So at the top of this entry you’ll find a podcast of “The Fall of ‘87,” a deep dive on the Jays’ catastrophic collapse in the last week of the aforementioned season. A certain former employer unhelpfully removed it from its platform, which would be bad enough, but also scrubbed it from all others (Apple, Spotify et cetera).
I’ve listened to the podcast start-to-finish twice: first, when it was finished in September 2017, in advance of its release marking the 30th anniversary; and again, this week, after I presumed it lost and gone forever. (Somehow I tripped over it when I was walking through my archive.)
“The Fall of ‘87” wound up being a finalist for best news-feature podcast in the Canadian Radio Television Digital News Association awards. The RTDNA did not have a sports category, nothing on the lighter side of the news spectrum, so “The Fall of ‘87” was in against two serious features produced by CBC website, which seemed to have pretty bottomless financial and human resources on the production side. We were a two-man op: me and Amil Delic, a really gifted production talent and all credit should go to him that the podcast works so well as it does. One of the CBC pods won—I really wasn’t paying close attention when the award was being handed out as our nomination was just a placeholder. After I offered consolations and thanks to Amil, he pointed out that he had in fact produced both of the CBC podcasts before joining our organization. Yeah, one of us knew what he was doing. (Hint: It wasn’t me.)
I got some nice feedback about the podcast, all of it making me feel sheepish. In the end, I felt “The Fall of ‘87” was a missed opportunity. With a few features in the works I had a bunch of balls in the air when the assignment was tossed my way. Yeah, doing a podcast for the first time while knocking out unrelated 4,000-word profiles had be juggling butcher knives, goldfish bowls and chainsaws. Oh, and say, can you write a feature off the podcast as well? Not ask too great, said I. Would “The Fall of ‘87” be better if I had concentrated on the one job? No doubt.
The text feature that came out of it was as good as I could have expected—it was a controlled situation. It’s linked here from the Sportsnet website. It’s long—don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Like I had avoided the podcast for six years, I hadn’t even glanced at this story. In the Department of Second Guesses (DSG), maybe I could have used a little less “me” in it. Submitted into evidence the opening paragraphs (in bold below):
I run the risk of sounding like your bat-guano crazy uncle for caring about this, but it’s a simple statement of fact: A generation of fans have no recollection of Exhibition Stadium. Never saw a Blue Jays game there. Never saw the Argos there. Never saw Toronto Metros Croatia. Never saw that rite of ’80s summers, the Police Picnic.
If you’re in your 20s, you probably couldn’t figure out where the stadium once stood if you were dropped at the Princes’ Gates with a compass. If you’re 35, you might have some vague recollection of a trip to the ballpark as a tyke, bouncing on your father’s knee. Maybe. It doesn’t matter how much of a fan you are; it’s just the timeline. What went down at Exhibition Stadium is stuff you may have read about, that you’ve seen pictures of, maybe grainy videos with graphics that look like hieroglyphics.
So, a bit of personal history: Hundreds of times I and now-doddering thousands went to the Ex. And, no, those of us down on the turf 35 years ago for the Who’s Farewell Tour didn’t get a refund any of the dozens of times survivors of the band have reunited since. An object lesson to never trust advertising, the concert turned out to be a farewell to guilelessness, that’s about it.
I had some strange experiences at Exhibition Stadium, maybe the strangest was in high school back in the 70s when, at an all-comers 10,000-metre race on the track, my friend and I seized the lead on the opening two laps and only then realized that the field included Jerome Drayton, who had won the prestigious Fukuoka Marathon and owned the world record for 10-mile run. He was probably driving home while we were still circling the track, getting our lap times from the Bulova Tower.
Of course, watching the most famous of tenants at Exhibition Stadium was strange enough. Taking in the Toronto Blue Jays at their original home put certain demands upon the ticketholder. If you were born too late, you don’t know what it was like to sit down the right-field line, completely sideways in your seat, with your neck craned 90 degrees to get a look at home plate. Or to be down in the lower rows of the outfield grandstands and have to peer over the fence, any ball making it to the warning track disappearing completely. To look overhead with dread at seagulls. To be chilled to the bone by winds off the lake during an April night game. No, it wasn’t always like that famous first Opening Day against the White Sox when snow fully covered the carpet — sometimes it was colder.
Yeah, definitely a lot less “me” would have been a preferred recipe. Fact is, however, there was even more “me” and undistilled goofiness in the first draft. This is what the opening paragraph originally looked like (again, in bold below).
