NOTE: The “game engine” involved in this 1987 replay is Strat-O-Matic, the computer version, using super-advanced features (with the notable exception of the closer rule, which I have never used and never plan to). We begin with the actual Opening Day rosters, lineups, and starting rotations “as played.” Certain changes to lineups and pitching rotations may be made as dictated by the rules of Strat-O-Matic (particularly with regard to pitcher rest) or the results of the replay. All actual injuries (or suspensions, etc.) resulting in significant chunks of time missed (whether or not the “disabled list,” as it was then called, was used) will be reflected in the replay – but other transactions such as trades, position changes, callups, demotions, and waiver placements may not; instead, each of these will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis in order to ensure that they make sense within the context of the replay. (For example, had the Red Sox still been in contention in August of 1987, it is highly unlikely that they would have released Bill Buckner, traded Dave Henderson and Don Baylor for prospects, or moved Dwight Evans from right field to first base, and they probably won’t do any of these things, should they remain in contention at that point of my replay.) That having been said, late-season callups like Keith Miller of the Mets and Jeff Treadway of the Reds – who batted .373 and .333, respectively, in limited at-bats – will be confined, insofar as is possible, to the roles that they played in the actual season, so as not to distort any outcomes unduly. In the past, I have felt free to overuse players like Miller and Treadway on an experimental basis, and I have a pretty good sense of what the results will be (or at least can be) in such circumstances. In the case of this particular replay, I am withdrawing that self-permission, though this is not intended as any kind of value statement on the question or merits of such overuse. Beyond that, if anyone has any questions about the replay, I’ll be glad to answer them, so just reach out.
In your Gracie’s world, the baseball season always begins in Cincinnati. This insistence puts us right away into the thick of the fantasy element – not only because it never does so anymore in reality, but because, even in 1987, when, customarily speaking, it still did, it actually didn’t, since those dastardly Toronto Blue Jays very controversially jumped the gun and scheduled their Opening Day game (versus Cleveland) to begin half an hour earlier than Cincinnati’s. This led to a lot of talk, some of it rather nationalistic in tone, about the Reds’ opener being the first American game and the beginning of the American season: many of which statements not so subtly hinted that the word “real” might properly be substituted for the word “American.” We’ll dispense with all that here, and begin our 1987 campaign, as tradition would dictate, in The Queen City. Interestingly, we’ll still have an opening matchup, that way, between a Canadian team and a team from the state of Ohio, since the Reds, in their opener, hosted the now-defunct Montreal Expos.
The Expos were reeling at the start of 1987. Several years earlier, they had been one of the finest, most exciting teams in baseball, led by stars Gary Carter, Andre Dawson, and Tim Raines. Catcher Carter had been traded to the Mets in 1985, and while that hadn’t been an especially popular deal, at least the man for whom he had been exchanged, shortstop Hubie Brooks, had had a great season in his first year in an Expos uniform, and he had been on his way to an even better one in 1986 before suffering an injury. Outfielders Dawson and Raines, on the other hand, had left after the ’86 season as free agents – and that gets us into another, still uglier thicket right off the bat, because both were subsequently victimised by the “owners’ collusion” by which owners sought to penalise players for seeking free agency, and which rightly created such a scandal around this time. Practically speaking, this meant that, though they had been two of the finest ballplayers in the game for some years, no one would sign them. Dawson had ended up getting a contract on the eve of the 1987 season, when the Expos’ divisional rivals, the Chicago Cubs, broke ranks and offered him a one-year, bargain-basement deal which he accepted. (He then went on to hit 49 home runs and was named the National League MVP – though, seeing as how he was a member of a last-place team, some have suggested that he ought to have been passed over in favour of someone like Jack or Will Clark, or perhaps Darryl Strawberry.) Raines, meanwhile, along with other outstanding ballplayers like Bob Boone of the Angels, Rich Gedman of the Red Sox, Ron Guidry of the Yankees, and Doyle Alexander of the Braves, sat unclaimed, with nowhere to play as the season began, even as their former teams were manifestly hurting for their services – and Raines’s Expos perhaps most of all. With two-thirds of their starting outfield suddenly having departed, almost all of the experts had them pegged to finish dead last in the National League East.
