Fenway Park

by John Powers

  After a 7-0 loss, and then a 7-4 defeat in the finale, the Sox saw a season’s work vanish in a weekend. “I’m not happy and I’m not worried,” proclaimed second baseman Jerry Remy. “We’re tied and we shouldn’t be. But we’re not going to roll over and cry.”

  Indeed, despite dropping 13 of 16 games during their September swoon, Boston rallied heroically, winning its final eight dates with Detroit and Toronto. (Tiant shut out the Blue Jays, 5-0, on two hits at Fenway on the final day.)

  When the Indians hammered Hunter and the Yankees, 9-2, Boston found itself in a one-game playoff for the first time since 1948, when it met Cleveland at Fenway. “There is no way any of us right now can appreciate or even understand how it came to this,” said Burleson. “But what we do know is that this is the biggest day of our lives.”

  For six innings, the division title appeared within grasp after Boston had nicked Ron Guidry for two runs. But with one swing, the least likely Yankee, light-hitting Bucky Dent, lofted what seemed to be a harmless two-out fly ball to left. Torrez, assuming that the inning was over, walked off the mound. “Then I looked over my shoulder on the way to the dugout and couldn’t believe it,” he said. “Yaz is back to the wall, popping his glove, looking up. I said, ‘What’s this? What the . . .’”

  It was a three-run homer that put the visitors ahead, 3-2. The Yankees would take a 5-4 lead into the final frame. With two out in the bottom of the ninth, Burleson stood on third representing the tying run. But Yastrzemski, whose homer originally put his team ahead, popped up to third and the season was gone. The Yankees went on to win the World Series again and the Sox simply went home. “We won, but you didn’t lose,” New York owner George Steinbrenner told the disconsolate Sox, but none of them believed him. “We just blew it, that’s all,” said Burleson.

  It was a particularly bitter ending for Yastrzemski, who craved not only his third pennant, but also his first championship ring. “Someday we’re going to get that cigar,” declared the 39-year-old captain, who’d wept in the clubhouse after watching the last ball off his bat drop into Graig Nettles’s glove. “Before old Yaz retires, he’s going to play on a world champion.”

  Except for Eckersley, who went on to claim a ring with Oakland in 1989, none of the players on that Red Sox team ever did. By the time the 1979 season began, Tiant had taken his rhumba delivery to the Yankees as a free agent and Lee and his extraterrestrial aura had been dealt to the Expos. Still, optimism reigned as author John Updike (who 19 years before had penned “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” the famous farewell essay to Ted Williams) wrote an Opening Day story for the Globe describing the “first kiss of another prolonged entanglement.”

  But while the Sox started briskly, winning 12 of their first 16 games to lead the division by two-and-a-half games, they were demolished, 10-0, at home by the Yankees in their first meeting with Torrez on the mound and Dent, who was heartily hooted on sight, knocking him out of the game. “I turned on the radio this morning and heard that the season was over,” said Drago, whose team-mates were booed the next day when they came out for infield practice.

  Despite magnificent seasons from Lynn (a league-leading .333 batting average with 39 homers and 122 RBI) and Rice (.325, 39, 130), Boston never saw first place again and finished third, 11½ games behind Baltimore.

  Opening day always drew a crowd in the 1970s.

  1980s

  Red Sox manager Joe Morgan fumed after Rich Gedman was called out for crashing into Oakland’s Mike Gallego at second base during Game 3 of the AL Championship Series in 1988.

