Oil Can Boyd
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Dennis Ray 'Oil Can' Boyd is an American former professional baseball pitcher who played in Major League Baseball for the Boston Red Sox, Montreal Expos, and Texas Rangers. His nickname reportedly originated from his beer-drinking days in Meridian, Mississippi, where beer was called 'oil.' Over a 10-season career, he compiled a 78–77 record with 799 strikeouts and a 4.04 ERA in 1,389.2 innings.
Major league career
Boyd was selected by the Boston Red Sox in the 16th round of the 1980 amateur draft and debuted in 1982. Standing 6-foot-2 and weighing 150 pounds, he pitched 10 major league seasons before blood clots in his right arm ended his career. From 1983 to 1985 he won 31 games for Boston, including 15 victories in one season. By the 1985 All-Star break his record was 10–5 with a 3.19 ERA, and he finished that year with career highs in games started (35), complete games (13), strikeouts (154), and innings pitched (272.1).
He received the 1985 Boston Red Sox Pitcher of the Year Award from the Boston Baseball Writers Association. In 1986 he won a career-high 16 games, with an 11–6 record and 3.71 ERA at the All-Star break. During the 1986 American League Championship Series, he started two games against the California Angels, winning Game Six. He started Game Three of the 1986 World Series against the New York Mets, giving up four runs in the first inning and six overall while pitching into the seventh, taking the loss with only one run of support.
He was scheduled to start the deciding seventh game, but a rainout allowed manager John McNamara to choose Bruce Hurst instead. After learning he would not start, Boyd went to the visitors' clubhouse alone; pitching coach Bill Fischer found him intoxicated and locked him in the manager's office for the game's duration. In 1987 Boyd alleged that an encounter with police caused a hairline fracture to his pitching arm, requiring surgery in August, limiting him to seven games and a 1–3 record.
Injuries reduced his starts over his final two Red Sox seasons, with records of 9–7 in 1988 and 3–2 in 1989. He signed with the Expos as a free agent and in 1990 won 10 games with a 2.93 ERA.
Legacy
Boyd's issues, temperamental personality, and admitted drug use during his career have been well-documented. He was introduced to crack cocaine during spring training in 1986 and later admitted that on May 11, 1986, before a game in Oakland, he smoked crack before taking the mound. In 2012 he told Buster Olney of ESPN that he would lock himself in the bathroom at the ballpark and smoke dope. Boyd was the cover story of the August 4, 1986 issue of Sports Illustrated, titled 'Banned [but needed] in Boston.'
His troubles climaxed during the seventh game of the 1986 World Series when he was unable to appear; manager John McNamara and pitching coach Bill Fischer alleged he had been drinking and was too drunk to pitch. During 1987 spring training in Winter Haven, Florida, Boyd was detained by police over overdue video cassettes; when the titles were made public and included pornographic films, a Boston newspaper printed the names and called the incident 'The Can's Film Festival.'
He was inducted into the Southwestern Athletic Conference Hall of Fame in 2010. In 2012 his autobiography, co-written with Mike Shalin and titled They Call Me Oil Can: Baseball, Drugs, and Life on the Edge, was published by Triumph Books. In it he admitted using crack every day of the 1986 season and being high on marijuana in every baseball game he played from Little League through college. Boyd's intense charisma during Red Sox games included fist pumps, shouting from the dugout, and high-fives for teammates, and he was a go-to player for quotes in the Boston press.
One well-known quote came after a game postponed at Cleveland's Municipal Stadium due to fog from Lake Erie: 'That's what you get for building a ballpark on the ocean.'
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Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: Oil Can Boyd (CC BY-SA 4.0).
- Word definitions: the Codexery glossary, each quoted from its Wikipedia article.
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