Game Six

by Mark Frost

  Arm trouble bedeviled other members of the Reds’ pitching staff. After his first championship free-agent season with the Yankees in 1977, pitcher Don Gullett was limited by injury to only eight starts the following year and wasn’t on their active roster when New York won its second straight World Series, over the Dodgers, in 1978. The serious rotator cuff problems that then continued to plague him ended Gullett’s baseball career when the Yankees released him in 1980, after only nine seasons and a remarkable record of 109–50. In 1993 he rejoined the Cincinnati Reds as their pitching coach, a post he held until 2005. Don Gullett entered the Reds’ Hall of Fame in 2002.

  On the heels of his MVP season in 1977, George Foster signed a healthy long-term deal with the Reds that kept him in Cincinnati as a frequent All-Star and consistently productive player—his numbers to this point earned him frequent mention as a potential future Hall of Famer—through the end of 1981. The five-year $10 million free agent contract he then signed with the Mets—the richest the game had then ever seen—brought him into the radioactive bull’s-eye of the New York spotlight. The quiet, shy, and devout Foster—so dangerous for years as a central player of the Reds’ Midwestern ensemble—did not prosper as a leading man on Broadway. He stumbled badly during his first season, never came close to matching his once lofty numbers, and the shocking way in which his productivity quickly trailed off—he was released outright by the Mets in August of 1986 during the final year of his contract—became a cautionary tale for the perils of long-term contracts in the era of free agency. George Foster’s baseball career ended as suddenly as if he’d hit a wall, at the age of thirty-seven. He suffered through some serious financial difficulties after retirement, and it was rumored he’d been compelled to sell the famous Fisk home run ball that he’d caught off the foul pole in left field at the end of Game Six. Foster has since worked as a motivational speaker for various Christian organizations and causes, and as a committed supporter of youth baseball programs.

  His fellow outfielder Ken Griffey Sr. left Cincinnati for the greener fields of New York as well after the 1981 season, signing as a free agent with the Yankees. If he never quite matched the lofty expectations that his first few seasons with the Reds had raised, Griffey remained an outstanding professional ballplayer for a career that lasted nineteen seasons, into the early 1990s, when after a brief sentimental return to the Reds he made major-league history by playing alongside his oldest son, Ken Junior, just then beginning his soon-to-be Hall of Fame career with the Seattle Mariners. (In one memorable game they even hit back-to-back home runs.) Ken Griffey Sr. collected more than 2,100 hits, drove in 859 runs, and averaged .296 in his two decades in uniform, and he retired comfortably to Winter Garden, Florida, when his playing days were done, one of the first beneficiaries—because he’d always been smart with his money—of the free agent era.

  As recounted earlier, the Reds’ two outstanding young relievers in 1975 both went their separate ways when the Machine broke down three years later—Will McEnaney with Tony Perez to the Expos, and Rawly Eastwick to the Cardinals—and less than four years after that both were out of baseball. The lively, personable McEnaney encountered serious arm trouble, retired in 1979, and has since lived and worked in Florida in various construction- and contracting-related businesses. After he was traded, Eastwick played out the 1978 season in St. Louis and then, courtesy of his agent Jerry Kapstein, signed as an expensive and much-ballyhooed free agent with the Yankees. He never recorded a save for the notoriously demanding George Steinbrenner and was traded away to Philadelphia before his first season in New York ended. He spent a year and a half with the Phillies, then a season each with the Royals and the Cubs, before retiring in 1981 at the age of thirty. After tallying fifty saves during his first two brilliant seasons, Rawly Eastwick ended his eight-year pro career with only sixty-eight.

  FORMER RED SOX skipper Darrell Johnson, itinerant baseball man, landed another head job less than a year after Boston let him go. He became the first manager of the expansion Seattle Mariners, who entered the American League in 1977, with former movie star Danny Kaye as one of their principal owners, and their seriocomic origins perfectly capture the upside era of baseball in the late 1970s. The Mariners are the only team in baseball who owe their existence to the settlement of a legal dispute. The Seattle Pilots had begun life as the Pacific Northwest’s first major-league baseball team in the expansion of 1969, played a woeful first season without a proper stadium, attracted few fans, and promptly went bankrupt. They were then purchased for two verses and a chorus and immediately relocated to Milwaukee—where they became the Brewers—by their new owner, baseball’s future commissioner, Allan “Bud” Selig. Abandoned at the altar of commerce, the jilted city of Seattle, King County, and the state of Washington sued Major League Baseball for breach of contract. Six years later, in exchange for making their persistent, legitimate, and expensive suit go away, the American League awarded Seattle the Mariners franchise in their next expansion, which also included the Toronto Blue Jays.

