The 58th-to-last game Donnie Moore pitched was Game 5 of the 1986 American League Championship Series between Moore’s Angels and the Red Sox. It is the game that Moore will always be remembered for, although Al Michaels, who called that game and a hundred other momentous athletic contests for ABC, remembers it because it contained “the most dramatic hour of sports I’ve ever seen.”

“I did Lake Placid, the U.S.-Soviet game [the 1980 Winter Olympics hockey semifinal],” Michaels says, “but that drama took place within about 20, 25 minutes on the clock. This game in Anaheim, from the top of the ninth through the eleventh—if everyone sat around and debated the 20 greatest baseball games of all time, I think I could make a pretty good case for it.”

When Angels starter Mike Witt stepped onto the mound in the top of the ninth, leading 5-2 and coming off a breezy, nine-pitch eighth, the Angels stood three outs from their first-ever World Series appearance. Buckner smacked a leadoff single off of Witt, after which Angels’ bullpen coach Bob Clear got a call ordering him to get Moore and lefthander Gary Lucas warmed up.

“I don’t remember feeling rushed,” says Lucas, now 59, “but Donnie was the opposite: Get it going. Right now. Full throttle.” Policemen filed into the bullpen in advance of the celebration that stood two outs away once Witt struck out Jim Rice.

“I’m the guy who should probably take the brunt of everything that happened afterward because I could have kept Donnie out of that game,” says Lucas. “It’s kind of on my shoulders. I’ve felt it there for years.”

Don Baylor battled Witt to a full count before the Red Sox’ burly cleanup hitter lunged at one low and away, his bat landing the first knee-buckling uppercut of the Gatti-Ward fight that was about to ensue. Moore and Lucas pretended not to care about the two-run home run that dropped over the green vinyl sheet in leftfield. With the Angels’ lead now cut to one, Witt bore down and got Dwight Evans to pop up. One more out. Boston catcher Rich Gedman walking to the plate in the bright sunlight. “I knew he had gotten three hits [off Witt],” says Lucas, “and I had struck him out the night before, so I knew I was going in.”

Lucas would throw just one pitch that day—the pitch that Donnie Moore had helped him refine, the pitch that had made Moore an All Star and earned him the black Mercedes and the mansion on a two-acre spread in the Anaheim hills. Lucas and a few others called it a forkball. “Unfortunately, something just left me as far as what he had taught me and what I had done the night before,” he says, “and I tried to throw a better forkball than had ever been invented and it got away from me.

Jerry Wachter for Sports Illustrated

“I’m the guy who should probably take the brunt of everything that happened afterward because I could have kept Donnie out of that game,” adds Lucas, who hadn’t hit a batter for four years prior to plunking Gedman, and would strike Gedman out in all three of their other career appearances against one another. “It’s kind of on my shoulders. I’ve felt it there for years.”

Angels pitching coach Marcel Lachemann emerged from the Angels’ dugout and tapped his right arm as P.A. announcer Dennis Packer droned: “Centerfielder. Dave. Henderson.”

Tonya stopped catching Donnie around 1975 because of the pitch he picked up from Martin, an old-school Oklahoman who had been suspended from the big leagues from 1946 to ‘49 for moonlighting in Mexico. The split-finger fastball was too unpredictable for Tonya to catch. Too deceptive. “I didn’t want any part of that and he knew it,” she says.

Martin, the Cubs’ minor league pitching instructor, first showed the pitch to Moore in Midland, Tex., in 1974. Wedging the ball between his index and middle finger and throwing it as hard as he could, Donnie at some point found he had a knack for making it drop as it neared the plate. His friend and Midland teammate Bruce Sutter found he had the same knack, at almost exactly the same time. Moore and Sutter learned together from Martin that if you worked on stretching the webbing between the first two fingers then the pitch’s awkward grip could become more comfortable. They learned that the pitch could make good hitters look bad. Later they would learn firsthand that the pitch came with a price.

“Other than me, he had no one close to him that he could talk to deeply,” says Tonya. “Donnie was not a trusting person.”

The wrist is kept loose when throwing the split, so it’s murder on the shoulder and elbow. Sutter’s elbow is what went first. The surgically-repaired Cy Young winner, who would thank Martin and Moore in his 2006 Hall of Fame induction speech, soldiered on for three more years, just like Donnie was soldiering on in Omaha, before he threw his last pitch at age 35—Donnie’s age when he faced the Iowa Cubs in his last game. Lots of pitchers have messed around with the split or sprinkled it into their repertoires, but for guys like Sutter and Moore and Mike Scott and Hideo Nomo—pitchers who rely on it almost exclusively—no arm gets out intact.

Which meant that Donnie’s career had been hanging by a thread for years by the time he faced Dave Henderson in the ’86 ALCS, or more accurately, his career had been hanging by a few threads of connective tissue. Fibrous strands, unseen by Donnie or anyone else, that finally started to give way that spring, when Moore felt a stabbing pain in his lower back at the Angels’ 1986 spring training.

The relationship between Donnie and Tonya was clinging to its own frayed threads. For 20 years they had been a two-headed serpent that writhed against itself in equal parts agony and passion. Even today, Tonya will describe what a “selfish a------” and “awful husband and father” Donnie was, then seconds later reiterate how much she adored him and he adored her. Donnie did not discuss his marital problems with anyone, other than Buckner, very briefly, during an offseason hunting trip. Says Tonya: “Other than me, he had no one close to him that he would talk to deeply about things. Donnie was not a trusting person.”

Could a psychiatrist or marriage counselor have helped calm the storm that was building in him, Tonya is asked. Her eyelids lower with contempt—You have no idea what you’re talking about. She looks out the bay window next to her. “He would have died first.”

