by Mark Frost
“I just thank God for answering my prayers,” he said afterward. “To bring them here, and share my best hours, and not be away from them at the end. I have my faith. I accept God’s will.”
ON THE STRENGTH of free agency, the average major-league salary took another quantum leap forward in 1977, from $52,000 to $74,000, but as the Red Sox had already started to do, now the Reds began to trend downward. In the wake of the Tony Perez trade, what goodwill remained between Reds players and management from the championship years in Cincinnati evaporated like summer rain; the new economic realities had almost instantly reduced the team game of baseball to every man for himself. With only Johnny Bench signed through the coming season, every negotiation became fraught with tension generated by the rising financial tide; Bob Howsam managed to work out three-year deals with Morgan, Foster, and Griffey, and a five-year, $1 million contract for Davey Concepcion, the only Jerry Kapstein client now left on the Reds’ roster. But thirty-five-year-old Cincinnati native Pete Rose, the public face of his franchise now for more than a decade, held out for a better deal all through spring training, trading barbed insults with team officials in the press. Not until the night before Opening Day—which baseball traditionally observed with an afternoon game in Cincinnati, home of the first professional team—did Rose and the Reds reach agreement on a two-year deal. With Rose back on board, the Big Red Machine’s vaunted offense, they had every reason to believe, would continue to roll.
And so it did, but scoring runs remained only half of the game’s complex equation; Cincinnati’s underappreciated pitching staff had suffered crippling losses. With ace Don Gullett gone, none of their aging veterans or new acquisitions stepped in to fill the void, and as the season began, both Gary Nolan and Rawly Eastwick—fed up with team management for different reasons—announced that 1977 would be their last season with the Reds. Ineffective early in the season, Woodie Fryman, the veteran starter obtained in the Perez trade, walked away from his guaranteed contract rather than accept a demotion to the bullpen. With the rising Los Angeles Dodgers off to a blazing start under their new manager, Tommy Lasorda—an old Dodger farmhand friend of Sparky’s—the Reds found themselves already nine and a half games out of first place by the end of May. Despite being desperate for pitching help, the team sent Gary Nolan packing to the Angels before the June 15 trade deadline for a minor leaguer who never panned out. Their closer, Rawly Eastwick, followed him out the door to the Cardinals, for an untested youngster named Doug Capilla, who returned nothing close to equal value. Both trades attracted far less attention on deadline day because in a trade with the Mets Bob Howsam also managed to bring over Tom Seaver, the first legitimate superstar pitcher that Sparky Anderson had ever managed. The intelligent, disciplined Seaver came through for the Reds as advertised, going 14–3 over the remainder of the season, but he couldn’t carry an otherwise woeful pitching staff alone; gutted by the team’s disposal of all Jerry Kapstein’s clients, the arsenal of reliable bullpen arms Captain Hook needed to succeed was empty. Despite banner years by George Foster—who tied Willie Mays’s National League record with 52 home runs, drove in a Reds’ record 149 runs, and won the MVP trophy—and Johnny Bench, a mid-season swoon coupled with the Dodgers’ continued hot play effectively ended the pennant race by the end of July. Cincinnati finished the 1977 season in second place, ten games behind Los Angeles. By the end of the year—the rockiest behind the closed doors of their clubhouse that the Reds had suffered since Sparky’s arrival—even Bob Howsam acknowledged that the absence of the stalwart, stabilizing Tony Perez had wrecked his team’s once perfectly balanced chemistry. The other superstar egos that Big Doggie had always helped deflate and keep in check clashed repeatedly, while the younger players coming up felt continually disrespected by both management and teammates. Meanwhile, for his new team in Montreal, all Tony Perez did was bring the same solid leadership qualities to their locker room, and drive in ninety-plus runs for the eleventh straight year.
