Fenway Park

by John Powers

  On Monday, though, his club was teetering on the edge of extinction after St. Louis had administered 5-2 and 6-0 tutorials at Busch Stadium. It was left to Lonborg to bring the Sox back home alive and he delivered with a 3-1 decision. “Same lineup, same result,” Williams decreed for the sixth game in Boston. But his pitching choice was startling. Gary Waslewski had started only four games all season and had been sent down twice to the minors.

  Nobody with that little experience had ever been tapped for a decisive World Series game, but Waslewski performed superbly until the sixth inning and Boston hitters worked over eight St. Louis hurlers. The Sox set a post-season record with three homers in the fourth as Yastrzemski, Reggie Smith, and Petrocelli chased starter Dick Hughes. Boston then broke things up with four more runs in the seventh for an 8-4 triumph.

  The outfield wall got a thorough scraping in March 1968.

  REMEMBERING TONY C

  Mike Higgins, the general manager, thought he was too young. But Johnny Pesky, the manager, had already seen enough of Tony Conigliaro in spring training in Arizona in 1964 to know he had a natural power hitter in camp, and he brought him up to stay at age 19.

  On Opening Day at Fenway Park that season, Conigliaro, a year out of St. Mary’s High School of Lynn, Massachusetts, stepped to the plate and in his first at-bat unloaded a home run off White Sox pitcher Joel Horlen.

  Conigliaro went on to become the youngest American League player to reach the 100-homer mark, and the youngest ever to lead the majors in homers (with 32 in 1965, at age 20). At the height of his popularity, the handsome, dark-haired Tony C also did a little singing, and he performed on The Merv Griffin Show, among other places.

  Conigliaro was hitting .287 with 20 homers and 67 RBI in 1967 as the Red Sox chased their first pennant in 21 years. But on Friday, August 18, at Fenway, his life changed forever. Conigliaro “was never one to back off from an inside pitch,” said Pesky, and Tony C was struck in the face by a fastball from Angels pitcher Jack Hamilton.

  The ball shattered Conigliaro’s cheekbone and cracked the orbital bone encasing his left eye. The impact also severely damaged the retina of his left eye. The beaning was so severe that Conigliaro dropped to the ground face first, bleeding from the nose and eye.

  Later, Conigliaro described the impact: “His first pitch came in tight. I jumped back and my helmet flew off. There was this tremendous ringing noise. I couldn’t stand it. . . . I kept saying to myself, ‘Oh, God, let me breathe.’ I didn’t think about my future in baseball. I just wanted to stay alive.”

  Conigliaro sat out the entire 1968 season, and after two comeback attempts, he retired in 1975 at age 30. Teammate Rico Petrocelli remembered the comebacks, the first of which produced a remarkable 36-homer, 116-RBI season in 1970, before Conigliaro was traded to the Angels.

  “He wouldn’t quit. He made the greatest comeback, I think, in the history of baseball. He was the most courageous player I ever saw,” said Petrocelli.

  Tony C remained a popular figure in Greater Boston, running a nightclub with his brother Billy, who had also played for the Red Sox. While he was being driven to the airport by his brother on January 3, 1982, Conigliaro suffered a massive heart attack; his heart stopped for several minutes, and he suffered a stroke and lapsed into a coma.

  Conigliaro remained in a vegetative state until his death on February 24, 1990. He was 45 years old.

  The Tony Conigliaro Memorial Award is presented annually by the Boston Baseball Writers Association to the major-league player who has overcome adversity with the spirit and courage demonstrated by Conigliaro.

  On August 18, 1967, Tony Conigliaro’s life changed forever when he was struck in the face by a pitch from the Angels’ Jack Hamilton. “Tony C” had led the league in home runs in 1965 with 32, at age 20 the youngest to do so at the time. His injuries from the beaning kept him out of baseball for almost two years, and after two comeback bids, he retired from the game in 1975.

  Nuns’ Day, which was a park tradition in the ’60s, brought an added dimension to the term “Fenway faithful.” Boston Archbishop Richard Cardinal Cushing (seated) was often in attendance.

  Fenway has played host to lots of soccer matches. In this 1968 contest, Ruben Sosa (17) of the North American Soccer League’s Boston Beacons fired on Chicago Mustangs goalkeeper Gerd Langer.

