I only ever knew of Oil Can Boyd from his baseball cards. It was kind of a hard name to miss when you were flipping through an old stack of Topps. I loved Oil Can. I still love Oil Can, especially now that I know how he got his nickname: from his days drinking beer in Meridian, Miss., where beer was known as "oil," and Dennis Boyd apparently drank enough of it to take it as a moniker.
But here's something else I didn't know about the former Red Sox pitcher: he's the nearest thing to a contemporary emodiment of the great Satchel Paige, and says he frequently pitched while high on cocaine.
In a tremendously interesting and engaging interview with CBS Boston, Boyd spoke candidly on his his playing days, which spanned from 1982 to 1991.
"Some of the best game I've ever, ever pitched in the major leagues I stayed up all night (high on cocaine); I'd stay two-thirds of them. If I had went to bed, I would have won 150 ballgames in the time span that I played. I feel like my career was cut short for a lot of reasons, but I wasn't doing anything that hundreds of ball players weren't doing at the time, because that's how I learned it."
Indeed, cocaine use was rampant in baseball in the 80s, so Oil Can's admission is hardly shocking. But while other ballplayers were exposed as drug addicts and received second third and fourth chances, Boyd says baseball was unforgiving to him because he was not only black, but outspoken.
"The reason I caught the deep end to it is because I'm black. The bottom line is the game carries a lot of bigotry, and that as an easy way for them to do it.
"If I wasn't outspoken and a so-called 'proud black man,' maybe I would have gotten the empathy and sympathy like other ballplyaers got that I didn't get; like Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, Steve Howe. I can name 50 people that got third and fourth chances because they weren't outspoken black individuals."
Boyd says he was never drug tested, but "I was told that, yeah, if you don't stp doing this we're going to put you into rehab, and I told them fuck that shit, I'm going to do what I have to do. I have to win ball games."
From what I'm hearing from Oil Can, 1.) I love him more than ever, and 2.) he is going to make a perfect Satchel Paige in the forthcoming Jackie Robinson biopic starring Chadwick Boseman as Robinson and Harrison Ford as Branch Rickey.
Paige is one of the most phenomenal characters in American history, and probably the best pitcher to ever hold a baseball. He was a far more charasmatic and interesting guy -- though historically less impactful -- than Robinson. Based on baseball ability and value, Satchel should have been the one to break the color barrier. But America was hardly ready for Jackie Robinson in 1947, and it certainly wasn't ready for the ramblin', mercurial, throughly authentic yet uncontrollable Paige.
Hopefully the film will give Satchel and Oil Can a significant role. If you head over to CBS Boston, be sure to listen to the audio of the interview. I could listen to Oil Can Boyd talk all day long.
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