The Red Sox faced startlingly similar problems in 1977. Their offensive prowess as a team hit an all-time peak, as they launched 213 home runs while scoring 859 runs, both franchise records. Carlton Fisk turned in the finest campaign of his long and distinguished career: 26 home runs and 102 RBIs while hitting .315. Second-year player Butch Hobson wrested the third base job from Rico Petrocelli, who announced his retirement during spring training, and knocked 30 homers with 112 RBIs. George Scott banged 33 round trippers, and Bernie Carbo, back home and comfortable in Fenway again, returned to form with 15 home runs off the bench, while hitting .289. Jim Rice’s remarkable talent came to full fruition and he simply dominated the league, 39/114/.320. The wondrous Yaz (who turned thirty-eight during the season) hit 28 homers, with 102 RBIs, and averaged .296. In New York, the arrival of the Yankees’ egocentric free agent Reggie Jackson (prefaced by his infamous “I’m the straw that stirs the drink” comment) led to inevitable clashes with their unstable, alcoholic manager Billy Martin, which climaxed in a nationally televised near fistfight between them in the dugout. Boston had built a six-game lead over New York by midsummer, but ineffective pitching and manager Don Zimmer’s erratic handling of his staff proved their undoing. Following a spring holdout for a long-term contract—which, citing his age, the team’s front office refused to give him—Luis Tiant ended up going only 12–8 on the season, but he still led the team’s starters in wins; Rick Wise won eleven, Ferguson Jenkins only ten, Bill Lee only nine. Due to Zimmer’s incessant tweaking of his rotation, every starter but Tiant and Jenkins ended up spending time in the bullpen. The Red Sox’s expensive free agent reliever Bill Campbell justified his pricey contract by winning thirteen and leading the league in saves with thirty-one, but Zimmer burned out his arm with shortsighted overuse; Campbell would never produce another comparable season.
A festering culture clash also came to a head during the summer of ’77 between the straightlaced, old school Zimmer and a group of free-spirited souls—empowered now, it seemed, by the mere existence of free agency, to challenge all authority in their way—led by Lee, Wise, Jenkins, and Carbo. The group called themselves the “Buffalo Heads,” after their disparaging nickname for Zimmer, and although their brash irreverence provided great copy for the town’s hipper young sportswriters, the long-term effect on team chemistry would have graver consequences. Boston lost its lead in the East Division by the end of August, and in mid-September, when the hated Yankees, who had momentarily risen above their own raucous personality disputes, took two from the Red Sox in a three-game series, the issue was settled; the Red Sox and Orioles ended the 1977 season tied for second in the division, two and a half games behind New York. The Yankees and Dodgers went on to meet in a memorable World Series that the Bronx Bombers won four games to two, led by Reggie Jackson’s five home runs, including three in the clinching game. Former Red Don Gullett, who had gone 14–4 in his first season for the Yankees and won Game Five of the Series, collected his third straight World Series ring. Reggie Jackson, standing up to ungodly pressures in the toxic crosshairs of the New York media, had transformed himself into one of the sports world’s rare single-name icons. Despite Bob Howsam’s dire predictions about the advent of free agency, attendance and television ratings trended higher throughout both leagues, and given the sudden, startling success of Steinbrenner’s mercenary Yankees, the future of free agency as the shortest path to baseball championships had been affirmed.
Eighty-nine players entered 1977’s free agent draft that fall, and once again as a matter of principle only the Cincinnati Reds refused to play. In Boston, Jean Yawkey fired Dick O’Connell, the one competent general manager her late husband had ever hired, turning the team over to Haywood Sullivan, a onetime minor leaguer and former director of player personnel. That winter, Oakland A’s owner Charles Finley tried yet again to sell his left-handed ace Vida Blue before losing him to free agency, this time to Cincinnati for $1.75 million and a minor leaguer; and once again Commissioner Bowie Kuhn voided the deal
, in the interest of maintaining baseball’s “competitive balance.” At which point the Reds’ sixty-year-old president, Bob Howsam, chief architect of the Big Red Machine, had seen, and had, enough of the game’s new through-the-looking-glass rules. He announced his retirement to a boardroom position before the 1978 season, turning over day-to-day operations of the franchise to his marketing guru and longtime hatchet man Dick Wagner. The abrasive Wagner’s first move was to give away Jack Billingham, the Reds’ winningest pitcher for the last six years, to the Tigers for two middling prospects.
Both Sparky Anderson in Cincinnati and Don Zimmer in Boston announced that they planned to return to a more disciplined managerial style in the upcoming 1978 season. While Cincinnati largely stood pat, Boston made aggressive trades for the Angels’ speedy middle infielder Jerry Remy—again replacing Denny Doyle, the man whose job he’d won three seasons earlier in Anaheim—and the Indians’ dashing young starter Dennis Eckersley, and they reacquired the fiery Dick Drago to shore up their bullpen. All those moves paid off. Tiant and Lee returned to form, Jim Rice got white-hot early, carrying the Red Sox offense—he would win the American League MVP award that year—and by the All-Star break Boston had built a nine-game lead in the East Division. In Cincinnati, thirty-seven-year-old Pete Rose, playing out his final contract year, collected his three thousandth hit and then dominated every sports headline in America with a riveting forty-four-game hitting streak that tied an eighty-one-year-old National League record, during which the Reds kept pace with both the Dodgers and Giants in a tight, three-way West Division race. With his team fourteen games behind Boston, the Yankees’ Billy Martin self-destructed after an escalating string of conflicts, calling out both his star Reggie Jackson and employer George Steinbrenner in the press. (“One’s a born liar, and the other’s convicted.”) Steinbrenner demanded Martin’s resignation and replaced him with the team’s placid former pitching coach Bob Lemon. At this point, a World Series rematch that fall between the Reds and Red Sox seemed increasingly likely.
