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

by Mark Frost

  Some of the Red Sox lingered for a while in their dugout, staring blankly out at the diamond. Tactical police, wearing riot helmets, escorted the last of their pitchers in from the Boston bullpen through the unruly remnants. Luis Tiant, his hat off, looking out at the mound from the steps of the dugout, was the last man to quit the field.

  On this night, less than twenty-four hours after the dizzying crescendo of Game Six, the rest of a silent, depressed, and orderly crowd cleared out of Fenway Park in less than ten minutes. Four hundred policemen had been stationed between the ballpark and Kenmore Square, prepared for either trouble or even greater celebration, and they scarcely needed to move. Only eighteen minor injuries were reported on the night, most of those from people falling in the bleachers.

  Tony Kubek, who’d made his way from the booth to the Cincinnati clubhouse during the bottom of the ninth, on this night without having to change direction, jumped up on some tables they’d thrust together and prepped for interviews alongside the Reds’ young broadcaster Marty Brennaman in front of NBC’s cameras.

  Eight hundred and sixty-two miles away, car horns blared and firecrackers crackled through the night as thousands of fans celebrated in Cincinnati’s downtown Fountain Square: The Reds had won their first World Championship in thirty-five years.

  Pete Rose and Joe Morgan hung on to each other in their locker room; their strong, unbreakable bond—perhaps the closest friendship in baseball history between a white and black player—had at last captured a championship for the Big Red Machine. If Tony Perez represented the soul of this team, and Bench its sturdy backbone, these two unlikely superstars remained its beating heart.

  Tony Kubek brought a red-eyed Sparky Anderson up on the tables for the first interview. “This one’s for my friend Milt Blish, and my family who’s not here, and for all my friends and everybody I love.” Then, overcome with emotion once again, Sparky couldn’t say another word, turned away from the cameras, and down into the embraces of his coaches and players.

  A beaming Joe Morgan gave all credit to Pete Rose and their hitting coach Ted Kluszewski, whom he credited with teaching him how to handle tough outside pitches, and then went out of his way to compliment losing Red Sox pitcher Jim Burton, saying he’d thrown him an almost perfect final pitch and that he’d been fortunate just to get a piece of it to drive in the winning run. Morgan had collected only seven hits in the World Series, but two of them had won exactly half the games they needed for the title.

  Tony Kubek informed Pete Rose, who’d hit .370 and driven in Game Seven’s tying run, that he’d just been named the Series’ Most Valuable Player; the writers also couldn’t help but notice that Pete had reached base on eleven of his last fifteen plate appearances, remarkable by any standard. As Morgan poured champagne over his mop-top haircut, Rose barely appeared to hear what Kubek told him. His vocal cords shredded from shouting at his teammates, Pete gave all the credit to Tony Perez for getting them back in it with his home run in the sixth—“That was the turning point”—and to Joe Morgan for coming through in the ninth just as he had ever since he’d become the final piece of the Big Red Machine. The power, the defense, the bullpen, and timely hits and speed and hustle—in the end this flesh-and-blood wonder that Bob Howsam and Ray Shore and Sparky Anderson envisioned, designed, and assembled had at last come together.

  “This is the happiest moment of my life,” said Rose. “Let’s do it again; I’m ready to start spring training tomorrow.”

  An elated, articulate, exhausted Johnny Bench echoed that sentiment, his voice cracking with emotion, and also gave worlds of credit to the Red Sox, who had fought them longer and harder and tougher than they or anyone else had ever imagined they would be able to do. Reds team president Bob Howsam shook hands with Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, accepting his congratulations for the cameras. Both men agreed that they had just witnessed the end of the greatest World Series in baseball history.

  Three of the team’s second-stringers jumped up on a table and mocked the Fenway crowd’s chant of “Loo-ee, Loo-ee!” Joe Morgan, annoyed, told them to knock it off and show some respect.

  “Luis Tiant can pitch on any team in any league and be a winner,” he said.

