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

by Mark Frost

  Dwight Evans stepped in to open the inning against Borbon, who had only pitched an inning in two appearances in the Series so far. A perfect reflection of his personality, Borbon was a power pitcher who didn’t mess around, going right after hitters with fastball, sinker, slider—all of them thrown hard, all of them moving, most of them in or near the strike zone: He dared you to hit him. Evans watched Borbon’s first fastball, a called strike that appeared to land below his knees; Evans turned and stared at Satch Davidson in disbelief at the call, but said nothing. He watched the next two come in low and outside to take the count to 2–1.

  Dwight Evans talked to himself quietly and constantly when he was at the plate, small encouragements—Come on, let’s go—and he swung hard at Borbon’s next pitch, a fastball down the middle that he fouled straight back, evening the count at 2–2.

  In the 1973 postseason, after establishing himself alongside Clay Carroll as one of the anchors in Sparky’s bullpen, Pedro Borbon achieved a different kind of respect from his teammates during the infamous Pete Rose-Bud Harrelson dustup in Game Three of the National League Championship Series. They already knew he wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody. When he saw the bench-clearing brawl break out after Rose’s hard slide into Harrelson, Borbon immediately tried to rush in from the bullpen, but in his haste couldn’t get the gate to open, so he simply ripped it off its hinges and tossed it to the ground. Borbon ran to the infield and charged into the melee like a berserk marauder—in the middle of the resulting scrum he allegedly bit one of the Mets on the leg—and by the time four teammates could pull him away, his jersey had nearly been torn off. He put on the cap he’d picked up in the scramble, thinking it was his, and when his teammates pointed out to him that he was wearing a Mets cap, Borbon took it off, ferociously ripped it apart with his teeth, spit it out on the field, and for good measure stomped on it. Ever since that incident his teammates had called Borbon “Vampire.”

  Borbon came back with the hard slider on the outside corner. Evans leaned in, went with the pitch, and smacked it hard to the right side. Morgan moved to his left to deftly grab the hot shot and throw Evans out at first. One out. Shortstop Rick Burleson stepped in next, and Luis Tiant, wearing his warm-up jacket, moved into the on-deck circle. Bench waved Ken Griffey in a few steps in right field, then called for a sinker, which bounced in the dirt and nicked off of Bench’s right hand for a ball. Although he stood six-one and weighed in at a solid 210 pounds, Johnny Bench had the biggest hands most people had ever seen on a human being, freakishly outsized, almost as if he had an extra knuckle on each finger. He had been photographed a number of times demonstrating one of his favorite stunts: holding seven baseballs in each hand. On at least two occasions during his early career—once when his glove got snagged on his shin protector, another time when he was trying to show up a pitcher who wasn’t throwing as hard as Bench thought he should be—Bench had simply reached out and caught major-league fastballs with his massive bare right hand.

  Reflecting his hyper-charged metabolism, Pedro Borbon worked fast, hitting the outside corner for a called strike, then missing the same corner low twice in a row to fall behind in the count to Burleson, 3–1. When he missed again high and outside, Burleson trotted down to first with a free pass.

  Sparky Anderson immediately popped out of the Reds dugout and walked toward the mound, as always stepping gingerly over the third base foul line. Bench met him at the mound as Sparky reviewed the situation with Borbon—one out, one on—but he was really there to stall for time as he waited to see who Darrell Johnson was going to send up to pinch-hit for Luis Tiant. Assuming Johnson would bring up a left-handed bat to face Borbon, Sparky had already told Larry Shepard to call the bullpen, where left-hander Will McEnaney was on his feet throwing to backup catcher Bill Plummer. To Sparky’s surprise, he glanced back at home plate over Bench’s shoulder—and did a double-take when he saw Tiant stepping into the batter’s box.

  Okay, that makes it easy.

  Sparky immediately ended their “conference” on the mound and headed back to the dugout. One out, with a runner on first in the bottom of the sixth, tie game, his entire bench available to him, and his pitcher obviously running out of steam, and Darrell Johnson had decided to let his pitcher bat and, clearly, intended to send him out to start the seventh inning. A few of the Red Sox quietly shook their heads at the decision, questioning their manager’s judgment.

