by Mark Frost
Umpires for the World Series used to be selected on merit by their respective leagues, but after a one-day walkout staged by the then two-year-old umpires union nearly upended the 1970 postseason, the men in blue had since bargained hard for better wages and working conditions. In 1974 their union pushed through a ruling that the World Series would henceforth be staffed by a crew drawn in random rotation from the pool of all umpires with at least six years of major-league experience, which in the minds of many players and managers simply ensured and rewarded mediocrity. By some strange luck of the draw, all six umpires for the 1975 World Series were working in their first Fall Classic. (Hearing that fact before the Series, Carl Yastrzemski had snorted contemptuously: “Then why don’t they just rotate the teams?”) Thirty-year-old Larry Barnett had been an American League umpire for seven years, garnering average reviews for his work, but by the time the World Series shifted back to Boston for Game Six, he had received a sack full of hideous hate mail for his controversial call in Game Three. An anonymous telegram had also been sent directly to his home in Prospect, Ohio, that threatened not only his life but that of his wife and two-year-old daughter. Local police immediately placed a twenty-four-hour guard on the Barnett house and family, and the FBI quickly came in to investigate at the behest of Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. Since arriving back in Boston on Friday, throughout the rain delay over the weekend, and that afternoon when he arrived at Fenway—even tonight, from in the stands, by agents stationed near where he was working the game at third base—Larry Barnett, scared half to death, had been under the watchful eyes of an FBI protective detail larger than the one that had protected former secretary of state Henry Kissinger at a game earlier in the Series.
Rose stepped back into the box and watched Tiant’s second pitch sail high and away for a ball. Tiant asked for another ball, stared in for the sign, and delivered an excellent low fastball that appeared to catch the outside corner, but Davidson called it a ball, 2–1. Rose and Fisk, who had been carrying on a casual, needling back-and-forth with each other throughout the Series, debated the merits of that pitch, while Fisk set up for the next one.
The FBI agents guarding Larry Barnett weren’t the only federal officers in attendance that night at Fenway. A Secret Service squad was also in the stands guarding the oldest son of President Gerald Ford, twenty-five-year-old Michael Ford, who was there watching the game. A longtime respected congressman from Michigan and the former minority leader of the House of Representatives, Gerald Ford had been elevated to the office of vice president in 1973 by President Richard Nixon, after Nixon’s disgraced VP, Spiro Agnew, under investigation for charges of bribery, conspiracy, and extortion committed during his prior tenure as the governor of Maryland, had been allowed to plead no contest to a single charge of tax evasion as long as he resigned. Less than a year later, when President Nixon himself was forced to abdicate his office under even darker clouds of criminality and misconduct, Gerald Ford became the thirty-eighth President of the United States, the only man in American history to reach the White House without ever winning election to either executive position. Although he had already made it clear he intended to run as the incumbent in the upcoming 1976 election, Ford’s formerly spotless reputation had suffered a serious blow a month after taking office, when he issued a general pardon for Richard Nixon, indemnifying him against the threat of any future prosecution.
Tiant came back with the same pitch, a sizzling fastball that nailed Fisk’s target on the outside corner; Davidson called it a strike to even the count at 2–2.
Although an inaccurate public image of Ford as a clumsy bumbler had already taken root—he had a bad knee that occasionally buckled and resulted in awkward spills—he was actually the most accomplished athlete ever to hold the nation’s highest office; playing both linebacker and center, he had anchored the University of Michigan’s football team during back-to-back national championships in the early 1930s, and retained a lifelong fan’s interest in every major American sport. There had been talk about President Ford attending a World Series game in Boston, but his chief of staff—an ambitious young political operative from Wyoming named Dick Cheney—had discouraged the idea. Security around the entire Ford family had been tightened severely during the previous month, after two bizarre and inept assassination attempts had been made on the President within weeks of each other in California. On September 5, a deranged former Charles Manson acolyte named Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, while dressed in a blood red nun’s habit, had pointed a loaded .45 automatic at President Ford during his appearance at a public park in Sacramento but was subdued before she could pull the trigger. Seventeen days later, on a crowded street outside the President’s hotel in downtown San Francisco, a frumpy middle-aged housewife, five-time divorcee, and professional accountant named Sarah Jane Moore fired a single shot at Ford with a .38 revolver and missed before being tackled by an alert bystander.
