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

by Mark Frost

  As Miller stood in, the crowd, whipped into a frenzy by Evans’s extraordinary catch, clapped and cheered in rhythm, trying to will their Red Sox to get this thing over with now. Pat Darcy, beginning his second inning of work, missed outside with a fastball, and then another in the same spot, falling behind to Miller, 2–0.

  Miller had attended Michigan State on a scholarship as a pitcher, but after converting to the outfield, he won the Big Ten batting title in his junior year, was named an all-American, and signed with the Red Sox after they made him their number two draft pick in 1969.

  Darcy came back with the fastball, and Miller fouled it back, 2–1.

  Working his way up through the Red Sox organization at Pittsfield and Pawtucket, Miller became good friends with minor-league teammate Carlton Fisk, and was introduced to Fisk’s younger sister Janet Marie. They began dating, and married three years later, the first full season that Miller joined his now famous brother-in-law on the Boston roster. He believed he was about to earn a spot in the everyday lineup in 1975, but the stunning arrival of Rice and Lynn had rendered Miller the forgotten man in the Red Sox outfield; dispirited by a lack of playing time, he had nonetheless made valuable contributions through the team’s stretch drive, with key hits and sound defense.

  Miller fouled another Darcy fastball down the left field line to even the count at 2–2, then another in the same spot to stay alive.

  Joe Garagiola, back in charge of calling play-by-play since the top of the inning, finally made reference to Tony Kubek’s absence—calls had been coming into the NBC switchboard from viewers, concerned about his sudden disappearance—explaining that he was shuttling back and forth between clubhouses, waiting to interview the winners. Down below the stands, Vinnie Orlando—Fenway’s longtime visiting team locker room attendant—opened the door for Kubek and, bending the rules a little for one of his favorite guys in baseball, waved him on in.

  Darcy’s fastball appeared to be losing some steam; Miller got good wood on his next outside pitch, spraying it to left field, but right at George Foster, who barely had to move to make the catch for the inning’s first out. After they’d tossed it around, Pete Rose walked the ball back to Darcy, pumping him up with chatter: “Keep it up, kid, you’re doing great. What a game, huh? I’d pay to see this one.”

  Red Sox second baseman Denny Doyle followed Miller to the plate, and Darcy started him with a fastball, high for ball one. The crowd had grown quiet again; they needed a rest, or another spark to jump-start them.

  Tony Kubek and his NBC soundman Aaron Traeger—lugging the heavy equipment required by Kubek’s cumbersome radio frequency microphone—now crept along the dank, low, ancient tunnel that cut down from the visitors’ clubhouse through the fens toward the Cincinnati dugout.

  Darcy followed his first-pitch fastball with a second one, on the outside corner for a called strike. Bench asked for another in the same spot, and Doyle fouled it back for strike two.

  As Kubek approached the dugout, he was surprised to find Sparky, standing back down in the shade of the tunnel, watching the game and sneaking a smoke out of sight of NBC’s roving cameras. Sparky never wanted kids to see him with a cigarette, but a man with this much tension and nervous energy to discharge could only chew so much damn gum.

  Bench went right back to the outside fastball, and Doyle pounded it into the dirt right to Davey Concepcion, who hoovered it and threw to Perez at first for the second out. It was Yaz’s turn at the plate, and the Fenway crowd stood and cheered him yet again. Three for five on the night, Yaz watched Darcy’s first fastball catch the inside corner for a strike.

  Sparky sensed someone behind him in the tunnel, turned, saw that it was Kubek, then smiled and waved him forward. Kubek, always reluctant to intrude on players or managers while they were on the job, cautiously advanced until he could just catch sight of the field.

  Joe Morgan retreated all the way onto the edge of the outfield grass, playing Yaz to pull it hard to right. The veteran took a fearsome cut at Darcy’s next fastball, fouling it straight back and falling quickly behind 0–2.

  Sparky dropped his cigarette, ground it out underfoot, took off his cap, and ran his fingers through his silver shock of hair. In the dim light of the tunnel, he looked weary and drained, two decades older than his forty-one years.

  Darcy’s next pitch missed low in the dirt, 1–2 now to Yaz.

  Sparky looked back at Kubek—he knew Tony understood—and just shook his head. Boy oh boy. A stolen moment alone in the tunnel, wrestling with the game’s damnable, obdurate gods. Sparky waved Tony closer, encouraged him to stay, then popped up the three steps to the dugout and went back to work, clapping his hands, prowling up and down the bench. Kubek mounted the steps to where he could see home plate but still remain out of sight from cameras and the crowd.

  Yaz drilled Darcy’s next pitch on the ground right toward Concepcion, a carbon copy of the ball he’d just handled from Doyle, the kind of play he could make in his sleep.

