Game Six: Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America's Pastime

by Mark Frost

  In the Cincinnati dugout, attention—already keen—cranked up another notch as the Reds took the field, all their movements sharp, organized, and purposeful. The contrast between the two organizations could not have been more apparent. Cincinnati’s systemic obsession with playing the game the right way, with instilling discipline off the field—the short haircuts, the strictly enforced uniform code, the suits and ties on road trips, the insistence on polite public relations—had created a remorseless and efficient killer on the field. No one ever strayed very far off the line in Cincinnati, not even the superstars. During their mediocre start to the 1975 campaign, after Johnny Bench and Reds broadcaster Marty Brennaman had burned the candle at both ends during a night in Montreal—and Bench showed up for the day game that followed the worse for wear—Brennaman had made the mistake of telling Sparky about their eventful evening. Sparky ripped both of them a new one in front of the team; Bench homered in that game and the Reds responded with their longest winning streak of the season, going 41–9 and running away with the West Division. Boys will be boys, but Brennaman learned never to confide in Sparky about their nocturnal adventures again. Bench had always kept a vivid memory of walking through the teams’ hotel during their Series matchup with the Oakland A’s in 1972 and catching a whiff of marijuana outside the room of one of the biggest A’s stars. “I guess we’re not in Kansas—or Cincinnati—anymore,” said Johnny.

  The fractious Red Sox, who had nearly risen in revolt against their manager earlier in the season, seemed almost adolescent by comparison; richly talented but emotionally undisciplined, not truly unified in the regimented, shoulder-to-shoulder way of the Big Red Machine. No player on Boston’s roster exemplified this more than their gifted starting pitcher Bill Lee, who had won seventeen games for them now three years in a row, an unheard-of achievement for a left-hander in Fenway Park. Witty, well educated, supremely self-possessed and intelligent, Lee was a USC graduate who had played for and adored the great Rod Dedeaux, becoming the winningest pitcher in school history. Lee was also one of the first committed members of America’s baby boomer counterculture to reach stardom in the major leagues. He was descended from two generations of outstanding baseball talent, including his aunt Annabelle Lee, perhaps the greatest pitcher of the women’s professional baseball league that briefly flourished during World War II. A confirmed Southern California kid, Lee enjoyed the intellectual stimulation Boston offered but spent his off-seasons hanging out in Malibu with rock stars like Warron Zevon and the Eagles, dating Hollywood starlets, living the high lifestyle. Very much a product of his time—but way ahead of it in pro sports—Lee was by nature an inquisitive searcher, a committed anti-establishmentarian with articulate socialist leanings. Like most other young red-blooded American athletes he also liked to party, but whenever you handed him the ball he was as fiercely competitive on the mound as any pitcher in the game. No less an authority than teammate Carl Yastrzemski thought that at this point Lee was the best left-handed pitcher in the American League. Lee remained single-mindedly devoted to the game of baseball and its history, particularly the art of pitching; he could, and gladly would, expound on any aspect of his craft for hours. And most of the hidebound, conservative men who had grown up in and now administered or reported on the old school world of baseball—which included most of the people long connected with the Red Sox—thought he was completely out of his mind.