Tiant waited until he saw the sign from Fisk he wanted—another fastball, low and away—and Rose fought it off, fouling it out of play into the stands near third base, still 2–2.
Prior to her assassination attempt, Sarah Jane Moore had been peripherally connected to a bizarre story that had competed with the downfall of Richard Nixon as a principal obsession of American culture over the previous two years: the kidnapping in 1974 of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst. The nineteen-year-old granddaughter of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, Patty Hearst had been taken at gunpoint from her Berkeley, California, apartment by a scruffy, heavily armed left-wing group of urban anarchists who called themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army, better known in months to come as the SLA. After trying and failing to negotiate Hearst’s return for the release of some of their jailed comrades, the SLA demanded that her old-money family—guilty of countless but unspecified “crimes against the people”—establish an organization to provide food to poor Californians in exchange for Patty’s release. Her father complied by immediately creating People In Need (P.I.N.) and giving away more than $6 million worth of food to the poor and indigent in the San Francisco area. Sarah Jane Moore, reportedly obsessed with all aspects of the Hearst case, intersected the story here when she was hired as a bookkeeper for P.I.N. and quickly asserted herself into the organization’s daily operations. Instead of holding up their end of the bargain, the SLA responded by claiming that the food hadn’t been good enough, and Patty Hearst would remain their prisoner.
Tiant came back with a fastball again, falling off to the left of the mound and missing high and away, a full count now to Rose, 3–2. Rose immediately thought that the location and Tiant’s off-balance follow-through might be an indication that the pitcher was beginning to tire.
The real shocker came a month later, when Patricia Hearst, after enduring what was later revealed to be weeks of unrelenting isolation, brainwashing, and sexual abuse, announced in a tape recording sent to the press that she had joined the SLA and would henceforth be known by her revolutionary name of “Tania” she was soon afterward photographed carrying an M1 automatic rifle during a San Francisco bank robbery committed by the group. “Tania” and the rest of the criminal SLA gang remained on the loose, considered armed and dangerous, and Patty Hearst joined them on the FBI’s ten most wanted list.
With Armbrister running on the pitch, Tiant threw another high fastball that Rose fouled straight back—it ended up in the hands of Dick Stockton up in the open-air broadcast booth, just to the third base side of home; Garagiola and Kubek wisely ducked—having confirmed Rose’s opinion that Tiant was losing his edge and might finally be ripe for the plucking.
After six of the SLA’s leaders were killed during a bloody shootout with a Los Angeles SWAT team in May of 1974, Patricia Hearst continued to elude authorities for more than fifteen months, until she was finally arrested without resistance in a San Francisco apartment on September 18, 1975. During those intervening months, the increasingly unstable Sarah Jane Moore had been forced out of her job at P.I.N., fallen in wi
th some ex-con radicals connected to the SLA, become a part-time informant for the FBI against them, and claimed the Bureau then assigned her to go undercover into another Bay Area Marxist revolutionary cell. That group had no sooner converted the malleable Moore to their wacko radical manifesto when her FBI connection became public knowledge, both sides dropped her like a leper, and she spiraled into a delusional state that spawned a welter of violent fantasies. Some of those apparently involved “rescuing” the recently collared Patty Hearst from federal captivity, and four days after Patty Hearst’s arrest—connecting dots that only a disintegrating mind could perceive—Moore took her shot at President Ford.
With the count full, Armbrister took off as the next pitch left Tiant’s hand, a fastball low but in the zone, and Rose was ready: He lined it sharply into straightaway center field. Armbrister rounded second, hesitated, and then accelerated toward third as he saw the ball reach Fred Lynn on the first hop, but as Lynn tried to transfer the ball to his throwing hand it caught momentarily in the webbing of his glove. Armbrister safely reached third, and instead of rushing a throw to third, Lynn wisely threw behind him to Doyle covering second, holding Rose to a single, his second in a row and second of the game against Tiant. Pete Rose now led the World Series in hits, and the Reds had runners on first and third with only one out, their most serious threat of the game.
