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

by Mark Frost

  They settled the thing on April 2, the day before the season was scheduled to begin; at 232 days, still the longest work stoppage in the history of American sports. Sparky and his Tigers and every other team went back to work, and the 1995 season began, but this time the fans stayed away. Perceiving their long-running conflict as a selfish argument between billionaire owners and millionaire players—the average major-league salary had by now nearly reached $700,000 a year—much of America turned its back on baseball; attendance and ratings plummeted throughout the 1995 season, and in the years that followed.

  His protest cost Sparky Anderson about $150,000 of his salary that year, which he never recovered, and at the end of the 1995 season the Detroit Tigers fired him. He was sixty-one years old at the time, in perfect health, had won more baseball games in his managing career than all but two men who’d held that job in history, and at that point remained the only manager ever to win a World Series in both leagues. Aside from a few of his players, just about the only other person in the rest of the sport who stood up for Sparky publicly was broadcaster Tony Kubek. Since leaving NBC in 1989, Tony had been calling games for the Yankees’ cable TV baseball network, and few men have seen more baseball games in their lives; fewer still care more about the integrity of the game. When the strike ended the 1994 season, Tony Kubek wrote acting commissioner Bud Selig a sixteen-page letter detailing the many ways in which he believed the sport had lost its way, and offered solutions for how he thought those critical problems could be addressed. Selig never answered him.

  Kubek resigned from the Yankees that winter and never called another baseball game; he’s never even watched one since, so distraught is he at what has happened to the game he loved, a disaster for which he holds players and owners equally accountable. In an honor long overdue for one of the finest, most honorable men in baseball history, Tony Kubek was finally given the Ford C. Frick Award in 2009.

  Sparky Anderson never managed another baseball game, but that was not a choice in which, it turned out, he had any say. Although he refuses to even consider the idea that he’s been blackballed, there’s little doubt that Sparky’s principled position cost him his place in the game he’d served so faithfully for forty-three years. No matter; he still calls his decision to refuse any part of that 1994 fiasco the proudest moment of his life.

  “The game is bigger than all of us,” he says.

  The principal recipients of Sparky’s forced retirement have been his many friends and family, including his fourteen grandchildren, who have since had him more to themselves. And when he stood up to give his speech beside Carlton Fisk and Tony Perez and Marty Brennaman as he was honored with them at baseball’s Hall of Fame in late July of 2000, here’s what else Sparky Anderson said, when he turned back and pointed emphatically to those two players:

  “I want you to take a look at the people behind me and put it in your brain when you look at ’em; the people that came before them, and these people, and the people that will come after them. That is baseball. All the other stuff you’ve heard about baseball is just makeup. Those people made this game and they will protect this game, and I hope every manager that follows me will listen very carefully: Players earn this, by their skills. Managers come here, as I did, on their backs, for what they did for me. My father never got past the third grade, but there ain’t a guy that ever went to Harvard as smart as my daddy. My daddy said this: “I’m gonna give you a gift. It’s the greatest gift to take all the way through your life. And if you live with this gift, everything will work out perfect, and it’ll never cost you a dime, and that gift is this: If every day of your life, with every person you meet, you will just be nice to that person, and treat that person like they are someone.’”

  Johnny Bench and Joe Morgan, already in the Hall, were there that day, and so was Yaz, and forty-two other Hall of Famers, the largest alumni turnout to that point, and most were in tears by the time Sparky finished. Tony Perez followed him to the podium; he was introduced by Commissioner Bud Selig. When Pudge Fisk followed Perez to make his own speech, he had this to say:

  “I’d like to congratulate Sparky and his family. I played against you in the ’75 World Series, just for a few games; you might remember…seems a lot of the guys I played against from ’75 are here for some reason. I’m not quite sure, but I played against Tony in ’75, and then he came to the Red Sox and I found out why they call him the Big Dog…Doggie for short…They shouldn’t have called him just Big Dog, because he was the lead dog…

  “I played with Rico, and Yaz, and Dewey, and Freddie, and Spaceman, and Jim Ed and Rooster, but the guy I had the most fun playing with, catching for? Luis Tiant. The best and most colorful pitcher I’ve ever caught, and the best and most colorful ever, I think, in a Red Sox uniform.”

  Fisk and Johnny Bench had joked with each other for years that because of the remarkable way Game Six had ended, the Red Sox and their fans still thought that “their team had won the 1975 World Series three games to four,” and Fisk referenced that now when he turned to Marty Brennaman.

  “And as you called it, Marty, we won that Series three games to four, you know that.”

  Marty Brennaman’s speech that day narrowly averted controversy when some older hard-line Hall of Famers caught wind of a rumor he was going to press the case that Pete Rose should be there with all of his old teammates in Cooperstown, and let it be known that they’d get up and walk out on him if he did. Johnny Bench heard about it and let Marty know shortly before the ceremony, but Brennaman stuck to his guns. While thanking all of those who were there that day from the Big Red Machine, he also mentioned “those who should be here—Bob Howsam, Dave Concepcion, and yes, by God, Peter Edward Rose.”

