In his new book, former New York Mets pitcher Ron Darling went into explicit detail about the 1986 team’s drug and alcohol use.
By David Hong
Former New York Mets pitcher and current team broadcaster Ron Darling just wrote a new book titled Game 7, 1986: Failure and Triumph in the Biggest Game of My Life.
Interestingly, in it, he discussed how drugs and alcohol helped fuel the team during games.
Darling explained that some players took amphetamines before games and would sometimes turn to alcohol to re-trigger the effects of the amphetamines.
Here is some of what Darling shared with ESPN:
“You’d see guys toward the end of a game, maybe getting ready for their final at-bat, double-back into the locker room to chug a beer to ‘re-kick the bean’ so they could step to the plate completely wired and focused and dialed in,” Darling wrote. “They had it down to a science, with precision timing. They’d do that thing where you poke a hole in the can so the beer would flow shotgun-style. They’d time it so that they were due to hit third or fourth that inning, and in their minds that rush of beer would kind of jump-start the amphetamines and get back to how they were feeling early on in the game — pumped, jacked, good to go.”
We all knew the 1986 World Series champions had a lot of party guys with wild images, who did drink often. And, of course, players like Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden who even continued their off-the-field party antics past their playing careers.
Darling, on the other hand, was never one who dabbled with alcohol or drugs and was one of the gentler Mets players on that team. So, it’s ironic that it was he who shared all this.
Whether it did fuel the 1986 team or not, we all already knew (without actually knowing).
