Game Six

by Mark Frost

  The Cincinnati Reds, baseball’s dominant franchise of the 1970s—without question one of the greatest teams of all time—would not make it back to the World Series until 1990, when that endearing underdog edition unexpectedly won a fifth championship title, drawing even with Boston’s all-time mark. But the Reds haven’t been back to the Series since, a small-market team struggling in a deep-pockets game, a victim of the unbalanced business environment that Bob Howsam had so accurately predicted for baseball.

  Joe Morgan followed Pete Rose and Sparky out of Cincinnati at the end of his two-year contract, after the 1979 season. He would play his last five seasons in baseball for four different franchises, a proud, aging star with declining skills, reuniting briefly in 1983 with both Pete Rose and Tony Perez on a mercenary Phillies team that lost the World Series to the Orioles. Carl Yastrzemski ended his career in Boston that same fall with striking dignity and an unsurpassed outpouring of emotion both for and from this singular, taciturn man, at the age of forty-four, after twenty-three seasons in a Red Sox uniform, the longest tenure spent by any one player with only one team in all of baseball history. Yastrzemski, the last of his breed, a self-made blue-collar superstar with the work ethic of an immigrant blacksmith, embraced that last great public good-bye and then disappeared into the private life he’d always craved, and from which he has since only seldom emerged. Of Cincinnati’s four great Hall of Fame-caliber stars, only Johnny Bench would end his career as a Red, after seventeen years. He said good-bye at the end of 1983 as well; although limited by age and injury to first and third base for his last few seasons, Bench played his last game behind the plate at home, where to this day he represents the standard by which all others must be judged for baseball’s most demanding position. Of all his contemporaries, Johnny moved the most seamlessly into life without a uniform: broadcasting, business, public speaking—all unqualified successes. His keen mind and street smarts had led him to figure out how the world worked very early on during his eventful journey out of Binger, Oklahoma; with at last a solid marriage and late fatherhood recently coming his way, it’s a pleasure to report that Johnny Bench now lives a happy, satisfied, and well-examined life. Davey Concepcion followed Bench into retirement in 1988, after nineteen seasons as a Cincinnati Red, amassing numbers that in any other era, for his position, might have secured a ticket to the Hall of Fame. But in the era he played into and that immediately followed him, when shortstops began mysteriously hitting like center fielders—for a variety of reasons, some of which will continue to haunt and shame baseball for another generation—Davey Concepcion’s exemplary career has as a result been mistakenly overlooked. Although he remains something like a god in his native Venezuela, where he now lives, an inspirational figure to kids and countrymen, Concepcion remains somewhat in the shadow of his four former teammates in America. Resigned to this fate, he said it best near the end of days for the Big Red Machine: “They are superstars: I am a Concepcion.”

  In his wanderings through the wilderness of free agency, Tony Perez made a three-year stop in Boston for the struggling Red Sox before moving on to the Phillies and his brief reunion with Morgan and Rose. All three men were released after the Phillies lost that World Series, and their diaspora continued: Morgan back home to Oakland for his final year, Rose for a single season to Montreal—where he finally passed four thousand hits—and Perez back to Cincinnati. Big Doggie finally hung ’em up there in 1986 after his last three seasons, playing part-time while functioning as an unofficial coach toward the end, for the native son who had likewise returned home and taken over as the player-manager of the Reds in 1985, Pete Rose. So Doggie was on the bench to see his old friend finally break Ty Cobb’s all-time hit record on September 11, 1985, the number that the now-forty-four-year-old Rose had been obsessively chasing for years after his skills had begun to seriously erode. Once their Captain Ahab finally killed his whale, the Cincinnati front office kept Rose on as manager, but the Reds quietly dropped him from their forty-man roster after the end of the 1986 season; by then Pete Rose had posted 4,256 hits, putting the most cherished of his many records almost unquestionably out of reach. But unlike all of his celebrated contemporaries, Rose never said good-bye, never officially retired as a player—the aging process being the least of so many truths he refused to face about himself—always keeping that door cracked open for a return that never happened. Then, in 1989, baseball’s commissioners—the outgoing Peter Ueberroth and his successor, the erudite former president of Yale University, Bart Giamatti—began their extensive investigation into allegations that Pete Rose had placed bets on baseball games. The rest of Pete Rose’s sorrowful, stuttering fall from grace has been extensively documented elsewhere. Since his release from federal prison in 1991 after serving five months for income tax evasion, Charlie Hustle has been forbidden to wear any major-league baseball uniform—although the Cincinnati Reds, in a private gesture of both respect and protest, have since refused to issue his unofficially retired number 14 to any of their players at any level—and to this day Pete Rose remains on the Hall of Fame’s “permanently ineligible” list. While doing little over the years in either print or public behavior to help his forlorn cause, Pete Rose lives in perpetual hope that his name will someday be removed from that list and added to the longer one those walls were built to contain and honor.