The Reds, meantime, were picked by the majority of those same experts to finally consolidate their conspicuous potential and capture the National League West, which had been won the year before by Houston in what many considered to have been something of a fluke. But the NL West was always rather unpredictable around this time, so who knew? Cincinnati seemed the safest bet, because they had a ton of offensive talent, led by centre fielder Eric Davis, a power-hitting speedster whom I still consider one of the three most talented major-league players I ever had the privilege of seeing (Rickey Henderson and Ken Griffey, Jr. are the others). In retrospect, the pick seems an odd one, because they just didn’t have any significant depth in their pitching rotation and would even be relying on a career-long reliever, Ted Power, to fill one of their critical starting spots. Ominously, in the opening game of the season, Tom Browning, just two years removed from being a twenty-game winner, allowed five runs in three innings to the depleted Expos before being lifted; he would finish the year with an earned-run average north of five, and several of their other starters wouldn’t fare much better. The Reds came back and won that game, 11-5, as Davis hit a homer and stole two bases, but they would struggle with their pitching all season long – and with injuries, and with a manager (Pete Rose) who apparently was playing both ends against the middle, as we now know, and might or might not have been placing bets on or involving his own team.
Meanwhile, up north, the opener featured two teams from what was then unquestionably the best division in baseball: the old American League East, comprising Baltimore, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, the New York Yankees, and Toronto. Each besides Cleveland had won the division in one of the previous six seasons, and all but Cleveland and Toronto – our two competitors here – had gone on to win the league pennant and play in the World Series. Toronto had topped the division in 1985, and though they had fallen short in ’86 – the Red Sox won it – it was thought, by a plurality of commentators, that the Blue Jays would retake the championship in 1987. In some quarters, however – most notably the pages of Sports Illustrated – the chic pick to win the division was Cleveland, which had lost a hundred games as recently as 1985, but which had made huge strides in 1986 and was loaded, even more than were the Reds, with outstanding hitters. If, in retrospect, however, the vogue for Cincinnati in the NL West seems ever so slightly misguided, that for Cleveland in the AL East seems little short of insane, because they had next to no decent pitching, and they knew it, even if no one else did. They were never in the running, and they ended up finishing with a dismal record of 61-101, the worst in all of baseball. The Blue Jays, meanwhile, surprised almost no one by staying in the thick of the race, and mostly at the head of it, all the way down to the season’s final weekend – and thereby hangs a tale: one which you may rest assured this lifelong Tiger fan will relate by and by.
Finally, a note on the Cleveland club: back in 1987, as most of you will doubtless know, this ballclub had a nickname which has since been deemed – I think justifiably – offensive when used by non-Native Americans. To their credit, it’s now been changed. Their new nickname, the Guardians, is harmless (and, apparently, historically informed) – but, in the years before the change was made, it had been my habit to refer to them by one of their previous nicknames, the Spiders, and in the context of this particular project, I intend to keep doing so. Therefore, when you see “the Spiders,” think Cleveland.
In any case, that’s a bit of the “real-life” backdrop to these opening games. What follows is what transpired in the earliest stages of your Gracie’s 1987 baseball replay.
Reds 5, Expos 2 – This game was not a thing of beauty – it contained five errors – but it did have the kind of dramatic finish that you hope to see in the season’s traditional opener, not least because it whets your appetite for more baseball. The game was tied 2-2 in the last of the eighth, and Cincinnati had runners at the corners with two out and relief pitcher Ron Robinson due up to hit against Andy McGaffigan. Paul O’Neill, a lefty, was summoned to pinch hit, and Montreal responded by bringing in Bob McClure, a former starter but by that point in his career a so-called “lefty specialist,” to relieve. In place of O’Neill, then, who simply didn’t bat against lefties at this stage of his career, Lloyd McClendon – one of my favourite utility players back in those days, and the future manager of the Toledo Mud Hens – came up to the plate. McClendon, though a righty, actually hit righthanded pitchers far better in 1987 than he did southpaws (he didn’t hit anyone especially well) – but the roll came up on McClure’s card, which was what I had been fearing, since that’s full of land mines, and McClendon ended up slugging a three-run homer to give the Reds a 5-2 lead, which John Franco held in the ninth. The Expos had ten hits in this one – three of them by Hubie Brooks – but they left ten men on base, had a runner thrown out at the plate, and saw their steadiest RBI man, Tim Wallach, rap into two double plays. Hometown kid Ron Oester, second baseman of the Reds, struggled afield, with a pair of errors, but also collected four hits and an RBI, which helped to make up for the offensive shortcomings of star Eric Davis, who went 0-for-4 and was thrown out on a stolen-base attempt.