  The signature moments of the decade—on the diamond at least—occurred a couple of weeks and thousands of miles apart—in Anaheim, California, and in Queens, New York. But swirling around the historic Dave Henderson homer and the haunting Bill Buckner gaffe of 1986 were plenty of Fenway Park vignettes, both celebratory and shocking. Seemingly for the want of a stamp on an unmailed contract offer, native son and stalwart catcher Carlton Fisk walked away from the team in 1981. Soon after, the luxury-box era debuted at Fenway, and ultimately 40 of the revenue-producing suites were built on the ballpark roof. In 1983, an ugly ownership rift was exposed on a June night that had been reserved for celebrating the wondrous 1967 pennant and one of its stricken heroes. In the fall of that same season, Captain Carl, who had kept his feelings in check for pretty much his entire 23-year career, said farewell with an emotional lap around the ballpark. On a cold April 1986 night, Boston’s “Rocket Man,” Roger Clemens, was propelled into the spotlight by a record 20-strikeout game, the opening salvo in his first Cy Young Award season. Sparked by the “Hendu” home run, the Sox made the World Series for their only time of the decade; it had been 11 years since they had been there, and it would be 18 more before they returned. When the team foundered in 1988, Joe Morgan, the bullpen coach, assumed the duties as manager on an “interim” basis. But the Sox took off on a remarkable run, winning a leaguerecord 24-straight home games. All the while, Morgan, who hailed from nearby Walpole, kept things on a “six, two and even” keel as he guided the team to the playoffs twice in three years. Once in the postseason, though, his Sox struggled mightily—their losing streak, which began with Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, would last 13 games and 12 seasons.

  The club never got rolling in 1980. Stalwarts like Jim Rice, Fred Lynn, Carl Yastrzemski, and Butch Hobson were among the lame and the team was stuck in fifth place at the All-Star break. At the end of September, when attendance had dropped by 400,000, management dumped Manager Don Zimmer with a year left on his contract. “A change was needed and we made it,” said General Manager Haywood Sullivan, who promoted Johnny Pesky from coach to manager for the rest of the season. “Economics has something to do with it, fan reaction, public relations, on-the-field things. Let’s be fair about it, sometimes change creates attitude. I’m looking for a little different tone, that’s all.”

  Zimmer, whose 411 victories in four-plus seasons still put him in the top seven in club annals, was sanguine about his dismissal. “I’ve heard a lot of boos,” acknowledged the man who’d never been fired nor held a job outside of the game. “I’ve made a lot more friends than I have enemies in my stay here. That certainly holds true in the clubhouse. This has been a good club to manage. A damn good club.”

  What the front office wanted, Sullivan stated, was “a strict disciplinarian, a solid baseball man and a motivator.” The choice was Ralph Houk, a decorated Army major who’d directed the Yankees to consecutive World Series championships in the early 1960s, and then returned to oversee their reconstruction before moving on to Detroit, where he took on another renovation job before retiring to Florida. “My golf game didn’t get very good,” Houk said upon returning to baseball. “The fish weren’t biting. How often can you cut the grass?”

  Red Sox manager Don Zimmer kicked at the dirt after being ejected by umpire Marty Springstead on April 14, 1980.

  Houk was a transition specialist, which made him a natural fit for a 1981 Boston club that had lost three prominent regulars—Fred Lynn, catcher Carlton Fisk, and shortstop Rick Burleson—during the off-season. Burleson was traded with Butch Hobson to the Angels for Carney Lansford, Rick Miller, and Mark Clear. Fisk and Lynn took advantage of a baffling oversight by the Boston front office to switch uniforms; because management hadn’t offered them new contracts by the December deadline before their option year, Fisk and Lynn were able to declare themselves free agents.

  While the dispute was being heard in January, the club traded Lynn and pitcher Steve Renko to the Angels for outfielder Joe Rudi and pitchers Frank Tanana and Jim Dorsey. When arbitrator Raymond Goetz ruled for Fisk, “Pudge” exchanged red socks for white and decamped for Chicago. Through a scheduling coincidence, Fisk played in his 10th Opening Day at Fenway (but his first as a visitor), where he cracked a three-run homer in the eighth that gave his new confrères a 3-2 decision.

  “I honestly wasn’t concerned about how the fans were going to react to me,” said Fisk, whose line-drive
home run quieted a crowd that hadn’t been sure all afternoon whether it should applaud or boo him. “I thought it would be mostly positive, which I feel it was. I knew there would be some hooters, but I thought the majority would be favorable because I don’t think I ever gave them any reason in all of the years I played here to feel any differently.”

  Rich Gedman, up from the minors, was the part-time new man behind the plate with Glenn Hoffman at short and Miller in center, and the syncopated Sox were essentially out of contention by the end of April after dropping seven straight, including four games by a 28-8 aggregate during a sobering sweep by the Twins at Fenway. So a two-month players’ strike actually was a blessing, since Major League Baseball went to a split-season format when play resumed in mid-August, giving everyone a clean slate.

