Game Six: Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America's Pastime

by Mark Frost

  The 1970 Cincinnati Reds were a veteran squad, packed with a host of gifted players who had never quite gelled as a team, and having watched managers come and go over the years, they greeted this peppery little bush leaguer with open skepticism. After they stopped asking “Sparky who?” they called him “the minor-league motherfucker.” Sparky saw it, heard it, sensed it—he could always read people—and told them straight off: You don’t have to like me. You don’t have to respect me. I’m here to earn your respect. He started by taking the time to get to know them and their families, comprehending who each of these men was inside and what they needed not just as players but as people. From day one of spring training in 1970, Sparky installed the same rigorous, regimented training program that had been a crucial component of the Dodgers’ system in which he’d grown up. The Reds’ veterans grumbled—catcher Johnny Bench called their camp that year “Stalag 17”—but the team emerged from Florida in tremendous physical shape. Anderson also recognized the corresponding values of imposing strict discipline while maintaining each man’s self-respect, and had an unerring instinct for keeping that equation in balance. Managers in baseball then still held absolute authority; Sparky wielded his without lording it over you, although God help you if you pushed him too far. Whenever the Reds needed a shakeup, he’d call a team meeting, then single out and rip one of his superstars, who were tough enough to take it, and smart enough to realize that he was sending a message to the rest of the squad. By the end of their first season together Sparky had brought each of his men face-to-face with the mirror, and from then on they gave him everything they had. Anderson knew that he’d inherited a unique core of talent, and he was always first to acknowledge the part that luck had played in landing where he had when he had, but it took skill, toughness, psychology, street smarts, attention to detail, and bone-grinding hard work to keep adding the right pieces and then forge all that talent into a team. Sparky’s philosophy as a manager of a team this deep and strong was simple: If the clubhouse was under control, the field would take care of itself, and the Reds’ record since he’d taken over offered irrefutable evidence. The Big Red Machine had won more games during the 1970s than any other team in baseball.

  Anderson would have been perfectly happy remaining their anonymous commander in the dugout, but during the Reds’ ascent a fascinating transformation occurred in their manager as well: The modest, down-to-earth, formerly camera-shy George Anderson developed what amounted to a public alter ego, and this chatty, magnetic, approachable, and (now) white-haired character named “Sparky” had become one of the most liked and instantly recognizable characters in all of American sports, an ambassador for his sport and a star in his own right. By the end of his first season, when he’d led the Reds into a World Series that they lost in five games to Earl Weaver’s fearsome Baltimore Orioles, Cincinnati’s management insisted that their manager now sign all his autographs as “Sparky.” Contemporary marketing experts call the process “building the brand,” but his popularity came about in a much more organic way: Sparky simply liked every kind of people, and the impact he made on them was often profound. During the week they’d spent in Boston for this World Series, Sparky had already made a dozen friends for life, won over every tough Southie cabdriver he’d encountered, and had the notoriously cynical Boston sportswriting fraternity following him around like a pack of happy puppies. Sparky possessed the rare gifts of presence and poise, sincerity, good humor, and authenticity, and as his parents had taught him to do, he treated every human being he met as his equal. As much as Sparky always liked to downplay his contributions, there was a whole lot more to managing a big-league squad than writing out the lineup card. But you never heard him take credit for it—Rod Dedeaux and Casey Stengel had taught him that as well—another part of what made him such an exceptional leader of men.

  The 1975 Cincinnati Reds had everything: power, speed, exceptional defense—at one point in 1975 they went fifteen straight games without committing an error, another major-league record—a strong and versatile bench, and a bulletproof committee bullpen that had led the National League in saves with fifty. No wonder their good starting pitchers never got the credit they deserved. But as great as the Reds were in 1975, and had been consistently for the six years since Anderson arrived, they hadn’t yet won the World Series that would validate their vaunted reputation. Cincinnati’s historical record in the Fall Classic, although not as operatic or lavishly lamented as that of the Red Sox, was every bit as dismal, and on the facts less than half as productive. After winning their first World Series championship in 1919, the Reds waited twenty years for their second and had captured just one more National League pennant since, in 1961, only to be steamrollered in a five-game Series by the powerhouse Yankees. Another decade of doldrums followed, but since Sparky had taken the helm, the Reds had climbed within reach of that elusive prize twice, only to come away both times empty-handed. So it hardly mattered now that they were only one game away from the championship again; Stengel had said it to him first decades ago and Dedeaux had repeated it ad infinitum, and Sparky kept saying it now in the same classically fractured baseball syntax until he was blue in the face: They don’t hand out no trophies for second place.