Spiders 5, Blue Jays 3 (11 innings) – Perhaps the prognosticators were on to something after all? The Spiders looked like one-hundred-game winners, not losers, on this particular Opening Day, as they overcame a 3-1 eighth-inning deficit, forced the game to extra innings, escaped a bases-loaded jam in the bottom of the tenth, and then scored two runs in the top of the eleventh to win it. Joe Carter, who generally annoys me so much in Strato, striking out and leaving runners all over the basepaths, that I routinely refer to him as “Joke Carter,” had the game-winning RBI for Cleveland after Brett Butler had doubled and Julio Franco had singled off losing pitcher Mark Eichhorn to start the eleventh, and the Spiders picked up an insurance run on DH Andre Thornton’s double-play grounder. Doug Jones – the man who had relieved starter Tom Candiotti in the tenth with the bases jammed and struck out Lloyd Moseby to end the threat – picked up the win, and the top four hitters in the Cleveland lineup totalled seven hits (three for extra bases) and four RBI. For Toronto, Jesse Barfield had three hits, including a two-run double, but the Blue Jays’ other two outstanding outfielders, George Bell and Lloyd Moseby, each went 0-for-5, with Moseby being robbed of a first-inning home run on a spectacular catch by right fielder Cory Snyder.
Yankees 6, Tigers 3 (12 innings) – This looked like it was going to be a nice opener for your Gracie’s Tigers when they jumped out to a 3-0 lead after two innings, thanks to a run-scoring wild pitch by Dennis Rasmussen and a two-run single by my eternally beloved Lou Whitaker. But Dave Winfield drove in three runs with a homer and an RBI groundout, and the Detroit offence stalled, necessitating extra innings (the real opener between the two ballclubs also went to extras). Jack Morris, always ready to go deep into a game right from the start of the season – he pitched nine and two-thirds innings in the actual game – was superb through eleven full frames, allowing four hits and four walks while striking out eleven batters, but eleven was the longest I could go, and every longtime Tiger fan will recall that the bullpen was the Achilles’ heel for the ’87 club. Eric King walked Dan Pasqua to lead off the twelfth, committed an error on a bunt attempt, threw a run-scoring wild pitch, and then allowed a double to Rickey Henderson, to which Mike Heath (playing in right field) superadded an error of his own, allowing Henderson to score. Dave Righetti, who pitched four hitless innings, then set down the Tigers in the bottom of the twelfth. The Tigers mustered but two hits – one of them a double by Whitaker, the lone Tiger with multiple safeties – between the third and twelfth innings, as Rasmussen settled down nicely before giving way to Righetti, who was simply brilliant and picked up a well-deserved victory.
Rangers 3, Orioles 2 – Just as in reality, this was a tight pitchers’ duel at Memorial Stadium between Mike Boddicker and Charlie Hough – but, unlike in its real-life counterpart, it was Hough and the Rangers who came out on top. Texas was able to score in only one inning off Boddicker, who walked none and struck out eleven (pitchers tended to rack up a lot of Ks against the Rangers in these days), but that inning, the fourth, saw them accumulate three extra-base hits, capped by Ruben Sierra’s two-run blast, and that was just enough for Charlie. (One of those extra-base hits was a triple by big Pete Incaviglia, who somehow managed to leg out four of them in 1987.) I have always felt like the Orioles, who finished 67-95 in reality (they were 30-25 at one point and then collapsed), underachieved in this season, and I’ve had some success with them in Strato in the past. But probably not with this lineup, which contains hitters with such gaudy averages as .232, .206, and .188, and which glues Larry Sheets (31 homers in 469 at-bats) and Jim Dwyer (15 in 243) to the bench even against righty hurlers.