  After Johnny Bench was done talking to the press, utterly spent, he sat and watched Tony and Pete and Joe and Gary and the others letting loose, the pressure finally off them all, and then his gaze settled on Sparky, his eyes dazzling now, moving through the room, stopping to savor and share the triumph with each and every one of his players, and Bench felt happier for him at that moment than for anyone else there. The lively little man who’d chased the dream for a decade but never found success as a player himself, who with hard work, persistence, and bedrock strength of character had made himself into the best manager in the game, showing more insight, fairness, and compassion for the men in his charge than anyone Bench had ever known. Sparky had always tried to tell them that what they’d all been striving for wasn’t about money or fame or trophies; it was about the feeling, what getting there together would give their hearts and souls that no one could then ever take away.

  And this was it, right here and now—this moment, this feeling—after all their years of striving and winning and falling short, they had finally made it to the top, and with that peculiar, distant second sight of his, Johnny knew right then that it would live on in all of them forever.

  THE RED SOX stayed in their clubhouse while the Reds celebrated long into the night. The mood in the home locker room remained solemn, and they spoke dutifully to reporters, but no one seemed to have the energy for anger. Subdued and wrung out, all struggled for words to adequately express their disappointment; the contrast from the extraordinary high they’d experienced less than twenty-four hours earlier was almost too great to comprehend.

  Only an agitated Bill Lee couldn’t let it go, already sick and tired of talking about the lollipop pitch he’d thrown to Perez, wondering why nobody asked him about the pitch he’d thrown to Bench just before that should have resulted in an inning-ending double play if Doyle had made the throw to first.

  “Dynasty, my ass,” Lee said bitterly, when asked if he thought the Reds were now confirmed as the best team in baseball.

  “I know we made believers out of a lot of people,” said a red-eyed Don Zimmer. “Especially the Cincinnati Reds. They know they were in a dogfight.”

  Denny Doyle didn’t come out of the showers until the last of the reporters had drifted away. Cecil Cooper sat banging a bat into his duffel bag after he’d packed up his belongings. Rick Burleson just stared into his locker.

  As Rico Petrocelli sat in front of his locker, contemplating his uncertain future—his doctors would now have to decide whether he should keep playing—Bernie Carbo came by to quietly shake his hand: “I really hope you come back, Rico.”

  “What do I do now? How do I take this? I just feel dried out, mentally,” said Dick Drago. “I mean, it’s been a lot of fun, but…”

  “We should have won five of the seven games,” said Jim Willoughby. “We lose on a bleeder. We lose the World Series on a chip shot to center field.”

  “We had nothing to be ashamed of,” said Dwight Evans. “We gave it all we had.”

  “Yes, I’m drained,” admitted Carlton Fisk. “I think we all were tonight after last night’s game, and that’s probably why we couldn’t take advantage of the opportunities we had early in the game.”

  “I think this brought us closer as a team,” said Carbo. “We know what we can do now. With all this talent, we’ll be back in this thing again. But I know, right now, I couldn’t play another game tomorrow.”

  When asked if this defeat felt more disappointing than the last World Series the Red Sox had lost, in 1967, their grim but resolute captain Carl Yastrzemski shook his head, trying to correct and set the tone. “This is tough, but we’ll put this one behind us. We have a good, young team. Let’s start thinking about next year.”

  But he also thought back to a conversation he�
��d had with Tom Yawkey years earlier, when in a brutal on-field collision he’d suffered two broken ribs and a lacerated kidney during the 1965 season. Yawkey had come to visit him every day during his nine days in the hospital after surgery; that was when Yaz felt he’d really gotten to know his employer, and they’d been extremely close ever since. Yawkey was never comfortable talking much about himself—he kept the focus on his young ballplayer and how he was progressing—but one day he opened up to him. “Yaz, you have no idea what it would mean to me to win it all. Just once.”

