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

by Mark Frost

  Tiant started him with a hard fastball on the outside corner for a called strike.

  Cesar Francisco Geronimo hadn’t played a lot of formal baseball growing up, but he discovered while playing softball for his high school seminary that he’d been blessed with a freakishly strong throwing arm. On the strength of that alone he’d been scouted and signed in 1967 by the Yankees, who tried and failed to make a pitcher out of him. They moved him to the outfield, but when he didn’t show much promise at the plate, the Yankees let him go to the Astros, who were impressed by his speed and that spectacular arm, qualities they desperately needed in the cavernous, artificial-turf outfield of the Astrodome.

  Tiant came right back with another fastball down the middle for another called strike, challenging Geronimo now, ahead in the count 0–2.

  Starting in 1969 Geronimo had played three part-time seasons for the Astros, primarily as a defensive replacement, getting to the plate only 138 times. He still hadn’t hit much and showed almost no power, but he’d caught the Reds’ attention with his nine-foot stride and howitzer arm. Sparky had been preaching the importance of defense ever since he arrived, particularly up the middle; he considered the catcher, the two middle infielders, and the center fielder to be the heart of any defense. With Bench and Concepcion already in place, Sparky figured that Morgan and Geronimo—who wouldn’t have to hit much if he patrolled center like they thought he could on the carpet in Riverfront—would give him the strongest defensive quartet in the league. Not only did the Reds’ bet pay off on Geronimo’s defense—he had just won his second straight Gold Glove as one of the National League’s best defensive outfielders; all four of the Reds’ defenders up the middle took home that award in 1975—under coach Ted Kluszewski’s sound tutelage he’d grown into a much better and more patient hitter than they’d ever anticipated, giving them bonus production out of the eighth spot in the lineup.

  Tiant came back in with a live fastball inside that just missed for a ball, then another that Geronimo just caught a piece of with a late, defensive swing, fouling it back to the screen.

  The Reds’ most effective pinch hitter, Terry Crowley, had moved out to the on-deck circle, to bat in the pitcher’s spot, officially indicating that Gary Nolan was done for the night. Sparky hadn’t said a word to Nolan when he came in, and didn’t have to; even though he’d shown much better stuff in his second inning, Nolan knew they couldn’t afford to fall any further behind. Although he felt dejected about being pulled from the game so early, Nolan didn’t hang his head, and instead of staying in the clubhouse after his shower, he put on a fresh uniform, walked back down the tunnel to the dugout, and grabbed a seat on the bench, hoping to see his team come back.

  Having set the table with a steady diet of fastballs, Tiant gave Geronimo the full-throttle windup and then pulled the string on a slow outside curve that Geronimo swung at and missed by a foot for Luis’s third strikeout of the game.

  Without a runner on base, Sparky called Crowley back to the dugout, saving him for later in the game, and sent up Darrel Chaney in his place. The twenty-seven-year-old Chaney was a Reds lifer, a slick-fielding switch-hitting infielder who had shared the starting shortstop job with Davey Concepcion until he won the job outright in 1972. Chaney had become one of the leaders of the Reds’ second stringers who occasionally cracked the lineup of the “Great Eight” during the regular season, but who disappeared almost completely in postseason play. This self-deprecating group of scrubs banded together off the field and played an important role in the Reds’ positive team chemistry, keeping one another loose, never complaining about their limited roles, good soldiers in Sparky’s reserve corps. They prepared for their sporadic appearances with diligent professionalism and took an almost perverse pride in the degree to which the press and anyone outside of the most fanatic Reds boosters completely ignored them. They decided to call themselves, not for public consumption, the “Big Red Turds,” and even had T-shirts made bearing the phrase, which they wore under their uniforms. Chaney had made one previous pinch-hit appearance against Tiant, in Game Four, striking out with a runner on base.

  Chaney’s appearance here in Game Six was even briefer, as he lifted a first-pitch fastball into the prevailing wind in deep left field, where Yastrzemski hurried back to the base of the Monster and snagged the ball over his head for the second out of the inning.