  His younger Red Sox teammates gave him a pass—like fellow USC alum Fred Lynn, who greatly benefited from Bill’s generosity to him as a rookie, and thought Lee’s stream-of-consciousness style with the press was actually good for team morale—and no one appreciated him more than fellow ace Luis Tiant, who recognized and respected any man who played his heart out on the field. Lee did it in a much more vocal and excitable style than the contained and elegant fire of El Tiante, but the bond between them as committed warriors who loved the game for its own sake was genuine and strong. Lee just didn’t have much of an editing mechanism in place between his nimble mind and mouth, and although Boston beat reporters continually benefited from his willingness to hold court on any variety of subjects—often leading them into elaborate metaphors and tangents within the course of a single answer that pulled in references as disparate as astrophysics, Kurt Vonnegut, and Native American mythology—some of the older and more cynical hacks also wrote many cruel and contemptuous things about him. One disparagingly dubbed him “Spaceman,” and the nickname stuck, with time and frequent use rounding into a more affectionate interpretation, and it still sticks to him today. Others liked to mock his off-field habits, like his use of ginseng and honey as an energy source before games, as if that were some kind of punkish rebuke to the old customary amphetamines. Despite all this routine abuse, Lee remained a consistently informative and engaging interview, who continued to cooperate with reporters even after they ripped him; in this way he was also one of the first contemporary athletes to understand that he was not just a performer but an entertainer, both on and off the field. He was also willing to make himself a lightning rod for critical bolts to take the heat off his teammates, as he had when, during a losing streak in the middle of the season, he publicly criticized Boston’s reactionary response to the busing crisis. A firestorm of anger at Lee’s political point of view ensued, but for the moment fans stopped ragging about the losing streak, and the team’s fortunes on the field soon turned around. Lee often answered even the simplest questions in paragraphs, but also appreciated the art of brevity: When asked what he thought of the World Series so far, after the teams had split the first two games in Boston, he simply said: “Tied.”

  In most ways Bill Lee was much more representative of what had been going on within the fervid baby boomer culture than most of the blinkered athletes in professional baseball, who had been cloistered according to tradition in hermetic, tightly controlled conservative environments since signing their first contracts. That would soon change; only ten days before Game Six the boomer generation had planted one of its most prominent flags in the pop culture landscape when Saturday Night debuted on NBC with guest host comedian George Carlin. It’s easy to forget now, after its multiple decades as a staple of weekly American programming, that the public had never seen any network show written, produced, and performed almost entirely by and for people under the age of thirty. Savagely satirical, casually hedonistic, a howl of protest and righteous irony against the straightjacket Nixon-era Silent Majority, the show captured a moment in American time as concretely as Mount Rushmore. By the time its second episode aired, hosted by singer-songwriter Paul Simon on the night that Game Six had originally been scheduled to play, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Gilda Rad-ner, and the rest of the original Not Ready for Prime-Time Players were already on their way to becoming household names. Bill Lee had been raving about the show to his teammates since its debut. He’d also been raving about a twenty-five-year-old singer-songwriter from New Jersey named Bruce Springsteen, who since the release in late August of his third album, Born to Run, had set the music world on fire. With his gruff, tender, working-class poetry and serious kick-ass chops, Springsteen and the E Street Band burst on the American scene like a supernova, articulating the hopes and busted dreams of the Silent Majority’s children, braiding the disparate strands of rock’s varied influences into a singular, inspirational vision. In an unprecedented display of his impact, on the day Game Six was played editions of both Newsweek and Time magazines—America’s top national arbiters of conventional mainstream culture—hit the streets with Springsteen on the cover. Although earnest, respectable dramas like Dog Day Afternoon and Three Days of the Condor were topping the box office on movie screens that fall, a phenomenon called Jaws—directed by twenty-eight-year-old Steven Spielberg—had opened in July, become the first film in history to gross over $100 million, and was still rewriting the record books; in Hollywood’s executive offices a new gold rush was already under way, with producers desperate to cash in on this revealed appetite fo
r youthful summer blockbusters. Just ahead of that sea change, operating under the radar in London, a low-budget sci-fi film called Star Wars had been shooting since March. Like many others of his age and temperament, Bill Lee and his generation were at this point well on their way to finding, and raising, their voices.