Sitting next to her is Demetria—tall, immaculately dressed, blessed with her mother’s looks more than her father’s—who says, “Well, that’s what happened, isn’t it?”

It was the Moores’ only reason for subjecting themselves to several days of interviews over the course of three years: the hope that someone out there might see in a friend or loved one what the Moores had not noticed in Donnie during the days just before his death. “The next step after recognition is getting help for the person,” says Demetria. “And making sure that the endangered wife or mother is safe… My daddy was not a bad man. I know that in my heart.”

Courtesy of Demetria Moore

Tonya says her former husband was “broken by some of the things he experienced as a child.” She declines to elaborate. Having grown up with Donnie in rural Texas and having traveled the country with him for years on his baseball odyssey, Tonya knows better than anyone that she and baseball were Donnie’s greatest accomplishments, his two most prized possessions. She also knows, more painfully, that she and baseball were the root of his ruin, never more profoundly than in the summer of ’89, when he realized he never owned either of them at all.

“He tried to act like it was no big deal,” Laskey said of the moment Donnie returned from Rosenblatt and said he’d been released, “but you knew it hurt.” Donnie had been hell-bent on playing in the big leagues since his age matched his final jersey number. So hell-bent that he transferred to an all-white high school because he knew that Monterey High’s coach, Bobby Moegle (the winningest coach in Texas history), could help him get drafted. So hell-bent that he pitched in nine straight playoff games not so much to win the state title (which Monterey did that ’72 season) but so that more scouts could see him. So hell-bent that Donnie turned down the powerful University of Texas baseball program in favor of Ranger [Junior] College. He wanted to quit school the moment he was offered a pro contract. It was an early version of the Omaha Ramada, a quick signpost in a life completely dedicated to pitching in the bigs. And now, in the summer of ’89, sooner than he was ready to hear it, the minors were telling Donnie Moore: No thanks.

“That’s what most of the one-on-one conversations I had with Donnie were about: ‘What’s next?’” says Laskey, who pitched for the Giants in the ’80s and currently calls their games as a local broadcaster. “He had no clue where to go, who to be.”

The Moores hope that someone out there might see in a friend or loved one what they had not noticed in Donnie. “The next step after recognition is getting help for that person,” says Demetria. “ My daddy was not a bad man . I know that in my heart.”

Laskey insisted that Moore drive their rental car from Rosenblatt back to the Ramada and leave the keys for him at the front desk after Moore checked out. When Laskey returned to the hotel after that night’s game, he saw that Moore also left him an envelope containing cash—half of that month’s car rental charge. “First-class move,” Laskey says.

Midwest Airlines, now defunct, had four daily flights from Omaha to L.A. in June 1989. Each stopped in Chicago. Former Omaha Royals GM Bill Gorman thinks the big-league club probably booked Moore on one of these flights, which means he probably told Tonya he had been released during his layover because Tonya remembers: “He said he was getting ready to get on a flight and I remember I only had a couple hours to get out of the house.”

He arrived in a taxi at 4610 Cerro Vista, the home he had bought upon signing his $3 million contract with the Angels in ’86. In a two-acre meadow behind the house lay a private pond, home to 15 ducklings that had been given to the Moores by one of Donnie’s hunting buddies. Tonya was partial to those ducklings. Their presence at her ankles during her strolls around the pond had brought her rare slivers of peace.

When they first moved in, Donnie had the pond stocked with catfish so he could drop a hook in it when he didn’t want to drive to the country. But when he came home from Omaha in the summer of ’89, the catfish were gone and there was green scum on the pond. The ducklings were ducks and they didn’t get as much attention or torn-up bread as they used to.

Donnie’s only task before he began hunting Tonya was to pour some Jack Daniels into a tumbler and drink it. If he stayed consistent with his usual routine, he did this more than once. “He called everybody looking for me,” Tonya says. She was staying with a platonic friend, who lived with his sister and a roommate in an apartment in Rancho Cucamonga, 45 minutes from Anaheim.

Jerry Wachter for Sports Illustrated

Major league teams in the mid-’80s weren’t as discreet as they are today about things like cortisone shots. The Angels’ ‘87 media guide reported that Gary Lucas received six such injections in his injured back between spring and mid-July of ‘86. Donnie Moore’s friends, relatives and teammates believe he had twice that many in the same span, but his treatments continued until at least Oct. 12 of that year—the day he stood on the back of the mound in the ninth inning of Game 5 of the ALCS, preparing to face Dave Henderson and record the final out that would send the Angels to the World Series.

Moore somehow summoned his vanishing velocity and overpowered Henderson with fastballs that reached the plate sooner than Henderson expected them to. Henderson told ESPN writer Jim Caple in 2005: “I was in trouble. I was just trying to survive.” Henderson had been awful at the plate (.189) since arriving via trade from Seattle that August and was only playing in Game 5 because starting centerfielder Tony Armas hurt his ankle in the fifth inning. Witt had fanned Henderson on four pitches in the seventh. Now Witt was in the Angels clubhouse, watching on a boxy TV as Henderson fouled a 2-2 fastball straight back, his bat catching but a sliver of the ball. Without that sliver the Angels would have played Game One against the Mets the following Saturday.

We can share all these what-ifs and stories-within-the-story, but all that has mattered over the last 28 years is that Moore’s next pitch was a split-finger fastball that Henderson said “hung there a little bit” before breaking down and away. It was not an awful pitch. It was the first non-fastball Henderson saw from Moore. Henderson, his left knee locked prematurely, flung his bat toward the outside corner. Al Michaels summoned the high, slightly embarrassing octave he had accessed for Do you believe in Miracles? and cried: “To leftfield and deep and Downing goes back and it’s GONE! Unbe-LEEEV-able!”