They'd do that thing where you poke a hole in the can so the beer would flow shotgun-style. They'd time it so that they were due to hit third or fourth that inning, and in their minds that rush of beer would kind of jump-start the amphetamines and get back to how they were feeling early on in the game-pumped, jacked, good to go."
"The 'jar' was like our traveling medicine cabinet, a way to chase the aches and pains. You'd walk into the clubhouse and catch one of your teammates sitting in front of his locker looking like he'd just been through a spin cycle. There'd be dark circles under his eyes. The simplest movements would be accompanied by the groans of an old, beaten-down man."
Does this really surprise anyone? I mean, the details are certainly a bit eye-popping at first, because hitting a baseball is hard enough, and chugging a beer before your at-bat seems a bit on the insane side. However, baseball players have solidified themselves as a whacky bunch.
Former MLBer Tim Raines admitted to keeping cocaine in his back pocket and only slid headfirst into bases to avoid breaking the vial. Jose Canseco talked about how there used to be two coffee pots in the clubhouse - one with regular coffee and the other laced with stimulants. And the alleged stories we've heard about A-Rod taking injections into his stomach and drawing blood in the men's room of a Miami nightclub (he admitted to the DEA that he paid $12,000 per month for the PEDs).
The list goes on.
So when Darling tells us the '86 Mets were shotgunning beers in the clubhouse before taking cuts on the on-deck circle, sure, we might be a little taken aback knowing the explicit details, but we probably shouldn't be stunned to hear that such behavior was alive and well just 30 years ago.
