Former Red Sox pitcher Oil Can Boyd says he used cocaine

FORT MYERS, Fla. (AP) Former Red Sox pitcher Dennis ``Oil Can'' Boyd says he probably pitched under the influence of cocaine ``at every ballpark'' during his 10-year career.

``There wasn't one ballpark that I probably didn't stay up all night, until 4 or 5 in the morning, and the same thing is in your system,'' Boyd said in an interview with Jon Miller of WBZ radio in Boston. ``It ain't like you had time to go and do it while you were in the game, which I have (done) that.''

Boyd was 78-77 with a 4.04 ERA in his career. In eight seasons with the Red Sox, from 1982-89, he was 60-56. In his last two seasons, he was 18-21 with Montreal and Texas.

``Some of the best games that I've ever, ever pitched in the major leagues, I stayed up all night. I'd say two-thirds of them,'' he said Wednesday at JetBlue Park, where Boston holds spring training, ``and if I had went to bed, I would have won 150 ballgames in the time span that I played and ... I felt like my career was cut short for a lot of reasons.''

One of them, he said, was ``bigotry.''

Boyd said he ``wasn't doing anything that hundreds of ballplayers weren't doing at the time, because that's how I learned it and I just caught the deep end of it. And the reason, too, also, that I caught the deep end of it (is) I'm black and the bottom line was that the game carries a lot of bigotry and that was just an easy way for them to do it.''

He said that ``If I wasn't outspoken and so-called `a proud, proud black man' maybe I would have got empathy and sympathy like other ballplayers got that I didn't get; like a Darryl Strawberry or Dwight Gooden, Steve Howe. I can name 50 people that got third and fourth chances all because they weren't outspoken black individuals.''

The right-hander, now 52, said not all of his teammates supported him, but veterans like Dwight Evans, Bill Buckner and Don Baylor did.

He also said he never had a drug test during his baseball career, but was told that ``if you don't stop doing this, we're going to put you into rehab, and I told them that I'm going to do what I got to do. I got to win ballgames. We'll talk about that in the offseason, but right now I got to win ballgames.''

Boyd's best seasons with the Red Sox were 1985, when he went 15-13 with a 3.70 ERA, and 1986 when he was 16-10 with a 3.78 ERA.

An autobiography of Boyd, ``They Call Me Oil Can: My Life in Baseball,'' is scheduled for release in June.