Tonight at 9pm EST MLB Network will air "1986: A Postseason To Remember" featuring present-day interviews with many principals from the '86 World Series between the Mets and the Red Sox. Of particular interest to baseball historians and people who hate Roger Clemens is a disagreement over the circumstances surrounding Clemens's exit after the seventh inning of Game 6. As manager John McNamara tells it:
He came off the mound in the bottom of the [seventh] inning and we were waiting there at the steps to congratulate him you know, getting out of the seventh and he came down the steps and he said, "That’s all I can pitch." Quote unquote. And my answer to him was, "You gotta be s***ting me." And he said "No," and he showed us his finger … where he had the start of a paper tear on his middle finger and - well, correct this right here and now – he had no blister whatsoever, and how that got started I don’t know. But it spread rapidly and it continued over the next two years [that] the blister took him out of the ball game. And that is not the case. As sure as I’m sitting here.
Clemens remembers things differently:
I think I was getting ready to hit and if I’m not mistaken, McNamara pinch-hit Mike Greenwell for me. Again, I don’t know why [McNamara] would say something like that, if it was to deflect attention from the game. My recollection is I was at the bat rack putting my gloves on or getting my bat, my helmet or whatever and getting ready to go hit. I think I had only given up four hits. I’ve pitched 100-pitch games, I’ve pitched 150-pitch games, I think I threw a 164-pitch game at some point in my career, so I don’t know where that came from.
The program's scope isn't limited to the World Series, as it includes reminiscences of the league championship series as well. Bob Costas and Tom Verducci host, with Costas apparently having printed several hundred note cards to work from during the studio portion of the special:
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Keith Hernandez and Mookie Wilson will be on tap, as will numerous members of the Sox, Astros, and Angels teams from that postseason.