  “Well, we’re only a game out,” Houk reckoned after Boston had been mugged, 7-1, by Chicago in Opening Day II at Fenway. Since the Sox had been four behind when the strike began, that constituted progress. By season’s end, though, the deficit was two-and-a-half games, which turned out to be the club’s closest finish to the top for five years.

  While there was some satisfaction in playing a full slate in 1982, the Sox experienced a peculiar season that was as disappointing as it was encouraging. Despite winning 89 games (only five times in 30 years had they won more), they finished third, six games behind the Brewers. And though they were in first place at the end of June, the Sox subsequently dropped 10 of 13 games and never recovered. “We just weren’t quite good enough,” observed Clear.

  An electrician tinkered with some of the 95 lights on one of Fenway Park’s light towers in March 1983.

  In April of ‘83, for the 10th straight year, Jane Alden put up bunting on the Red Sox dugout and along the right-field line.

  JIM RICE’S ONLY CAREER SAVE

  One of the more emotional moments in Fenway history started as just another perfect summer Saturday at the ballpark.

  On August 7, 1982, Tom Keane drove down to Fenway from his home in Greenland, New Hampshire, on the Granite State’s sliver of a seacoast, with his sons Jonathan, 4, and Matthew, 2. Keane had scored tickets for an afternoon game against the White Sox, and these weren’t just any seats. Through a friend, Keane had gotten tickets from Red Sox Executive Vice President Haywood Sullivan, and they were two rows from the field, just to the left of the Red Sox dugout.

  “You were actually right there,” Keane told an ESPN reporter years later. “It was a seat that everybody would dream of when they had little kids and you wanted to get them close to the action. It was just ideal.”

  The boys had cheered wildly when Sox second baseman Dave Stapleton—Jonathan’s favorite player—came to the plate in the fourth inning. But Stapleton swung late at a pitch and slashed a foul ball into the stands. The elder Keane didn’t see the ball, but he did hear a cracking sound. He thought the ball had hit the side of the dugout—until he turned and saw the blood coming down his son’s face. Jonathan had been hit by the foul ball and suffered a fractured skull.

  Red Sox left fielder Jim Rice, who had been perched on the top step of the dugout, waiting his turn to hit, reacted instinctively. “Jim Rice was right there with his arms immediately,” Keane said, “I mean immediately.”

  Rice was described by the media of the day as standoffish, or even sullen. His reserved manner was fortified for a time by an impression that, as an African-American ballplayer, he wasn’t as warmly received by Boston fans as a white superstar would have been. And as an eight-time All-Star and the American League’s MVP in 1978, Rice certainly qualified as a superstar. But none of those perceptions mattered one bit on that day, when Rice’s quick reaction may have saved Jonathan Keane’s life.

  Rice, a father of two young children, later said he was thinking of one thing, and one thing only. “My child,” he said. “Just someone, myself, just taking care of my child, picking my child up and taking him to the clubhouse.”

  “I was kind of chasing Jim Rice; he was carrying Jonathan,” said Keane. “There was an ambulance waiting. When we got to the hospital, they were set up for neurosurgery.”

  Doctors at Children’s Hospital, just a mile away, relieved the pressure on Jonathan’s brain and gave him medicine to guard against seizures. He was hospitalized for five days.

  Eight months later, Jonathan was reunited with Rice. On April 5, he threw out the first pitch at Fenway to open the 1983 season.

  “Obviously, as we sit here today, what he did saved [Jonathan’s] life,” Keane said. “I mean you had a young child, his left skull is fractured open, it is bleeding profusely. The worst could have happened.”

  Said Rice, years later, “Playing baseball was more of a talent than a gift. The reaction to save somebody’s life, that’s entirely different.”

  Boston was nowhere near good enough in 1983, when the club finished 20 games out in sixth place with its worst record (78-84) since 1966. Everything went sour in early June, when minority owner Buddy LeRoux announced a takeover (the so-called “Coup LeRoux”) that provoked an immediate riposte from Sullivan. The dueling press conferences, observed Globe beat man Peter Gammons, resembled “the staging of a Mel Brooks parody of post-Mao China.”

