Bob Boone (1947–2026): One Strike Away From Changing Mets History

Bob Boone died Monday, ten days short of his 79th birthday. His son Bret announced it. In the Boone family, the news always travels through baseball.

If you're under 40, you probably know him as Aaron and Bret Boone's dad. Friends, you have the family tree exactly upside down. Aaron and Bret are Bob's kid. There's a difference, and the difference is 2,225 games behind home plate.

Let that number breathe for a second. Bob Boone caught 2,225 major league games. When he passed 2,000 in 1988, he was the first catcher in history to get there — every other position had crossed that line a quarter-century earlier, because every other position gets to stand up between pitches. Boone held the all-time record for six years. Carlton Fisk finally passed him in 1993, in the last game Fisk ever played — by exactly one game, 2,226 to 2,225. Even the record book needed to go down to the final day to beat Bob Boone. Iván Rodríguez owns the mark now, and Gary Carter is fifth on the list.

He wasn't a passenger back there, either. Seven Gold Gloves — two with the Phillies, four with the Angels, and one more with Kansas City at age 41, when most catchers are icing both knees as a lifestyle choice. He caught 117 shutouts. Rickey Henderson ran on Boone 26 times and got thrown out 15 — the best success rate any catcher ever posted against him. His full 1977 season behind the plate: eight errors, three passed balls. Three. There are catchers who have three passed balls in a weekend.

The Phillies drafted him out of Stanford in 1969 as a third baseman, then converted him to catcher, partly because they had a kid named Mike Schmidt coming. (Good call by everybody.) Boone took over the job in 1973, finished third in the Rookie of the Year vote, and spent a decade as the quiet machinery inside those great Phillies teams — Schmidt, Bowa, Luzinski, Carlton, and Boone behind the plate calling the pitches.

October was where he cashed in. In Game 5 of the 1980 NLCS, winner-take-all in Houston, Boone ripped a two-run single off Nolan Ryan to give the Phillies the lead in a game they'd win in extra innings to take the pennant. Nine days later he was behind the plate for the final pitch of the 1980 World Series — Tug McGraw striking out Willie Wilson, the Phillies champions for the first time in 97 years of trying. Hold that image. We're coming back to Tug.

Then Philadelphia sold him to California — for cash — after the 1981 season. Boone had been one of the players' leading voices in the '81 strike, and nobody in baseball pretended the two facts were unrelated. All he did in Anaheim was average better than 140 games caught a year through his late thirties, make another All-Star team at 35, and on September 30, 1984, catch Mike Witt's perfect game. Two closing seasons in Kansas City, retirement at 42, and a Nationals front-office job into his seventies followed.

Now — the Mets part. Because for a guy who never wore the uniform, Bob Boone spent an astonishing amount of his life standing in our way at Shea Stadium.

Opening Day, April 8, 1975. Seaver vs. Carlton, the third straight year those two opened the season against each other, 45 degrees and everybody wearing a coat over their hope. Boone walked in the third, got bunted to second by Carlton, and scored the Phillies' only run on a Dave Cash double that Dave Kingman lost in the sun. He doubled in the fifth, singled in the eighth, and went home 2-for-2 with a walk — the entire Philadelphia offense — and the Mets still won 2-1.

April 15, 1979, first game of a doubleheader at Shea. Tie game, sixth inning, Craig Swan on the mound. Manny Trillo singled and took second when Lee Mazzilli kicked the ball around in center, and Boone — Boone — singled him home with the run that beat us, 3-2. And who came in to save it for Philadelphia? Tug McGraw, who closed the door on his old team and then, a year and a half later, threw the most famous pitch of his life straight into Bob Boone's mitt to end a World Series. Tug is the thread that runs through this whole story. Our guy, their catcher, one pitch, forever.

August 15, 1980: 44,754 people at Shea on a fireworks night, the Phillies in a pennant race with Montreal and the Mets still close enough to pretend. Boone drove in the first run with an infield single, Pete Rose collected his 3,500th career hit, Tug pitched in relief, Dallas Green — a future Mets manager — ran the show from the Phillies' dugout, and Philadelphia won 8-0. By September our summer had wheezed out, as those summers did. Theirs hadn't.