  Even while leading them to the World Series, Darrell Johnson had been through a rocky season, only his second as a big-league manager. The forty-seven-year-old Nebraska native had knocked around the minor leagues for most of the 1950s, finally sticking with the Yankees in 1957. He was on their roster, although he didn’t see any action, for both of the back-to-back seven-game World Series that Casey Stengel’s famed pin-striped squad split with Hank Aaron’s Milwaukee Braves. After falling back into the minors, and beginning his career as a manager with a St. Louis Cardinals farm team, Johnson began the 1961 season as a bullpen coach for the Cardinals but was fired along with their manager in early July. He was immediately signed as a player by the Phillies, who then traded him a month later to Cincinnati, who were still in the pennant race and in need of an experienced backstop. Johnson played well in twenty games for Cincinnati, and when the Reds clinched their first pennant in twenty-one years, he reached the World Series for the third time, this time against the Yankees, and started two games facing Yanks lefty Whitey Ford, going 2–4 against him. The following spring the Reds released him, and he signed with Baltimore, where Johnson’s playing career soon ended and he began working as a full-time coach. His peripatetic journey as a baseball lifer continued until he caught on as a coach with the Red Sox in 1968. Three years later he landed the managing job on Boston’s Triple-A franchise, where he worked with and developed many future Red Sox stars: Fisk, Evans, Burleson, and Rice. After leading that team to consecutive playoff appearances, Johnson was finally tapped to succeed the popular Eddie Kasko as the organization’s major-league skipper prior to the 1974 season.

  Although most of the younger players he’d gotten to know in the minors remained loyal to him, Johnson had a harder time convincing the veteran Red Sox corps he’d inherited that he was up to the job. He was a stoic, conservative man to begin with, who didn’t like to make a lot of moves on the field, and many of the team’s older players felt he managed less to win than he did not to lose. Johnson also battled a drinking problem, a not uncommon fate for men who’d spent most of their adult lives knocking around the minor leagues. Red Sox players cited at least two occasions during the first half of the 1975 season when Johnson showed up at the stadium for a road game stone drunk—once, with a black eye, at seven in the morning—and they’d had to plant him in a corner of the dugout. He often quarreled with longtime Red Sox radio voice Ned Martin, who seldom liked what he saw from Johnson on the field and wasn’t shy about saying so on the air. Even Carlton Fisk, who’d benefited more than any other current player from Johnson’s tutelage in the minors, felt he wasn’t the same manager he’d known in Louisville. Left-handed starter Bill Lee, who had a particularly contentious relationship with the old-school Johnson, felt that their bullpen coach Don “Bear” Bryant, a player-coach under Johnson during his tenure in Louisville, was in Boston largely to help wrangle the manager after hours and between bars. Tensions over strained communications had come to a head between Johnson and his team early on in the 1975 season, when an angry clubhouse meeting nearly resulted in an open player revolt. Johnson was able to smooth things over with them by promising to pay more attention to his veterans’ point of view, and when the Red Sox went on a mid-season tear to seize the East Division lead that they never relinquished, winning, as it usually does, rendered most of those fractious disputes a memory. But many still felt they’d won the pennant in spite of their manager, not because of him, and after the Red Sox swept the A’s in the Division Series, Johnson had taken no part in their clubhouse celebration in Oakland, remaining in h
is office, drinking alone with his off-season hunting buddy, A’s outfielder Joe Rudi.

  Once they reached the World Series, the contrast between the cautious, stone-faced Darrell Johnson and the gregarious, masterful managing style of Sparky Anderson could not have been starker. Firmly in command, acting always with conviction, but the first to admit mistakes if his proactive moves didn’t pan out, Sparky handled his team during games like a maestro at the philharmonic. Aware that he’d be facing a notoriously tough and cynical Boston sportswriting corps, Sparky invited them all into his office at Fenway before the Series, and when the Globe’s Cliff Keane greeted him as “Busher”—a derisive baseball term used to describe lifers in the minors—Sparky smiled, worked his way through the crowd, and kissed the top of Keane’s bald head.

  “I just want you guys to know,” said Sparky, “that’s the way we National Leaguers treat you guys in the American League.”

