Don Cooper Confirms That Mark Buehrle Was Shitfaced When He Picked Up The Save In Game 3 Of The 2005 World Series
As a player, when you look back on your career, it’s the little things like this that you remember. Think about it; a lot of you played HS sports and probably like to reminisce about them a lot. It’s not often you talk about the game winning touchdown you scored. It’ll be that time you got caught stealing booze out of your neighbor’s garage and your coach made you run until you puked the next day. Or the time you were fucking around with fireworks and threw one in your buddy’s 1992 Buick Century and it caught the cloth on fire, causing the car to explode. Again, it’s the little things.
Yeah, winning the World Series and being on the pinnacle of the baseball world for a year trumps all. But 10, 20, 30 years from now, when Buehrle, Aaron Rowand and Joe Crede are throwing back cold ones in one of their back yards, they won’t be talking about Jermaine Dye’s go-ahead single in game 4, or Uribe’s catch diving head first into the stands. They’ll be telling stories about how Buehrle was shitfaced drunk in an extremely high leverage situation with Cooper yelling to him from the dugout “AIM FOR THE MIDDLE AJ!!!” Or belting out some Steve Perry on karaoke at a random bar in Kansas City. Or all of the road tail they pulled. Most of the time, it will be all of the stuff they did BESIDES win the World Series, though that might come up here and there as well.
Joking aside, I can confirm this story is in fact true. At Soxfest this year, Cooper was speaking in front of a panel and a fan asked him if Buehrle was in fact drunk while he picked up that save. Cooper laughed and said, “no comment”, meaning “yes, he was obliterated.” I also went to college with the batboy of the 2005 White Sox, (we were freshman in HS), and he told us that the pitchers would get absolutely smoked during the games in their off days. So yes, this story about Buerhle is true, no it is not some urban legend, and yes it is awesome in every single way.
Also, with the whole celebration of the 10 year anniversary of the 2005 World Series, from Soxfest over the winter until now, I have heard players from Aaron Rowand, Joe Crede, and John Garland over the last few months to Bobby Jenks most recently talk about the extreme camaraderie the 2005 team had. That even with a blend of Japanese, Spanish, and English speaking players, the rapport they had was through the roof and they had each other’s back through thick and thin. I don’t think that team was necessarily more talented than the current one, but they were the epitome of a “team”. A group of men, banded together, who shared a common goal. To me the current roster seems like a collection of random pieces with no unity, bond, or collective mindset. It’s sad, but true.