Boston Red Sox Memories: Remembering the 1986 ALCS
By Drew Athans
Since Major League Baseball has suspended the 2020 season, let’s take a trip back in time and revisit the Red Sox thrilling victory in the 1986 ALCS.
With the dearth of actual live, real baseball to watch this spring, like many other baseball die-hards I’ve taken to watching old Boston Red Sox games on YouTube. It’s actually been great fun to go back and watch (or in many cases, re-watch) games, some of which I haven’t seen since they aired and some which were from before I was born.
Not only have I been able to relive a lot of great memories (and some painful ones), but it’s given me a chance to zero in on a lot of little things and nuances that I either missed the first time around or simply didn’t remember. Taking advantage of all this time, I decided to do something a little crazy (or a little stupid depending on your perspective) and revisit one of my favorite teams of all time, the 1986 Red Sox.
I recently re-watched and wrote about Roger Clemens’ two twenty strikeout games from 1986 and 1996 which led me to the crazy/stupid decision: I was going to watch every game of the 1986 ALCS. The series was one of the most dramatic high points in Red Sox history. I love that team and that season so much that I knew I had to do it.
The Red Sox won the AL East in 1986 with a 95-66 record and finished 5.5 games ahead of the second place New York Yankees. Meanwhile, in the AL West, the California Angels (as they were then called) finished 5 games ahead of the second place Texas Rangers with a 92-70 record.
The ALCS and NLCS, which had come into being in 1969 when Major League Baseball split the two leagues into two divisions each, had been a best-of-five series from 1969 to 1984. In 1985 it was expanded into the best-of-seven game series we know today. (As a side note, it may be because it’s how I grew up with baseball, but the 2 divisions per league and one round LCS playoffs before the World Series is the sweet spot for me. I wish MLB would go back to that format, although I know they never will).
The Red Sox had home field advantage in the series and hosted games 1, 2, 6, and 7 while the Angles hosted games 3, 4, and 5. The series started on October 7, 1986, a mere two days after the Red Sox final game of the regular season.
What follows is based on of the notes I took while re-watching all seven games. I did watch most of the series when it actually happened in 1986 (I was not quite seven years old) but didn’t remember a lot of what happened, so watching the games again was a real treat for me.
Lastly, Red Sox manager John McNamara went with a three-man rotation of Roger Clemens, Bruce Hurst, and Oil Can Boyd in this series and stuck with the same lineup and batting order for pretty much the entire series:
Wade Boggs, 3B
Marty Barrett, 2B
Bill Buckner, 1B
Jim Rice, LF
Don Baylor, DH
Dwight Evans, RF
Rich Gedman, C
Tony Armas, CF
Spike Owen, SS
Rice and Baylor swapped places in the order once or twice but otherwise, this was the lineup used throughout the series. Sometimes Dave Henderson was put in as a defensive replacement for Armas late in games and Dave Stapleton subbed for Buckner late in game when his (Buckner’s) ankles got increasingly worse, but substitutions were usually kept to a minimum.
Without further ado, let’s begin.