  “Lonborg and champagne,” Williams predicted for the finale even though his ace would be dueling Gibson on two days’ rest. “CINDERELLA TRIES ON THE SLIPPER,” read the Globe headline on the morning of Game 7 as all of New England anticipated a fairy-tale finish. “This is a story that has to have a happy ending,” Kaese declared. If the Sox lose “it will be the wolf gobbling up Little Red Riding Hood.”

  The wolf licked its chops.

  The Sox couldn’t solve Gibson, who struck out 10 and hit a homer off the depleted Lonborg, who departed after six innings with St. Louis leading by six runs. “Lonborg and champagne, hey!” the Cardinals chanted in the clubhouse after they’d claimed their second world championship in four years by a 7-2 count. “Now it’s our turn to pop off,” shouted outfielder Flood as he pried open a bottle of Mumm’s. “Pop this.”

  As the club packed for the winter, hundreds of Red Sox fans lingered in their seats, unwilling to let go of the most enthralling season of their lives. “The laurels all are cut, the year draws in the day, and we’ll to the Fens no more,” Roger Angell wrote in his New Yorker account.

  While the Dead Sox days were over, it would be another eight years before the Sox suited up for a playoff game. Even before the club convened for spring training in 1968, the chances for a reprise had lessened markedly when Lonborg tore up his knee skiing at Lake Tahoe before Christmas. That was the prelude to a procession of problems that sabotaged the season. Lonborg returned, but posted a losing record. Santiago hurt his arm and never won another game. Scott saw his average plummet from .303 to .171 and failed to hit a homer at Fenway. And Conigliaro’s comeback bid ended before it began, undone by blurred vision.

  The Sox, who never were in first place after Opening Day, were out of contention by Flag Day. “We’ll win it next year,” declared Yastrzemski, after Boston had finished fourth, 17 games behind the Tigers. “There’s no doubt in my mind about that.”

  When Conigliaro smashed a two-run homer and scored the winning run in the 12th inning of the opener at Baltimore in 1969, Boston fans saw it as a harbinger of a restoration. But nobody that year was going to catch the Orioles, who won 109 games and claimed the East Division in the first season of baseball’s four-division format. When Boston slipped from second to third in August, player discontent grew with Williams and his whip-hand ways. The friction peaked in Oakland when the skipper yanked Yastrzemski after the first inning for not hustling, bawled him out, and fined him $500.

  With nine games to go in the season, Yawkey dumped Williams, who went on to win two championships with Oakland and be enshrined in the Hall of Fame. Memories of the Impossible Dream had been soured by an irremediable dyspepsia. “The days of wine and roses didn’t last long, which should have been predictable,” Globe columnist Ray Fitzgerald mused.

  1970s

  It is one of the most famous images in all of sports: Carlton Fisk willing (and waving) his fly ball to stay fair for a walk-off home run in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series.

  By the time the 1970s began, a new attitude pervaded baseball in Boston. Smiley faces were everywhere, and not just on those ubiquitous T-shirts. Fans no longer hoped for a team that could play meaningful games after the Fourth of July, they had suddenly come to expect it. In the 1970s—through Vietnam, Watergate, the oil embargo, and the Bicentennial—the Red Sox had a winning record every season, extending their streak of consecutive winning seasons that began in 1967 to 13 by the end of the decade (then ultimately to 16—the most in their history). With that success, however, came seemingly inevitable heartache. They performed heroically in a World Series that many proclaimed the best ever played, which helped to t
ake Bostonians’ minds off divisive court-ordered school busing. However, the Sox lost in the ninth inning of Game 7 on a bloop single to what many considered one of the best teams ever assembled, the 1975 Cincinnati Reds. Fenway got a facelift after that series, as an electronic message board—a first for baseball—and a padded, resurfaced left-field wall debuted in 1976. Two years later, the Sox seemed poised to run away with a pennant, only to have it all come crashing down in the most wrenching fashion. Getting 99 wins in the regular season—their second-highest victory total in 63 years—only got them into a one-game playoff with the Yankees at Fenway, where they lost by a run with the tying man on third in the bottom of the ninth. The Green Monster, which had given them so much during a teamrecord display of home–run hitting the previous year, took from them this time, in the form of a seeming pop fly ball by a light-hitting shortstop. The sage who had spray-painted “No hope!” in foot-high letters across the street from the ballpark in late September 1978 had been right, but barely.