  Slumped on a bench in the corner of the locker room, Coach Johnny Pesky, who’d spent more years in a Red Sox uniform than anyone else in the room, had tears in his eyes: “I just feel so badly for Mr. Yawkey that we couldn’t win that seventh game for him again.”

  TOM YAWKEY, who’d remained in his private rooftop box until most of the crowd had filed out of Fenway Park, walked out haltingly, ashen but with his head held high. A single reporter stood outside in respectful silence, waiting for him to speak first.

  “Three times for the World Series Championship, three times into the seventh game…three times a loser.” His voice trailed away, and then he tried to rally. “But I’m proud of my players. They gave it everything they possibly could.”

  His wife Jean gripped his arm and helped her ailing husband slowly toward the stairs.

  “I guess it just wasn’t meant to be,” he said quietly.

  AFTERWARD

  We didn’t win this World Series. Baseball did.

  SPARKY ANDERSON

  I want to own the Red Sox until the day I die;

  then I’ll decide what to do with them.

  TOM YAWKEY

  THAT THESE TWO TEAMS HAD JUST PLAYED THE MOST competitive World Series in baseball history remains beyond dispute; five one-run games, five come-from-behind wins—including all four won by the Reds—and two extra-inning affairs, including the unprecedented drama and spectacle of Game Six. The Red Sox had outscored the Reds in the Series by a single run, 30–29, while logging sixty hits to the Reds’ fifty-nine. The Red Sox pitching staff had recorded an ERA of 3.86, to the Reds’ 3.88. Both teams had played extraordinary defense; of those fifty-nine runs scored, only three in the entire Series were unearned. The numbers confirm that never had two teams in a championship been more evenly matched, but there had been much more than routine excellence on display; stars had delivered under pressure, unknowns had turned into heroes, and millions of fans with no rooting interest in either team had been brought back to baseball by the extraordinary drama the two teams had created. As a result, more people had watched the 1975 World Series on television than any ever played—NBC banked record revenues for their good fortune—and the excitement it generated, if only temporarily, lifted the spirits of a country in dire need of distraction from hard and troubled times. Professional baseball benefited more directly: The 1975 World Series ignited a major revival in both ratings and live attendance for the sport that would last throughout the decade. And due to its exposure during the broadcasts, Fenway Park began its transformation from a battered old local landmark to a beloved national baseball mecca.

  Based on the strength, guts, and experience of their rosters, both teams now seemed poised to dominate their respective leagues for years to come, but the fairy tale ending promised by Game Six for the long-suffering Red Sox and their fans died hard and fast. The World Champion Reds returned to Cincinnati in triumph, and while that city turned out in force to celebrate their ascension with a daylight parade that lifted civic pride to levels unseen in two generations, Boston was about to endure a long, cold winter of discontent, dominated by headlines of racial strife in its forcibly integrated schools and furious political protest on its streets. Politicians in Washington grudgingly admitted that the nation’s economy was mired in its second year of the most serious recession since the Great Depression—resulting in a combination of runaway inflation and economic stagnation that the press dubbed “stagflation”—while all Western democracies confronted not only the continued tensions of the Cold War but a new threat posed by a cartel of hostile oil-producing nations called OPEC; a darker global reality had dawned. On the heels of the disastrous Watergate disgrace, and only six months after the last American military forces had withdrawn in defeat from Vietnam, America’s image and standing in the world appeared suddenly and shockingly diminished. Gerald Ford, the nation’s unelected president, his own image indelibly tarnished by his controversial pardon of Richard Nixon, faced a serious challenge within his own party for the coming bicentennial-year election from a retired movie star, California’s former governor Ronald Reagan, a man long considered too radically conservative and outside the mainstream of political discourse for national office. Late that fall, almost unnoticed, an obscure one-term governor of Georgia and peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter declared that he would seek the Democratic nomination for President in 1976.

  Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey’s health seriously deteriorated after the World Series, and the news that he was undergoing chemotherapy for leukemia slowly filtered out of the organization and into the community. Although fans and many writers preferred to believe that their team’s youth and precocious success had just sounded the overture to a certain future dynasty, this most recent defeat had delivered a mortal blow to Yawkey’s endurance and will to survive. He would spend the coming months in and out of the hospital, while his capacities to provide direction and leadership for his team steadily declined, at a moment when it turned out they were needed the most.

  Because the rules of baseball, as the game had always been played off the field, were about to change forever.

  On December 23, 1975, in the office of MLB’s official arbiter, the nearly century-long reign of baseball’s reserve clause came to a shocking and sudden end. Since its inception in the late nineteenth century, the reserve clause had stipulated that every player currently under contract to any team—traditionally one-year deals—remained under legal obligation for an option year beyond the life of that contract, during which they were compelled to negotiate and sign their next contract exclusively with that same team. If the team failed to come to terms with players before a season began, they possessed the unilateral right to then renew their contracts for an additional year, which triggered yet another “option” year. As the owners’ logic had evolved over the intervening decades, baseball teams therefore “reserved” the right to maintain a legal vise grip on their players, as long as any signed contract existed, in perpetuity. There had been many challenges by players over the years to this brief, stubborn legal provision, one that owners argued was the key to their ability to operate as a business, but all had been turned aside by the American judicial establishment, up to and including the Supreme Court in the case of Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood in 1969. A three-time All-Star, Flood sacrificed his career while trying to free himself from the reserve clause; when his attempt failed, he was out of baseball in less than two years. Many others had tried to buck the system before and since, but no one on the players’ side of the argument had ever before stopped to consider: What would happen if the reserve clause was challenged by a player without a signed contract?

  With the encouragement and support of Marvin Miller, the former labor lawyer and then director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, starting pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally—of the Dodgers and Montreal Expos, respectively—had for different reasons refused to sign contracts with their teams prior to the 1975 season. Both teams then exercised what the reserve clause maintained was their legal right and unilaterally renewed their contracts, offering small raises, for the 1975 season. Both men showed up to work in 1975—Messersmith would win nineteen games for the Dodgers that year; McNally ended up retiring before the season ended—and both were paid according to the terms of their “option year” contracts, but neither man ever put pen to paper agreeing to those terms in a new contract. At the conclusion of the 1975 season, Messersmith and then McNally�
�who had no plans to play again, but participated on principle alone—then filed with Major League Baseball legal grievances claiming that because they had played out their option year without signed contracts, they were no longer bound or obliged by the stated terms of the reserve clause to negotiate exclusively with their current teams for the coming 1976 season. The next move in this high-stakes chess match was dictated by a concession Miller had won from baseball’s owners in 1970’s Basic Agreement: that instead of being decided internally by the owners themselves, this troublesome case would now be submitted to professional arbitration. And that meant their arguments would be heard by the arbitrator retained by baseball for exactly this purpose, seventy-year-old New York attorney Peter M. Seitz.

  The heart of the players’ brief was simplicity itself: The language of the reserve clause concretely stated that the rights of teams to renew a player’s contract extended “for a period of one year” beyond the life of the current signed contract. That period, in both men’s cases, had now clearly expired, and therefore they claimed the reserve clause no longer exerted any limits or authority over their ability to seek employment elsewhere within the sport of professional baseball. And on December 23, 1975, Major League Baseball’s salaried legal arbiter, Peter Seitz, handed down his ruling—known forever after as the “Seitz Decision”—that he agreed with the players’ interpretation of the language in the reserve clause. He founded his decision on a central tenet of American contract law, that whenever a clause is ambiguous, the ambiguity should be interpreted in a manner least beneficial to the party who had placed that clause in the contract to begin with. That party was Major League Baseball, and if team owners had truly wanted an eternal iron-clad grip on their players—according to Seitz—they should have spelled it out in more concrete terms. Seitz didn’t find that the reserve clause was in any way illegal, he simply agreed with the players that the clause, as written, should only be legally binding for one year.