  Rose’s downfall was just beginning when, fittingly, Johnny Bench and Carl Yastrzemski entered the Hall of Fame together in 1989, their first year of eligibility. In his first eligible year Joe Morgan joined them there in 1990, unquestionably the greatest second baseman in baseball history, and by this time well launched in his second career as a broadcaster for ESPN. Somehow—someone please explain this—Bench received only 96 percent of all votes cast, Yastrzemski 95 percent, and Morgan only 82 percent. Foolishness in this boy’s game, we learn, is hardly confined to the field or front office. Two latecomers to the Reds and Red Sox stories soon followed them into the Hall in 1991: Ferguson Jenkins—whose candidacy was delayed by but survived a 1980 suspension for drug possession; the habits of his “Buffalo Head” days died hard—and in 1992 the splendid Tom Seaver, who tallied nearly 99 percent of the votes, which is more like it. Eight more years would pass before more members of their company from that night at Fenway Park would join them in Cooperstown, along with a couple of the men who worked Game Six behind a microphone.

  DICK STOCKTON, whose call of Fisk’s home run offered such perfect accompaniment to a classic moment, thrived in the aftermath of Game Six. The attention that came his way as a result of his outstanding work in the 1975 Series not only soon resulted in a long-term national contract with CBS Sports, he also got the girl: Stockton and Boston Globe reporter Lesley Visser had their first dinner date in Boston a week after Game Six. He took her to the romantic, Hungarian-themed Café Budapest at a downtown hotel. One of Lesley’s girlfriends pointed out to her that this would be the third time in less than a week that the dapper Stockton had squired a date to that particular restaurant; when Lesley brought that up to Dick over dinner, he responded with a twinkling candor that helped his cause: “What can I say? I like the chicken paprikash.” Dick and Lesley married a few years later, and remain married, happily so, to this day. After establishing her own career as a sportswriter, Lesley became a pioneering figure among female sportscasters for CBS, the first woman beat reporter ever to cover the National Football League, Major League Baseball, and the National Basketball Association, while serving on the broadcast team for every major event in American sports. In 2006, she became the first woman ever honored by the Pro Football Hall of Fame, for her contributions to their game as a broadcaster. Dick Stockton’s long and distinguished career has touched just as many bases, as the lead play-by-play man for the NBA during the 1980s, and during two decades covering pro football and Major League Baseball for Fox and basketball for TNT, where he continues to appear. In 2001, Stockton was given the Curt Gowdy Award by the Basketball Hall of Fame for his outstanding contribu
tions to the sport. His smooth, informed style and thorough professionalism has never wavered, and remains an asset to any contest he covers.