  Three up, three down for the Red Sox in the home half of the eleventh. Kubek began to wonder: Did either team have the energy left to win this thing?

  RICK WISE walked in from the Boston bullpen to pitch the top of the twelfth inning for the Red Sox. This would be his first appearance in relief all year, but they couldn’t have found a more solid or dependable man to turn to at such a point in this game, World Series, or season. The son of a talented collegiate pitcher, Wise had early on found his footing on the path of life; he’d been a baseball prodigy, leading his team to the Little League World Series at the age of twelve, and his high school team to the Oregon state championship. When he graduated, the Phillies drafted him at seventeen, and he made their club the very next year. A big, strong, durable power pitcher with excellent control, during the next nine seasons he won 129 games in the National League, 86 of them complete games, an astonishing figure by today’s standard. He swung a mean bat, too, cracking fifteen career home runs. On one amazing day at Riverfront Stadium in 1971 Wise tossed a no-hitter against the Big Red Machine and hit two home runs in the bargain, a performance unmatched in baseball history. After seven years anchoring a perpetually mediocre Phillies staff, and in the midst of a difficult contract negotiation, Wise was traded straight up to the Cardinals for starter and future Hall of Famer Steve Carlton. All Wise did over the next two years was lead St. Louis in victories, and notch a win as the starting pitcher in the 1973 All-Star Game, before he was traded again at the end of that season, to the Red Sox, along with teammate and friend Bernie Carbo. A torn shoulder muscle derailed his first year in Boston—an injury he attributed to being overworked in cold weather during the first weeks of the season by his new manager, Darrell Johnson—but Wise had bounced back as strong as ever in 1975, leading the Red Sox with nineteen wins and winning the third game of their sweep over the A’s in the League Championship Series. He had given Boston exactly what they’d hoped for when they acquired him; a bellwether arm for their starting rotation and plow-horse durability, one of the most dependable, strong-minded men in all of baseball.

  Because he had faced the Reds before—often and successfully—Wise had been held back by Darrell Johnson until Game Three in Cincinnati, where he’d no-hit them four years earlier. Although a long time in coming, the Reds that night exacted their revenge on Rick Wise: He gave up five runs, and three home runs, in only four and a third innings, before Johnson sent him to the showers. This was the infamous Armbrister game, when the Red Sox fought back bravely to tie it in the ninth before coming undone after the fateful collision in front of home plate in the tenth. No one had been more disappointed in his performance in that game than Wise himself, but Johnson hadn’t called on him again, and he had been itching to get a redemptive shot at the Reds ever since. The mortal blow during Wise’s stint in Game Three had been a two-run shot struck by catcher Johnny Bench, who was the first man he would now have to confront in the top of the twelfth inning of Game Six.

  Although he was never
one to complain, and his numbers had been as good as or better than his lofty career averages, 1975 had been one of Johnny Bench’s most difficult seasons. From that early car accident in his first year with the Reds organization, Bench had ever since been regularly beset by a series of injuries and odd misfortunes. Most of them were attributable to the wear and tear of the game’s most demanding physical position and the take-no-prisoners way in which he played it. But in the last month of the 1972 season Bench’s doctor had noticed a spot on his lung during a routine X-ray. Extensive tests failed to determine its nature—although he had never been a smoker, cancer was the obvious concern—and while the Reds were losing their agonizing World Series that fall to the Oakland A’s, Bench was staring down an appointment with the knife once the season ended. Although contemporary diagnostic techniques would have obviated the need for such drastic measures, doctors had to open his chest and split his ribs to get at the lesion, which turned out to be a rare, but completely benign, fungal infection called San Joaquin Valley Fever. Bench recovered from the postoperative trauma to play 152 games the following year, but posted some of his lowest numbers of the decade.

  After another excellent campaign in 1974, Bench had come into 1975 in his best shape in years, but a home plate collision in late April with Giants outfielder Gary Matthews changed all that; the blow shredded the cartilage along the top of his left shoulder. Enduring cortisone shots injected three inches into the joint every few days to dull the severe pain, Bench could barely lift his left arm and needed help just taking off his shirt. The frayed tissue constantly scraped an underlying nerve, making it difficult for him to sleep whenever the medication wore off, but he kept playing with the injury throughout the long march of the ’75 season, missing only twenty games, making the All-Star team yet again, hitting .280 with 28 home runs while driving in 110, leading the club in both categories. For his troubles, he was treated to repeated speculation by hometown sportswriters that the great Johnny Bench was washed up and his extraordinary talent had hit the downhill side. Nor could he find much relief from this bruising treatment at home, privately suffering through the messy public unraveling of his first marriage. Instead of giving in to despair, Bench treated all these slings and arrows with the same wry, privately amused, slightly removed perspective that had always sustained him, and simply went out every day and did his job.