  For whatever reason—education, entitlement, or the arrogance of youth produced by both—like many of his contemporaries, Lee did not suffer fools or their authority gladly, and to his way of thinking most of baseball, and the Red Sox in particular, had more than its share of both, starting with manager Darrell Johnson. Johnson’s decision halfway through the weekend’s rain delay to push back Lee’s scheduled start in Game Six and throw Tiant instead had inspired a furious public tirade from the southpaw. Not unlike the way in which Jack Billingham had gone after Sparky, Lee called out Johnson in the press, calling the decision dumb and gutless, maintaining he should have been allowed to make his start in Game Six while giving Tiant an extra day of rest—which Lee, like few others, knew he needed—before hurling a decisive Game Seven. Missing from Lee’s protest was, of course, any possibility that he might not win his Game Six start, but that was part and parcel of his confident makeup. He also knew that a cold, wet night in Boston was tailor-made for the baffling array of off-speed stuff with which, in a brilliant effort, he had held the Reds firmly in check through eight innings of Game Two, before the Red Sox bullpen let the game slip away in the top of the ninth. Darrell Johnson smoothed over Lee’s anger to reporters—after unloading on him angrily in private—and stacked all the chips he had left on Luis Tiant as previously announced. Bill Lee was the only Red Sox pitcher Johnson did not dispatch to the bullpen for the start of Game Six, although he hadn’t seen fit to use any of those other arms yet, a lack of action that by this point in the evening had driven Lee half-crazy; watching from the dugout, he knew that Luis hadn’t had his best stuff since the fifth inning and was out there pitching on guts and guile alone. As the seventh inning stretch ended, Lee couldn’t stomach any more and headed back up the tunnel to the clubhouse for some stretching and meditation, part of his usual between-starts regimen. If Game Six turned out to be another season-ending loss, it was all on manager Darrell Johnson as far as Bill Lee was concerned, unless the Red Sox could somehow dig down deeper now than they’d ever had to go and rally to even this Series.

  Which, as the home team came to the plate in the bottom of the seventh, appeared less likely than at any other point in the evening; the team, for the moment, looked deflated and stale, stunned by the relentless way in which Cincinnati had caught and overtaken them, almost sleepwalking into the bottom of the seventh. The Reds recognized the symptoms, they’d seen it time and again; opponents absorbed so many body blows from the Big Red Machine by the late innings that they simply lost the will to fight back. That’s when the finishers in Sparky’s superb bullpen went to work nailing shut the coffin.

  Pedro Borbon strode out for his second inning of work on the mound. John Kiley gamely initiated a traditional rallying cry on his Hammond, and the fans tried desperately to encourage them to fight, clapping rhythmically as second baseman Denny Doyle led off the inning. Pete Rose edged in at third, protecting against the possibility of a bunt.

  Borbon, who was to put it mildly prone to bouts of overexcitement, had been so pumped up in his first inning that he overthrew a lot of his pitches. He missed here for the same reason with his first fastball, outside for ball one.

  A snappy dresser off the field and on the road, Borbon liked to present himself as the model of an upscale businessman, in keeping with the Reds’ conservative team philosophy. Whenever they traveled, he always carried an expensive designer leather attaché case in support of that image, a cultivated executive look and style.

  Borbon came back with the fastball in on the hands and overpowered Doyle, who swung late, hit it on the handle, and popped up weakly to Dave Concepcion at short for the first out. As Carl Yastrzemski came to the plate, the crowd began to clap again in support of their captain. Borbon came inside with a sharp breaking ball that Yaz thought dropped out of the zone, but Satch Davidson called it a strike. Yaz stepped out of the box, letting Davidson know under his breath, without looking at him, what he thought of the call. Borbon’s next pitch, fastball, came in low again. Yaz laid off, and this time Davidson agreed with him, evening the count at 1–1.

  But according to his Reds teammates, the only things Borbon ever carried in that fancy briefcase of his were a brick to give it the appearance of heft, a steel comb for his immaculate Afro, and two razor-sharp spurs for the fighting cocks he raised and trained back in the Dominican.

  Borbon’s next pitch, a nasty breaking ball, fooled Yastrzemski, and he chopped it into the dirt, a weak grounder to Morgan at second, who had to run in to make the play, fumbled it slightly, and fired to Perez as Yaz hustled down the line, out by two steps. Two outs.

  Borbon looked completely in control, but Sparky already had his bullpen humming again, getting his twin rookie closers ready, left-hander Will McEnaney and right-hander Rawly Eastwick, the best closing duo during the season in all of baseball.

