There’s a turning point in every season. I’d like to say it’s when I went on a tear and led the team during the stretch run. Actually, it was when I got hurt (laughter).
We could have folded, but we got better. We had a lot of guys really step up. Omar Moreno was playing good. Lynn Jones was getting key hits. Pat Sheridan ... Darryl Motley. Everybody pulled their pants up and went a little harder.
We were two-and-a-half games out of first place when I received an injection from the Texas Rangers team doctor near the end of August. I was out of the lineup for the next month-and-a-half. They Royals won 13 of the next 15 games, while I was in the hospital. After I got out of the hospital and was getting close to being back to full speed, I’m thinking that the team is going so good, would you be messing it up if you try and put me back in the lineup. But the thing about us is that it always came down to the last week, or so, of a season. It was almost like that every year. I knew I could help at the end of the year.
What made my season was – after I had the allergic reaction to the penicillin shot – we get to the second-to-last day of the season and we had clinched a tie for the American League West pennant. We were playing the Oakland A’s, and I got the game-winning hit in extra innings to put us in the playoffs. That made my season.
It was in the 10th inning. Sheridan had hit a one-out single. Then, Greg Pryor singled, and Sheridan went to third. Lonnie Smith had a ground out. I come up with two outs and a runner in scoring position. In the bottom of the ninth, Jay Howell got me on a ground ball to second leading off the inning. I knew he was a fastball pitcher, so that’s what I was looking for in the 10th. I got the single that sent us to the playoffs.
That ended what was a really scary time for me because when I got hurt I didn’t know if I was ever going to be able to play again or run the way I could before. It was such a freaky thing.
I had a bad cold or the flu or something in August, and I was just hacking around and not having much energy. We’re in Texas. It’s about 100 degrees like it always was. I’m talking to our trainer, Mickey Cobb, and saying, “Holy Cow, Mick. We gotta do something.” So Mick says after the game we’re going to get you a shot. The doctor is going to come in and see you.
It’s the Texas Rangers doctor because we were on the road. I didn’t know it at the time, but he’s the same doc that punctured Billy Martin’s lung one time when he gave him a shot. I’m seeing him in the training room, and I’m feeling pretty good as far as us being in the race. But I have no energy. I see the doc, and he says he’s going to give me a shot. He’s going to mix these two penicillins together, one for quick results in 48 hours and a longer lasting one that works for seven days. He’s mixing them up, and I thought he said take your clothes off and get up on the table.
I took my shorts off, and I’m getting ready to climb up on the training table. I feel a pinch in my butt and I just go, “Yeow!” I jerked back and it just ... I bent the needle. I was like, “Wow. I thought you said get on the table.”
I get up on the table and I’m lying down, and within two, three, four minutes I know something is wrong. I can’t get off the table. I’m frickin’ sweating and just can’t move. I say “Mick, something is wrong.”
I knew my body, and I knew immediately something was wrong. But Mick says to lay there for a few minutes and see how I feel. I mean I just can’t move. By now everybody has left the locker room. I need to get a shower and get back to the hotel, but I can’t move. They help me into the shower and sit me in a chair. That’s how I take my shower, sitting in a chair like I’m drugged up and just “blah.” What I don’t know is that my left buttock is moving backward, swelling up and getting bigger, bigger, bigger, little by little. What I feel is that it’s like somebody has taken a sledgehammer behind my left leg and just hit it. Boom! Boom! It’s just driving me up the wall.
I finally get dressed, but now I have to go through the crowd outside the gate to the hotel about 200 yards away. I can hardly walk. I’m groggy. People are lined up all the way to the hotel, just hounding me for autographs. I’m just, “Please, please, let me get to my room.”
“You suck!”
I’m dying, basically. They are yelling and screaming at me. I’m just trying to make my way to my room. When I get there, I can’t go to sleep. I’m just hurting. Mick always said he was a 24-hour trainer, so I call him at 1 or 2 a.m. or whatever time it was. He gets in a taxi with me, and we go to the hospital.
We see another doctor there, and he goes, “I’m going to give you a shot.”
I say, “You give me a frickin’ shot, I will kill you. There is no way you are going to give me a shot, man.” So he goes, “OK, I will give you these pain pills. Take one every 45 minutes or whenever you need them to get rid of the pain.”
He has no idea what is going on. Nobody does.
I go back to the hotel and pop a pill. Fifteen minutes later, I pop another one. Then 45 minutes later, I pop a pill. It is not making a dent in the pain. I don’t get a lick of sleep all night long.
We have an afternoon game the next day. I’m trying to get over there, but I can’t bend down to put my pants on. I have to sit on the bed, put my pants on the floor, step into them and try to pull them up that way. Then, I notice I can’t button my pants. My butt is getting bigger, and bigger, and I don’t know it. When I sit, it hurts. Everything hurts.
I walk into the locker room. I’m half dressed, and half awake. I haven’t gotten any sleep. I walk into the locker room and Mickey says, “You gotta go home now to see Dr. Myers and Dr. Joyce.” So, he gets me on a plane and I’m flying home. I’m sitting in first class, and every time the plane hits a bump, I’m going, “Ooooooooooh.” The stewardess is going, “Poor baby.”
I’m going through a divorce and not living at home, but I ask my wife at the time, to pick me up at the airport. I had just bought her a ‘Vette – we were going through all that “I don’t want to be a minivan mom” stuff. Well you know, in a ‘Vette you can feel every bump in the road, and I swear she was finding them on purpose – no, I’m just kidding about that. But I am banging around in the ‘Vette just screaming.
