AS Goose Gossage, the newest member of the Hall of Fame, talked yesterday, 30 years melted away.
Suddenly, we were all back in Fenway Park on Oct. 2, 1978. Gossage is on the mound and it’s the ninth inning.
The shadows cover all but right field.
There is one out; the Yankees are clinging to a 5-4 lead.
Gossage walks Rick Burleson. Jerry Remy singles to right as Lou Piniella makes a great stop of the ball to keep Burleson from going to third.
Jim Rice flies deep to right, which would have scored Burleson if not for Piniella’s play. Burleson moves to third, bringing up Carl Yastrzemski.
The night before, Gossage went to bed thinking he would be facing Yaz for the final out.
Now it is all happening, and for the first time in his career Gossage is a nervous wreck. So much so that he starts talking to himself.
“I’m asking questions and answering them,” he said. “I said, ‘Well, here’s what you went to bed last night thinking. Here’s Yaz.’
“I said, ‘Why are you so nervous? You always played the game for the love and the fun of it. What’s the worst thing that could happen to you?’
“I said, ‘Well, I’ll be back in Colorado tomorrow hunting elk.’ ”
That was the perfect answer.
“It was the first time all day that I’d been able to even breathe,” he said. His arm came back to life.
Gossage’s first pitch to Yaz was down.
“The next pitch,” he said, “was pretty much down the middle of the plate, but tailed into him and he popped it up to [Graig] Nettles.”
After the Yankee celebration, Gossage is sitting alone in the training room, gathering his thoughts when Thurman Munson comes in and asks, “Where did you get that?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Those last two pitches had another foot on anything else you threw all day,” Munson said.
“I finally relaxed,” answers Gossage to which Munson, always the agitator, adds, “What took you so long?”
If not for that pop-out, history could have changed in many ways. The Curse of the Bambino may have been reversed much earlier, Bucky Dent’s home run might have come in a losing cause and Reggie Jackson’s add-on eighth-inning blast that gave the Yankees a 5-2 lead might have been forgotten.
Jackson was a surprise visitor to the press conference yesterday to congratulate his old teammate. On the way out the door Reggie offered this about the Roger Clemens situation: “I’m watching it as a friend and I don’t like what I see. I’m rooting for him but he certainly has an uphill battle.”
Gossage is going into Cooperstown this summer with a Yankees cap on his head. He said he might not have remained in The Bronx, if not for getting Yaz to pop up.
“They may have traded me,” Gossage explained. “Because people would have hated me. The fans would have hated me. I started the year [badly] and would have ended up [badly]. That why I say there is such a fine line to a career.”
Gossage said his low point came earlier that 1978 season in a game in Toronto.
“I picked up a bunt and threw it about 40 rows up, game over,” Gossage recalled. “I just collapsed in my locker and cried.”
It’s OK for Hall of Fame closers and presidential candidates to cry.
Gossage never hit it off with Billy Martin and really didn’t come out of his funk until Bob Lemon replaced Martin. “That really helped me,” Gossage said. “I felt this real dislike from Billy all the time.”
That dislike stemmed from an incident when Martin instructed Gossage to hit Billy Sample for no apparent reason during a spring training game.
“I told him no, I wasn’t going to hit him,” Gossage said. “That was his way of testing my loyalty. When Billy was gone it was like night and day for me.”
As for his trademark fu-manchu mustache, Gossage said, “I grew it to tick Steinbrenner off.”
Did it work?
Gossage smiled and said, “He wasn’t hard to tick off.”
The Hall of Fame just became a lot more fun.