  Only confirming the adage that every manager is hired to be fired, leading Seattle’s reborn franchise proved to be a thankless exercise; the Mariners spent most of the three seasons Darrell Johnson completed with them in the West Division’s cellar before he was let go during the 1980 season in favor of former Dodgers great Maury Wills. The Mariners would burn through Wills and then six more managers before finally recording their first winning season in 1991, and remain one of only three major-league franchises that have never played in a World Series. Darrell Johnson landed his last big-league managerial gig for another of those luckless teams—the Texas Rangers—leading them for half a season on an interim basis in 1982, after old friend Don Zimmer, who’d brought him in as a coach, was himself let go by the Rangers after less than two years on the job. Johnson spent most of the next two decades as a scout, coach, and administrative assistant for the New York Mets; as a result, he was in the clubhouse when the Mets celebrated their second World Championship title in 1986, over the Boston Red Sox. After the 1999 season, and forty years in organized baseball, Johnson finally retired from the game at the age of sixty-two, and five years later died of leukemia at his home in California.

  Don Zimmer, another old-school baseball lifer, went back to coaching for most of the 1980s after the Rangers fired him, until the Chicago Cubs hired him as their manager in 1989. He led them to a rare division title and was named Manager of the Year; that was Zimmer’s high-water mark at the helm. The Cubs fired him two years later, and he went back to work as a coach for the expansion Colorado Rockies. In 1996, Joe Torre brought him over to the Yankees as a bench coach for their championship years during the second half of that decade, and although this was his only stint with baseball’s most famous team, it remains the organization he is mostly closely identified with by the modern fan. Zimmer made sympathetic headlines during the 2003 League Championship Series, when an ugly brawl erupted between the Yankees and the Red Sox, and pitcher Pedro Martinez violently tossed the then seventy-two-year-old Zimmer to the ground. After leaving the Yankees in 2004, Zimmer hired on as a senior advisor for the Tampa Bay Rays, and at seventy-eight—the last onetime Brooklyn Dodger player still active in the game—he has still to this day, proudly, never drawn a paycheck outside of professional baseball.

  Second baseman Denny Doyle, forever tied to Zimmer by their misunderstanding at third base in the ninth inning of Game Six, lasted only two more seasons in Boston. His eight-year major-league career came to an end when he was thirty-three, after having the odd distinction of being replaced at second base for the second time, on different teams and opposite coasts, by the same player; the Red Sox acquired the man who’d originally unseated him in Anaheim in 1975—Massachusetts native Jerry Remy—from the Angels by trade before the 1978 season, and when Denny was unable to hook up with another team that spring he called it a career. That same season he founded the Doyle Baseball Academy in Winter Haven, Florida, with his younger brothers Blake an
d Brian, twins who also both played infield in pro ball, Brian in the majors with the Yankees. The Doyle Academy is still thriving today—they have coached nearly a million young players over the years—one of the most highly regarded baseball training programs in the country, and Denny, a grandfather many times over now, still loves working with kids.

  First baseman Cecil Cooper became a bona fide star after the Red Sox traded him to the Milwaukee Brewers in the George Scott deal. While Scott quickly fizzled in Boston, Cooper made five All-Star teams in the next seven years and never hit below .300, while the home run and RBI production that the Red Sox had impatiently given up waiting for arrived in a big way. The always personable, well-regarded “Coop” also led the Brewers to a memorable World Series in 1982, which they lost to the Cardinals in seven games, before retiring in 1987 at the age of thirty-seven, and he still holds many Milwaukee franchise records, including most hits and RBIs in a season. He then worked in numerous capacities on the field and off for the Brewers’ front office, before moving back to his native Texas to coach for the Houston Astros in 2005. In 2007, Cecil Cooper became the first African-American field manager in the history of the Astros, the same team, you will recall, that employed in that capacity during Joe Morgan’s early years the racist Harry “The Hat” Walker.

