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

by Mark Frost

  “I’m supposed to be the guy who can keep the ball on the ground in Fenway,” said Billingham. “I pitched well here before and we won. I finally get my shit together, pitch a good game, and they hit me in the side of the head with something like this. They seem to think, ‘Good ol’ Jack, he won’t get mad.’ Well, I’m tired of being pushed around.”

  Billingham was able to cool off after his day away—and at no time had he wished any ill will to Gary Nolan, who was one of his closest friends on the team—but his outburst to Hertzel, as he must have known it would, showed up in the Cincinnati Enquirer on Monday. When Sparky was then asked about Jack’s outburst by Hertzel, he calmly refused to take the bait.

  “There’s nothing wrong with him being upset and saying so in print,” said Sparky evenly. “During the season a player shouldn’t open his mouth, but I can understand something like this in a World Series. If he wasn’t mad I figured he wouldn’t have wanted to pitch in the game.”

  On Tuesday afternoon, when they got to the park before Game Six, Larry Shepard had taken Jack aside to say, “I know you’re upset, but I know you’re gonna be a pro about it.”

  Billingham had been hopping mad, and when he took the mound in the third inning of Game Six that night he was still simmering. But for a guy who never said much and whose game had recently come into question because he seldom showed much emotion whether he won or lost—they didn’t call him Cactus Jack because of his chatty mood swings—maybe, Sparky had calculated, a little fire in the belly might do him some good.

  With the Reds behind by three runs with the bases loaded, and the dangerous Rico Petrocelli at the plate, as Sparky walked back to the dugout he hoped to hell he was right.

  Americo Peter Petrocelli—inevitably “Rico”—a twelve-year veteran and one of the most popular players in Red Sox history, came to the plate and the crowd greeted him with a big cheer. At thirty-two, the same age as Jack Billingham, Rico had also faced his own recent crises of confidence. A fierce competitor who led by word and deed, and earned a reputation as one of the toughest guys in baseball, he’d grown up in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, the youngest of seven kids in a big working-class Italian-American family, during the golden years of 1950s New York baseball, when Mays, Mantle, and Duke Snider patrolled center field for the city’s three franchises. When he blossomed into an outstanding high school student and athlete, Rico’s four older brothers pitched in with extra money so he could concentrate on sports instead of helping after school in the family’s garment industry business. He was offered a basketball scholarship to North Carolina State, but the same Red Sox scout who’d signed Carl Yastrzemski brought Rico to the team’s attention, and the game he’d always loved the most won out when he signed with Boston. Like Yaz, he’d also been an excellent high school pitcher, but they would both end up making a living with their bats. After only three years in the team’s farm system, Petrocelli earned a spot on the Red Sox roster, where Carl Yastrzemski became his closest friend on and off the field.

  Rico won the starting shortstop job out of spring training in 1965, but the team’s manager at the time, an old-fashioned autocrat named Billy Herman, rode the shy, insecure rookie mercilessly, and nearly drove him out of baseball; Rico credited Yaz’s steadying support during that time as the only thing that sustained him. When Dick Williams took over the team two years later, he tried a gentler tack with his gifted young shortstop by giving him more responsibility; Rico responded with his first All-Star season and became an integral part of the “Impossible Dream” team. Many credited a mid-season fight that broke out on the field between Rico and his childhood friend, Yankee first baseman Joe Pepitone, as the spark that ignited the Red Sox season, and he came through under pressure at the plate time and again, most famously hitting two home runs in Game Six of the Series against St. Louis. Petrocelli went on to become one of the most feared power hitters in the game, setting an American League record for home runs by a shortstop, with forty in 1969, and proved equally adept in the field, establishing new defensive standards for the Red Sox at his position. When the team had a chance to acquire the great veteran shortstop Luis Aparicio in 1971, which would necessitate moving Petrocelli to third, they told Rico the deal wouldn’t go through unless he approved; the consummate teammate, Rico agreed to make the switch. He continued to steadily produce with his bat and, even more remarkably, set a major-league defensive record at a position he’d never played before, going seventy-seven games in one stretch at third without an error. A series of nagging injuries dampened his offensive production over the next two seasons, but Rico seldom failed to come through in the clutch, which, along with his heart-on-the-sleeve style, forever endeared him to Red Sox fans. He was one of their acknowledged team leaders now, and Boston had appeared to be well on their way to their first Eastern Division title in 1974.

  Then on September 15, in a day game at Fenway against Milwaukee, blinded by the glare of the midday sun on the center field bleachers, Rico was unable to see a fastball from Brewers pitcher Jim Slaton that nailed him flush behind the left ear, below the protective edge of his batting helmet. Tied for the team lead in home runs at the time, and their best RBI man, Petrocelli was unable to play for the rest of the season, which accelerated their shocking collapse at the wire, when they lost the division title to Baltimore.