I run the risk of sounding like your bat-guano crazy uncle, but this is a simple statement of fact: A generation of fans have no recollection of Exhibition Stadium. Never saw a Blue Jays game there. Never saw the Argos there. Never saw Toronto Metros Croatia. (Google it. They never got a parade.) Never saw the Who’s Farewell Tour. (As if.) Never saw that rite of 80s summer, the Police Picnic. (Okay, Google it again. And when you see Flock of Seagulls, understand, that’s the lame British synth band and not the extended family of the bird murdered by Dave Winfield back in ’83.)
Oh well. By way of explanation, I will say this: I really wasn’t looking to write a straight magazine story, pasteurizing the podcast, as it were. Nor was anything like a simple transcription of the script what I had in mind. In a magazine story, the challenge for a writer is establishing a voice—some writers possess their single authorial voice and I like to think I do voices. I wasn’t just trying to do a voice here, but rather set in place what in the cinematic world would be labelled a storyworld: a setting that has a set of sensibilities; a out-of-kilter place where you had a sense that the absurd was about to unfold. Stick around and it will all be upside down.
(I don’t have the rough draft of the story, but I know it featured not only Flock of Seagulls and The Who’s farewell tour line but also a reminiscence of seeing The Three Stooges in the grandstand back in the day, when the pie-in-face vaudevillians in their dotages drew bigger crowds than the Beatles. Pretty sure there was a line in there about seeing the Hell Drivers hitting the ramp and peeling the length of the straightaway on the passenger-side-wheels-only.)
My editor on the piece, the redoubtable Evan Rosser, always had a good sense of when I should be held back—otherwise I would have been careening through stories like one of the Hell Drivers.
Regrets about what was excised, I have a few. Far tougher, though, is recalling how I couldn’t land interviews with all the principals I had targeted. The one that hurts the most is an ex-Blue Jay whom I had talked to many times before: Tony Fernandez, the Jays’ gifted but star-crossed shortstop back in ‘87.
(Readers of this SubStack will remember the excerpt from my memoir for Audible and Amazon which appeared in this space back in December: Tony Fernandez, Damaso Garcia, John Mayberry & Rambo: Which one doesn't belong? This full chapter about a baseball fantasy camp in the Dominican is linked here, although you’ll need a paid subscription or at least a trial sub to access it.)
There would have been so much to ask Fernandez about. How do I discreetly raise the season-ending injury when undercut on the pivot by Bill Madlock’s infamous hard-and-probably-gratuitous-if-not-filthy slide? Watching those last games with his arm in a sling? Alas, calls made to Fernandez, then working for the Texas Rangers, went unreturned. I asked a couple of ex-Jays and ex-staffers to help me out but there was no budging Fernandez. An email that invoked his giving me a lift to my hotel in his rickety old car and his time trying in vain to help me in the batting cage drew no reply. Sigh. Not having Fernandez hurt, although not so much as writing (linked here) this remembrance on Sportsnet’s website in 2020 when he died of kidney disease far too young or talking about his life story on CBC (embedded below).
My appearance on CBC above.
THE TOUGHEST part of reading and listening again to “The Fall of ‘87” is the role of someone that I did track down for an interview: Jeff Musselman, a left-hander who went 12-5 coming out of the Jays’ bullpen in his rookie season. If there is such a thing as your average ballplayer, it wasn’t him. He set himself apart from the crowd by his background and off-season work: He had graduated from Harvard grad and was putting in time, when available, on Wall Street. That year he was the guy who seemed to have the world as his oyster, seemed destined to have a major-league career that play out like Jimmy Key’s, long, accomplished and lucrative.
Musselman proved to be a reticent witness—the farthest thing from a publicity hound that season, seemingly content to have others steal his thunder, I guess. Musselman played a critical role in the Jays’ unfolding swoon however. As laid out in the story that ran online:
When people talk about the great pitching performances in Blue Jays history, Mike Flanagan’s name doesn’t come up as often as it should. But on that last Saturday of the season, Flanagan took it right to the limit and beyond.
{In] 1987 I had one foot in the press box and the other in the stands. I unabashedly thought of Flanagan with my weight leaning on the foot I kept in the cheap seats. Back in the early ’80s, my friends and I made a point of getting to the Ex as soon as the gates opened on game day, especially if the visiting team had a big-name starter going. The O’s were a priority for us. We’d watch Jim Palmer toss and think, “How does he make it all look so easy, so unhurried?” And we’d listen for Mike Flanagan. He was considered the funniest guy in the game, the coiner of nicknames. When Flanagan was in his ’79 Cy Young season, he called the veteran Jim Palmer “Cy Old”. He was a fountain of one-liners.