  Curt Gowdy, who covered Game Six on radio for NBC, left the network’s baseball broadcast team shortly after the 1975 World Series ended, when lead sponsor Chrysler expressed a preference that Joe Garagiola—already on their payroll as a corporate spokesman—become baseball’s number one voice. Gowdy stayed on to cover football for NBC until 1978, then split his time between CBS and ABC, working for his close friend Roone Arledge, with whom years earlier he had co-created the groundbreaking series Wide World of Sports. Gowdy continued to cover countless other sporting events—in a prodigious career that included, to name just a few highlights, thirteen World Series, nine Super Bowls, and eight Olympic Games—and produced and hosted the show closest to his heart and Wyoming roots, The American Sportsman. In 1984, Gowdy became the first broadcaster associated with Game Six to be given baseball’s Ford C. Frick Award, bestowed annually since 1978 to a broadcaster who has made major contributions to the game of baseball. Gowdy announced his retirement in 1985, but continued to periodically appear on football and baseball broadcasts all the way up until 2003, when he called a Red Sox-Yankees game for ESPN as part of their “Living Legends” series. One of the most reliable and admired sportscasters of all time, Curt Gowdy died on February 20, 2006, at the age of eighty-six.

  Joe Garagiola followed Gowdy as the principal play-by-play voice of baseball at NBC, teaming with Tony Kubek until 1982, when Vin Scully joined the network as their lead announcer. Garagiola continued on as Scully’s color commentary partner until 1988, when after a contract dispute he finally resigned from NBC after nearly thirty years. After a short stay as part of the broadcast team for the California Angels, Garagiola moved to the Phoenix area, where he lives and continues to work to this day, a more mellow grandfatherly presence both off screen and on than during his network days. Among many other jobs he’s done in television since—including his popular offbeat stints doing “play-by-play” for the Westminster Kennel Club’s annual Dog Show—Garagiola provides his patented folksy color commentary on television for the Arizona Diamondbacks, an expansion franchise that joined the National League in 1998; Garagiola’s oldest son, Joe Junior, served as the Diamondbacks’ first general manager, and now works as senior vice president of baseball operations for Major League Baseball. (One of Garagiola’s broadcast partners for the Diamondbacks from 1998 through 2006 was the team’s lead play-by-play man Thom Brennaman, son of the Reds’ longtime voice Marty Brennaman.) In 1991, Joe Garagiola followed Curt Gowdy as a recipient of the Ford C. Frick Award.

  Marty Brennaman has manned the microphone for the Cincinnati Reds ever since the 1975 World Series, and since 2007 he has worked in the booth along with his son Thom, one of the most unique broadcasting partnerships in baseball history. Their spirited, opinionated on-air debates about the game are like listening to an elevated version of the dinner table/front porch conversations that take place within every baseball-loving family in America. When he was deservedly given the Ford C. Frick Award, Marty Brennaman joined Curt Gowdy and Joe Garagiola in the Hall of Fame in 2000.

  Not only did the 1975 World Series return record revenue for NBC, their coverage of the event also won an Emmy for outstanding sports broadcast of the year. Executive Chet Simmons left the network a few years after the ’75 series to become the first president and CEO of a new cable TV network—revolutionary at the time but often dismissed as an unworkable business model—called ESPN. After launching that network, Simmons went on to work as commissioner of the short-lived United States Football League, a competitor to the NFL that, as it happened, was an unworkable business model. Simmons is now comfortably retired and lives in Savannah, Georgia.

  After winning election to a second term in 1976, baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn remained at his post until the end of the 1984 season, when he was replaced by Peter Ueberroth. Often controversial during his time in office—one of the most tumultuous periods in the game’s history—Kuhn is now rightly considered to have been one of the most effective and evenhanded stewards baseball has ever known. The former lawyer retired back into private practice, then into retirement in Florida, and died in 2007, at the age of eighty. Kuhn was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame the following year.

  THE PLAYERS IN GAME SIX who had never been stars, and even some who were but whose careers were already in their twilight by 1975, never got a taste of the Monopoly money that free agency subsequently stacked on the table. Reserve infielder Doug Flynn went to the Mets in the Tom Seaver trade, and enjoyed productive years there and in Montreal as a starter before retiring after eleven seasons and entering the business world back in his native Kentucky. Back-up Reds catcher Bill Plummer, who played nearly his entire ten-year pro career behind Johnny Bench, now works in the minor leagues for the Arizona Diamondbacks organization.