  If his Reds didn’t close the deal this time, Sparky knew that the combustible mixture of talent, luck, and locker room chemistry that enabled any winning ball club to perform at its peak could blow apart on the first strong breeze. No one in Cincinnati’s front office had said as much to him, and they didn’t need to; he knew that his own job, the jobs of his coaching staff and almost every man on the roster, hung in the balance. Every championship team had to learn to win at this level, and by any fair measure the men of the Big Red Machine had all had more than enough postseason education. It was expected of them now. It was time.

  One more win.

  And so the question for tonight. He’d moved Morgan back up into the second spot for the first two games of the Series, on the heavy, wet grass of Fenway, dropping Griffey down to seventh. They’d split those games, an acceptable result. Back home on the turf at Riverfront for Games Three through Five, he’d slotted Griffey back in between Rose and Morgan. With their speed restored at the top of the lineup, the Reds had won two of those three games and seized the Series lead. Now, back at Fenway for Game Six, especially after the weekend’s torrential rains had muddied the track, percentages dictated he should go back to Morgan batting behind Rose, and drop Griffey to the seven hole again. Griffey had come through with a timely ninth-inning hit to win Game Two but had been struggling at the plate since—Sparky thought his budding young star was feeling the pressure of his first Series—and even the rock-steady Morgan had been pressing a little, trying to make things happen, although he’d started to come around in Cincinnati. Anderson needed power more than speed on the damp field at Fenway tonight, and nobody set the table for the meat of his lineup like Little Joe. Morgan himself had been lobbying for the move since the playoffs began, and Sparky gave everything his best all-around player said a lot of weight.

  But something ate at him. Every time he picked up the pen that afternoon to write in Joe’s name under Pete’s, he hesitated. Sparky lived and died with percentages, but he also trusted his gut, and right now it was burning a hole through him.

  He knew it had something to do with that pitcher the Sox were throwing at them again tonight. The man this damn rain delay was letting them bring back a game earlier than they otherwise would have been able to, the one who’d single-handedly won the only two games the Red Sox had taken in this Series, the second one—Game Four, one that Sparky felt the Reds should have grabbed—on sheer guts and willpower alone. Their ace, the only man in a Boston uniform who really unnerved him, the wild card in this whole mysterious equation.

  That damn Tiant.

  FOUR

  When we play, we play. Forget the excuses.

  RED SOX SHORTSTOP RICK BURLESON

  ON THEIR WAY UP TO THE BOOTH TO PREPARE FOR THE br
oadcast, Tony Kubek and Dick Stockton made a pass through Fenway’s rooftop press box and grabbed a quick bite to eat at the buffet. Boston Globe beat writer Peter Gammons came over to say hello to Kubek, and introduced his colleague Lesley Visser, the comely, wide-eyed young woman at his side. Gammons explained that Lesley was the beneficiary of the press pass that Kubek had graciously procured for him that day. Trying not to gush, Lesley thanked Kubek profusely. Kubek, in turn, introduced her to Dick Stockton, whom Lesley knew from television as the Red Sox play-by-play man.

