Did you see the video on social media recently where former major leaguer Eric Byrnes is on a podcast with former major leaguer Will Clark and tells a hilarious story about how former major leaguer Tim Flannery gave him a gummy before he went on MLB Network? In a hilarious story, Byrnes admitted he was super high and had trouble talking on TV because he had cotton mouth.
Here’s the full exchange between Byrnes and Clark about the gummy.
The problem with the story?
Flannery says it’s mostly fake news.
This story is the latest involving athletes confessing to having fun, or too much fun, with alcohol and/or drugs and then trying to perform.
Will Clark seems to be specializing in these stories lately. On the same podcast, The Thrill told the story of how he and Cal Ripken, Jr. drank every beer in the Metrodome clubhouse after a game, went on the field in their underwear in a drunken stupor, and fell asleep in the training room. Here’s that clip if you’re in the mood to laugh about baseball legends getting drunk.
David Wells told a detailed story that he was out partying with cast members of Saturday Night Live into the early hours of the morning, then pitched his 1998 Perfect Game for the Yankees while still half-drunk.
Dock Ellis famously claimed that he threw his 1970 no-hitter for the Pirates while on LSD and a movie was even made about it.
Books often bring out the best/worst in alcohol confessions. The 1986 New York Mets are immortalized more for how hard they partied than for winning the World Series. The stories are jaw-dropping. Most are true. Some of the craziest were vehemently denied. But they persist into folklore these days.
In the original tell-all that arguably started the genre, pitcher Jim Bouton in his landmark book “Ball Four,” told the story of Mickey Mantle hitting a pinch hit home run while nursing a raging hangover because he got super drunk the night before under the assumption he wasn’t playing the next day.
"So he staggered up to the plate and hit a tremendous drive to left field for a home run. When he came back into the dugout, everybody shook his hand and leaped all over him, and all the time he was getting a standing ovation from the crowd. He squinted out at the stands and said, 'Those people don't know how tough that really was.'"
The drunken stories of Mantle were part of a somewhat charming legend for most of his life. That all changed in his final years, when Mantle expressed extreme remorse about his boozing, admitted he has memory lapse and doesn’t remember a lot of details about his career.
If you type the name Wade Boggs into google, these are the top six suggestions for the word you might want next.
If you’re not familiar, Boggs claimed to drink somewhere between 70 and 107 beers on a cross-country flight.
Oh to be young, rich and surrounded by people who will help cover your excesses.
I suspect I’m starting to sound like I’m on a soapbox about how athletes need to be better role models or something. Not at all. I enjoy these stories. I want more of them. They’re funny and (hopefully) harmless. I usually take them with a grain of salt, knowing the exact details are lost to history and brain cells and the natural human desire to exaggerate stories for entertainment.
Heck, I’m just as guilty as anyone else of exaggerating a story about a night when I had too many drinks, but how hilarious/fun/wild/charming I was. Most people have done the same.
Still, I enjoy playing the “is it true?” guessing game. So let’s play the game with some of these examples.
Is it true David Wells threw a Perfect Game while still drunk after partying with Saturday Night Live cast members?
This is absolutely not true and it’s very easy to prove. Wells threw his Perfect Game on May 17, 1998. Here’s the boxscore. The final episode of SNL that year was a week earlier, on May 9, 1998, starring David Duchovny.
Wells initially told this story on — what else? — a podcast.
“So I ended up going and one thing led to another and at about 5:30 in the morning I came strolling in, just schnockered, so I only got a couple hours of sleep,” Wells said on The New York Post’s Pinstripe Pod. “Still drunk. I think I would’ve blown over the limit. Surprised I didn’t get pulled over on the way into the park. It wasn’t on purpose, I just got caught up in the moment at ‘Saturday Night Live’ with Jimmy Fallon and the guys there. And it just escalated.
“I went to the park, I was a wreck. I mean, I was a wreck. (David Cone) told me, he goes, you need to go to Monahan’s office to get away from everybody, you stink. So I just started chewing gum, drinking a lot of water and coffee, about ten trips to the bathroom. My stomach was boiling over pretty good. I don’t know, at about 11:30 I had a pancake in there from the spread and I felt a little bit better but I was still a wreck.”
Another problem with Wells’ story: Jimmy Fallon was not even on the cast in May of 1998. Fallon joined SNL in the Fall of 1998.
I’m not saying that Wells was not hungover when he pitched that day. I’m not saying he didn’t ever party with the SNL cast, including Fallon.
But it was literally impossible for Wells to be at a “SNL After Party” into the wee hours before his Perfect Game because the show was on summer hiatus.
Is is true Dock Ellis threw a No Hitter while on a LSD acid trip?
I think this is not true. I think his LSD trip was the day before.
As the story goes, Ellis was in Los Angeles on a day off between games, spent the night partying with drugs and alcohol. He woke up, not knowing what day it was, thought it was still the off day, took another LSD tablet about Noon, then a friend realized that not only was it no longer the day off, the game was that night, in San Diego, it was a doubleheader, and Ellis was starting Game One. Somehow, Ellis was taken to LAX, caught a short flight to San Diego, and took a taxi to Jack Murphy Stadium in time to start the game at 6 pm and threw a no hitter against the Padres while tripping.
