by Jerry Remy
He had good range, too. He was also very good at making the pivot at second base. One of the funny stories about him that year is we had a big series coming up with the Yankees at Fenway Park. Rooster had popped off in the press about the Yankees. The next day, the headline was about how Burleson hates all the Yankees. It was like, “Oh my god, what is this all about?” The Yankees didn’t appreciate that very much, and they were coming in at second base trying to kill us that whole series because of the comments that he made.
The aftermath of ’78 was sad for me. Tiant went over to the Yankees. In spring training of 1979, I remember Zimmer telling us, “Any time you get on first base today, let’s run on Luis.” Thurman Munson was catching, and we didn’t realize he had a sore arm.
When we started the official season, he says, “Did you guys have fun with me in spring training?” We didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.
I said, “No, Zim told us just have a little fun with Luis.”
He says, “You didn’t realize that I had a bad arm?”
What I wanted to say was, “If you had a bad arm, you shouldn’t have been catching in that game.” But I didn’t say it, so he was pissed and that’s something he never forgot. It was that kind of a chippy relationship between everybody.
Then, we had Hobson at third base, who was this tough Alabama kid. Just a guy who lived hard and played hard. I wouldn’t call him the most talented third baseman in baseball. He made a bunch of errors, but he had power. He was a guy at the bottom of the lineup who could hit home runs for us and drive in runs. He was playing hurt all year. He had these bone chips in his elbow and it was painful to watch him throw the ball. Instead of having surgery, he’d just keep moving around the chips into a place where he could throw comfortably. He was doing that just about all year. But he was another guy that was in the Burleson mode of going balls-out all the time. He was a football player at Alabama, played for Bear Bryant. He had that kind of mentality and he was very tough.
We had Jimmy Rice, who had the best year I’ve ever seen anybody have. I mean, he did everything that year for us. He hit home runs. I think he led the league in total bases. He was just the guy you wanted at the plate in key situations. People always talk about his power, but he also had a very good batting average. You think of the two monster home runs he hit in the game, but then, you’d look in the paper, and he also had four hits, and you’d go, “Where did the other hits go?” You didn’t remember those, but you remember the monster home runs that he would hit, and he also played a damn good left field. He played that wall very well. That’s something he got better and better at, as time went on, and by the time I got there, he was really good at playing that wall.
The other thing about Jimmy is he never took a day off. I mean, I remember him going to the dentist and getting wisdom teeth pulled and playing that night, where other guys would be out for a couple of days. He was also very quiet, and he wasn’t fond of the media. He just wanted to play baseball and be left alone. He had some issues with members of the media. He threw Thomas Boswell from The Washington Post into a rubbish barrel. He picked him up and threw him right in the trash can. He was so strong.
In my stretch with the Red Sox, he’s probably the best player that I played with because he was in the prime of his career, and he was there longer than the other guys. The other guys either left because of free agency or got traded. You just had the feeling that every time Jimmy came to the plate, he was going to do something big, and in ’78, he did. He did everything big.
We hit it off, and while I wouldn’t say we were close, I was probably as close as anyone was going to get to Jimmy. I always felt like he was a guy who I could go up to and have some laughs with, and talk to, whereas I don’t think others felt the same way.
As for Fred Lynn, in my mind, had he spent his whole career in Boston, he probably would have been a Hall of Famer. The reason I say that is because Fenway was built for him, and I also think that extra little push that you get from playing in Boston would have pushed him to a higher level than maybe playing somewhere else. He could do everything. He was a great center fielder. He was a great hitter. He could use the wall anytime he wanted to use it. He was a very good base runner. He had a good, strong throwing arm. He was just a totally different personality than the guys I’ve mentioned so far. He was very laid-back. Very Southern Californian. Not that all guys from Southern California are laid-back, but he was. Not much bothered him. He was kind of just relaxed. He took whatever results came. That was pretty much it.
I wouldn’t call the relationship between Jim and Fred close, from what I could tell. When Fred got the Rookie of the Year in 1975 and Jimmy didn’t, that may have had something to do with it. I mean, I can’t say they were enemies. Over the years, they developed a closer relationship.
Then, you had Dwight Evans. “Dewey,” at that stage of his career, was finding himself as a hitter. He was always a great outfielder. Even when I was playing with the Angels, the rumor was you didn’t hit it out to right field. If Evans is out there, you don’t try to take the extra base. That was the scouting report. I was lucky enough to see that firsthand when I became a member of the Red Sox. He could play right field like nobody’s business. He was so quick at getting balls into second base, or making that spin move and throwing somebody out at third base. It was a pleasure to watch. He got hooked up with Walt Hriniak, and I think Walt did wonders for his career, offensively.
Walt wasn’t the official hitting coach in 1978, but five or six guys used him as that. Jimmy used Johnny Pesky, but Yaz and Fisk and myself and Dwight all used Walt, who was the best coach that I’d ever had in my life. He had a certain style which have him a bad rap because hitters looked like clones, but there were others who worked with him who didn’t look like that at all. I think that he got a horrible rap here in Boston with the people who worked for the organization, because you had Ted Williams, who would come to spring training where it was his way or the highway.