Ken Griffey came up for the Reds’ biggest at bat of the game. Sparky and the Reds’ entire bench crept forward toward the rail on the edge of the field.
Tiant started Griffey with a fastball, again up in the zone, but a little late on the swing, Griffey fouled it high into the stands down the third base line.
The crowd grew restive, sensing trouble. Griffey had produced under similar pressure in Game Two, driving in what turned out to be the game-winning run in the ninth inning. Then, in the bottom of the ninth in Game Four in Cincinnati, against Luis Tiant—with one out, men on first and second, and the Reds trailing by a run—Griffey had hit a screaming line drive toward left center; Fred Lynn turned around, tracked the ball down at full speed, and snagged it over his shoulder at the base of Riverfront’s deep center field wall, the kind of defensive gem Lynn had been making all season. This one saved Game Four and the win for Tiant.
Tiant missed outside with a fastball, 1–1.
Pete Rose took an exaggerated lead off first base, trying to draw a throw and induce Tiant into an error that would score Armbrister from third. Tiant looked Rose back toward the bag but didn’t take the bait. He came in again to Griffey, using the same windup and toward the same outside location, but pulled the string on a slow curve. Griffey resisted and the pitch missed low, 2–1.
Behind in the count, Luis needed a good pitch now, and he reared back and threw his best fastball of the game, which clipped the outside corner for a strike, evening the count at 2–2.
“Boy, that was a good pitch, Tony,” said Garagiola.
“He needs another one,” said Kubek. “Right now.”
Fisk called for a curve, and set up low and away. The pitch arced toward the plate but floated and hung up, waist-high over the outside edge. Griffey had time to measure and adjust to the speed and then belted it, a majestic, deep drive toward left center field. The runners, Armbrister and Rose, held up halfway down the line, turning to watch the flight of the ball. Just as he had on the ball Griffey hit at Riverfront in Game Four, Fred Lynn immediately turned and with the briefest of glances sprinted back toward where his superb tracking skills told him the ball would come back to ground. His path took him straight toward the 379 sign in the corner formed by the left field wall angling sharply into the joint of the center field section. Ten feet from the wall, on the edge of the generous warning track, his back completely turned to home plate, Lynn glanced again over his shoulder, drew a bead on the ball, took one quick look at the wall, and then leapt up desperately to make the grab, knowing he was dangerously near the concrete and about to collide with it, turning his body counterclockwise back toward the infield.
His glove missed the ball by less than a foot; it smacked the left field edge of the wall almost on the numbers and caromed wildly back toward right center. Completing his awkward turn, Lynn’s back slammed straight into the concrete just on the center field side of the angle, his limbs splayed out, his hat came flying off, and he immediately slumped to the ground.
Seeing the ball bounce free, Ed Armbrister trotted home for the Reds’ first run. By the time Dwight Evans could reach the ball and throw it back in to Rick Burleson, Pete Rose had motored all the way around from first and scored the Reds’ second run. Griffey was already gliding into third with a stand-up triple, and Burleson ran the ball in to hold him there. Carl Yastrzemski had joined Evans in right center, having chased the ricocheting ball all the way over from left, and then they both turned; NBC cut to a zoom shot of center field, the umpire at second called an urgent time-out, and Fenway went instantly silent as everyone realized that Fred Lynn was still lying motionless at the base of the wall. His bent legs turned to the right, his upper back still wedged against the concrete, his glove lying on the ground beside him, utterly motionless—he looked dead, a battlefield casualty frozen in time.
Yaz got to him first, leaning down, relieved to hear Lynn respond to his first question; his young teammate had never lost consciousness but was afraid to move. He’d hit the concrete at full speed, taking the impact into his lower back, and as he lay there crumpled on the track he’d lost all feeling in his legs, totally numb from the waist down. Dwight Evans reached them moments later and knelt down beside him.
