Can's Film Festival

The fall of Oil Can Boyd

Can's Film Festival

One of the problems with our baseball sims is that they do a poor job of reflecting the random off-field things that happen in the sport.

Now, I should be fair. You do get some random stories on OOTP. But even that game doesn’t have many of the kind of scandals that literally come from nothing that you get in real life.

Boyd was an interesting pitcher. He had a great season for the Red Sox in 1985, going 15-13 with a 3.70 ERA, but giving up a league high 273 hits in 272.1 innings in the process. He went 16-10 in 1986 with a 3.78 ERA, which was pretty good for the third man in a rotation that already had Clemens and Hurst.

But the oil can started to rust in 1987, at the tender age of 27.

And, strangely enough, the culprit seemed to be movie rentals.

The first mention came in this innocuous article from mid-February 1987:

Boyd was energetic and sure of himself, of course. And $600,000 a year or so could get you a lot of kung fu video rentals, even back in 1986.

However, the oil can apparently didn’t like returning his rentals:

$367.24 shouldn’t be a lot of money when you’re talking about a guy making around $600,000 a year, even when you do account for taxes and other ridiculousness. And, sadly, I wasn’t able to find a copy of The Lakeland Ledger to show you Dick Scanlon’s original article.

What I can show you, though, is just how much VCRs cost back in those days. This comes from the exact same issue of The Boston Globe:

A basic Emerson VCR ran just under $300, or less than Boyd’s charge for the late rental returns. And a 6 head high quality VCR cost just under $600.

Note as well the videos for sale for $5 each, as well as the new releases at only $9 each.

As far as rentals are concerned — while I don’t have any access to Winter Haven newspapers, I was able to find some rental ads from that time in other Florida papers. For example:

Boyd probably wasn’t all that technically proficient — but you can imagine how easy it might have been to buy 2 VCRs, get your 20 free rentals, and just make copies of the movies you wanted to keep. But it probably would have been cheaper to just buy them outright.

Or maybe Boyd went with a store like this:

Anyway — VCRs weren’t cheap, that’s for sure. But it’s still kind of ridiculous for him to incur the $300+ costs just for not returning his movies.

And, of course, that wasn’t the end of the articles:

People started doing slam dunks on Boyd:

From The Berkshire Eagle, March 7, 1987, page D1

Fist of Fury is a classic: Carol needed to get around a bit more. Ninja III looks like straight-to-video garbage. It’s Alive is a horror B movie that is far from a classic. Nudes In Limbo is, umm, interesting. And I think “Sexcetra” refers to this film (don’t worry, nothing bad is shown), which looks to me like hot garbage.

Anyway, $180 or whatever for 5 movies, 4 of which are awful, sounds like a crazy price to charge.

Instaed of winning 20 games in 1987, Boyd wound up injured:

From Hartford Courant, May 25, 1987, page 31

Boyd did finally come back to the team in late June, but was injured again not long afterwards:

From The Birmingham News, July 26, 1987, page 36

He was never the same pitcher again. He did have a good season in Montreal in 1990, but wound up traded to Texas the next year, and that was that.

Now, Boyd was going to be injured no matter what. However, I do have to wonder whether some of his frustration wasn’t related to the ridiculous movie rental scandal.