Upon arrival in Toronto, he wasted no time in cracking up his teammates. When the Jays acquired Flanagan, they dropped Phil Niekro from their roster and Flanagan wound up with the ancient knuckleballer’s courtesy car. When a new teammate asked Flanagan how he knew that he was driving Niekro’s old car, Flanagan said: “Because Phil left his teeth in it.”.
The media had saddled Pat Gillick with the nickname “Stand Pat” but the acquisition of Flanagan with the clock ticking at the trade deadline nullified the knocks. The Jays had lost confidence in Dave Stieb, and you got the impression that even Dave Stieb had lost confidence in Dave Stieb — what most had presumed was an impossibility. Getting a former Cy Young winner with a World Series ring and swagger? Well, as a fan, you couldn’t ask anything more of the GM.
That Saturday, the Jays and Tigers were tied for first. A Toronto win would have at least guaranteed them a tie atop the AL East and a playoff game at Tiger Stadium on Monday. It was Mike Flanagan versus Jack Morris, two guys who didn’t make the Hall of Fame, two guys more clutch than a lot of those in Cooperstown.
Morris pitched in and out of trouble all day long — he walked five batters and the Jays left eight men on base between the fifth and eighth. George Bell got all of a Morris fastball, but he was just out ahead of it and it hooked foul into the upper deck. “I often wondered how that might have changed the way that game went and Sunday too,” says Larry Millson, who was in the press box that day. “Saturday you sensed there was a tightness around the team that might not have been there before. If [that ball off Bell’s bat] had stayed fair, it probably would have loosened up the whole team.”
By the end of nine, Morris had given up only two runs but he’d thrown 163 pitches and was thoroughly spent.
Mike Flanagan didn’t have his greatest stuff, not by a long shot, and he never overpowered anybody. Through nine, he had also surrendered two runs, and it might have only been one and a W for the Jays if it weren’t for an errant throw by Manny Lee in the fifth that led to a run for the home team. Flanagan was out of the game after the bottom of the 11th. He had thrown 139 pitches.
Jimy Williams didn’t go to Henke when he lifted Flanagan, even though the big reliever hadn’t pitched in six days. The scorebook shows that he called for the rookie, Musselman, to start the 12th and that Musselman wound up loading the bases. Mark Eichhorn came on and induced Alan Trammell to hit an infield grounder to the left side of the infield. Manny Lee bent over and the ball went under his glove and right between his feet …
Flanagan was burning up in the clubhouse after the game. He barely stopped short of throwing Williams under the bus and then backing up over the manager. “The only reason Williams was able to talk Flanagan into coming out of the game is that [Flanagan] thought Henke was going in,” Millson says. “Flanagan never forgave Jimy for that. He put it kind of cryptically after the game — he said, ‘There’s no one in this clubhouse that thinks it’s their fault.’ I knew what he was getting at without pointing a finger. He wanted to keep going [and] Henke could have gone more than one inning.”
I was surprised when Jeff Musselman agreed to participate in the podcast. I had pitched a profile of Musselman to Toronto magazines I was writing for back in ‘88, but after getting a green light he begged off. He hadn’t gravitated towards the spotlight when he first entered the Jays clubhouse (like, say, David Wells back in the day, or Alex Manoah more recently). In the spring of ‘88 he checked himself into alcohol rehab at Sunnybrook in Toronto. Unrelated to his drinking he’d have a heart attack before his 30th birthday. His career was over not long after. (The Harvard Crimson published an account of his return to speak at his alma mater that’s worth your time, linked here.)
Photo from the Toronto Star in 1988.
After baseball Musselman became an agent and not a minor player—befitting his academic pedigree, a Vice President of the group headed by Scott Boras, the most influential agent in the business. Through his assistant with the Boras group I managed to let Musselman know that many of his teammates were aboard for the podcast: Tom Henke, Jesse Barfield and Ernie Whitt among others. And I told him that talking about that game on the last Saturday of the ‘87 season was critical to the piece.
Musselman was more than smart enough to read between the line that I laid outs: After his own struggles with alcohol and a history of depression, Mike Flanagan had committed suicide in 2011. He was 59. The one-liners and gag nicknames were his cover for private torment, which reached its breaking point after disappointments as an executive with the Orioles and a financial crush. No one could better talk about Flanagan than the guy who came into the game for him at Tiger Stadium.