  The front-office turmoil sent an aftershock through the clubhouse as the Sox promptly were swept at home by the Tigers and went on to lose seven in a row, tumbling from first place to fifth in less than a week. “I can’t believe what I saw,” said a nonplussed Houk after a comedy of errors resulted in a 10-6 loss to the Orioles. “I’ve never seen so many things happen like that in my life.”

  The rest of the season was forgettable, except for the finale, when Yastrzemski made a farewell tour of the park where he’d performed with both dignity and distinction for 23 years. “They just kept saying, ‘We love you, Yaz,’ over and over,” he said after the fans had saluted him. “I’ll never forget it.”

  That was the end of an era that began with the departure of Ted Williams and ended with the blossoming of Wade Boggs, who won the batting title in only his second year with the club by hitting .361 in 1983. Yastrzemski wasn’t the only familiar face missing from the starting lineup when the club convened for 1984. Gedman had taken over for Gary Allenson behind the plate; Bill Buckner (obtained from the Cubs for Dennis Eckersley) was at first; Marty Barrett stood in for the hobbled Jerry Remy at second; Jackie Gutierrez replaced Hoffman at short; and Mike Easler (obtained from Pittsburgh for John Tudor) was the designated hitter.

  It was a dramatic changeover and after losing 10 of their first 14 outings, the Sox were 10 games off the pace by the end of April. Yet with a young rotation—that included Bruce Hurst, Dennis Boyd, Bob Ojeda, and Al Nipper—gradually finding its way, the club’s stock clearly was on the rise, most notably with the arrival of right-hander Roger Clemens, the top draft pick from the previous year who debuted on May 15 and quickly established himself as an overpowering force.

  His dominance of Kansas City in an August date at Fenway was a high-octane preview of future performances, with Clemens striking out 15 batters with no walks and only 31 balls to 33 batters. “The sound you heard was me: Owww!” testified catcher Jeff Newman. “He done hurt my hand.” The Royals, who managed one run across nine innings, were duly impressed. “That was the best stuff we’ve seen all season and we’re not going to see better,” declared Mike Ferraro, a Royals coach. “He has the best stuff in the American League, hands down.”

  IN THE LAP OF LUXURY

  The 1980s gave us the concept of corporations slapping their names on stadiums for a price, and the debut of the luxury box, including at Fenway Park.

  In 1980, the Red Sox began to realize they could no longer survive with the park as it stood. With only about 34,000 seats and an escalating payroll that could not be met by ticket sales alone, Fenway Park was in danger of crumbling under the financial stresses of the day.

  Before 1970, players made an average of $20,000 per year; by the early 1980s, they were making more than $100,000 on average.
There once was a time when owner Tom Yawkey didn’t worry about finding new ways to generate revenue, but Yawkey was gone. He had died of leukemia in 1976.

  The Red Sox constructed 21 luxury boxes on the roof of the ballpark along the first-base side that debuted during the 1982 season. They later added boxes on the third-base side and behind home plate that brought their total to more than 40 luxury boxes (or suites), with an average of 14 seats per box, at a rental price of $50,000 to $70,000 per season.

  From the day he took over the Sox business operations, Red Sox co-owner Buddy LeRoux set out to raise revenues. Along with constructing the luxury boxes, he increased ticket prices dramatically and eliminated Yawkey’s policy of saving 6,500 bleacher tickets for sale on the day of a game. The interest on money deposited for advance ticket sales was believed to have brought the Red Sox as much as $2 million a year at that time. LeRoux’s plan to add a second tier of seats, some 6,000 of them, atop the luxury boxes was never implemented.

  LeRoux’s approach ran counter to the Yawkey philosophy that no one should invest in sports to get rich.

  Eventually, the ownership battles between LeRoux and his limited partners on one side and Sullivan and Jean Yawkey, Tom’s widow, on the other, culminated in LeRoux being bought out of his ownership stake by Mrs. Yawkey in 1987.

  Ted Williams stood, typically forgoing a tie, during the ceremony in which his No. 9 was retired, along with Joe Cronin’s No. 4, on May 28, 1984. Team owner Jean Yawkey and former teammate Johnny Pesky joined the festivities.

  YAZ SHOWS HE’S HUMAN

  Carl Yastrzemski always wanted the other team to think that he was a machine. He wanted the pitcher to stare in and see a hitting robot staring back from the plate.