  Carlton Fisk came to the plate, and now the rhythmic clapping from the crowd was down to only a handful of people. Taking a deep breath, checking his bat, knowing this might be his last chance in the Series, Fisk watched the first pitch from Borbon miss outside for a ball. Working quickly, Borbon came right back with a challenging fastball that Fisk swung on and missed to even the count at 1–1.

  Throw strikes: That was the mission, for Borbon or any member of Sparky’s bullpen at this stage of the game. Don’t walk anybody; make ’em put it in play and let that tremendous defense behind you go to work. Borbon came back with another slider thrown with the same sidearm motion as the last fastball, and just as Fisk swung, it dropped out of the zone and he chopped another weak grounder into the dirt, which Davey Concepcion scooped up on the second bounce and chucked to Perez at first.

  No sound from the crowd. The seventh inning was over, only the second time in the game that they’d meekly gone out in order, and just like that the Red Sox were down to their last six outs.

  SIXTEEN

  Sometimes things go wrong, even when you’re doing your best. That just shows none of us are perfect. So I keep trying with all my heart, and if that’s not good enough, I’m not going to hang my head.

  LUIS TIANT

  HE’D THROWN 110 PITCHES IN THE GAME NOW. HIS FASTBALL, landing consistently up in the strike zone, had visibly lost its sting, and the Reds had torched him for eight hits and five runs in the previous three innings. Darrell Johnson’s devotion to his team’s star pitcher and emotional leader now moved beyond reason as he sent Luis Tiant back out to the mound to start the top of the eighth. They trailed the best team baseball had seen in a generation by two runs, with only two innings left to rally or the Series would be lost. Johnson had a deep, rested, and ready bullpen to turn to in order to keep the game in reach. Watching now on television, each in his own separate clubhouse, pitchers Jack Billingham and Bill Lee—one long done for the night and into his third beer, the other trying to mentally and physically prepare for a tomorrow that might never come—simply couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw Tiant emerge from the dugout.

  A dread silence from the crowd as Reds center fielder Cesar Geronimo came up to open the inning.

  First pitch, fastball, on the inside half of the plate, and Geronimo, greeted by exactly the pitch he was looking for, turned on it. High and deep, just inside the right field foul line. Way back in the seats. Gone. The Reds’ eleventh hit off Tiant in the game and Geronimo’s second home run of the Series.

  Reds, 6; Red Sox, 3.

  A cascade of boos echoed around Fenway, not directed at Tiant, but at manager Darrell Johnson as he finally left the dugout to do what everyone else in the park knew should have been done at least an inning earlier. Johnson signaled the bullpen, asked his pitcher for the ball, and as Luis Tiant made the long walk
in, the crowd rose for one last standing ovation. Pitching coach and former teammate Stan Williams was the first to greet him, with a handshake and embrace, and the rest of the coaching staff and reserves soon followed. Stoic but clearly downcast, Luis gathered his warm-up jacket and took a seat on the bench. His night, his season, and his World Series were over.

  With Reds pitcher Pedro Borbon due up—and for once, no pinch hitters in sight—Red Sox left-hander Rogelio “Roger” Moret rode in and accepted the ball from Darrell Johnson on the mound. The tall, rail-thin, twenty-six-year-old Moret—who uncannily resembled what a young Luis Tiant Sr. might have looked like in his prime—had turned in a brilliant 1975 campaign, his third full year with the team. A native of Puerto Rico, signed as a free agent out of high school, he had, like so many of his Red Sox teammates, found himself as a pitcher while playing for Darrell Johnson in the minor leagues. Moret had been astonishing during his first full season with the Red Sox in 1973, leading the American League in winning percentage with a 13–2 record, but then taken a step back in ’74, finishing 9–10. Beginning the 1975 season in the bullpen, Moret reentered the rotation as the fifth starter in late June and down the stretch helped propel the team to the pennant, finishing the year at 14–3, topping the league in winning percentage for the second time in three years. With his record now at 41–18 during his tenure in Boston—and the recipient of a revised mid-season contract from a pleased and generous Tom Yawkey—Moret seemed poised to become a fixture in the Red Sox rotation for years to come.