But as the season wore on, hidden flaws in both teams’ rosters surfaced. Uncertain of his reserves—which once again no longer included the erratic Bernie Carbo, banished to Cleveland in mid-season—Zimmer drove his regulars hard, trying to increase Boston’s lead and secure his own uncertain future as manager, but only succeeded in wearing them out. Despite Sparky’s efficient use of a thin pitching staff, Cincinnati’s lack of solid starters behind Seaver eventually came back to hurt them, and for the first time cracks appeared in their dependable offense: Joe Morgan and Johnny Bench broke down physically, Ken Griffey retreated from the promise of his early seasons, and while George Foster continued to produce, Cesar Geronimo suddenly lost his way at the plate and Dan Driessen proved conclusively that he was no Tony Perez. Without the same depth he’d always had on his bench to paper over those flaws, and despite one last desperate September winning streak, Sparky and the Reds won ninety-two games and finished second, two and a half games behind the Dodgers. Most longtime observers of the team agreed that in light of the problems with which he’d had to contend, 1978 might well have been Sparky Anderson’s finest season as Cincinnati’s manager.
Meanwhile, in Boston, the old familiar aura of pending disaster returned to Fenway with bad intent. Although they had squandered most of their commanding lead over the previous eight weeks, the Red Sox still led the Yankees—who had charged back from the dead under Bob Lemon—by four games at the start of September, when the Yankees came into Boston for a crucial four-game series. The Red Sox lost the first three games without putting up any visible fight. Tony Kubek, broadcasting one of those games for NBC, remarked in wonder: “This is the first time I’ve ever seen a first-place team chasing a second-place team.” Don Zimmer had both Bill Lee—whom he had banished to the bullpen because of their intractable personality clash—and Luis Tiant available to start the final game of the series, both confirmed Yankee-killers, but he stubbornly refused, sending instead an untested rookie fresh from Pawtucket named Bobby Sprowl to the mound. The Yankees predictably destroyed Sprowl—who in his career would never win a single major-league game—completed their sweep and moved into a tie for the lead in the East Division; in New York, sportswriters gleefully dubbed their march through New England the “Boston Massacre.” The deflated Red Sox tumbled three and a half games behind the Yankees but then, on the verge of elimination in mid-September, gamely battled back in a manner not seen since the glorious summer of the “Impossible Dream” Boston won twelve of their last fourteen games, including the last eight in a row, to catch the Hated Ones at the finish line and force a one-game playoff at Fenway for the Eastern Division Championship.
Which only succeeded in adding, then, to the list of Boston’s tragic messengers of doom (“Pesky, Gibson, Armbrister…”) the name of Yankees shortstop Bucky “Fucking” Dent. When the light-hitting shortstop’s long pop fly to left field in the seventh inning caught a suddenly refreshed outgoing breeze and just cleared the Monster for a three-run home run, Boston lost their 2–0 lead, the playoff game, the Division Championship, and, many believed, their will to live. And for the third time in three elimination games in the last eleven years, Carl Yastrzemski—a man who deserved so much better—recorded the Red Sox’s final out.
Boston’s new front office team kept Don Zimmer in their dugout but at his insistence dispatched the last of the bedeviling Buffalo Heads: For a warm body named Stan Papi, Bill Lee—seventy-five wins in six seasons—was traded to Montreal, where he would flourish and become a favorite new teammate of Tony Perez. To thirty-eight-year-old Luis Tiant, who had just completed his eighth straight outstanding season for Boston, and most recently pitched a brilliant two-hit shutout against the Blue Jays in the do-or-die final game of 1978 that moved them into the playoff against the Yankees, the Red Sox now offered only a lowball single-year contract. Buddy Leroux, the former Red Sox trainer who had wormed his way into Jean Yawkey’s favor as a partner in the team’s new ownership group, told Tiant bluntly that he was now too old to justify a longer or larger investment. His fierce pride cut to the bone, El Tiante turned his back on Boston and signed a two-year deal with the Yankees for $840,000. Since the day he arrived, Luis Tiant had not only been the most important presence in the Boston clubhouse, he was the greatest money pitcher in the history of the franchise—31–12 lifetime in September and October—and the Red Sox had just shown him the door without so much as a pat on the back.