I get home, all I want to do is sleep. I haven’t slept since Friday, this is Saturday night. I can’t go to sleep. Sunday she just looks at me, and I must look like I’m dying I guess because she goes, “I’m going to take you to the hospital.”
Dr. Joyce is waiting on me there. He takes one look, touches my butt and I just scream, and he goes, “Emergency room, NOW!”
The next thing I remember is that I’m lying on my stomach. I look over and I see Dr. Joyce has this puzzled look on his face like I had never seen before. He is holding some kind of ruler, and he’s putting it in the cut he has made on my butt. He says, “If this doesn’t go down another centimeter, we have to go back in and re-operate.”
I’m laying there, grogged up and I’m trying to put this in my head. What is going on? He’s already operated once? The next thing I know, they take me up to a room in the hospital – not the operating room, thankfully.
He came in the next day and told me what was going on. I had an allergic reaction to the penicillin. I don’t think I had ever had a shot before. I didn’t break out in hives or anything like the normal reaction. My muscles were just tearing themselves apart. He even asked me if they could put my symptoms in a medical book because it was so weird.
The biggest thing I can remember was the look on his face. That scared me. He looked like he was puzzled about what was going on. I had never seen that look on his face. It was a look that really freaked me out. Then he told me, “If you had waited one more day, you would have died.” That is some scary stuff. I was being poisoned by the penicillin.
I’m in the hospital for a couple of weeks, and that’s the time the Royals were winning 13 of 15 games or something like that. I would follow the standings while I was in the hospital. I was so out of it that sometimes I would try and listen to the games and I would think they had lost when I went to sleep and found out the next morning that they had won. Man, that was really hard. To be in that hospital listening to it every night. I got more nervous listening than I did performing. Every day I’m trying to figure out, “Did we win?”
Now, when I’m getting ready to come back, I’m thinking my muscles have been ripped apart. I have to work myself back in shape, and I’m wondering if I take a big stride whether the muscles would rip and I would never play again. I was kind of hesitant. I mean I got a big old scar on my butt, and all that scar tissue was really tight in my buttocks. I didn’t know if I could ever run again like I used to. I was worried if I went too hard I would hurt it again. The team had been doing so well. I came back in the middle of September, and we were playing about .500 ball during that little stretch. I felt like I was hurting everything.
Then one day I’m out in the outfield. We had lost three straight or four straight, something like that. There was a ball that I knew I had to get to. My instincts just kicked in. I had to go get the ball, and I was just playing the game again – not thinking about it. I took off, and I could almost feel everything breaking up in there, all that scar tissue. I was running again, and that made me feel good. That’s when I knew I was all right.
This team was really different than the 1980 team when everyone was having a great year on offense. This was a pretty disappointing year for me offensively. I think I only hit .278. We didn’t have anybody hitting over .300 except George. But we were a winning team. You know a lot of people look at offense. Offense doesn’t win a majority of baseball games. Defense does, defense and great pitching – and timely hitting. Not just hitting, timely hitting.
I know guys who go 3-for-4 and when you come up with a runner on third and two outs, they go 0-for-1. It’s not about how many hits you get, it’s when you get them. A lot of guys on that team were getting timely hits. We had three young pitchers on that club who really developed.
I don’t know that we had a feeling at the beginning of the year that this was going to be the special year, but we felt pretty good about our team. I had come back in 1984 and hit .301, and we had lost to the eventual World Series champs in the playoffs. In 1985, we lost three of our first four or something. We were under .500 in the middle of May, and didn’t reach .500 for good until the middle of June. We had a lot of veterans who knew it was going to be a long season. We just keep playing and didn’t panic. If we went through a bad spell, we knew that other teams were going to go through it too, so nobody panicked.
The three young pitchers had some success in 1984 and felt like they still had something to prove: Bret Saberhagen, Mark Gubicza and Danny Jackson. Sabes pretty much became our No. 1, at least it turned out that way that he was kind of matched up against the other team’s No. 1.
Sabes was a young, I won’t say cocky guy, I’ll say very confident. There’s a difference between cocky and confident. He was confident about his ability and what he could do. I think that rubbed off on Danny Jackson, and it rubbed off on Gubicza. The other guys? Charlie Leibrandt was somewhat of a veteran and Buddy Black was there. We could have had some controversy with the older guys and Saberhagen because those guys were here before the young guys.
They could have bitched and moaned about not being No. 1, but it was more so that everybody wanted to win. Gooby had a great fastball. He was tall, long, and an intimidating kind of guy. He wasn’t smooth. Neither was DJ. He had tenacity. DJ was a grinder.
It wasn’t just the starting guys. Quiz was a great reliever. Don’t forget about Steve Farr, Joe Beckwith and Mike Jones. I think we had nine or 10 guys on the staff. All the guys got along. It was really kind of crazy how it all happened. Everybody blended in.
That’s one thing I can say about Kansas City Royals players. They blend in together. I was with the A’s and Cubbies at the end of my career. With the Royals, we never had a Jose Canseco type of guy who set himself apart. Even our superstar guys blended together. Our teams were always pretty much like the city itself. Mr. K was that kind of guy. Mr. Schuerholz was that kind of guy. The guys on the team – everybody worked. Everybody did their job. We didn’t complain.
Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t like that every day. Some guys complained. I complained – I know that’s hard to believe (laughter) – but all in all we got along. That was pretty cool about all our Royals teams.
One thing was a little disappointing for me was that I hated to see the Guru (Larry Gura) not be a part of it. He meant so much to me the year before when I came back from the suspension. He really looked out for me. I always felt a little close to him because people don’t remember that my number when I came up to the team in 1977 was 32. When I finally made the team, 32 was the Guru’s number. That’s how I ended up being No. 6.