  Stockton responded the way most red-blooded American males did upon meeting Lesley; he began figuring out how he was going to end up with her phone number by the end of the conversation. Not without cause, Dick had developed a bit of a reputation around town as a ladies’ man—he was a high-profile bachelor and this was the mid-seventies—and pressed as he was for time, he threw caution to the wind and asked her out to dinner. Accustomed as any attractive young woman is to fielding male attention, Lesley might have demurred, but this was her first visit to the fabled Fenway press box, with scores of the nation’s best sportswriters preparing to man rows of typewriters arrayed like a battery of guns toward the playing field. The room was flooded with lifelong heroes from her improbable chosen field, and this was the first time she’d ever laid eyes on most of them: Dick Young, the irascible dean of baseball beat writers, from New York’s Daily News; the Los Angeles Times’s wry humanist Jim Murray; the New Yorker’s elegant essayist Roger Angell. The whole experience left her “feeling a little like Dorothy after crash landing in Oz.” An unknown walking into the commissary at MGM wouldn’t have felt more starstruck.

  So she said yes to dinner. Stockton pocketed her phone number, excused himself, and hurried after Kubek to the NBC broadcast booth; so far, so good. Lesley stepped back out of the way, standing behind the top row of press box seats as game time approached, and prepared to drink it all in.

  ON GAME DAY before his scheduled starts nobody talked to Luis Tiant. Before every other game, on any other day, Luis was the clubhouse clown, the prankster who kept the whole team loose. As his friend Tommy Harper liked to say about him, Luis “woke up funny,” and his sly, corner-barbershop perspective punctured all pretension; take yourself too seriously around El Tiante at your own peril. His elaborate practical jokes had become the stuff of legend in Fenway, and there was no limit to the lengths to which he’d lie in wait to exact revenge for any retaliation. A major-league club’s locker room chemistry is the submerged end of the iceberg the public seldom sees, but has as much to do with its success as what happens on the field. Every squad is hierarchical and naturally forms a pecking order, immediately apparent to everyone on the roster, that dictates deference and ritualizes daily routine—stars at the top, scrubs at the bottom—for better or worse. But Tiant had tweaked the Red Sox status quo from the day he first arrived in Boston in 1971—at that point a broken-down former star, buried in the bullpen, trying to resurrect his career after two lost, injured seasons—and his first target had been the team’s dour veteran captain, Carl Yastrzemski.

  By virtue of his talent, work ethic, and decade-long tenure, Yaz was the Red Sox’s unquestioned leader, but although as intelligent and articulate about the game as any man playing it, he didn’t tend to say much. Intimidated by Yaz’s intensity and smoldering self-containment, the team’s younger players went out of their way to avoid ruffling his feathers, which created an unintended air of tension around the captain and their locker room. Although deeply talented, the Red Sox of that moment hadn’t come together as a team, and were succinctly described as “twenty-five players taking twenty-five cabs.” Tiant immediately sensed that the driven, reticent Yastrzemski was also simply shy, and when he responded to the first prank Luis pulled on him with roars of laughter—and soon after retaliated with a prank of his own—the ice was broken. Tiant dubbed Yaz the “Great Polacko”—nobody else could get away with that—but he made even more fun of himself; everybody laughed at Luis. The squad had grown steadily closer off the field ever since, with the good-natured Tiant as its unifying center; his ability to accept the bad with the good—and laugh at both—had given these Red Sox a guiding philosophy.

  And during that time, regaining arm strength and control after nearly losing his career, Luis Tiant had reclaimed his status on the field as one of the most respected starting pitchers in the game. He’d won seventy-nine games for the Red Sox since, winning twenty in three consecutive seasons, if you counted his recent postseason wins, a feat no Boston pitcher had accomplished since the dawn of the twentieth century. As Darrell Johnson had predicted when they signed him, Tiant was now the number one starter on the Red Sox staff, but his recent performance during their drive to the pennant in 1975 had elevated him to the revered status of a Boston folk hero.

  Twice in the previous three seasons the Red Sox had squandered substantial late-season leads in the East Division and let a postseason berth slip from their grasp; in 1974, their epic collapse had been one of the most wrenching any team had suffered in twenty years. With that heartbreak fresh in their minds, the Red Sox reached September of 1975 with a six-game lead, and New England’s fatalistic fans began glancing over their shoulders, certain that another specter of doom must be gaining on them. Misfortune seemed even more certain when later that month their power-hitting rookie left fielder Jim Rice was lost for the year, his left hand fractured by an errant fastball. Earl Weaver’s Orioles, who had overtaken them in ’74, charged hard at the Sox again now, cutting the lead to four and a half games.