Carl Yastrzemski wept when he heard the news.
“They’ve torn out our heart and soul,” he said.
In Cincinnati, at around the same time, new hard-line president Dick Wagner let the almost thirty-eight-year-old Pete Rose know that if he wanted to remain a Red he would have to accept a pay cut for the coming 1979 season. Rose made it clear he would have been willing to take a smaller raise than what he could land on the open market to stay with the Reds, but this insult was too much to bear. Privately, the Reds had also begun to hear unsettling reports about Pete’s off-field problems with bookies and gambling losses, the first shadows of the coming scandals that would bulldoze Rose’s last decade in baseball, and decided it was more prudent to cut their ties to him. Embracing his freedom with the enthusiasm of a born hustler, Rose broke off negotiations, made a public relations show of shopping his services around all of baseball, and a few weeks later signed with the Philadelphia Phillies for more than twice what the Reds had just refused to pay him: $810,000 a year for four years.
Then, on November 27, a week after their negotiations with Rose collapsed, and the team had just returned from an exhibition tour of Japan, Dick Wagner flew out to Los Angeles and asked Sparky Anderson to drive down and meet him for breakfast at the LAX Marriott. Sparky assumed that, with Bob Howsam gone, they were finally going to discuss the possibility of signing some free agents during the off-season to fill the team’s widening roster gaps. After a quick meal, Wagner asked Sparky to come up to his room, where Sparky took a seat and Wagner went
into the bathroom for a moment. When he came out, Wagner dropped a bombshell.
“I’m not bringing you back,” said Wagner.
Too stunned to speak, Sparky didn’t even ask why, and Wagner offered no explanation. He hugged Sparky when they parted, with tears in his eyes. Sparky drove home to Thousand Oaks in a daze.
Baseball managers have always known they live on a razor’s edge—in the pro game’s three centuries only four managers have lasted with a single franchise for as long as twenty years—but Sparky had just set the Reds’ franchise record for career wins. In nine seasons he had captured five division titles, taken the team to four World Series and won two of them, half of Cincinnati’s total in a hundred years. There was talk that Sparky had lost his once firm grip on his men, or that he was going to quit rather than yield to a front office demand that he make changes on his coaching staff, but none of those issues ever even came up in meaningful discussion. Instead, just like that, nearly tripping over Pete Rose as he made his own way out the door after sixteen seasons in red, Sparky Anderson was gone.
MANAGER DON ZIMMER LOST his job after the 1979 season. A year later, by late 1980, the triumvirate of Carlton Fisk, Rick Burleson, and Fred Lynn would all be gone from Boston. The Red Sox, flailing under their incompetent, feuding new management, would not seriously compete for or win another American League pennant until 1986. As Peter Gammons then summed it up, the expected dynasty of the great team that the Red Sox had assembled in the mid-seventies lasted exactly one night, from the end of Game Six to the end of Game Seven. Jim Rice and Dewey Evans were the last remaining members of the ’75 squad to participate in 1986’s memorable World Series, which ended in yet another tragic fall for New England’s fans after a less fondly remembered Game Six carved the name “Buckner” into their wall of infamy. Around this time a fanciful, long-suffering Boston sportswriter decided that the Red Sox’s multiple twentieth-century disappointments could only be the product of a Stephen King-like “curse” that sprung from the sale of Babe Ruth—King himself, fittingly, is a passionate, lifelong Red Sox rooter—and a colorful, half-baked urban legend crept into popular culture. Perhaps the fable provided some irrational comfort for New England’s perpetually bereaved, but it was never more than poppycock; the harder truth behind the Red Sox failures lay in Tom Yawkey’s often willfully obstructionist tendencies as the team’s lord and master—his blind loyalty to front-office sycophants, his early distrust of a “farm” system, his insupportable holding of the color line a decade after Robinson—and the comic-opera mess that his widow and her proxies quickly made of the best roster the team had ever assembled. Most of that sorry legacy was overlooked in favor of his longevity and service to the game when, in 1980, five years after his death, Tom Yawkey became the first man involved with Game Six to be inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame.
