NEW YORK (WFAN.com) -- The 1986 New York Mets were a team that won't soon be forgotten.
More than 30 years later, the Mets still haven't won another World Series. The 2019 season arrives with newfound hope for a Mets roster that has been re-upholstered during the offseason, but they'll have to achieve something incredible to come close to matching what the '86 Mets did.
On Monday, Ron Darling, a member of that 1986 championship team, joined Mike Francesa to talk about his new book "108 Stitches: Loose Threads, Ripping Yarns, and the Darndest Characters from My Time in the Game."
Darling spoke about an incident during Game 3 of the 1986 World Series when Lenny Dykstra allegedly yelled racial slurs in the direction of Boston Red Sox pitcher Dennis "Oil Can" Boyd.
"In those days, and if you read the whole paragraph, Lenny had a way about him. He was a little crazy," Darling said. "...The world has changed. What was said 33 years ago in a fraternity of young men trying to play a sport, as you look back on it when you're 57 or 58 years old, you're kind of ashamed of the complicity of yourself to these kind of things. ... In those days people tried to rile each other in a lot of different ways, you hoped it didn't happen that way."
According to Darling's new book, Dykstra yelled "every imaginable and unimaginable insult and expletive in (Oil Can's) direction -- foul, racist, hateful, hurtful stuff."
Dykstra has since responded on Twitter. He apparently plans to sue Darling for "creating fiction."
Dykstra has been making news for all the wrong reasons in the past few years. The Mets' hero from 1986 has served prison time for bankruptcy fraud, grand theft auto and money laundering since he retired from baseball. Drug and terroristic threat charges against Dykstra, stemming from an incident in May 2018, were dropped in March.
Darling and Francesa spoke about a wide range of subjects, including the present-day Mets.