Remember when everybody made a big deal about Boston Red Sox pitchersdrinking beer and eating fried chicken in the team's clubhouse last season? Um, yeah. Turns out those guys were lightweights compared to Dennis "Oil Can" Boyd back in the 1980s. During a radio interview yesterday, the former Bo Sox pitcher—who is releasing a book called They Call Me Oil Can in June—revealed that he pitched about two-thirds of his major league games with the Red Sox, Expos, and Rangers under the influence of cocaine.
"There wasn't one ballpark that I probably didn't stay up all night, until four or five in the morning, and the same thing is still in your system," he told WBZ NewsRadio 1030 in Fort Myers, Fla. on Wednesday. "It's not like you have time to go do it while in the game, which I had done that...Some of the best games I've ever, ever pitched in the major leagues I stayed up all night; I'd say two-thirds of them. If I had went to bed, I would have won 150 ballgames in the time span that I played. I feel like my career was cut short for a lot of reasons, but I wasn't doing anything that hundreds of ball players weren't doing at the time; because that's how I learned it."
In addition to revealing that he used to pitch while he was still high, he also said that he feels as though he got a bad reputation in the league because he was an outspoken black man. "The reason I caught the deep end to it is because I'm black," he said. "The bottom line is the game carries a lot of bigotry, and that was an easy way for them to do it. If I wasn't outspoken and a so-called 'proud black man,' maybe I would have gotten the empathy and sympathy like other ballplayers got that I didn't get; like Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Howard, Steve Howe. I can name 50 people that got third and fourth chances all because they weren't outspoken black individuals."
Oh, and he also said that, during his playing days, he was never drug tested, either. "I never had a drug test as long as I played baseball," he said. "I was told that, yeah, if you don't stop doing this we're going to put you into rehab and I told them, 'Fuck that shit.' I'm going to do what I have to do, I have to win ball games. We'll talk about that in the offseason, right now I have to win ball games."
Yikes. Hey, Boston fans: Suddenly a bottle of Sam Adams and a piece of chicken in the eighth inning doesn't seem like such a big deal, does it?
[via CBS Boston]
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