Bill’s Content

[youtube]cTc1m93RMOs[/youtube]

I don’t intend to help anyone speak ill of a former Cub great, but I have a point to make. This guy makes a case that Bill Buckner’s miserable performance in the 1986 World Series makes him suspect that Buckner deliberately tanked the game:

Shoeless Joe Jackson gets the boot after a Series in which he proves himself to be the best player on the field, yet fans and media alike attribute the Red Sox’s 1986 collapse to Babe Ruth’s ghost without anybody giving it a second thought. Say it ain’t so. I’m not saying that I think the 1919 World Series wasn’t fixed, just that the 1986 World Series was fixed too …

Count me among those who think that Shoeless Joe got the shaft, but not as big a shaft as the screwing they gave Buck Weaver. But how does that equate into “he played poorly, so he MUST be cheating? It doesn’t. But that doesn’t stop this guy from trying:

[snip]

Consider this: Buckner went 0-for-5 in Game 6, stranding runners on base in every at-bat (the only player to do so in a postseason game until Hideki Matsui did it in 2005). And it wasn’t just one bad game, either. After batting .267 during the regular season in 1986 — even that was well below his career average of .289 — Buckner batted an abysmal .188 during the World Series with zero extra-base hits and just one RBI. This is all the more surprising when considering that he entered the postseason after an absolutely torrid September in which he batted .340. Perhaps most shocking about Buckner’s World Series performance is the fact that he struck out three times in his 32 at-bats. For most hitters, a 10.7 at-bats per strikeout (AB/K) ratio is phenomenal, but Buckner was one of the best contact hitters the game has ever seen. Over the nine-year span from 1979 to 1987, Buckner led the league in at-bats per strikeout four times (including 1986) and finished in second place four times. His 10.7 AB/K in the 1986 World Series seems odd only given the fact that his AB/K ratio was 25.1 during the regular season in 1986 and 20.7 over his career.

And he has a bad game or seven at the wrong time, and so some Red Sox fan goes on the Internet and accuses him of tanking the game deliberately.

This proves my theory: Red Sox fans are even bigger buttheads than Yankees fans. And that’s saying a lot.

[tags]Bill Buckner,1986 Word Series,Boston Red Sox,Shoeless Joe Jackson,Buck Weaver[/tags]

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 22nd, 2006 at 12:41 pm and is filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.