DENNIS ECKERSLEY

The Eck. A throwback in the truest sense. Shoulder-length hair. Full mustache. Deep manufactured tan. Seemingly fit. Expansive baseball understanding. First Ballot Hall-of-Famer. A language all his own. A self-avowed full-throttle whack job. Way back when.

Even now.

And “it’s a beautiful thing.”

“Walk-off piece.”

“Cheese.”

“Educated Cheese.”

“Easy Cheese.”

“Gas.”

“Going Bridge.”

“Johnson” — (“A three-run bomb”).

“Slam Johnson.”

“Punchout.”

“Jump Street.”

“Salad.”

“Educated Salad.”

“Paint.”

“Hair.”

“Moss.”

“Branch Work.”

“Dead Central.”

“Just To Stay In Shape.”

“Iron.”

“Lamb.”

“Pair Of Shoes.”

Whew!!!

Eck’s baseball dialect is his and his alone; his glossary knows no bounds. Candid and blunt in dispensing his “Eck-isms,” he knows the game inside and out and remains just as enthusiastic in his second career as a Red Sox (and TBS) broadcaster/analyst as was the 20-year-old fresh-faced and long-haired Cleveland Indians rookie in 1975.

“Man, it’s been 40 years since I got to Boston,” he chuckled recently. He was acquired from the Indians in a 1978 spring training trade. “I’ve been saying this [stuff] forever…It’s me, my personality, but it’s not always my own stuff,” he concedes. “It’s an accumulation of whoever I’ve been in contact with my whole life.”

Dennis Lee Eckersley was the most dominant closer in baseball from 1988–1992. He allowed five earned runs in the entire 1990 season. His ERA that year? 0.61.

He also surrendered one of baseball history’s most unlikely and iconic home runs thirty years ago ending Game 1 of the 1988 World Series.

The Dodgers’ Kirk Gibson, hobbled by bad knees and hamstrings to the point of being barely ambulatory, limped from the trainer’s room to the batting cage to the plate, pinch-hitting in the bottom of the ninth with two outs.

(This in and of itself represented the height of irony. Gibson was one of the fastest and most durable athletes of his era; he was an All-American wide receiver at Michigan State before beginning his professional baseball career).

It would be the only plate appearance of the Series for the man who would be named the NL MVP that season. Eck made him look silly until Gibson turned the tables by depositing a very hittable 3-and-2 backdoor slider into the right field seats.

The 2-run shot — uncharacteristically Eckersley had walked left-handed pinch-hitter Mike Davis before facing Gibson — won the game for the Dodgers 5–4 and rumor has it that the term ‘walk-off’ was coined by Eckersley shortly thereafter.

Yes, Gibson “went bridge” with a “walk-off piece” off the Eck which fueled LA’s ’88 World Series victory. Tommy Lasorda never had it so good.

Eck was a complicated dude and still is.

Alcoholism runs in his family and his brother Wally is a convicted felon doing hard time. It was late-December of 1988 when Wally went on trial and Dennis agreed to take the stand as a character witness for his brother. If that wasn’t harrowing enough in and of itself, Eck knew that his life would become an open book.

To say that he burned the candle at both ends would be an understatement. He was a raging drunkard. A sot. A womanizer. And the well-worn cover of youthful transgressions would no longer provide the peeling band-aid on a broken leg; he was 34 years old.

No more secrets. It was a relief for Eckersley. [He was] “prepared to explain that I am an alcoholic. That’s my life story. I’ve been carrying this thing inside me for so long, I’m actually happy it’s coming out,” he remarked at the time.

Not until January 1987 when he entered Edgehill Newport, a treatment Center in Newport, R.I., did he come to grips with his addiction to which he referred to as “my disease.” It was a matter of being ready. “I’m lucky my whole life didn’t get torn apart. I could have lost my wife, my career, everything,” he recalled. “Instead, I finally started growing up.”

Growing up from the flamboyant 20-year-old kid who had made the show.

“I was in the big leagues when I was 20. That’s the age of a college junior. How do college juniors act? How can you grow up while playing big league baseball? Well, I didn’t. I don’t blame baseball for my drinking, because I was an alcoholic,” he reasoned. “But the baseball life made it worse. How does the saying go? Drink to celebrate, drink to drown your sorrows. That was me — to the max.”