  Both Larry Shepard and Ted Kluszewski had noticed something in the team’s chart of Tiant’s pitches and pointed it out to Sparky just before Chaney’s at bat. Instead of the dizzying array of off-speed offerings they’d seen from Tiant during his first two games—which had caused most of the Reds to lay off his first pitch—they’d noticed that tonight he was starting almost every batter he faced with a fastball around the plate, trying to sneak in a strike and get ahead in the count. Armed with that information, Sparky had warned Chaney to be looking for a first-pitch fastball, and sure enough Tiant had thrown him one in the zone; Chaney, with a grand total of seven home runs in his seven major-league seasons, had hacked at it and driven the ball to the warning track.

  Word spread quietly through the Reds dugout. Back to the top of the order, Pete Rose came to the plate for the second time, looking fastball, and when Tiant came at him with one, Pete nodded and watched it land outside for a ball. Now expecting him to come with something off-speed, Rose sat back, and Tiant served him one on a platter, a soft change that broke down over the heart of the plate; Rose whacked it into center field for the Reds’ first hit of the game.

  Sparky got up on his feet, clapped his hands, and climbed the first step of the dugout, as Rose rounded first; no one else in Fenway might have agreed at that moment, but Sparky felt the stirrings of a shift in momentum.

  Ken Griffey came up for his second at bat, as Rose took a short lead; no threat to steal in this situation—Sparky was more interested in continuing to field-test his new theory about Tiant.

  And there it was, another first-pitch fastball; Griffey swung and stung it back up the middle of the box. Tiant reached down low to his left, the direction his follow-through was already carrying him, and the ball just ticked off the webbing of his glove. That redirected it right to where Denny Doyle was drifting to his left off second, and he scooped it up and fired to Cooper at first, beating the swift Griffey by a step for the third out, to end the inning.

  The Reds were still down three runs, had only one hit through the first third of the game, and Darrel Chaney’s at bat wouldn’t amount to much in the game’s final box score, but in the eternal chess match between pitcher and batter, Sparky had found his first exploitable edge against the baffling Tiant.

  NINE

  I thought I had to show all my stuff and almost tore the boards off the grandstand. One of the fellas called me “Cyclone,” but finally shorted it to “Cy” and it’s been that way ever since.

  CY YOUNG

  SUGGESTIONS THAT THE FIRST GAME OF THE FIRST “World Series” in 1903 might have been fixed weren’t helped when one of Boston’s regulars was approached by an infamous gambler in the lobby of their hotel before the fourth game in Pittsburgh and offered $12,000 if he’d lie down and let the Pirates win. That same player, catcher Lou Criger, had been the most obvious suspect in the Americans’ shameful performance during Game One—he committed two errors in the first inning alone—but this time, either stricken with remorse or insulted by the size of the offer, Criger immediately reported the incident to American League president Ban Johnson. Aware that public opinion already harbored suspicions of monkey business on the part of his league’s best and most representative team, Johnson suppressed information about the offer—it wouldn’t reach print for twenty years—and the Americans still went on to lose Game Four, although not before mounting a spirited and genuine ninth-inning comeback, by a final score of 5–4. Boston now trailed in the best of nine Series three games to one; the success of Pittsburgh’s mission to crush their upstart rivals from the junior league appeared inevitable.

 
; Game Five changed everything. Throughout the game Boston’s fanatical Royal Rooters—many of them newspapermen, led by saloon owner “Nuf Ced” McGreevey and his brass band—staked out a position on top of the Americans’ dugout, belting out improvised lyrics to the popular song “Tessie” that called out and individually savaged members of the Pirates’ lineup. In the sixth inning of a tense, scoreless contest—with Cy Young back on form for Boston—two of Pittsburgh’s outfielders, unable over the Rooters’ racket to hear each other calling for a routine fly ball, ran into each other and the ball dropped. With the team unnerved by the play, a slew of errors by Pittsburgh followed, Cy Young drove in two runs with the key hit, and Boston broke the game open, going on to win in a rout 11–2. They came back the following day to win again, 6–3, and even the Series at three games apiece. Both Pittsburgh’s players and their fans appeared stunned, while McGreevey and his Rooters went marching triumphantly around the city after the game. The Pirates’ owner tried to steal his tired pitching staff some rest the next day by claiming it was too cold to play Game Seven—it was sixty degrees—but the plan backfired when Boston was then able to come back at them with an equally refreshed Cy Young. Young handled the Pirates easily again for his second victory, winning 7–3, and seized the lead for the Americans in the Series, which now headed back to Boston.

