by Mark Frost
Darrell Johnson managed the American League All-Star team the next day—Fisk, Lynn, Yaz, and Tiant had made the squad—with the Red Sox stuck at .500, in third place, while rumors that Johnson was about to lose his job ran rampant. On the other side of the field, Sparky Anderson led the National League team onto the field. Four of his Cincinnati regulars had been named to the Senior Circuit’s starting lineup—Bench, Morgan, Rose, and George Foster, who was having his first monster year—and Sparky would name three others to the team as reserves, Tony Perez, Davey Concepcion, and Ken Griffey, off to the best start of his young career. President Gerald Ford attended the game, and the National League won the meaningless exhibition easily, 7–1, with Sparky’s own Reds providing most of the muscle—seven hits, four runs, and four RBIs among them, including a massive two-run shot by George Foster. Fred Lynn produced the American League’s only run, with a solo homer.
From their virtual dead heat atop the sport only nine months before, the two teams from Boston and Cincinnati were now headed in opposite directions. The world champion Reds were already well on their way to another runaway win of the National League’s West Division, and in the second half of the season would only play better. It was clear to all observers and participants in Boston that Darrell Johnson had irrevocably lost the confidence of his players and control of his clubhouse; even his former protégé Carlton Fisk had a serious falling-out with him and now openly questioned Johnson in print. When the team lost five of their first six games after the All-Star break, on July 19, less than a year after being named baseball’s Major League Manager of the Year, Darrell Johnson was fired as the field manager of the Red Sox and replaced by his third base coach, Don Zimmer, who vowed to restore order and discipline in the Boston locker room.
Now that the new rules were established, within three weeks—all before August 9, when the new Basic Agreement would take effect—the team signed Carlton Fisk, Fred Lynn, and Rick Burleson to expensive, but not crushing, five-year contracts; the plague of free agency had been avoided, for the time being, by the Red Sox after all.
“THE BIG RED MACHINE” wasn’t just the centerpiece of a clever marketing campaign, nor did it simply describe the juggernaut team that had dominated the National League during the 1970s; it was an apt description of the entire organization that team president Bob Howsam had so carefully assembled in Cincinnati since his arrival in 1967. The Reds had had only nine hundred season ticket holders on the books when Howsam was hired by the consortium of local businessmen who owned the team. Only six years later, in 1973, the Reds drew more than 2 million fans at home, the first of eight straight seasons they would pass that benchmark, a remarkable record for a team playing in the second smallest market in major-league baseball. By turning the Reds into a regional franchise—thanks to the game’s first truly modern marketing department, headed by Dick Wagner—while fielding one of the strongest lineups in baseball history, in 1976 Cincinnati led both leagues in attendance by drawing nearly 2.7 million paying customers. And that year the squad of players that Howsam and Anderson and scout Ray Shore had constructed with such extraordinary care and precision reached its zenith.
The Reds won 102 games in 1976, and captured the National League’s West Division by ten games, for their fifth divisional title in seven years. Joe Morgan won his second consecutive Most Valuable Player Award, the fifth awarded to a Red in seven years—teammate George Foster finished second—and Little Joe led the league in both on-base and slugging percentage, while stealing sixty bases. Tony Perez drove in more than ninety runs for the tenth consecutive season. Pete Rose led the league in both hits and runs scored, with 130, finishing fourth in the MVP voting. Ken Griffey turned in the league’s second highest batting average at .336. Five of the Great Eight hit over .300, and their only starter who didn’t make the All-Star team—center fielder Cesar Geronimo—hit .307 and won his third Gold Glove in a row. Three other Reds were awarded their customary Gold Gloves—Bench, Morgan, and Concepcion—and the team led all of baseball in fielding percentage, while committing the fewest errors. Whenever his regulars needed a rest, Sparky’s disciplined and ready bench players picked up the slack with no visible drop-off. Following Captain Hook’s now established formula of relying on his entire pitching staff, the 1976 Reds featured seven ten-game winners—a National League record—and once again led the league in saves.