Red Sox trainer Charlie Moss and manager Darrell Johnson sprinted out from the dugout, Moss reaching Lynn first. The entire crowd remained on their feet, straining to get a view. Fenway had gone as quiet as a tomb. The fans had seen Lynn make dozens of spectacular, headlong plays throughout his first season, and he’d never been hurt or injured on any of them; now it looked as if their Golden Boy’s miraculous rookie year—and the Red Sox’s prospects for both present and future as well—had met a tragic end. Charlie Moss gently helped Lynn extend his legs, easing him out of the awkward posture and trying to relieve any strain. Pitching coach Stan Williams then joined them from the bullpen as Lynn planted both hands on the ground behind him and crabbed forward slightly, going all pins and needles as the first feeling returned to his legs.
The anxious crowd clapped their hands and blew horns as Lynn began to stir, and when the other men helped him rise gingerly to his feet, they cheered. Lynn bent over from the waist, carefully assessing the damage. He’d taken worse hits on crossing patterns in the middle of the field as a receiver in football, but his legs and lower back felt stiff and bruised. He picked up his glove, took a few deep breaths, and walked back onto the outfield grass, Charlie Moss and Darrell Johnson at his side. Lynn stretched from side to side, moving a little easier, and told Johnson he wanted to keep playing. As Moss and Johnson started back toward the dugout, and the crowd realized Lynn was not only all right but staying in the game, the cheer became a sustained ovation.
With one out, the Red Sox lead reduced to one, and the potential tying run in Ken Griffey at third, Joe Morgan walked to the plate. Darrell Johnson drew his infielders in to the edge of the grass, unwilling to give up that run on a groundout. Tiant, looking slightly unsettled, missed high once again with a first-pitch fastball, then low and away with a hard curve, quickly behind in the count to Morgan, 2–0. Knowing he only needed a medium-deep fly out to bring home the swift Griffey, Morgan looked and waited for a pitch he could lift into the air. Going back to the same misdirection that had just failed with Griffey, Tiant threw the changeup again; Morgan adjusted, but slightly overanxious, he swung hard and missed the center of the bat by a fraction of an inch. The ball skied straight up in the air, a high pop fly to third base, where Rico Petrocelli barely moved and settled under it for the second out.
Two outs, and with the sacrifice fly no longer in play, Johnny Bench stepped into the box. Bench
had been given the same tip in the Cincinnati dugout, that Tiant was tending to start batters with first-pitch fastballs for strikes. He hadn’t needed to be told; from his extraordinary expertise behind the plate he knew more about most pitchers’ patterns than they did themselves. He’d already hit 240 home runs in his career, more than any other catcher in baseball history besides Hall of Famer Yogi Berra, and done it on a steady diet of fastballs, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But for all the hoopla that had been made in the press about how the Reds’ relentless right-handed bats were going to dine out on Fenway’s short left field, they hadn’t yet hit a single ball off the Green Monster in two and a half games of the World Series.
That streak ended moments later when Tiant threw his next first-pitch fastball to Bench. It came in low, but Johnny reached out for it and hit a rope that rocketed toward left field and smacked into the wall about twenty-five feet up. The old master of the Monster, Yastrzemski, retreated back exactly to where he knew the ball would rebound, caught it on the bounce as it came down, then whirled and fired to second, holding Bench to a 310-foot single.
But not before Ken Griffey trotted across home plate with the Reds’ third run of the inning, to tie the game. Bench had come through again. The Red Sox’s early lead had become a memory.
Now Tony Perez stepped in for his third trip to the plate in the game, the seventh Red to bat in the fifth, with the go-ahead run in Bench on first. The Cubans faced off; Perez lunged at Tiant’s first offering, a slow curve, and whacked it foul down the first base line. Tiant came back at Perez with a fastball, but again missed up and away, certain evidence his legs were beginning to tire.
For the first time in the game, pitchers stood up and began throwing in the Red Sox bullpen—right-hander Jim Willoughby, their long reliever, and rookie left-hander Jim Burton.