  He’d had the press eating out of his hand ever since. With his rapid-fire wit, accessible emotions, aphoristic insights, and cheerfully fractured way with words, Sparky made their jobs so easy they clamored around him like trained seals. Darrell Johnson always showed up dutifully for their scheduled joint press conferences, but appeared to enjoy them about as much as a root canal, and reporters extracted sentences from him with something near the same ease; his lack of eloquence had become something of an inside joke among the working press. For the first time in a World Series, both managers had also agreed—Johnson reluctantly—to wear wireless microphones during the games and to allow their commentary to be used in the highlight film that would be assembled afterward by Major League Baseball. Sparky, predictably, gave them an avalanche of material and insights to work with. Johnson hardly spoke, and as the Series advanced, some of the Red Sox players made a joke out of going up to their manager and periodically cursing into the mic that had been duct-taped to the front of his jacket.

  Darrell Johnson often defended his minimalist style of managing—another direct contrast to Sparky—as one that reflected his philosophy about the game itself: When you had players as talented as he did, the best thing a manager could do was set the lineup and get out of their way. Both men’s methods had demonstrably worked; here their two teams were, after all, in the World Series. But to the degree that Johnson’s reticence also reflected a deeper insecurity in his character, for the first time in Game Six, with his stubborn insistence on sticking with Luis Tiant, this tendency threatened to impact events on the field. Johnson had been Luis’s manager when he began his extraordinary comeback in Louisville, benefited enormously from his greatness in Boston during the last two seasons, and had every reason to think the world of his talent, passion, and tenacity. When Johnson had defied the conventional odds and kept Tiant on the mound throughout his struggles in Game Four, Tiant had delivered magnificently for the win that had kept the Red Sox in this Series. But the thought now nagged at the minds of some of Boston’s players, most of the press, and many of the fans at Fenway as Luis stepped up to bat in the bottom of the sixth: Had Darrell Johnson allowed his faith in Tiant to lead the Red Sox into danger?

  Rose and Perez crept in again from the corners, and before Borbon went into his windup, Tiant squared to bunt, making it clear he was only there for a second straight at bat to sacrifice Burleson to second, where Cecil Cooper might drive him in. But Luis let the first pitch go by, and Davidson called it a strike on the outside corner. Tiant squared again, but watched the next one sail high for a ball, 1–1, and then another came in low, 2–1. Tiant bunted the next pitch foul down the first base line, taking the count to 2–2, then looked down to third base coach Don Zimmer for the sign: A foul ball off a bunt now meant a strikeout, but Zimmer flashed the bunt sign again, Rose and Perez charged in, and Tiant offered on a hard sinker from Borbon that flanked off his bat, bounced down onto the plate, and kicked directly back over Bench’s head.

  Foul ball, out on strikes. Two outs now, their runner still at first—Darrell Johnson’s gamble, as far as his pitcher’s at bat was concerned, had failed.

  First baseman Cecil Cooper followed Tiant to the plate. Working briskly, Borbon started him with a sinking fastball, low for ball one. He followed with a fastball that tailed wide outside, then another outside fastball that Cooper fouled off, taking the count to 2–1. Bench moved inside, called for a slider, and Borbon hurled a beauty that cut toward Cooper and nearly sawed off the bat in his hand. He swung defensively and chopped it down into the dirt, resulting in a harmless soft grounder to Morgan at second, who flipped to Perez for the easy out at first to end Boston’s sixth inning.

  After leading all American League designated hitters for average in 1975, Cecil Cooper had now gone 1–17, still mired in his horrendous World Series slump. Momentum, often invisible to the eye but apparent to any alert baseball sensibility, had firmly shifted to the Cincinnati Reds.

  FOURTEEN

  If Boston wins tonight, you would have to give the favoritism in this Series to Boston. But even if they do, don’t bet your car or your house against us. Be very careful.