  Jack Billingham, pitching from his regular delivery with the bases loaded, for his first pitch came in with a hard sinker that Petrocelli hammered foul for strike one.

  When Rico tried to come back during spring training of 1975, he continued his usual excellent play in the field, but the effects of the beaning persisted at the plate; he suffered from vertigo, disabling migraines, and occasional severe bouts of dizziness, and had trouble focusing his eyes, which left him unable to pick up the ball out of the pitcher’s hands. A chronic worrier to begin with, as his average and power numbers plummeted, he developed an ulcer that would torment him all season. He tried glasses in June to correct his vision, but abandoned them three weeks later when they didn’t help, and frequently had to take himself out of games when the vertigo or headaches came on. As his condition worsened, Petrocelli left the team during a road trip in mid-August and for the first time in his life began to seriously contemplate retirement. Finally, after days of exams and consultation, doctors at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Hospital hit on a mix and dosage of medication that helped allay his symptoms. He returned to action in early September and quickly regained his hitting stroke; with Baltimore creeping up from behind on the Sox’s division lead again, Rico hit the climactic home run on September 16 that secured Luis Tiant’s 2–0 showdown with Jim Palmer and effectively ended the Orioles’ charge.

  Billingham missed outside with a slider to even the count at 1–1.

  Petrocelli continued to deliver through the League Championship Series against the A’s, hitting a key home run off their ace reliever Rollie Fingers to nail down the win in Game Two. When he’d continued to swing a hot bat through the first five games of the World Series as well, leading the team in hitting, fans and writers in Boston assumed that their old, dependable Rico had come back for good. They didn’t know that the heavy medication he was on had begun to cause some deleterious side effects, and that in the last few days even some haunting whispers of his balance and vision problems were starting to recur.

  Billingham had struck Petrocelli out the first time he faced him in Game Two, and he challenged him again now with a low, running fastball that Rico took a big cut at and missed. Behind in the count now, 1–2.

  Rico didn’t have to look far to witness the fearful damage a pitched baseball to the head could do to any hitter. He had seen his good friend and former Red Sox teammate Tony Conigliaro’s stellar career destroyed by a hideous beaning in 1967. The popular young outfielder nearly lost his life on that terrible night, and although he gamely attempted to come back twice from the injuries, he hadn’t been close to the same ballplayer, and the vision in his damaged left retina never comple
tely recovered. Conigliaro’s second comeback finally ended with his retirement, at the age of thirty, earlier in the 1975 season; he was at Fenway for Game Six that night, covering the game as a regional television reporter. The team’s former starting second baseman Doug Griffin still hadn’t recovered from a 1974 beaning he’d taken from feared fastballer Nolan Ryan, necessitating the trade for Denny Doyle. Red Sox third base coach Don Zimmer still carried four steel screws in his head from a couple of terrible beanings that had curtailed his major-league career in the early 1960s. Despite dozens of these crippling, career-ending injuries throughout the decades, major-league baseball had only instituted the mandatory use of the batting helmet in 1971.

  Trailing three games to two in the Series, Rico had privately admitted to himself as he took the field that night for Game Six that this might well be the last ball game he would ever play. But he wasn’t through yet; he’d faced Billingham in Game Two, and after that early strikeout, he’d singled off him in the sixth inning, driving in the second Red Sox run of that game. A hit now with the bases loaded, two outs, and runners moving could blow Game Six wide open.

  Billingham would come back with that fastball again now, Rico figured, and he set up for it. But Bench called for the curve, low and outside, disguised brilliantly by Billingham’s easy, rocking sidearm motion, which never varied from pitch to pitch. Already committed to the swing, Petrocelli realized what was coming a hair too late, but with his timing disrupted, he could only wave at it helplessly as the ball broke sharply down and away, well out of the strike zone, and he went down swinging for the third and final out.

  “Cactus” Jack had ridden in and put out the fire.

  TEN

  My specific interest in writing to you is to seek your assistance on a matter of deep concern to myself and one of my constituents, Mr. Luis Tiant.

  SENATOR EDWARD BROOKE

  LUIS TIANT AND HIS WIFE, MARIA, HAD DECIDED DURING the early years of their marriage to keep their home in her native Mexico City, where all three of their children would be born. After making the Cleveland Indians’ roster in 1964, Luis left his family every spring, often not returning for longer than a few days, over the All-Star break, until the season ended in October, just as his father had done during his career in the Negro Leagues. Not until he went through his fall and rise, reestablishing himself as a star in Boston, did Luis even consider buying a home and moving his family to the United States. Once he had gained that sense of security, after ten years of seasonal separation, the Tiant family was finally reunited in August of 1974 when they bought a house next to the eleventh fairway of Wollaston Golf Club in suburban Milton.

