To Read: An Oral History Of The Varitek-A-Rod Fight & A Feature On Dennis Eckersley

Two great things to read today.

Jen McCaffrey of The Athletic presents an oral history of the Jason Varitek-Alex Rodriguez fight, a few days before its 15th anniversary.

It was July 24, 2004, and the Red Sox beat the Yankees, 11-10, in one of the best regular-season games ever played at Fenway Park. The drama unfolded in a Shakespearean manner beginning with a bizarre rain delay laced with gamesmanship and unraveling with a wild third-inning brawl before a comeback capped by an inexplicable walk-off home run against a Hall of Fame closer. ...

Mueller: I don't think he'd ever charge Roger Clemens or somebody significant on the mound. But I feel like he took advantage of Bronson. It was a breaking ball, an off-speed pitch, and I was like, "Oh, please."

Rodriguez: You look at some of those moments and you cringe like, "What the hell was I doing?"

Mueller: I was like, "Man, I want to see this because I want 'Tek to take down A-Rod." ...

Millar: The best part of that fight was over there on the first-base side on that on-deck circle. I think you forget there were some big boys over there. Trot Nixon, Tanyon Sturtze and Gabe Kapler. They can move some luggage. Out of nowhere, we look over like, "What's going on?!" And then Tanyon was bleeding around his eye and Trot is trying to choke him out because he saw him grab Kapler around the neck and it gets weird for a second. ... There's always a good little fight that goes on, on the side. ...

Schilling: To me, that was the day the 2004 team found its identity.

Millar: We were at a point where we needed to figure out how to win. I always joked around and said we went 2-0. We won the baseball game and won the fight.

Chad Finn of the Boston Globe has a fantastic feature on Dennis Eckersley.

The Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, has enshrined 232 players, and if there is one among them who is distinctive in as many different ways as Eckersley, that player needs a better publicist.

Eckersley was born in Oakland, California, and raised in nearby Fremont. He fell in love with baseball when "the Giants played the Yankees in the '62 World Series,” he says. "I was eight years old. Isn't that when everyone falls in love with baseball, at eight years old?"

He demonstrates his pitching motion, which featured a high leg kick reminiscent of '60s Giants ace Juan Marichal, a fellow Hall of Famer. "Marichal was my hero," he says. "I was hooked." ...

[Eckersley debuted with Cleveland.] Then on March 30, 1978, near the end of spring training, Eckersley was traded to the Red Sox along with catcher Fred Kendall ...

The same day, his wife Denise, whom he'd married when they were both 18 and with whom he had an infant daughter, Mandee, told him she wanted a divorce. A few months later she told him she wanted to marry his best friend, Indians center fielder Rick Manning. ...

The Red Sox had acquired a 23-year-old pitcher with a golden arm, a broken heart, and a devastated soul. "I was in agony my first year here, and no one really knew that. I was [expletive] angry, man. I was late all the time. I would be rolling in when batting practice was going on. I lived downtown, how the hell are you going to be late? I was angry, and someone was going to pay." ...

The Red Sox traded Eckersley to the Chicago Cubs in May 1984 for another player of some renown. ... Eckersley found some on-field success in Chicago, winning 27 games in three seasons, but there were no night games at Wrigley Field then, which meant he could start drinking earlier.

At Christmas 1986 while visiting family in Connecticut, Eckersley wound up drunk at the gathering. His sister-in-law recorded it on video and made him watch it the next day. "I saw the look in my eyes; I didn't know that guy and I didn't like that guy," Eckersley said years later. "I had to turn off the video. I saw too much. ...It was an ugly feeling in my stomach."

In January 1987, he checked himself into an alcohol treatment facility in Newport, Rhode Island, and got sober. ...

In Oakland, Eckersley was reinvented as a closer. ...

Eckersley wound up saving 390 games, along with winning 197 — he's still the only player in Major League history to have 100 saves and 100 complete games. He made six All-Star teams, won the American League Cy Young and Most Valuable Player awards, and won a World Series. When he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2004, he was asked what his plaque should look like. "As long as the mustache looks right, everything will be OK," he said. ...

Eckersley, incurably candid as he is, does not pretend his life is perfect. He brings up the tragedies and dark times willingly, talking of ghosts old and new that haunt him. His sister, Cindy Cowgill, died last August at age 58. "She just drank herself to death," he says. "I still can't believe it." His older brother, Wally, has been in and out of prison, and was sentenced to 48 years in 1989 for the kidnapping, aggravated robbery, and attempted murder of a 58-year-old woman. In May, a New Hampshire newspaper revealed that the daughter Eckersley and Nancy adopted, who has battled mental illness and is now 22, is homeless in the state. It's one subject he would prefer not to talk about on the record, but it's clear the circumstances leave him aching. ...

For all his glory on the field, Eckersley's most impressive save was of himself. "I used to play the role of Johnny Diva, this baseball god," he says, "but inside, I was full of doubts. I was always like that, like, 'Uh-oh, it's about to go wrong.' I fight that, but man, I'm figuring it out. I'm happy now. It's a good life. ... Ultimately, it's just about being understood. Don't we all want that?"

Why Eck has not seen fit to work with a writer on a book about his "life and times" is a mystery to me. His honesty, common sense, candidness, humour, and crisp memory guarantee the result would be a hit.