Red Sox Outfielders Let Another One Get Away : This Time, Ball Drops Out of Evans' Glove for Home Run

Red Sox Outfielders Let Another One Get Away : This Time, Ball Drops Out of Evans’ Glove for Home Run

By GORDON EDES

Oct. 23, 1986 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

BOSTON — Dave Henderson followed the flight of the ball, measured the approach to the fence, calculated the angle of the leap, saw the confluence of ball, glove, man and wall . . . and felt the despair as the ball bounced off the glove and over the fence.

Deja vu in Boston. Only this time, the Red Sox center fielder wasn’t the one who alley-ooped the ball over the fence for a home run. This time, Henderson could only watch helplessly as right fielder Dwight Evans, Boston’s eight-time Gold Glover, put leather on Len Dykstra’s seventh-inning drive, only to have the ball fall out of his glove into the visitors’ bullpen.

It was a two-run home run for Dykstra, the crushing blow in the Mets’ 6-2 win over the Red Sox Wednesday night that evened the World Series at two games apiece.

New England Patriot linebackers can’t do tip drills any better than the Red Sox outfield. First, Henderson, now Evans.

“It kind of reminded me of the play in Anaheim,” Henderson said.

“Somebody in the bleachers hollered out, ‘Dewey, you’re going to come up in the ninth and hit a two-run homer to win it.’

“That struck me as kind of funny.”

This had all happened before--Game 5, American League playoffs, Anaheim Stadium, Bobby Grich the hitter, Henderson the outfielder who was destined for Red Sox infamy when Grich’s ball flipped out of his glove and over the fence.

Henderson altered that destiny--and the course of the playoffs--when he homered in the ninth inning, with the Red Sox one strike away from elimination.

There was no such instant redemption for Evans. He singled in a run and scored another in Boston’s two-run eighth, but there would be no more scoring.

Evans, who made what may have been the most famous catch in Boston’s World Series history--he flew into the right-field corner to take an 11th-inning home run away from Cincinnati’s Joe Morgan in Game 6 of the 1975 Series--now was faced with questions about the catch he didn’t make.

“You probably could see it better than I could,” he said to the crush of reporters that surrounded him in the Red Sox clubhouse. “What did you see?”

Evans knew that those assembled wanted to hear what he had seen.

“The ball carried back,” he said. “The wind was blowing toward left field, and the ball sailed back toward center field.

“The ball carried funny . . . We’re going to check the kid’s bat, now that I think of it.”

Evans was playing Dykstra shallow when the Met center fielder connected off Boston reliever Steve Crawford. With long strides, he covered the distance to the warning track, then jumped when the dirt beneath his feet told him he was about to hit the five-foot-high fence.

“I got above the wall,” he said. “The ball was out (a home run), I think, when I caught it.

“My chest hit the wall, and the ball was jarred out of my glove. The ball was on the end of my glove--what we call a snow cone.”

In the Boston bullpen, Red Sox reliever Joe Sambito could not see what was happening.

“We’re shielded by the wall that separates our bullpen from theirs,” Sambito said. “We listened for the crowd’s reaction.

“We looked for a replay on the scoreboard, but they never showed it. Now I know why.”

In the Met bullpen, reliever Jesse Orosco knew Dykstra’s ball had a good chance of carrying into their midst.

“Evans got to the wall and the ball jarred loose,” Orosco said. “He knew he had it, but it something that got away.

“That’s no good feeling.”

After the ball came out of his glove, Evans rested his arms for a couple of moments on the wall, his head down.

“I feel bad about it,” he said later, “but I did the best I could. I felt bad that it was a two-run homer, but I’ve got nothing to hang my head about. I didn’t carry the ball over.”

An inning earlier, Evans had stood in front of the same fence, reached back and taken away a home run from Darryl Strawberry.

“You catch it or you don’t,” Henderson said, far from the crowd around Evans. “I’m sure he thought he had the ball all the way. . . . He’ll make the play if it’s supposed to be made.”

But not even Evans’ collection of Gold Gloves can bring back the one that got away.