Nobody could really understand what Walt was teaching us. He was teaching the Charlie Lau method of hitting, which was very popular in those days. Some guys had completely different looking stances than what they did before he got a hold of them. He got the bad reputation of, “Well, he is trying to make everybody the same.” That’s not true. I wasn’t the same as Dwight and Yaz wasn’t the same as Dwight. Walt kind of worked with you individually to get the most out of you. He had certain beliefs, but it’s not like he demanded we do this or that. I think the combination with him and Evans really clicked. Dwight became a really good hitter under the tutelage of Hriniak.
He also helped me incredibly, because I went from a guy who hit a lot of fly balls that went about 280 feet for outs to more of a line-drive, ground-ball type hitter, which turned me into a .300 hitter. What he did for my career was unbelievable. The other thing about him is he couldn’t sleep at night if we didn’t hit. He was so involved as a person and a coach that he lived and died with everything we did. He knew when to talk to people and when not to talk to people. For example, if I had a bad game, I didn’t want to talk to anybody. He knew that. He’d wait until the next day, and when I’d get there early, then we’d have a chat about the night before, and what’s going on, and go back out and work on it. He was an amazing man. He broke his right arm doing flips one day, and he tried to learn how to throw left-handed so he could still throw batting practice. That’s how crazy he was.
We had George Scott at first base, the best defensive first baseman I ever played with. You had total confidence that every throw over there, “Boomer” was going to catch. On balls that were hit between first and second base, he’d love to show off his range, going toward the second base bag. He loved making that backhanded play and then throwing to the pitcher covering. What I thought was funny was after a while, he said to me, “Call me off that ball. Call me off that ball.” He really didn’t want to be called off the ball because he wan
ted to make the play, so I’d just say, “Yeah, Boomer, okay. No problem. I’ll call you off.” He just kept doing the same thing over and over, even if I called him off.
He had just a smooth glove, and, boy, did he save errors. Even off-balance throws from second on double plays, we didn’t worry about it because we knew that he was going to pick it at the other end. I think his best hitting days were behind him by then, but he never lost it with the glove. He could still put a hurting on you with some home runs and stuff like that at that time, but I don’t think he was as offensively effective, in that particular time, as he was earlier in his career.
Then, you had Fisk behind the plate. There was always this raging debate between who was the best, Fisk or Munson. There was also another guy who was very good down in Texas, Jim Sundberg, a very good defensive catcher. I’m partial to Fisk, because I played with him. He was a giant behind the plate. He was so big. You don’t see a lot of really tall catchers. He had the ability to be very flexible and get down as low as he possibly could to give pitchers good targets.
He had a great throwing arm. He threw directly over the top. He threw cross-seamed fastballs to second base, where Munson would throw kind of almost like three-quarters. Munson was so quick that if he made a good throw, he’d get you by five feet, but a lot of his throws would end up going into center field, because he’d bounce them. It was really a gamble running on him. You either were going to be safe by quite a distance, or you were going to be out by five feet. You never knew which throw was going to be a good one for him. Fisk was another disciple of Hriniak. He was just a clutch hitter. He was a great base runner for a big guy. I think he might have been our best base runner.
Behind the plate, he was definitely in charge. There was no question about that. I think the pitchers probably got sick of him going to the mound, but if he had something to say, he’d be out there. There was that famous picture of him taking the mask and putting it on top of his head, walking out to the mound. In those days, he was slow and methodical, but if he had something to say, he’d say it to you. There was no bullshitting around with him. He was to the point, not with just pitchers but with everybody. He was pretty incredible. Again, the best catcher I had ever been around.
Our manager was Don Zimmer. Zim was totally different than anybody else I’d played for. I played for Dick Williams. I played for Norm Sherry. I played for Dave Garcia with the Angels. And then all of a sudden, I’ve got Zim, who was totally a position player’s manager. He didn’t care for pitchers. I don’t know where that came from. A lot of people think it came from when he was beaned, when he was younger. He pretty much ran the same lineup out there every day. He was one of those guys who didn’t do a lot of platooning.
A couple of funny stories about Zim. There was one time I was struggling against left-handers, in ’78 or ’79. Zim sat me down against a couple left-handers in a row. I went to Hriniak and I said, “Walt, what is going on here? Why am I not playing against these left-handers?” I realized I wasn’t hitting them that good but Zim never changed the lineup. Walt told me to go in and ask Zim. I made the mistake of doing just that. Zim must have been waiting on me, because I knocked on the door and before it even got out of my mouth, he was chewing my ass out about even having the balls to come in and ask him why I wasn’t playing. He started rattling off these numbers. He was screaming so I walked out. I went up to Hriniak and I said, “Thanks for having me go in there. Christ. I just got my ass chewed out for 10 minutes.”
The other funny story was we were playing at Fenway one day, and I attempted to steal second base and got thrown out. Zim called me in and he asks, “Did you check the way the wind was blowing?” I said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “Well, the wind’s blowing straight out. When you’ve got guys like Yastrzemski and Rice and Fisk hitting behind you, you don’t get thrown out at second base with the wind blowing out at Fenway Park.”