  Manager Eddie Kasko had a few words for his team in the clubhouse on April 5, 1973.

  After his vocal and volatile predecessor, the bespectacled Eddie Kasko seemed decidedly buttoned-down and dialed-back. But the new Red Sox manager was not averse to the occasional outburst if provoked. “I’ve been known to throw furniture around,” he said. Since most of the key members of the 1967 squad still were in place, the clubhouse mood was optimistic going into the 1970 season. “We’ll win the pennant,” Carl Yastrzemski declared during spring training.

  They did win the opener at New York. But the Sox never spent another day in first place. After they went 9-17 in May, they were stuck in fifth. The low point came on June 25 when the club lost, 13-8, to Baltimore in 14 innings at home, despite having led, 7-0. They gave up six runs with none out in the final inning. Before long even Yastrzemski, the team’s only All-Star starter, was being booed at Fenway.

  Kasko’s Mr. Chips mien was fraying, too. One day in Anaheim, he stormed into the press box after the organist had played “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” during one of his mound visits.

  “We need players,” general manager Dick O’Connell told Tom Yawkey in the press room one August evening when the Sox were stuck in fourth. “We’ve only got eight players.”

  “We do?” the owner replied. “Who are they?”

  After Boston finished almost exactly as it had in 1969—21 games behind in third place, with an 87-75 record—changes were inevitable. The most startling was a trade that sent Tony Conigliaro, who had led the team in RBI the previous season, to the Angels for three players. “Honest, I never thought I’d be traded. [I thought] that being a hometown boy meant something,” said Conigliaro, who’d spent all of his previous seven major-league seasons in Boston.

  Mike Andrews was shipped out, too, dealt to the White Sox for Luis Aparicio. “The fans want a winner and I think we’ve got one now,” Kasko declared before the 1971 season. The club was in first place by the end of April, and won 13 of 15 in late April and early May, putting them up by four games. But the Memorial Day weekend was followed by a slump in which they dropped 11 of their next 14 outings to fall five games off the pace. A lifeless 6-1 loss at New York in early June prompted Kasko to close the clubhouse door and upbraid his underperforming crew. “I’m sick of watching guys hang their heads around here just because we’re in a rut,” he barked.

  A vendor sold popcorn and ice cream on Van Ness Street outside Fenway Park in August 1974.

  THE SPACEMAN COMETH

  William Francis Lee once told Bowie Kuhn, the commissioner of baseball, that he sprinkled marijuana on his pancakes. Lee was an outspoken nonconformist who famously called his Red Sox manager, Don Zimmer, a gerbil. He jogged five miles to the park on the days he was scheduled to pitch, and he once staged a 24-hour walkout when the Red Sox released friend and teammate Bernie Carbo. He said, “Baseball’s a very simple game. All you have to do is sit on your butt, spit tobacco, and nod at the stupid things your manager says.”

  Lee also won 119 games over his 13-year career, appearing in the most games ever by a Sox left-hander (321), and recording the third-most victories (94) by a Sox lefty.

  Lee won 17 games in three consecutive seasons for the Red Sox and started two games in the 1975 World Series. Lee’s loathing for the Yankees endeared him to Sox fans. In 1976, a collision at home plate resulted in a bench-clearing brawl and Yankee third baseman Graig Nettles threw Lee to the ground in the melee. After the game, Lee called Yankee manager Billy Martin “a Nazi” and the team “Steinbrenner’s Brown Shirts.” Lee missed two months with torn ligaments in his shoulder.

  For much of his time in Boston, Lee also feuded with Zimmer, as Lee’s attitude and lack of respect for authority clashed with Zimmer’s old-school personality. Zimmer relegated Lee to the bullpen, and at the end of 1978, the Sox traded Lee to the Montreal Expos for Stan Papi, a utility infielder. The furious Lee bade farewell to the Red Sox by saying, “Who wants to be with a team that will go down in history alongside the ‘64 Phillies and the ‘67 Arabs?” Lee went on to win 16 games for the Expos in 1979, but the team tired of his antics as well, releasing him in 1982 after he staged a one-game walkout over the release of infielder Rodney Scott.

  As Globe columnist Ray Fitzgerald once said, “He marches to a drummer no one else would let into the ballpark.”