That fall, for the second year in a row, the Reds swept their first playoff opponent—this time the Philadelphia Phillies, who had won 101 games in the regular season—in the National League Championship Series 3–0. Their opponent in the 1976 World Series would be the New York Yankees; under manager Billy Martin they had withstood a late charge by the Red Sox—who had come to life belatedly once Don Zimmer took over, but ended up finishing third behind the Yanks and Orioles—coasting to the East Division title by ten and a half games, and then squeaked by the Kansas City Royals in five games to capture their first American League pennant since 1964.
Ray Shore’s extensive scouting reports told Sparky that the Reds had little to worry about from the Yankees, and once again Shore was on target. Stronger in every measurable category—and even more so in the less tangible ones, like mastery of fundamentals and cast-iron confidence—the Reds hit .313 as a team and swept the Yankees 4–0 to win their second consecutive World Championship, the first time any team from the National League had turned that trick since the New York Giants in 1922. Johnny Bench slugged a three-run home run in Yankee Stadium in the top of the ninth in Game Four to clinch their final victory—he hit .533 in the Series, with six RBIs and two home runs—and was named the Series’ Most Valuable Player. After the Reds marched undefeated through their 1976 postseason, the national press combed through all of baseball history for comparisons, found precious few, and delivered a consensus opinion that the Cincinnati Reds of the seventies under Sparky Anderson had earned the right to be considered—along with the Yankees of the twenties and sixties, the Brooklyn Dodgers of the fifties, and the recent Oakland A’s—as one of the greatest dynasties that had ever played the game. The same writers predicted that the Reds also had to be considered the odds-on favorite to win their third straight championship in 1977.
But inside Cincinnati’s front office, even as the Big Red Machine on the field reached its highest level of perfection, a seed of destruction took root. President Bob Howsam had long been one of baseball’s most hardline, conservative critics of the game’s deepening labor crises, claiming that America’s pastime could not survive without the age-old protections of its reserve clause. After the players won the right to free agency when the Seitz Decision was upheld in federal court, Howsam predicted that its future consequences would one day ruin baseball, driving up payrolls to unimagined levels and forcing teams to price tickets out of the average fan’s reach. Large media market franchises with deep pockets would now dominate the sport, he claimed, destroying any illusion of parity and driving smaller city clubs into inevitable decline. Players moving with impunity from team to team in search of bigger paychecks would also ruin any semblance of roster continuity and alienate the blue-collar fans whose forged loyalties to established squads of identifiable players had always supplied baseball’s financial and emotional backbone.
So instead of trying to adapt to the rapidly changing times, Howsam determined that his Reds would simply ignore baseball’s stark new reality. They quickly signed Rose and Morgan to single-year contracts for 1976 at roughly the same figure—around $200,000, negotiated by their lawyers, not agents—and took the unprecedented step of inking the younger Johnny Bench to a two-year deal for nearly the same money. But when their fourth superstar, Tony Perez, held out for a comparable figure, the team initially wouldn’t give it to him. Uber-agent Jerry Kapstein had by then signed six of the Reds as clients, almost all of them pitchers, including their young ace Don Gullett, and at first the Reds’ chief negotiator, Dick Wagner, simply refused to deal with him. The owners’ lockout postponed the opening of spr
ing training and jeopardized the regular season, but when it ended at Bowie Kuhn’s insistence, the team finally signed Tony Perez, grudgingly, to a single-year deal close to what they’d given their other three superstars. Jerry Kapstein’s clients were among the last Reds to sign; one, veteran reliever Clay Carroll—winner of last fall’s Game Seven—held out and was promptly traded in late 1975 to the White Sox. Don Gullett, after being told that he didn’t deserve a multiyear contract, refused to sign at all, and became the only Cincinnati Red who would declare free agency when the 1976 season ended. The Reds then went about their business as if nothing else had changed, and stormed through the season to the National League pennant and the World Series.