  Their running battle climaxed in the most exciting game Fenway had seen since 1967, a tense pitchers’ duel on September 16, between Oriole ace and future Hall of Famer Jim Palmer and Luis Tiant, who tossed a masterful 2–0 shutout in front of an ecstatic crowd, to extend Boston’s lead. Tiant had defended the ramparts. From that point on the Red Sox held firm; the Orioles couldn’t gain any more ground and, exhausted by the effort, faltered at the wire. Despite the loss of Rice, their offense never sputtered, and the Red Sox clinched the American League East in the final week of the season. Their subsequent sweep of the three-time defending World Series champion Oakland A’s in the League Championship confounded the national pundits, who never placed much stock in Boston’s chances, and worked their faithful into a frenzy. Much of their adoration settled on their number one starter, Luis Tiant, the foundation of their finishing kick and the player Tom Yawkey singled out as “the man who did it for us.” His numbers cinch the argument: In the last three weeks of the season, and thus far into the League Championship and World Series, while throwing five complete-game victories at Fenway Park in a row, Luis Tiant had allowed only one earned run to cross home plate.

  Out in right field, Luis finished his warm-ups in the bullpen, slipped on his jacket, strutted into the dugout, and sat by himself on the Red Sox bench—eyes hooded, brow furrowed, in a trance of concentration—until it was go time. When El Tiante stepped out on the field to take the mound for Game Six, the fans at Fenway rose as one, an extended standing ovation. No starting pitcher had won three games in a World Series since the Tigers’ Mickey Lolich in 1968, and only once had a team ever lost a Series when a pitcher pulled off that rare feat. The crowd urged Tiant to his task, and the chant they’d adopted as their battle cry that summer filled the air: “Loo-eee, Loo-eee, Loo-eee!”

  In the press box, the staccato clatter of keys from two hundred typewriters signaled the onset of hostilities. Young David Israel from the Washington Star had managed to secure a seat next to Red Smith, the seventy-year-old veteran baseball writer for the New York Times, poised over his blue portable Olympia. The chilly evening air in the open press box felt electric; Israel sensed a story was waiting out there on the field for him, the kind that could make careers. If half of catching a break was being in the right place at the right time, this might just be his night.

  In the trailer under the right field stands, at precisely 8:30 P.M. Eastern standard time, director Harry Coyl
e called the broadcast’s first shots, cued Joe Garagiola in the booth, and Game Six, the first World Series game ever played at night in Fenway Park, went out live to the nation and around the world on NBC. Garagiola made his opening remarks and then introduced the audience to Dick Stockton, who would handle play-by-play for the first half of the game, then turn it back over to Garagiola.

  Boston Celtics forward John “Hondo” Havlicek drew a big hand from the crowd as he and his wife, Beth, took their seats near the field. The thirty-five-year-old forward, a week away from starting his fourteenth season with the club, was one of the last remaining links to the remarkable 1960s Celtics dynasty that had captured eleven NBA championships in thirteen years. After most of that group, led by center and coach Bill Russell, retired, Havlicek had captained the Celtics to their first title in five years, in 1974, and his presence seemed to encourage the crowd to believe that tonight anything was possible for their Red Sox. With its smaller rosters, basketball had been the first of the major sports to start lavishing star players with contracts that made more headlines than the games themselves; Havlicek was playing for $250,000 this year, more than the entire championship Celtics roster had cost just a decade earlier.

  On the Cincinnati bench, Sparky Anderson jammed another stick of gum in his mouth and took his place on the bench beside coach Larry Shepard; he always had Shepard sit to his right, and when the Reds were in the field, third base coach Alex Grammas sat on his left. Superstition, the secret religion of baseball—and Sparky was a devout believer—demanded that they always assume this formation.

  Home plate umpire Satch Davidson handed the game’s first ball to Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk, who threw it out to Tiant, and he completed his final warm-up tosses.