Brewers 17, Red Sox 1 – Oof! In actuality, this was the game that began Milwaukee’s legendary thirteen-game season-opening winning streak and helped doom Boston – the defending AL champions – to a 78-84 record. In that realm, at least, the score was a respectable 5-1. In our replay, it was one of the worst shellackings over which I’ve ever presided. This was a 5-0 game heading into the last of the sixth, and while it seemed somewhat unlikely that the Red Sox were going to come back, it nonetheless would have surprised me to know that they’d already had the best of it. But the Brewers then batted around in consecutive innings, scoring twelve runs in the two frames combined off Bob Stanley, Wes Gardner, Joe Sambito, and Steve Crawford; I just couldn’t find anyone capable of shutting them down. Incidentally, while I understand that Roger Clemens was unprepared to start in this opener due to a holdout, and I guess he wanted to save Bruce Hurst for the first game at home, I have never understood John McNamara’s decision to open with Stanley, who had pitched for years exclusively in relief and who just didn’t have the repertoire of pitches anymore to be a starter. (Indeed, moved back to the bullpen in 1988, he responded by pitching quite well.) I really feel like that choice, combined with Clemens’ late arrival and the situation surrounding Rich Gedman, helped instil a sense of disorganisation throughout the team at large, from which the players never quite recovered. We’ll see if their cardboard counterparts can bounce back any better. For the Brewers, every offensive starter but one had a hit, five of them had at least two (Paul Molitor and Jim Gantner led the way with three apiece), and Greg Brock, Bill Schroeder, and Robin Yount each had four runs batted in, with Brock and Schroeder homering and Yount homering twice. Ted Higuera, the Brewers’ ace lefty whose 1987 card is actually filled with trouble spots (he had a 3.85 ERA), allowed seven hits and three walks over eight innings, striking out seven, and got the win; the Red Sox scored their single run only after they were already down 12-0, on a solo blast from Dewey Evans, who always seemed to perform well on Opening Day. (In 1986, he had hit Jack Morris’s very first pitch of the season out of the park.) One thing the Red Sox can take comfort in: it can’t get any worse. Or can it?
White Sox 9, Royals 6 (11 innings) – I have never had very good success with this Kansas City team, and something tells me that this replay may be no different. Starter Danny Jackson – who was considered in some quarters, at season’s outset, the morning-line favourite to win the AL Cy Young Award, and actually went on to lose eighteen decisions – pitched okay, but he simply has too many walks on his card to succeed in Strato as a non-dominant lefty pitcher. He, and the team’s other pitchers, will also be routinely hurt by the sorry KC defense (three errors on this day, leading to five unearned runs) – particularly in its present configuration, with George Brett (an e50) at third and David Letterman’s favourite ballplayer Buddy Biancalana (an e88!) at short. But the three opposing players who really hurt them in this opener were Bobby Thigpen, who pitched four and two-thirds scoreless innings in relief, Fred Manrique, who smashed a pinch-hit homer off Jackson to tie the game in the eighth, and Ivan Calderon, who hit two home runs, including the game-winner in the top of the eleventh, and knocked in a total of five runs. Frank White and Steve Balboni each had two hits and two RBI for KC, as did Gary Redus for Chicago – but one of the unfortunate side effects of a long game like this is that someone always seems to take a really ugly “collar,” and indeed, in this one, Willie Wilson of the Royals and Donnie Hill of the Sox each started the season on a particularly sour note, going 0-for-6.