When you look at the Pittsburgh Pirates 1970 schedule, they played at home on a Sunday, June 7 against the Dodgers to end a nine-game homestand. They had a day off on June 8 as they traveled to San Francisco. They played a Tuesday night game on June 9 against the Giants at Candlestick Park, then a Wednesday day game on June 10. In all likelihood, they traveled after the game from NorCal to SoCal. The Pirates had a day off on Thursday, June 11 before starting a series in San Diego on Friday, June 12 against the Padres.
It’s logical to deduce Ellis went to his Los Angeles home, for the day off between cities. It’s believable he took LSD. This was the 1970s, after all, and Ellis’ substance abuse problem were well chronicled. He became a counselor after he got sober and died in 2008 of liver cirrhosis.
It’s quite possible the LSD was still in his system from the day before. It’s almost guaranteed Ellis was on some type of “pep me up” pill or “greenie” because those were common in the 1970s and Ellis has claimed he took something before every game.
But I have trouble believing he took the LSD on the same day as his start. It’s convenient timing that a flight even existed between LA and SD to get him there. Starting pitchers receive leeway for arriving at the ballpark later than most players. But still, they usually took swings during batting practice. Wouldn’t it be a story if the Pirates starting pitcher for Game One of a doubleheader was late? Wouldn’t they just push him back to start Game Two?
I went on newspapers.com to read the next-day dispatches from all the Pittsburgh papers and the wire services. Obviously, none were going to mention or even hint that Ellis was on drugs. Nobody knew. But there was no description, whatsoever, about Ellis still being “amped up” or “in a calm focused zen state” or anything noteworthy.
The most entertaining item is something for those who believe in no-hit jinxes.
It was well over a decade before the LSD story emerged, by Ellis himself. It’s actually a shame that Ellis is only remembered for the LSD story. He was ahead of his time for being outspoken about the treatment of Black athletes and compiled an impressive career.
Still, I think the LSD trip was the day before.
Is is true Wade Boggs drank 107 beers on a cross-country flight?
I doubt this. I’m sure he drank a lot, but come on, one hundred and seven beers?
If you’re not familiar, this story originates from the first episode in Season Ten of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” Slash Films has the details:
"[Boggs] was famous for baseball, he was also famous for the amount of beer he could drink," series co-creator and star Charlie Day explained to Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show when the episode first aired. "Supposedly, when they would have these cross-country flights, he would drink on average 40 to 50, some say 70 beers. So our characters are trying to break that record in the episode ... and then see if we can hit a baseball the next day, cuz not only would he drink 70 beers, but then he'd go, like three for four."
Wade Boggs himself makes a cameo in "The Gang Beats Boggs" as a hallucination that motivates Charlie to win the competition. When the baseball legend was on set, Charlie Day finally got the true record straight from the boozehound's mouth. "Well, he told me that the actual number," Day revealed to Jimmy Fallon. "He pulled me aside and he was like, 'Charlie, really it was 107.'"
Let’s do some math. It’s a 6.5-hour flight from Boston to Los Angeles. That’s 390 minutes. That means Boggs drank roughly one beer every three minutes for 390 consecutive minutes? Is there even 107 beers on the entire plane? Even if this was a chartered plane, are the flight attendants really going to keep serving him?
Even if you started drinking at home, then drank at the airport before the flight, then drank on the plane, then the flight had a layover, and you kept drinking during the layover, and kept drinking on the second flight, you might get up to 12 hours total time here. But I still can’t fathom how you’d get drink 107 beers, stay awake, and not become so incredibly inebriated that people around you would allow it to continue.
If this was Andre the Giant, I can believe 107 beers, because I’ll believe anything involving Andre the Giant.
But for Wade Boggs? I’ll believe 50 beers, maybe even 60. I can’t believe 107.
So who is right, Eric Byrnes or Tim Flannery about the gummy?
I know Byrnes a little. When he played for the Oakland A’s, I was a beat writer for The Oakland Tribune. I enjoyed covering Byrnes. He was a spaz on the field. He was a quote machine off the field. He made good copy.
I suspect Flannery is correct because if Byrnes was so high that he couldn’t talk, surely that would have been newsworthy at the time, or somebody would have found the clip by now, and we could all see the evidence that Byrnes went on national TV under the influence of a gummy and couldn’t talk.
I do know this: Byrnes grew up in the Bay Area, he was a huge Giants fan, and Will “The Thrill” Clark was one of his all-time favorite players. It’s understandable that Byrnes is on a podcast with one of his childhood heroes and wants to impress him with a wild story … OR … that he took a good story and fudged the details to make it a legendary story.
I also think this: Byrnes wasn’t maliciously trying to enhance the story by lying on purpose. That’s probably how Byrnes remembers the story because memories are fleeting, and memories change over time, and it’s been enough years, and it probably wasn’t the only time in his life that Byrnes got high.
And I also really think this: It’s easy to get caught up in the moment with your childhood hero when you’re the co-founder of the “No Filter Network” and trying to get a lot of clicks. [It’s working.]
In the meantime, I think Flannery said it best in his Tweet.
“no business like show business”. Love u fellas.
I’ll conclude with this: Eric Byrnes, Will Clark, and all other former athletes, keep the confessions coming. I want them all. I like the challenge of researching if the story is impossible (like David Wells) or use some deductive reasoning (like Dock Ellis), and I enjoy debating with my friends which stories are true.
Readers: what is your favorite athlete “confessional” that you think is bogus?