  Jack Billingham, who in his thirteen-year playing career, which ended in 1980, won 145 major-league games—talent that would have been worth multiple millions in today’s marketplace—has remained in baseball ever since as a minor-league pitching coach, mostly in the Houston Astros organization, a respectable but modest living for a great competitor and all-time stand-up guy. The Red Sox’s Rick Wise—eighteen years, 188 wins, through 1982—recently retired as the pitching coach for a nonaffiliated minor-league team, the Lancaster Barnstormers. Both Wise and Billingham were lifers, intelligent talents still in love with the game that entranced them as kids, having never known another profession, who missed easy street by a decade. At the other end of the scale, Boston left-hander Jim Burton, who surrendered the Series-winning hit to Joe Morgan in Game Seven, pitched only one more game in the major leagues and ever since his early retirement has owned a successful printing business in North Carolina.

  When his dreadful arm troubles persisted, Gary Nolan finally called it quits in 1977—110–70 in his outstanding career—and has since prospered in a second career outside of baseball, working for Steve Wynn in the hotel and gaming industry. The classy, understated Nolan joined many of his former teammates in the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame in 1983. Scrappy starter Fred Norman stayed with the Reds until 1980, finishing his career a game over .500, at 104–103. Clay “Hawk” Carroll retired after fifteen years of pro ball in 1978 to a quiet life on his farm in Kentucky; he made it to the Reds Hall of Fame in 1980. It took Cesar Geronimo a while longer to join Nolan and Carroll there—he was finally inducted in 2008—after his fifteen-year professional career ended in Kansas City in 1983; active in many social and charitable programs, he’s lived ever since back in his native Dominican Republic. His fellow countryman and Reds teammate Pedro Borbon, who retired after twelve years in the majors in 1980, now splits his time between the island and Houston. Reds’ reserve infielder Ed Armbrister’s pro career lasted only five years, until 1977, and he soon returned to his home in the Bahamas—still one of only five Bahamians ever to play Major League baseball—and for a while served as his country’s director of sports, but his name lives on in New England: “Armbrister” remains graven in the memories of Red Sox fans of a certain age like a jailhouse tattoo.

  Another stand-up guy whose time in baseball was all too short, pitcher Pat Darcy—forever known as the man who surrendered the home run in Game Six to Carlton Fisk—played only one more season in the major leagues before a torn labrum in his pitching shoulder curtailed his career. After struggling to get healthy during three years of minor-league ball, Darcy moved into life after baseball in 1981. He went back to college and finished his business degree, married and started a family in Tucson, Arizona, and has worked ever since in commercial real estate and banking. He stays in touch with many of his former Reds teammates, and unlike some players who’ve given up famous home runs in their pasts, he has never shied away from talking about his fateful encounter with Carlton Fisk in Game Six. Darcy’s only gripe with his place in baseball history, and it’s a small, good-natured one, has to
do with the depiction of their shared moment that appeared in the Oscar-winning 1997 film Good Will Hunting. In order to draw out the suspense of Fisk’s climactic at bat, just before the home run pitch is thrown, director Gus Van Sant cuts to a shot of Darcy kicking dirt around on the mound, looking concerned, as if he’s trying to delay confronting Fisk. That little piece of landscaping actually occurred at the beginning of the inning, after Darcy had completed his warm-up tosses but before Fisk stepped into the box. Shocking, isn’t it, Hollywood rearranging reality to suit its narrative requirements—and apparently there’s gambling in Casablanca as well. (Speaking of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s esteemed screenplay, Dick Stockton and Lesley Visser couldn’t help but notice when they saw the movie together that Robin Williams’s psychiatrist character recounts to Damon’s Will Hunting that he also met his future wife on the night of Game Six, at a bar just outside of Fenway.) Anyway, Pat Darcy would like you to know that he didn’t hesitate before throwing his last pitch to Fisk, acknowledging manfully that this does nothing to change the fact that Fisk still walloped it into the night. And you can still hear Dick Stockton’s original call of that moment in the movie, permission for which the filmmakers graciously thanked him in the final credits.