But his personality was multidimensional even at that tender age, a fact that did not escape old pal and former Red Sox teammate, pitcher Bruce Hurst.

A more improbable pairing would be hard to find. Eck was Eck and Hurst was a reserved and shy Mormon from St. George, Utah. Somehow, Eckersley became Hurst’s idol. “I wanted to have Eck’s style on the mound,” Hurst remembered. “My first day of spring training, I called home to tell everyone I’d played catch with Dennis Eckersley. The other day I found my ’81 baseball card, and I saw that I had grown a mustache to look like the Eck. Once I got to know him, I realized how complex and decent he is. He was always there to help me through some very rough times. He understood adversity and knew how to deal with it. When he was traded by the Red Sox to the Cubs [in May 1984], I actually sat down and cried.”

Hurst saw Eckersley’s grace under fire related to travails both on and off the field. He watched the Eck patiently answer questions for almost 45 minutes after coughing up Gibson’s dramatic homer.

He had heard about the class Eck exuded after pitching the third game of the ’78 Boston Massacre, that infamous four-game sweep of the Sox by the Yankees in September of that godforsaken season. The teams were deadlocked 0–0 in the fourth inning when a two-out, bases-loaded pop-up fell in with five Red Sox fielders around it looking at each other. New York managed to put seven runs on the board by the time the inning was over.

After the game about 50 reporters were eating milquetoast-ish second baseman Frank Duffy alive, peppering him with questions demanding to know why he hadn’t made the play.

Eck emerged from the trainer’s room, made a beeline to Duffy and began waving off the vulturous scribes. “He didn’t load the bases, I did,” bellowed Eckersley. “He didn’t hang the 0–2 slider to Bucky Dent. [Bucky F. Dent]. The loss goes next to my name. Ask me about losing, not him.”

And then there was Eck’s reaction to a searing life-altering personal experience.

On the same day he found out about the trade from Cleveland to Boston, his first wife Denise told him to hit the bricks for good. She didn’t love him anymore. A couple of months later he learned that she and Indians outfielder Rick Manning — his best friend — were having an affair. They later married and although the story did not assume the grandiose proportions of the early-70s Mike Kekich-Fritz Peterson wife-and-life swap, the sting was there.

“I was hurt at first,” he said, “but Denise and I were kids when we got married. We were 18 and didn’t know anything.” Hurst marveled at the Eck’s civility toward the man who — as Eckersley described on-air this season, 40 years later — “stole” his wife.

“Every time Manning came to the plate against us, I used to fume and think, I hate that man,” Hurst recounted. “But Eck never did hate him. He still considered him a friend. I don’t know how he did that.”

What we do know is that Eckersley’s pinpoint control vaulted him into rarified air as a pitcher. As a starter he won 20 games (1978) and threw a no-hitter (1977). As a closer he finished first in the AL in saves twice, second two other times and third once. He saved 220 games in the five years between ’88 and ’92 never posting an ERA higher than 2.96. He walked 3 batters in 57.2 innings in 1989; 4 batters in 73.1 innings in 1990; and 9 in 76 innings in 1991.

In the 1990 campaign he became the first reliever in baseball history to record more saves than baserunners allowed (48 SV; 41 H; 4 BB; and 0 HBP). And in another statistical anomaly he had exactly the same WHIP and ERA that year: both were 0.614.

In 1992 at 37, Eck won the AL Cy Young Award and was named the circuit’s MVP; he had 51 saves that year and only two relievers in the game’s rich and storied past had ever accomplished that twin killing: Rollie Fingers in 1981 and Willie Hernandez in 1984. Since Eckersley, only one reliever — Eric Gagne in 2003 with the Dodgers — has won the Cy Young.

Eck retired in December 1988. “I had a good run. I had some magic that was with me for a long time, so I know that I was real lucky to not have my arm fall off for one thing, and to make it this long physically is tough enough. But to me it’s like you’re being rescued too when your career’s over. It’s like, ‘Whew, the pressure’s off.’”

Interesting.

Dennis Eckersley was rescued more than a time or two and knew something about pressure.

Throwing “educated cheese” with some “educated salad” as an accompaniment, and knowing how to “paint” ensured that he pitched at a very high level, “just to stay in shape.”

[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in October 2018.]