  The following February, while working out with his friend Judge Robert Schreiber at a local YMCA, Luis confided in him the greatest longing of his life: Now that he had realized his version of the American dream, the one thing missing was to be reunited with his mother and father and introduce them to their grandchildren. His parents were aging and struggling in Cuba, where life was hard and money remained scarce. Luis’s father, past seventy and ailing, had to pump gas at a service station to put food on their table, while his mother, Isabel, still worked as a housekeeper. Although Luis was now a celebrity in Boston, and recognized throughout the country, the iron curtain surrounding his homeland left him powerless to help. He spoke to his parents occasionally by phone, but never free from worry that their calls might be monitored by the Cuban state apparatus. Isabel had been able to make one brief visit to see Luis and meet her daughter-in-law and grandchildren in Mexico City in 1968; Luis Senior had been forced to spend that week in a Havana jail to ensure her return. Aside from seeing him pitch a game or two on television when the Red Sox made Game of the Week—the broadcast of Miami’s NBC affiliate, officially forbidden by the Castro government, just barely reached across the ninety miles separating Cuba and Florida—the Old Man hadn’t laid eyes on his son in nearly fifteen years. For the fortunate, lighthearted Luis Tiant, the likelihood that he would never see his parents again before they died had become a private and consuming sadness. He was haunted by the thought that if he lost them now, he wouldn’t even be allowed to attend their funerals.

  Ten years earlier, before he became a judge, Robert “Buddy” Schreiber had worked as an assistant district attorney under Edward Brooke, then the attorney general of Massachusetts, who in 1966 had become the first African-American to be elected to the United States Senate. A moderate Republican, Brooke was serving his second term now, and Schreiber offered to make contact with the senator on Luis’s behalf, to see if there was anything he might be able to do about his family situation. As protection against even deeper disappointment, Luis never allowed himself the luxury of hope with regard to his parents’ predicament, but he agreed to let Schreiber inquire on his behalf.

  Edward Brooke, as it happened—not surprisingly for a senator from Massachusetts—was a Red Sox fan in general, and a fan of El Tiante in particular, and he took an immediate, personal interest in Schreiber’s request to help the Tiants. Tom Yawkey and Dick O’Connell then weighed in on Tiant’s behalf as well. When he learned shortly thereafter that his colleague Senator George McGovern was planning an unofficial visit to Cuba during the first week of May, Brooke asked McGovern if he could deliver a letter from him to Fidel Castro and speak to him personally about the Tiants. McGovern, also a baseball fan, instantly agreed.

  As the Democratic nominee for president in 1972, fifty-three-year-old George McGovern had suffered one of the worst defeats in American electoral history at the hands of President Richard Nixon. A decorated World War II bomber pilot and an unapologetic liberal from South Dakota, McGovern’s principled opposition to the Vietnam War that had divided the country for a decade failed to win wide support, and the infamous “dirty tricks” waged against him by Nixon’s White House operatives undermined his campaign throughout. An unfortunate decision to pick as his running mate Senator Thomas Eagleton from Missouri, who failed to reveal that he’d regularly undergone shock treatment for depression and emotional illness, doomed McGovern’s candidacy and returned Nixon to office in a landslide. The shocking revelations of the Watergate investigation had since sent Nixon into exile and disgrace, while McGovern bounced back in 1974 to win reelection for his third term in the Senate, where he continued to champion progressive causes. One of those causes, most notably, was his ongoing attempt to repair the United States’ relationship with Fidel Castro and Cuba. Since shortly after his first election in 1962, not long after the Cuban Missile Crisis ended with the Soviet withdrawal of nuclear weapons, Senator McGovern had spoken out about the futility of continuing to embargo and isolate Cuba, and the dangers those policies posed to rising anti-American sentiments in Central and South America. In 1975, after years of failed back-channel attempts to arrange their meeting, Castro had finally agreed to sit down with George McGovern, the first elected official from the United States to visit Cuba in fifteen years.

  The day after McGovern arrived in Havana, on May 6, as a late private dinner with Cuba’s vice president was winding down, Fidel Castro showed up unexpectedly, a day ahead of their scheduled appointment. He had come directly from a championship baseball game between two of his country’s powerhouse state teams, and the two men began their conversation by talking at length about the game. Preferring to hold back his larger agenda for their more formal meeting the next day, and pour the footing of their relationship firmly in an area of mutual human interest, toward the end of the hour they spent together McGovern decided the time was right to bring up the matter of Luis Tiant.

  Castro knew all about El Tiante—and his father before him—and as a former pitcher himself obviously looked on Luis’s achievements as a Cuban-born player in the major leagues with evident pride.

  Without hesitating, McGovern took Senator Brooke’s letter out of his pocket and handed it to Castro.