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Amid a public feud with former teammate Lenny Dykstra over allegations in his new book, former Mets pitcher Ron Darling released a statement Thursday morning seeking to shift the attention back to this year's team but also defending what he wrote.
In his book, Darling wrote that while Red Sox pitcher Dennis "Oil Can" Boyd was warming up before Game 3 of the 1986 World Series, Dykstra shouted from the on-deck circle "every imaginable and unimaginable insult and expletive in his direction — foul, racist, hateful, hurtful stuff."
"I don’t want to be too specific here, because I don’t want to commemorate this dark, low moment in Mets history in that way, but I will say that it was the worst collection of taunts and insults I’d ever heard — worse, I’m betting, than anything Jackie Robinson might have heard, his first couple times around the league," Darling wrote in the book.
Dykstra led off the game with a home run, which Darling suggested might have been the result of him rattling Boyd.
Dykstra has vehemently denied the allegations and is threatening to sue Darling.
Former Mets Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden and Kevin Mitchell have said publicly they did not hear Dykstra yell racial slurs at Boyd. Keith Hernandez said he remembers Dykstra barking at the Boston pitcher, but he never heard what was being said.
Boyd told WFAN's "Carlin, Maggie and Bart" on Tuesday that he also didn't hear the vulgar, racist rant allegedly directed at him but said he believes Darling's account.
"I'm kind of disturbed about it, and I'm also kind of hurt about it because I have been around Lenny, and I played ball with Lenny in Japan," Boyd said. "And he didn't seem to come off as that type of a person. And he had even made home at one time in Mississippi, and that's where I grew up at. The person that I saw, I liked. The person that I talked to, I liked. So I'm quite disturbed about it, but I guess what you see on the surface is not really what a person might seem to be."
Dykstra quickly responded to Darling's statement on Twitter.
"Because I will be brutally honest that as soon as Lenny hit that home run, which was the biggest hit we need in the World Series, I was the first one to congratulate him," Darling said.
"In those days, people tried to rile each other in a lot of different ways. You hope it didn't happen that way."