Giants 7, Padres 1 – I actually don’t feel like these two teams – at least before they made their huge July 4th trade which sent a bunch of good players to San Francisco in exchange for a passel of also-rans – were that far apart in terms of talent, and San Diego was only three seasons removed from a National League pennant, which they had won with a roster made up of many of these same players. What happened in ’87 was that they got off to a poor start, and their first-year manager Larry Bowa, a notorious sorehead (he later wrote a book about the season entitled Bleep!: Larry Bowa Manages), panicked, went more than slightly berserk, and knocked the team’s “chemistry” – always precarious back in those days, when their roster featured several avowed John Birch Society members – into a cocked hat. Interestingly, one of the players who went south in that aforementioned trade (in more ways than one) was Chris Brown, the third baseman who had been an All-Star for the Giants just the year before but whose career soon ran aground on the shoals of what were then referred to, euphemistically, as “personality problems.” I remember Brown pretty well, not only because I remember nearly everyone who played in this era pretty well, but because his major league career came to a precipitous end in 1989 with the Tigers, for whom he had opened the year as the everyday third baseman. I recall that Sparky Anderson had been fairly high on him when he first hit town, but quickly became less so as his attitude and play both deteriorated. Sparky’s patience – and Brown’s time in the big leagues – finally reached its terminus when Brown asked out of the lineup one day on the grounds that he’d slept on his eye wrong. He later died in what was termed a “mysterious” house fire. The reason I bring all this up in the context of this particular game is that, in it, Brown doubled and crushed a two-run homer off his future teammate Eric Show, and the Giants scored four in the sixth to break open what had been a close game. Will that trade be made, in our world, after all? It remains to be seen. Candy Maldonado also had a homer and a double, and Jeffrey “Hack Man” Leonard added a homer – he probably took his sweet time circling the bases, too – and two RBI. Mike Krukow, whom I think has too good a card for a National Leaguer with a fat 4.80 ERA, went all the way for San Francisco, allowing five hits; the Padres’ only run came two batters into the game, when shortstop Garry Templeton followed Marvell Wynne’s leadoff triple with a sacrifice fly.
Astros 11, Dodgers 3 – The Houston Astros, those adorable popsicle-themed uniforms notwithstanding, were just the kind of killjoys who would play a night game, in their miserable Astrodome, even on Opening Day; your Gracie should know, because she was a pretty big fan of theirs back in these days, largely on account of the crushes she harboured for three of their players: left fielder (and fan favourite) Jose Cruz, centre fielder Billy Hatcher, and pitcher Mike Scott, the master of the split-fingered fastball (and, as everyone suspected and he himself pretty much later admitted, the scuffball). Perhaps it’s poetic justice, but I’ve never really had great luck with Scott in Strato, and it looked like this would be another struggle early, as the Dodgers kept getting in his five column and notched five hits off him in the first three innings, while his mound counterpart Orel Hershiser set down the first nine in order. But the fourth saw everything go wrong for Orel and the Dodgers, as Houston plated seven runs on six hits and an error, with the culminating blow coming on a three-run triple by shortstop Craig Reynolds. (I feel like there may be an excess of triples in Strato, and I’m interested to see how we’ll do in that department over the course of this replay. All told, on this Opening Day, there were seven in eight contests.) Billy Hatcher, much to my delight, was the other big hitter for Houston (was he using his infamous corked bat?), with three hits and three RBIs, while Bill Doran, Kevin Bass, and future Tiger manager Phil “Scrap Iron” Garner had two hits apiece. “Cheo” Cruz, alas, went 0-for-4, but he reached on two of the three LA errors and scored a run, and looked great doing it, I’m sure. Scott pitched a complete game, settling down after his rough start and striking out twelve, and though Ken Landreaux touched him for a two-run homer, that didn’t come till the ninth, when the Astros were already leading 11-1.
*
Tuesday, April 7 will feature seven games: the ten teams who didn’t play on Monday will open their seasons, and the LA-Houston and San Diego-San Francisco series will continue without a day off. There will be ten games on Wednesday and eleven on Thursday, with the first full slate of contests coming on Friday the tenth. So we’re jumping right in with both feet, and we ought to have a pretty good sense of the clubs by the time the first week is complete.
G'night Gracie 
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