But the moment that should be carved over the door is October 12, 1986, Game 5 of the ALCS in Anaheim. Boone, 38 years old, a .222 hitter that season, turned into a one-man wrecking crew: a home run off Bruce Hurst, a .455 average for the series. The Angels led Boston 5-4 in the ninth, two outs, one strike from their first pennant — one strike from keeping the Red Sox out of the World Series entirely — and Donnie Moore's forkball didn't break, and Dave Henderson hit it into the left-field seats. In the bottom of the ninth, Boone singled to start the rally that tied the game, because of course he did. The Angels lost in eleven, lost the series in seven, and you know what happened in Flushing two weeks later. If that forkball drops six inches, there is no Game 6. There is no ball through Buckner's legs. There's just the Mets and the Angels, and a very different October. Bob Boone was the man squatting behind the plate for the hinge of our entire history, wearing the other team's uniform, playing the series of his life.

Moore never outran that pitch; he took his own life in 1989, and it's worth saying that the cruelest inning in baseball history had a catcher in it too, and he carried his share of it with grace for forty years.

And then there's the family. Ray Boone was a two-time All-Star infielder. Bob was a four-time All-Star. Bret was a two-time All-Star. Aaron — the Yankees' manager, the 2003 pennant home run — was an All-Star. Four Boones, three generations, every one of them an All-Star, something no family had ever done. (Family lore insists they descend from Daniel Boone, which would make "Boone" the most nominatively determined name in American history.) His grandson Jake is an infielder in the Nationals' system, which means generation four is in the on-deck circle. He managed in the big leagues himself — Kansas City, then Cincinnati, where the Reds fired him on July 28, 2003, and the Yankees acquired Aaron that same week. The Boone family does not do slow news cycles.

I got to sit with two generations of that family at one table. In November 2012, at the Players Association's Legends for Youth Dinner, I interviewed Bob and Bret together — father and son, side by side, the family story handed back and forth the way families tell it. What stayed with me was Bob himself: no wasted words, everything measured, the catcher still calling the game even in a suit. He talked about growing up as Ray Boone's kid, and about the Phillies moving him from third base to catcher because a kid named Mike Schmidt was coming — the switch that built the whole career, told like it was just another lineup change.

Three generations of All-Stars, a fourth in the on-deck circle — that night it wasn't trivia, it was just the Boones at dinner. Press play and spend nine minutes with the patriarch. For once, he's the one doing the talking.

Bob and Bret Boone at the MLBPA Legends for Youth Dinner, November 2012. Photo: Richard James / SPORTSTALKNY.

Years later, Bret told me what the game looked like from inside that family, when he sat for Glove Story, the fathers-and-sons book I wrote with A.J. Carter. It starts with Ray. Bret’s first baseball memories are of his grandfather — a little kid up at five in the morning, catcher’s gear already on, waking Ray Boone up to play. “Grandpa was probably my early influence in the game,” Bret said. “I was relentless.”

Bob, meanwhile, was at the ballpark working, so it wasn’t hitting or throwing lessons — Bret learned the game by hanging around it, shagging flies and playing catch with Manny Trillo and Mike Schmidt while his dad got ready for that night’s game. “He taught me how to walk, talk, act, behave like a professional,” Bret said. “That’s the important part of raising kids.”

And the teaching never stopped. Bret’s son Jacob — the fourth generation — took his swing questions to Bob, his grandfather; Bret handled the mental side. Looking back, Bret said: “When you step back and look at what we’ve accomplished as a family, it’s pretty special — what we’ve done, starting with Grandpa, and then Dad, and then me, and then my brother.”

Greg Luzinski's post said it best: "RIP to close friend Bob Boone. My roommate has passed on." Roommates. The Bull, grieving the catcher. Those Phillies were a fraternity, and Boone was its dean of students.

Somebody had to squat behind the plate for two decades of baseball history. Somebody had to catch Carlton and Witt, single off Ryan with a pennant on the line, knock in the run that beat us on a Sunday in '79, and stand one strike from rewriting our October in '86. It was usually Bob Boone — upright, unhurried, throwing out Rickey Henderson for fun.

Rest easy, Boonie. And thanks for the forkball staying up. We'll take it from here.

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