Once Musselman was aboard, I sketched out how his story would fit in the pod—and by that, I don’t mean chronologically. Clearly, the penultimate day of the season represented the highest drama, excruciating tension. By comparison the last game of the season was anti-climactic—go to either the podcast or the online text and compare events and emotion around that final loss, which even as it played out felt inevitable, predestined, right down to a wounded Garth Iorg weakly grounding a ball back to the pitcher for the 27th out.
Amil, my colleague, wasn’t in the studio for the recording of my call with Musselman. He had a conflict in his schedule and his assistant, a kid named Josh, did the set-up. I got Musselman on the line and off we went.
I had high hopes for Musselman and he far exceeded them. He talked at length about his relationship to Flanagan, how he revered him. Flanagan was winning a Cy Young when Musselman had been in high school, a World Series ring when he was pitching in college. Though Flanagan had only arrived at the trade deadline just weeks before that last Saturday of the ‘87 season, the veteran who had seen it all had made a big impression on the rookie who seemed to be on the same path.
Musselman also talked about Jimy Williams’s decision to pull Flanagan from the game and send him (and, more pointedly, not Tom Henke) to the mound with the pennant hanging the balance. At times Musselman’s voice cracked. “Afterward I felt like I had let everyone down, most all that I had let Mike down,” he said. “They say it’s a game of inches but sometimes that’s the whole season. I never knew a disappointment in the game like it—not before, not since. And you live with it … you try to live with it.”
If it wasn’t five-star stuff, it was only because Musselman wasn’t going to neatly connect the dots between that crash in extra innings of Game 161 and his alcoholism. His issues predated his arrival in the Blue Jays clubhouse. Were they exacerbated by that L? Sleepless nights, yes. Anxiety triggered by just the mere mention of the Jays’ swoon, yes. It was a breaking point, probably a factor in his decision to go to management so he could enter rehab. Was it the catalyst, though? No, that train had left the station years before.
Musselman offered up an incredible story and if you listened to the podcast at the top of this SubStack or read the feature that ran on the Sportsnet website, you have one question: Why is none of this Musselman stuff in there? He’s a bit player.
Scroll back up the screen, reader. I mentioned that Amil had a conflict and that an kid assistant named Josh had been working in the booth, lining up the call for recording. Early in the interview I heard a couple of pops and zips and a couple of times the sound cut out for a fraction of a second. Something was clearly up. I asked Musselman to hold that thought—not ideal in an intimate interview with a reticent subject baring his soul—and I went out to the booth to make Josh aware that there might be an issue with the set-up. Josh wasn’t in the booth—in fact he was in the neighbouring booth, recording a wrestling podcast with a couple of his playmates from the company’s kiddie corps.
I asked Josh if he could leave the sandbox for a moment to attend to issues in the recording. Indignant about the interruption he came over—twisted a couple of dials, pushed a button and thumbed a lever. “Should be good,” he said and left to head back to his priority, yes, Kevin Owens' head-butting Vince McMahon or whatever.
After half an hour, I had everything I needed from Musselman and one thing I didn’t need at all, namely a sinking feeling that there might be some issues with the audio quality. There was none … by that I don’t mean no issues but rather no audio at all. When I brought Josh back into the booth the playback was white noise. Nothing could be salvaged. I had scant notes to work from, not enough to build a decent vignette.
I was ready to kill Josh and I might have but I moved directly into crisis management. I reached out to Musselman to ask him if I could get him back on the line.
He didn’t reply immediately. He didn’t reply at all. Apparently, it was tough enough to talk about once, never mind doing a second take.
I could have done a bit more with Musselman in the text on the website but then I’d be fielding questions from folks wondering why he didn’t make it onto the podcast—yeah, I’d be opening a can of worms. So I leaned into the Garth Iorg story—moving in its own way, but not a patch on Musselman’s. You be the judge.
The Jays were seemingly cursed that last week of the 1987 season, so it was only fitting that the podcast about that team was produced under black clouds. I could empathize with Jeff Musselman, the late Mike Flanagan too. People told me that they enjoyed the podcast (even if they didn’t get all the way through the text on the website). I’m pretty sure they were just being polite. Yeah, what if? If only. Sigh. You can click on “The Fall of ‘87” podcast and have a listen, but I can’t, not again. I only hear what the podcast wasn’t, what it might have been.
…..
No. 104: HENKE, FERNANDEZ & MUSSELMAN et al / The Fall of '87" & the fail of '17: In the wake of their disappointment the Jays could only ask, "What if?" With my podcast, I could empathize.