  He left it at that. No one walked out.

  “I wouldn’t have walked out,” said Joe Morgan afterward. “This day should not be about Pete Rose, and it would have been disrespectful to Tony and Sparky and Pudge if we had walked out. This is their day, and they earned it.”

  And the whole time during their induction ceremony, less than a mile away at a memorabilia store in Cooperstown unaffiliated with the Hall of Fame, Pete Rose was signing autographs and selling merchandise for a paycheck.

  AFTER GAME SIX and the Seitz Decision, this confusing new world became the reality of baseball for all its players; untethered, cast loose, without lasting allegiance. There was suddenly too much money to be made on the open market, and after nearly a hundred years of indentured servitude, who could blame these boys and men for trying to make the most of their brief productive years? So in the aftermath of Seitz, baseball’s liberated players scattered like ronin set adrift by their shogun, free to chase real or imagined fortunes during the short half-lifes of their professional careers. Fans to this day continue to rage about the sport’s astronomical salaries—the average as of this writing is now more than $3 million a year—but most also fail to consider that the average American worker spends forty years in the job market; the average major-league career is four years long, and if the “average” salary in these public arenas still seems wildly out of line with the working-class standards to which professional sports used to adhere, the time spent earning that wage is an equally important factor in the equation. In a culture so single-mindedly devoted to entertainment and return on the dollar, stars in any high-profile profession—actors, rock stars, corporate CEOs—by any rational measurement are now “overpaid” they also represent less than a fraction of 1 percent of the people working in their field. Begrudge these players their fortunes, then, if you will, but they are to a real extent only possible because of you, as long as you pay the rising ticket prices, buy the cable or satellite packages, purchase the merchandise, obsess over the radio talk show chatter. The value of both the Cincinnati and Boston franchises in 1975—stadiums included—lay between $11 and $12 million, which translates to about $47 million in contemporary money. That’s less than a certain third baseman in New York will make over the next two seasons. The estimated
worth of the Red Sox today is more than three quarters of a billion dollars. Gross revenue throughout baseball in 2008 reached almost $6.1 billion. Money, we can say without fear of contradiction, changes everything, and nothing’s ever gained, but something else is lost.

  Baseball did come back a few years after hitting bottom in 1994, gloriously it seemed at the time, on the brute strength of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds and their thrilling pursuit of ancient home run records. The extent to which we now know that revival was predicated on biological manipulation, deception, and dishonor has since dug the game into an even darker hole with no end in sight. But regardless, incredibly, the money keeps pouring in. His fellow baseball owners recently voted Bud Selig, no longer “interim” and under whose leadership they have all become wealthy beyond measure, as the greatest “commissioner” in baseball history.

  Old-timers used to say that baseball games played at night actually began at 1:30 in the afternoon, when players would first gather in the clubhouse and the locker room chemistry that formed that elusive thing called “team” began to work its alchemical magic. What happened back then on the bus rides and plane flights was as important to the sum total as the games themselves. Most players today show up an hour or two before game time, plug in their iPods, deal with agents and marketing deals and off-field business, isolated in their solipsistic bubbles, turning their collective focus to the game at hand only shortly before the first pitch. Each team is a consortium of wealthy, independent contractors who happen to, temporarily, wear the same uniform. Baseball never needed names on jerseys before 1976; fans knew their local lineups by their numbers. Names are a necessity now.

  They’re in late middle age now, all the players who strode the stage of Game Six. The youthful, big-league dreams they all shared had come to pass, lifted them up, making possible a large American life during and after their careers that for most would have otherwise remained hopelessly out of reach. To a man they all still love the game that gave them their measure of glory, and if baseball has more than its share of the intractable dilemmas informing so much of modern life, it also still has the game itself, in all its sweet formal simplicity and complex interior reality; that remains its richest, most valuable asset. The idea of finding meaning in a game, no matter how elevated the level of play or its artificially inflated significance in a culture that all too often celebrates size over substance, is easy to write off against the weight of the world’s concerns or the pressing limits of finite life spans. But such condescending assessments miss the essential nature of the nourishment these contests provide; because it is the human qualities embodied and displayed by the players in these arenas that we drink in and from which we derive soulful benefit: grace, stalwart strength, determination and inner fire, standing up under pressure, persistence and faith in something larger than the self, taking joy in victory, yielding with dignity in defeat. These things matter and they are, as much as any identifiable part of the human experience, eternal.