That became a little bit difficult for me, because I was there for speed. I think I stole 30 in ’78, and 22 of those came on the road, because Zim didn’t want me running at Fenway. I don’t think those guys hitting behind me were crazy about me running, anyway. That was especially true for Yaz, because if he had a hole at first base, he wanted that hole there. He didn’t want you running to take away the hole. When I was on second base, I was already in scoring position. He didn’t even want you moving at second base, because it would distract him. It was kind of a touchy situation because I came from a team where all we did was run.
Yaz was real quiet. He pretty much kept to himself. Off the field, he and Dewey would go out to dinner a lot together. But he was really focused on what he had to do. He DH’d a lot and was playing first base by the time I got to Boston, but he still played some left field and still played it great. He had no fear of the wall at all. He’d go crashing into it and try to make plays, and he became a pretty decent first baseman too, when they moved him over there.
Jim Rice and I meeting the great Carl Yastrzemski at the plate in 1978. (AP Images)
We had an underrated pitching staff. Campbell had a very good year out of the bullpen. Stanley was incredibly valuable to us. He filled every role that was possible. He’d start games if he had to. He’d come in and throw five innings in the middle of the game. He worked toward the end of the game. He’d be a setup guy. He’d close if he had to. He had a rubber arm.
Eck really was the key to our ’78 season. I remember playing against him. He no-hit us when I was with the Angels. He didn’t even realize he was doing it, but what he was doing was after he’d strike somebody out, or they’d get an out, he’d point to the guy in the batter’s box to get in the box next. You can’t imagine how bad you wanted to get a hit off him. None of us wanted the game to end, because we wanted to break up that no-hitter. He was kind of the same way with the Sox. He just wore his emotions on his sleeve. When he was good, he was really good. He would piss the opponents off with his antics on the mound. But it didn’t matter at that time, because he was so good.
And there was Bill Lee. I can’t say I knew him very well. I’m not sure anybody did, except maybe Jim Willoughby and Bernie Carbo. He was in his own world. But one of the biggest disappointments of the year, for me, was when we were playing a big series against the Yankees, and Zimmer decided to pitch Bobby Sprowl instead of Lee. Zimmer disliked Lee. He couldn’t stand him. I don’t know if that came into his thinking of who he started, but it really hurt us in that game. Sprowl was awful and Lee was going to put at least a competitive performance out there for you. But the one thing I remember about Lee is he’d take a lot of pressure off you, because he would go off on these rants with the media, and kind of draw attention away from what might be going on with us. The reporters would flock to his locker because they never knew what the hell he was going to say. He once called Zim a gerbil. You have to understand how that went over.
Then you had Tiant, who was the complete opposite, just the ultimate professional. He’d go out there every game expecting to pitch nine innings. The tougher the competition, the better for him. A great, great, great teammate. One of the funniest guys I’ve ever met in my life. Some of the conversations between him and Yaz were just absolutely hilarious, and Boomer, too. They were just absolutely hilarious to listen to. Tiant would constantly be on George Scott. Constantly. Then, he’d be all over Yaz, too, about his clothes.
Yaz was really cheap. He never went out and bought shit. One day Dick Drago threw a leather jacket in the trash at Fenway, in the clubhouse. Yaz saw him. He went into the trash, took it out, and asked, “What are you throwing this away for?” Drago said, “Well, it’s all worn out and stuff.” Yaz took it out of the barrel, slapped some things on the elbows, some suede pads or something, and wore it the rest of the year.
Of course, Tiant would see something like that and just completely tear into him. But Luis was great, because if you made a mistake behind Luis, he’d call you to the mound and say, “Do
n’t worry about it. You get the next one.” You always had a comfort level playing behind him. You weren’t afraid to make mistakes, because he was the kind of guy who would not let that bother him. He knew he wasn’t perfect, and he knew nobody else was perfect.
It was a pleasure to play behind him. He was so damn competitive. He was so funny. I remember somebody hit a home run against him in ’78. When contact was made, I heard Luis going, “Oh, my god” on the mound. This was a real bomb. It wasn’t coming back. He could do stuff like that. And you could hear jingling all the time. I don’t know if it was change, or I don’t know if he had his wallet in his pocket. I don’t know what it was. He was the guy who really loosened everybody up in the clubhouse.
* * *
It was a tough off-season. We felt we had another good team in ’79, even though we lost Luis to the Yankees. We felt like we were going to have a run of about three to four years that were going to be special. As a team we felt we were going to win it. But I screwed up my knee in ’79, sliding into home plate at Yankee Stadium. It was a terrible play on my part. There was a little fly ball down the first-base line. I thought Chris Chambliss was going to catch it. But Willie Randolph caught it instead and I tagged up and tried to score on it. I was out by probably seven feet. I tried to slide around the tag and I got my spike caught. That’s when I first tore my knee up. I didn’t get to play a lot the rest of that year. I played in 80 games total. Fisk played in just 91 games.