  As for himself, Lee said he was either long before or long after his time. He tried to keep the game in perspective. “I think about the cosmic snowball theory,” Lee explained. “A few million years from now, the sun will burn out and lose its gravitational pull. The earth will turn into a giant snowball and be hurled through space. When that happens it won’t matter if I get this guy out.”

  Bill Lee and young fan Tammy Patterson surveyed a pumpkin carved in the likeness of Luis Tiant.

  Still, the Sox lost to the Royals for the fifth straight time in mid-June, and slipped into third place. They never regained the lead, finishing 18 games behind Baltimore. That gave management the green light to clean house and by the time the team convened for spring training in 1972, only four players remained from the Impossible Dream team.

  The biggest part of the exodus came with a 10-player deal that sent six Boston players, most notably Jim Lonborg and George Scott and Billy Conigliaro (younger brother to Tony), to Milwaukee. “I’m sick of listening to some of those people,” said general manager Dick O’Connell, who’d been annoyed by clubhouse grumbling.

  When the season started, Tommy Harper was in center, Danny Cater at first and imposing rookie Carlton Fisk behind the plate. It took until late summer for the new group to coalesce and after losing 10 of their first 14 games, the Sox were buried in fourth place and had slipped to fifth as June was coming to an end. But as the pitching improved with Luis Tiant and Marty Pattin, Boston won 19 of its next 25, including a dozen in a row at Fenway.

  The midsummer run peaked with two extra-inning home victories over the Athletics, both wins coming from Oakland miscues. After A’s skipper Dick Williams intentionally (and inexplicably) had Doug Griffin walked to load the bases in the 11th inning so that Darold Knowles could face Yastrzemski, his pitcher walked in the winning run to give Boston a doubleheader sweep. The next night, with 1967 notable Gary Waslewski on the mound for Oakland in the 14th inning, Yastrzemski bounced a grounder off the glove of A’s third baseman Sal Bando to score Griffin from first base.

  By Labor Day, the Sox had taken over first place, beating the Yankees, 10-4, on three-run homers by Harper and Rico Petrocelli as the fans chanted “We’re Number One!” The season came down to a three-game series on the final weekend in Detroit after the Tigers had swept the Brewers (bashing ex-Sox Lonborg in the opener). “I wish the Red Sox a lot of luck and hope they win,” said former Sox team-mate Joe Lahoud after Detroit had run up a 30-10 aggregate on Milwaukee over three games. “But God help them.”

  Fans scaled a billboard to peer into Fenway Park in 1971.

  Boston needed divine interventi
on after losing, 4-1, in the series opener against the Tigers. Beating Tigers ace Mickey Lolich, who posted 15 strikeouts, would have been challenging enough. But the Sox literally tripped over themselves as Aparicio, who would have scored the lead run, stumbled rounding third on Yastrzemski’s third-inning double in a painful reprise of his Opening Day pratfall at Tiger Stadium that cost the club a victory. “I stepped on top of the bag instead of the corner and then I hit a soft spot on the grass,” said Aparicio, who gashed his right knee with his left foot when he went down. “How dumb can I be, spiking myself?” he groaned.

  Yet it was Yastrzemski who made the killer mistake, steaming toward third without noticing that his teammate had gone down and that Eddie Popowski had called Aparicio back to the bag. “There was no way then to hold Yaz to second,” the third-base coach said after Yastrzemski had been tagged out. When the Tigers finished them off the next day, some Sox players wept in the clubhouse. “You came a long way and have nothing to be ashamed of,” Kasko told them.

  Had Boston not given up so much ground in the early going, the season might not have come down to an untimely slip. “I told Haywood Sullivan I didn’t want to come to Boston next June and find the team eight or nine games back,” Yawkey said. “We’ve tried that too often.”

  The 1973 season started sublimely, as the Sox swept the Yankees at Fenway for the first time in an opening series since 1933. “Ah, Tiant et Fisk et Yaz, quisque cum clangore epico ballatorum ex Iliade,” Globe columnist George Frazier exulted in Latin after the Tibialibus Rubris had clobbered Eboracum Novum by a count of XV-V.

  The introduction of the designated hitter provided added oomph to a Sox lineup that needed more production, with Orlando Cepeda clouting the winning homer in the ninth inning of the third game. “I see about 15 guys at home plate,” marveled Cepeda, who’d been signed as a free agent. “It looks like the World Series kind of homer.”