  Pitcher Roger Moret, who was given away by the Red Sox shortly after the 1975 World Series, suffered the strangest and saddest fate of any participant in Game Six. After a single unproductive season in Atlanta’s bullpen, the Braves traded Moret to the Texas Rangers, where his 1977 season was curtailed by surgery to his pitching arm. In 1978, after behaving strangely before a home game in April against the Tigers—he started burying practice balls in the outfield before teammates chased him off the field—Moret froze in front of his locker with a shower shoe in his hand for ninety minutes, unable to speak, in an impenetrable catatonic state. After giving him a sedative, team doctors drove Moret to a psychiatric hospital, where he was confined for nearly a month. Although he recovered sufficiently to throw a few more innings for the Rangers that season, Moret had now been stamped with the stigmatic and fearful scarlet letter of mental illness; although he was invited to two more spring training camps, Moret never pitched in another major-league game. He scratched out a living in various minor leagues throughout the Caribbean for the next few years, until he could collect his small major-league pension, and he lives now, in poverty, battling his various ailments and demons, in rural Puerto Rico.

  Outfielder Bernie Carbo, once a Red and two times a Red Sox, nearly followed Roger Moret into personal disaster. Bernie’s longtime drug and alcohol dependencies finally wore him down shortly after Boston traded him for the second time, to Cleveland, halfway through the 1978 season. He signed as a free agent with the Cardinals in 1979, but appeared in only fifty-two games, was traded to Pittsburgh, and then released by the Pirates at the end of the 1980 season; his twelve-year major-league baseball career was over. Bernie returned home to Detroit and opened a hair salon, but his troubles followed him, and by the end of the 1980s, when that business went under, he was, by his own admission, not only still using drugs extensively, he was also dealing them. His marriage ended shortly thereafter, and his downward spiral hit bottom in 1993, when his poor mother took her own life in a particularly gruesome way and his estranged father died a month later. After a failed attempt at rehab, not his first, Bernie found himself in the emergency room of a local hospital one dark night shortly thereafter, broke, panicked, his body wrecked, out of hope, contemplating his own suicide. A chance encounter with a serene old man in the next bed delivered him into a sudden, startling moment of religious grace. After this profound conversion experience, Bernie began the long walk home. His former Red Sox teammates Bill Lee and Ferguson Jenkins, who had never given up on him, found Carbo the practical help he needed from the Baseball Assistance Team, a charitable organization begun in 1986 by former players to help those of their own who are in need. Bernie Carbo made it all the way back. He’s happily remarried now, the father of four—and a grandfather—and once he got himself straight Bernie fell back in love with the game that first brought him to the world’s attention, dedicating his life to an organization he founded and still runs today called the Diamond Club Ministry. Bernie is sixty-two now, in good shape again, and he lives in Alabama but travels all around the country, conducting baseball workshops for kids while preaching the virtues of a life lived according to scripture and warning against the dangers of substance abuse. He begins every workshop with a short video that tells the story of his baseball career, shows the many greats he played alongside, and features his time-stopping home run in the bottom of the eighth inning in Game Six.

  “I never knew God had a plan for me—and much of my life was hellish—but now I do, and I can see that it was there all along. Because I hit that one home run, and it allows me today to go any place and teach kids about baseball, and tell them about Jesus. God bless Tom Yawkey for the chance he gave me.”

  And to echo a sentiment shared by all of his former teammates, and managers, on both the Reds and the Red Sox, God bless Bernie Carbo.

  GUTSY RELIEVER Dick “The Dragon” Drago, who returned to the Red Sox by trade in 1978, pitched effectively in another fateful game at Fenway, recording the last out against the Yankees in the top of the ninth in what has forever since been known as the “Bucky Dent” game. Drago threw hard and well for the Sox until 1981, when the new management team traded him again, this time to the Seattle Mariners, where he played his final season. Drago retired to Florida and opened a couple of successful small businesses, but he has always stayed involved with the game of baseball, playing in a senior league and at one point barnstorming across Canada with a merry band of former players led by his old friend and teammate Bill Lee. Also a grandfather now, and in good health after undergoing triple bypass surgery in 2004, Drago remains involved with Red Sox fantasy camps and cruises, a successful outreach program begun by Boston’s principal current owners, John Henry and Tom Werner, that has brought many members of the once-estranged 1975 squad back into the fold.