At which point a much less significant rule change in the game that year helped seal the fate of the Big Red Machine: Major League Baseball had decided that the use of a designated hitter should be available to both teams for every game of the 1976 World Series. Sparky penciled in his best left-handed bench player at DH, backup first baseman Dan Driessen, against the Yankees, and Driessen responded by hitting .357 while coming through repeatedly in the clutch. His performance convinced Howsam and Wagner that the twenty-five-year-old Driessen, in their minds long the heir apparent at his position, was at last ready to supplant Tony Perez—who by his high standards had played a subpar postseason, hitting .269, with six RBIs and no home runs—as the Reds’ everyday first baseman.
On November 2, 1976, American voters elected Jimmy Carter as the thirty-ninth President of the United States, definitively turning the page on Gerald Ford and his lingering association with Richard Nixon and the Watergate era. Two days later, only two weeks after the Reds had secured a place in the game’s pantheon with their second consecutive World Series win, the game’s twenty-four owners gathered at the Plaza Hotel in New York for baseball’s first free agent draft. Slugger Reggie Jackson generated the noisiest headlines when he was drafted and then signed a few weeks later by George Steinbrenner’s Yankees for five years and the staggering sum of nearly $3 million. The Yankees had earlier filled their free agent quota when Reds’ ace Don Gullett signed with them for a multiyear, million-dollar deal.
The Boston Red Sox made an equally big splash in the pool later that night by becoming the first team to actually finalize a contract with a free agent they had selected: a relatively unknown right-handed reliever named Bill Campbell, from penny-pinching Calvin Griffith’s small-market Minnesota Twins, who had paid Campbell all of $22,000 in 1975 and then refused to give him a $5,000 raise. Campbell had responded by turning in the most spectacular season of his career during his option year, 1976, winning seventeen games and saving twenty, and the Red Sox signed him away for four years and just over a million dollars.
When the Cincinnati Reds’ turn to draft a player came that day—they were scheduled, according to the rules, as world champions, to pick last—team president Bob Howsam instead read a prepared statement for the press and the record: “In fairness to the players who have won the World Championship for us two years in a row, and considering the way our organization is structured, we do not think it would be right for the Cincinnati club to get into bidding contests that must come out of this draft.” Many, even most, of baseball’s owners and management had until recently felt exactly the same way, but when the game’s new rules became reality, only the Cincinnati Reds refused to participate.
Twenty-four players in all were selected and eventually signed that day in the first free agent draft, for what turned out to be an average salary of just over $200,000, nearly a 400 percent increase from what had been a major-league player’s average working wage in 1976. The future of baseball, as far as its long-suffering players were concerned, had arrived. The owners, even the more free-spending ones, remained wary; they would now wait to see results on the field before opening their wallets any wider.
Neither the Reds nor the Red Sox were finished with their off-season moves. A few weeks later, in early December, Boston traded the gifted Cecil Cooper—who hit .282 with fifteen home runs in 1976, and still hadn’t won the confidence of the front office—to the Milwaukee Brewers for two former, problematic Red Sox: first baseman and more traditional slugger George Scott—who suffered from both weight and IQ issues—and prodigal son Bernie Carbo.
On December 16, the Cincinnati Reds finalized a trade of another Kapstein client, reliever Will McEnaney, never mind that he had now saved the final game of two straight World Series, and first baseman Tony Perez to the Montreal Expos for two journeyman pitchers, Woodie Fryman and Dale Murray. Bob Howsam had offered Perez a chance to stay with the Reds in 1977, but only if he would platoon at first with Dan Driessen and accept a pay cut; Perez declined, as was his right, and Howsam knew that if kept Tony on the squad as a part-time player and let him play out his option year, he would then lose him to free agency without compensation. Only his teammates seemed to understand at the time—although both Howsam and Anderson later admitted their mistake—that the unique, intangible qualities of leadership that Tony Perez took with him could never be replaced.
