BOSTON (CBS) – Former Red Sox pitcher Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd admitted on Wednesday that two-thirds of the time he was on the mound, he was under the influence of cocaine. “Oh yeah, at every ballpark. There wasn’t one ballpark that I probably didn’t stay up all night, until four or five in the morning, and the same thing is still in your system,” Boyd told WBZ NewsRadio 1030’s Jonny Miller in Fort Myers, Fla. “It’s not like you have time to go do it while in the game, which I had done that. “Some of the best games I’ve ever, ever pitched in the major leagues I stayed up all night; I’d say two-thirds of them,” said Boyd, who spent eight of his 10 major league seasons with the Red Sox. “If I had went to bed, I would have won 150 ballgames in the time span that I played.”

This story’s been kicking around for the last day or two and I haven’t gotten to it because, as much as I love to hear from Can, I didn’t need to be told he was coked out of his gourd for his entire Sox career.  You don’t act like he did and look like he did all that time without being on the yay.  I mean, this was a man who couldn’t go a day without uttering some sort of coked out nonsense.  Whether it was the time he said “Pete Rose likes me.  He appreciates my flamboyenceness.”  Or the time there was a bomb scare called in against the team’s charter flight and he said he hadn’t been told “They keep me pretty much in the dark about everything. If it had blown up I wouldn’t have known a thing about it.”  Or the one everyone over the age of 30 should know; when a game was cancelled due to fog and he said “What do they expect when they build a ballpark on the ocean like that.”  In Cleveland.  Those could only be the words of a guy doing ski resorts worth of blow.

But easily the most under reported story of Can’s career was the dead giveaway.  In the ’86 World Series, he was scheduled to pitch Game 7.  But a couple of days of rain allowed them to start Bruce Hurst on regular rest.  But when Hurst ran out of gas in the middle innings, Boyd wasn’t the first guy out of the bullpen.  Instead they went with Al Nipper who’s greatest career achievement to that point was being Roger Clemens’ drinking buddy.  In fact, Oil Can never came into the game and no explanation was given.   Everyone I knew just assumed that when he got passed over he’d gone a coke binge like it was the most natural thing in the world.  So I’m happy to see he’s still alive, finding out Oil Can Boyd liked coke is like hearing Babe Ruth was on hot dogs or the Yawkeys hated the Negroes or Wade Boggs liked vaginas.  Tell me something I don’t know.  @JerryThornton1