  In front of their devoted fans, who had hoisted Cy Young on their shoulders when the team arrived home on the train at the South Station, the Americans shut out the depleted and dispirited Pirates 3–0 in Game Eight, to cap their improbable comeback in the first World Series, five games to three. Not unlike the way Joe Namath and the New York Jets would sixty-six years later shock the world by beating the heavily favored Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III, and thereby establish the legitimacy of the rival AFL, Ban Johnson’s brash American League had proved it belonged on the same playing field as the older National League. The Senior Circuit’s monopoly of America’s pastime had been broken, but the equality of the two leagues—now established as fact on the diamond—had yet to be formalized on paper.

  When Boston repeated as American League champions in 1904, the National League’s pennant-winning New York Giants—led by their legendary hard-ass manager John McGraw, who according to Ban Johnson had been behind that offer in Pittsburgh to Lou Criger to fix the first Series—refused Johnson’s challenge to meet again in any postseason exhibition. Although McGraw and the Giants’ owner, John Brush, claimed the National was still the only “major league” without equal, their refusal had more to do with the fact that at the time it was made—while the regular season was still going on—the American League was being led by the Giants’ new cross-town rival, the New York Highlanders. One of Ban Johnson’s original eight American League franchises in 1901, the Highlanders had begun life as the Baltimore Orioles, but Johnson changed their name and moved them to New York in 1903, as a direct territorial challenge to the arrogant Giants. A problem franchise for the first two decades of their existence, the Highlanders wouldn’t enjoy much success—and become considerably better known—until a few years after they changed their name in 1913 to the “Yankees.” They faltered in 1904 as well, but Boston would not pass them to clinch the American League pennant until almost the final game of the season, and by then it was too late for the Giants to change their mind about another World Series; and what would have been a matchup for the ages between Boston’s Cy Young—who that season threw the first perfect game in major-league baseball history—and the Giants’ great young star pitcher, Christy Mathewson, never materialized.

  The following year, in 1905, the two baseball leagues buried the last hatchet and agreed to end each baseball season with a mutually sanctioned showdown between their champion teams, who would “meet in a series of games for the Professional Base Ball Championship of the World.” They decided to scale their World Series back from nine to seven games—although it would briefly revert to nine from 1919 to 1921—and the New York Giants won that first official title in 1905, four games to one, over the American League’s Philadelphia Athletics.

  In the remarkable twenty-two-year career of Denton True “Cy” Young, the Ohio farmboy’s greatness spanned and connected the ancient and modern eras of his sport. When he began playing pro “base ball” in 1890, the mound was still just fifty feet from home plate—it was moved back to its current distance of sixty feet, six inches three years later—and pitchers had only been allowed to throw overhand to batters for the previous six years. Young went on to win 511 baseball games, the most by a mile in baseball history, and along the way established a host of other records that will never be broken. He had always been great, but he became an immortal in his sport while earning 192 of those wins in a Boston uniform, until the team’s new owner traded him to Cleveland in 1909 at the age of forty-one. Two years later Young finally retired back to the same Ohio farm, where he would spend the rest of his life, becoming one of the first grand old men of the pro game. He was the third pitcher inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame, in 1937, and the year after he died in 1955, at the age of eighty-eight, major-league baseball honored his pioneering contributions by establishing the Cy Young Award, initially given to the single most outstanding pitcher of the season in both of baseball’s two leagues. (Eleven years later, the award was expanded to honor the best pitcher from each league, which is how it’s been awarded ever since.)