“I never knew until he left that Tony Perez was our number one leader,” said Sparky later. “I should have stood up for him, but I didn’t. That’s how stupid I was.”
Perez’s attorney, Reuven Katz, organized a press conference in his office, for Perez to give his reaction to the trade before it was officially announced. He also called in his other client, Johnny Bench, Tony’s teammate and close friend for ten years, to let him know about it before the news broke. When Bench arrived, he saw the look on Tony’s face and neither of them needed to say a word. They hugged, and held on to each other for a long time, in silence. Regaining his composure, Perez remained characteristically professional and dignified in his final Cincinnati press conference and, after fifteen years with the organization, refused to criticize the Reds, saying only that he would always be grateful for the chance they’d given him to come to America from Cuba and make a better life for himself and his family. Bench was too upset to answer questions, but in their hearts both men knew they had come to the end.
And just like that, the glory years of the Big Red Machine were over.
THE BICENTENNIAL YEAR of 1976, which celebrated so many of Boston’s contributions to American history, would only be remembered as an ugly season in Fenway Park. The Red Sox faithful fell out of love with the team’s three stubborn holdouts—Fisk, Lynn, and Burleson—savaging them that summer for daring to put their own futures ahead of their sacred franchise. Under this unkind scrutiny, only the Rooster improved his performance on the field, while Pudge and Freddy suffered through what fans and writers decided, judged against their own previous Olympian standards, were subpar seasons. Carlton Fisk, the most articulate, proud, and passionate Red Sox player in a generation, never recovered his idealist’s love for the purity of the game; that might in most other walks of life simply be called learning the way of the world, but the sensitive Fisk took the very public process of his disillusionment particularly hard. The ageless, always dependable Yaz posted another solid year, and Jim Rice came on strong in the second half after Don Zimmer took over the team; the Red Sox even finished by winning fifteen of their last eighteen games, but they still ended the 1976 season in third place, only four games above five hundred. Bill Lee returned late in the year from his injured shoulder, but won only five games. Ferguson Jenkins, the team’s centerpiece off-season acquisition, won only twelve, and lost eleven. The new two-headed bullpen committee of Jim Willoughby and Tom House saved only fourteen games between them.
The most consistent man on the team’s troubled pitching staff remained the remarkable Luis Tiant, who at the age of thirty-five went 21–12, with a 3.06 ERA, and finished fifth in the voting for the Cy Young Award, on a team that hadn’t spent a single day in first place all season. Luis had treated all of the season’s insanity with his customary calm, and simply gone out every fifth game and done his job. In light of the monstrous distractions swirling around him, Tiant’s ste
llar performance in 1976 has to be considered as perhaps his most remarkable achievement. His parents, Luis Senior and Isabel, were there to watch it all unfold. They never did return to their native Cuba when their visas expired; Luis wouldn’t allow it, knowing how negligible the chances of ever seeing them again would have been, and the family had spent an idyllic year at their home in Milton, three generations under one roof, when for the first time in his adult life Luis spent many hours talking about the art and craft of pitching with his father. Then, not long after the 1976 season ended, after suffering through a few weeks of poor health, Luis Senior was diagnosed with an advanced, aggressive and inoperable form of cancer; there was nothing they could do, doctors told Luis, but try to make his father’s final weeks as comfortable as possible. With his family around him, very much at peace, Luis Senior left this life on December 9 at Carney Hospital in Boston.
“When my father passed away,” said Tiant a while later, “I had a feeling something would happen to my mother. She felt it, too, but she didn’t want to make me feel sad.”
Three days later, the day before the funeral, during a small gathering with friends and family at their home in Milton, Isabel excused herself and went upstairs to her bedroom, saying she wanted to sit in her favorite chair by the window and spend some time alone with her thoughts. They found her there a short while later; although she had been in good health, Isabel had died quietly of a heart attack or, perhaps more accurately after thirty-six inseparable years with her husband, a broken heart. The end, because they all must end, of a beautiful love story.