  Rick Burleson, who by 1980 had firmly established his credentials as the toughest and most valuable shortstop in Boston Red Sox history, was traded away to the California Angels when his original five-year deal expired after the 1980 season. Burleson proceeded to sign the biggest contract for a shortstop in baseball history: four years for $4.65 million. He also delivered, as he always had, on the field, making the All-Star team and being named the Angels’ Most Valuable Player in 1981. Burleson suffered a devastating rotator cuff injury to his throwing arm the following spring, however, and missed almost all of the next three seasons as he struggled to recover. He put together his last good, healthy season in 1986, earning the American League’s Comeback Player of the Year award. After one year as a free agent with the Orioles in 1987, Rick Burleson ended his playing career after thirteen years in the major leagues. After working as a coach, scout, and batting instructor for the Oakland A’s, Burleson returned to the Red Sox as a coach for then manager, and his former Boston teammate, Butch Hobson. In 2002, Burleson joined many of his old Red Sox friends in the team’s Hall of Fame. He has since embarked on a successful minor-league managing career and is currently the hitting coach for the Arizona Diamondbacks’ Triple-A Reno Aces.

  Third baseman Rico Petrocelli was one of the many teammates who preceded Burleson into Boston’s Hall of Fame, when he was enshrined there in 1997. Rico and his family kept their home in the Boston area after he retired in 1977, and he spent time covering the team for the Boston Herald, on his own sports talk radio program—one of the first in the country—and then for a season as the color man for the team’s radio broadcasts. He eventually spent three years managing in the White Sox organization, then returned to the Red Sox in 1992 to manage their Triple-A franchise in Pawtucket. After six years as a roving instructor for the team, Rico started his own marketing company in New Hampshire, a grandfather now and pater fam
ilias to his large and happy clan. He remains a welcome and familiar figure in Boston and a popular participant at the team’s many alumni activities.

  After being cast aside by the Red Sox in 1978, Bill Lee spent three seasons pitching for the Montreal Expos, basking in that city’s sophisticated bonhomie, before his committed antiestablishment ways brought him once again into conflict with hard-line baseball management. In early 1982, when Lee protested the team’s release of his friend and teammate Rodney Scott with a one-game walkout, the Expos front office responded starkly by cutting him adrift. Thirty-five at the time, Lee never played another inning in the major leagues, and not without reason suspected that collusion and conspiracy among the game’s executives were involved—although in the interest of fairness, conspiracy is not an unusual theory for Lee, on any number of subjects. At which point, in many ways, the even more compelling chapters of Bill Lee’s life as a wandering minstrel of baseball began. He has published four books, including two memoirs of his playing days, which are nothing less than the funniest and most literate, readable insider accounts of the professional game since Jim Bouton’s seminal Ball Four. He played semi-pro ball for many years, and still takes the mound today, devotedly, at the age of sixty-two; if you’ve got a bat, a ball, a field, and seventeen other likeminded souls, he’s there. Lee has barnstormed with countless teams he’s assembled for just that purpose all around the world, including China, Cuba, and some remote places where few had ever seen a baseball before. He once ran for President as head of the Canadian Rhinoceros Party; he didn’t garner enough support to make it onto any state’s ballot, but “party” remained the operative word. At one time a polarizing figure during the divisive era in which he played, as time has passed, and those once hardened generational lines in American sports have softened, Bill Lee has come to be more often appreciated for what he has always been: one of the greatest living advocates for, and acolytes of, the pure and simple beauty of the game of baseball. He has always worked, tirelessly, for many charitable causes. He remains the most friendly and approachable former sports star you could ever hope to randomly encounter, and one of the most engaging conversationalists you’ll ever find about a vast variety of subjects. He lives to this day on his farm in Northern Vermont, and has recently enjoyed an overdue reassessment of his best years in Boston, recognized now as one of the greatest left-handed pitchers in their team’s storied history. The Red Sox’s new owners have also wisely brought Lee back into the fold as part of their many alumni activities, and finally acknowledged his valued contributions to the team’s rich culture by adding him to the Red Sox Hall of Fame in 2008.