  The world these teams electrified in the fall of 1975 is a vastly different place now, but if it’s a better one, well, that depends on who you talk to. Faster, certainly, we’re as connected and jacked up as a juggler’s nervous system; sadder, absolutely, maybe even wiser, or—one hopes after this new century’s sobering first decade—at the least wised up. The past recedes more rapidly from sight than it once did, abandoned for the next big thing without a backward glance, particularly by the young; they’ll learn otherwise, most likely, once they taste the melancholy of mortality. Headlines tell us that greed hasn’t lost its death grip on the human spirit, but they also suggest that some poisonous age-old racial hatreds have genuinely softened; to its everlasting credit baseball has had more than a little to do with that. Even “entertainment” itself ain’t what it used to be—forms are breaking down all over, through repetition, overuse, or the evergreen lust for money; music, movies, novels, newspapers, network television, and even professional sports, now irreversibly razed and rebuilt into a multibillion-dollar wing of the “entertainment industry.” So few things remain constant, but not everything changes for the worse; the Boss and the E Street Band are still rocking the world like their lives depend on it, standing up to time, sure as every spring men break out the bats and balls and gloves, and every once in a while on the way to the financial planner’s office a blade of grass busts through the concrete, a miracle “team” falls together and lifts our hearts: the Twins of ’87 and ’91; Kirk Gibson, Orel Hershiser, and the Dodgers in ’88; the redemptive Series between the Diamondbacks and Yankees in the shadow of 9/11. It even happened for that battered old franchise in Boston in ’04 and again in ’07, finally burying all that nonsense about a “curse.” And somewhere, someday, maybe this year if we’re lucky, it will happen again.

  “Baseball don’t belong to the owners, with all their power and money, and it don’t belong to the players who make a million bucks a month, and walk around like they’re doing folks a favor just by showing up,” says Sparky. “The game belongs to the fans. Fans are the real owners, and someday they could pull the plug if they ever get fed up with all the nonsense. And we owe it to the game and those fans to make it the best sport in America again. We’ve got to solve all these problems together, and here’s a place to start:

  “A man takes care of his family, that’s what my daddy taught me. He knows how to treat people right; the way he wants to be treated. He never steals, he never cheats, and he gives something back. He does his profession proud, and he represents it with class instead of just filling his pockets. That was the most important thing about our team in 1975, and that Boston team, the thing that made them both great, the thing that put so many of ’em in the Hall of Fame.

  “They were all men.”

  Luis Tiant Jr. greets his father, Luis Tiant Sr., Logan Airport, Boston, August 1975

  Courtesy of Associated Press.

  You come here with two pockets.

  One is the winning pocket and the other is the losing pocket, and you have to carry them both with dignity.

  LUIS TIANT

  Appendix

  1975 WORLD SERIES GAME 6

  Fenway Park, Boston, Massachusetts

  Tuesday, October 21, 1975

  Attendance: 35,205

  Time of Game: 4:01

  Boston Red Sox 7

  Manager: Darrell Johnson

  Cincinn Reds 6

  Manager: Sparky Anderson

  W: R Wise (1–0), L: P Darcy (0–1)

  Winning run scored with 0 outs

  * * *

  BATTING

  2B: G Foster (1, off L Tiant).

  3B: K Griffey (1, off L Tiant).

  HR: C Geronimo (2, off L Tiant; 8th inn, 0 on, 0 outs to Deep RF).

  HBP: P Rose (1, by D Drago).

  TB: C Geronimo 5; K Griffey 4; G Foster 3; T Perez 2; P Rose 2; J Morgan; T Crowley; D Concepcion; J Bench.

  RBI: K Griffey 2 (4); G Foster 2 (2); C Geronimo (3); J Bench (4).

  2-out RBI: G Foster 2; J Bench.

  Team LOB: 11

  With RISP: 3 for 13.

  FIELDING

  DP: 1. G Foster-J Bench.

  BASERUNNING

  SB: D Concepcion (3, 2nd base off D Drago/C Fisk).

  * * *

  * * *

  BATTING

  2B: D Doyle (1, off F Norman); D Evans (1, off J Billingham).

  HR: F Lynn (1, off G Nolan; 1st inn, 2 on, 2 outs to Deep CF-RF); B Carbo (2, off R Eastwick; 8th inn, 2 on, 2 outs to Deep CF). C Fisk (2, off P Darcy; 12th inn, 0 on, 0 outs to Deep LF Line);

  SH: L Tiant (1, off J Billingham).

  IBB: C Fisk 2 (2, by W McEnaney, by F Norman).

  TB: C Fisk 5; F Lynn 5; B Carbo 4; C Yastrzemski 3; D Doyle 2; D Evans 2.

  RBI: F Lynn 3 (5); B Carbo 3 (4); C Fisk (4).

  2-out RBI: F Lynn 3; B Carbo 3.

  Team LOB: 9.

  With RISP: 2 for 10.

  FIELDING

  DP: 1. D Evans-C Yast
rzemski-D Doyle.

  E: R Burleson (1).

  * * *

  P Borbon faced 2 batters in the 8th inning.

  R Eastwick faced 2 batters in the 9th inning.

  L Tiant faced 1 batter in the 8th inning.

  Balks: None.

  WP: None.

  IBB: W McEnaney (1; C Fisk); F Norman (1; C Fisk).

  HBP: D Drago (1; P Rose).

  * * *

  OTHER

  Umpires: HP-Bob Davidson

  1B-Art Frantz

  2B-Nick Colosi

  3B-Larry Barnett

  Time of Game: 4:01.

  Attendance: 35,205.

  Field Condition: Unknown.