  SPARKY ANDERSON

  AFTER THEIR VICTORY IN THE FIRST WORLD SERIES IN 1903, and their second straight American League pennant the following year when the National League’s New York Giants refused to play them for a championship, the Boston Americans fell into a brief but steep period of decline. In 1904, after nearly being sold to a popular Irish politician, newspaper mogul and future maternal grandfather of John F. Kennedy, the colorful John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, the Americans were bought by the patrician WASP publisher of the Boston Globe, a Civil War veteran named General Charles Taylor. Hopes for improvement were soon dashed when it was revealed the general had purchased the team as an expensive plaything for his ne’er-do-well son John. General Taylor then put the dreamy wastrel in charge of the Americans’ day-to-day operations in the hope these new responsibilities would give the boy some purpose in life. (As demonstrated by the Yawkey clan’s early ownership of the Detroit Tigers, plutocratic nepotism has always played a major role in the history of professional sports.) No sooner had young John taken over than the 1906 season was marred by a gruesome tragedy: The troubled man Taylor had just named as his manager, Chick Stahl—a newlywed who, one theory suggests, was being aggressively blackmailed by a chippie he’d impregnated the year before—committed suicide during spring training. Undeterred, John Taylor persisted in establishing his credentials as a clueless, meddlesome young dilettante with a disastrous eye for talent.

  After the Chick Stahl public relations debacle, Taylor decided he should manage the team himself, an idea that league president Ban Johnson immediately nixed; then Taylor ripped through two more bad choices in less than three weeks—the athletic director at the University of Illinois, who sensibly quit once he realized what he’d gotten himself into, and then the team’s twenty-five-year-old first baseman, who’d never managed a game in his life—before Ban Johnson “suggested” he hire a more qualified veteran from New York named Jim “Deacon” McGuire. At the conclusion of the next two dispiriting seasons, during which he traded away most of the good players he’d inherited for dead wood, John Taylor decided that what his team needed most was a new look and name to rehabilitate its deteriorating image. Both of Boston’s baseball teams bought their uniforms from Wright & Ditson Sporting Goods, the city’s preeminent sports retailer. The store had become a resounding success for founder George Wright, younger brother and former teammate to Harry Wright, the player-manager who had founded both the original Cincinnati Red Stockings and, shortly thereafter, the Boston Red Stockings; George Wright had been the star shortstop on both those teams, and would later become an early inductee into baseball’s Hall of Fame. Wright & Ditson was also the store where a short time later a gifted young amateur golfer named Francis Ouimet would begin his professional life, as a stock clerk.

  During a visit with George Wright before the 1908 season John Taylor learned that the city’s older baseball franchise, the National Leagu
e’s Boston Nationals—the team that had begun life as the Red Stockings in 1871 but was now under new ownership and another name—had decided to give up their traditional red stockings for navy blue. In what is now remembered as the only good decision he ever made during his tenure, Taylor decided on the spot to co-opt the iconic crimson socks for his Americans and change their name to the Boston Red Sox for the 1908 season. Young John then promptly made the worst in his impressive string of bad executive decisions and traded pitcher Cy Young—coming off yet another twenty-win season at the age of forty—to Cleveland for a couple of nobodies and $12,500. In 1911, after his son had gutted the team’s once peerless roster, John Taylor’s father stepped back into the picture, took the reins from his knucklehead offspring, and the deeper nature of his initial interest in baseball finally came into focus: General Taylor had in the interim become a major shareholder in the Fenway Realty Company, which had bought up most of the usable land reclaimed by the city’s massive expansion and engineering project in the Back Bay’s boggy “fens” district. Taylor then sold half his interest in the Red Sox, through a shell company built to disguise his participation, to American League owner Ban Johnson. General Taylor then used the cash from that deal to “buy” a prime building site for a new ballpark from Fenway Realty Company, in essence, as one of that company’s principal investors, funneling the funds back to himself after a thorough laundering. Taylor then leaned on his friends downtown to issue citywide bonds that paid for construction, and he became the principal owner of the place he decided to call Fenway Park, where the Boston Red Sox began playing ball in the spring of 1912. The new trolley lines to Fenway that the city then compliantly installed brought hundreds of thousands of fans to the attractive new ballpark that season—an exposure that ensured the rapid sale and development of the surrounding reclaimed neighborhoods—which, not coincidentally, also largely belonged to General Taylor and the Fenway Realty Company.