  But after his timeless performance during Boston’s first championship season of 1903, Cy Young would never pitch another inning of a game in the World Series.

  ONCE DARREL CHANEY had batted for Gary Nolan, Cincinnati Reds left-hander Fred Norman walked in from the right field bullpen to the dugout and then out to take the mound, as the Red Sox came to bat in the bottom of the third inning. With three left-handed batters due up, and four of the first five in the Boston order, Sparky had played percentages and called in his own southpaw. Norman was a tough, scrappy thirty-three-year-old Texan from San Antonio, who stood only five-eight—the shortest starting pitcher in baseball—and weighed in at a hundred and sixty pounds. After being signed by Kansas City and bouncing back and forth between the minors and majors for nine years, he’d finally played most of a full season for the Dodgers in 1970 as a situational reliever, before St. Louis claimed him off waivers. The Cardinals dealt him again in ’71, to the woeful San Diego Padres, a 1969 expansion team that was struggling to survive financially. Nearing thirty, Norman earned a spot in the Padres’ starting rotation and pitched decently over the next two years, but with a cellar-dwelling team behind him he could manage only a 12–23 record. The fortunes of the Padres then went from bad to worse, and Norman’s record was 1–7 nearly halfway through the 1973 season, but the only win he’d notched had been against the Reds, where Bob Howsam and Sparky both saw some grit in his gutty performance that caught their eye. Short of starting pitchers at the time, when they learned the cash-strapped Padres had put Norman on the trading block, the Reds offered them a promising young outfielder and a substantial check. (A few months later, McDonald’s tycoon Ray Kroc bought the Padres; their finances improved dramatically—saving the franchise—and eventually so did the team on the field.)

  Few stood up and cheered the acquisition in Cincinnati, but skeptics were won over when Norman promptly went 12–6 during the rest of the year and won another thirteen games the following season. He’d turned in his best campaign yet in 1975, with a 12–4 record in thirty-four games and a 3.73 ERA, and even more important had been at his best late in the year, going 5–1 after the middle of August, filling the gap when the usually steady Jack Billingham faltered. Freddie Norman fit the profile of a Cincinnati Reds starter perfectly: a quiet, deeply competitive team guy who did whatever Sparky asked of him, and seldom overpowered batters but got them to put the ball in play, where the superb defense behind him could go to work. He kept the team in games, earned the respect and friendship of his catcher, Johnny Bench, gave way to the team’s superb bullpen in the sixth or seventh inning, and t
he Reds offense did the rest.

  Red Sox first baseman Cecil Cooper stepped in, leading off the inning for his second at bat of the game. Norman started him with a slider that missed outside for a ball.

  Because he didn’t possess a blazing fastball, Norman depended on changes of speed and location. From a hitter’s perspective, the speed of any pitch is not an absolute value, but matters only in relation to the other pitches he sees within the confines of any at bat; the ability to take ten miles an hour off a curve or slider, as Fred Norman could do at any time, made selective use of his modest fastball much more effective. He also never liked to use the fastball on a fastball count; his best pitch in those situations was a screwball, a reverse curve that broke sharply in on left-handers, often jamming them for outs; that remained his meal ticket as a major leaguer.

  Norman caught the low, outside corner with a slider for a called strike to even the count.

  After his clutch performance down the home stretch of the season, Norman had earned a start in the League Championship Series against Pittsburgh, and won the second game of their sweep with six strong innings that neutralized the powerful Pirates lineup. He had come out of the game with a slightly stiff arm, and a sore knuckle on the index finger of his left hand, neither of which appeared to be serious, and Norman fully expected a spot in the World Series rotation as well.

  Bench called for the same pitch again, slider low and away. Cooper swung late, and lofted a high pop fly to short left field, where Concepcion backpedaled under it for the first out. Cooper’s slump continued. Second baseman Denny Doyle dug into the box, and Norman started him with a breaking ball that missed outside.