  The fourth Red Sox pitcher of the night, and the twelfth to appear in Game Six—a new World Series record—the tall, solid, bespectacled Wise consulted briefly with his catcher, Carlton Fisk, as Johnny Bench dug into the box. Wise started him with a hard fastball, outside for ball one.

  Bench had slugged a fastball from Wise out of the park in Cincinnati, a pitch Wise had let stray over the plate without its usual effective movement; as a power pitcher, Wise knew that home runs were a frequent consequence of his worst mistakes, his Achilles’ heel. He was not going to make that same mistake tonight; his next fastball headed for the high outside corner and Bench swung late, skying it foul all the way above the grandstand directly behind home plate. Fisk hurled his mask aside and raced back to the screen in front of the first row, retreating two steps when the ball spun back away from the screen on the way down, then making the difficult catch as he tumbled back onto his rear. Fisk had retired Bench—the man writers had invariably compared him with since the moment he’d arrived—and Wise had won their rematch.

  Tony Perez stepped in, 1–5 on the night. Wise started him with a good-moving fastball that just missed low for ball one.

  Perez had gone 0–1 but drawn a walk off Wise in Game Three, and then startled him, with Bench at the plate, by stealing second, something he’d done only once all season; but the Reds’ scouting report had said anyone could run on the deliberate Wise. Perez confirmed it, and Bench had then promptly hit his home run, giving the Reds their early lead.

  Having waited patiently for his pitch, Perez watched another hard fastball catch the outside corner to even the count.

  Tony Perez had done every last thing the Reds had asked of him ever since they’d signed him as a raw teenager out of Cuba—switching positions, driving in more than ninety runs for nine consecutive years, all the while providing the emotional stability that had cemented this remarkable group of athletes together—and still he had to face the harsh reality that these World Series games might be the last he ever played in a Cincinnati uniform.

  Wise’s next fastball cut across the lower half of the zone—the pitch Perez was looking for—but he caught only a fraction of it, fouling it back hard, flush into Carlton Fisk’s mask, 1–2.

  Tony Perez was thirty-three now, an age when many good players, so history tells us, begin their inevitable decline. Although he was a year younger than Pete Rose, the Cincinnati front office still considered him the older, more expendable player—but then everyone seemed older than the hyperactive Charlie Hustle, particularly their wise and patient first baseman.

  Perez watched another fastball miss just low, evening the count again at 2–2.

  No matter that the Big Dog had not yet exhibited a single symptom of decline, an old baseball axiom held that it was far better to rid oneself of a player a year too soon, when he still had marketable value, than a year too late, when the bell had already tolled. Born of the unfettered arrogance granted to baseball’s owners by their age-old, iron-clad reserve clause, such mechanical thinking often led, as it would in Cincinnati before too much longer, to downfall and ruin.

  When Rick Wise had his good fastball—as he did tonight—almost no one could get around quickly enough to pull the ball on him, but Perez did here. After measuring the repeated low pitches he’d seen, he looked for another and swatted the one Wise then threw him sharply past a diving Rick Burleson for a single to center field; the Reds had the potential go-ahead run on base.

  George Foster stepped in, deliberate hitter versus deliberate pitcher, but perhaps conscious of the late hour, both men worked at faster than their normal pace; Wise fired a perfect pitch on the low outside corner for a strike.

  Wise looked Tony Perez back to first as he went into his stretch; he wasn’t about to let Perez surprise him with another steal, but he also knew that with the powerful Foster at the plate there was no chance Sparky would risk sending him.

  Wise made his second straight good pitch to Foster, low and outside, looking for the ground ball to end the inning; Foster chopped it foul to fall behind 0–2. Looking for the strikeout now, Wise threw his first curve of the inning, breaking low and away; Foster almost bit but laid off it and Davidson called it a ball, 1–2.

  Fisk set up inside, aiming to bust one in on Foster’s hands. Wise’s fastball ran in on him, and the prodigiously strong Foster muscled it into the air, floating gently out to left field, where it fell in for a bloop single in front of Bernie Carbo for the Reds’ fourteenth hit of the game. Perez advanced to second. Rick Wise hadn’t thrown a single bad pitch in the inning, but the Reds were in business, with two men on and only one out in the inning.

  From his perch on the tunnel stairs behind the Cincinnati dugout, Tony Kubek saw renewed purpose in Sparky and the Reds; this was character, this was who they were. Never give up, impose your will on the opponent, always keep fighting. Another hit now and they’d retake the lead, and if they did, it didn’t seem possible that the Red Sox could find a way to come back yet again at this late hour.

  Davey Concepcion came to the plate, looking for anything he could poke or prod past the infield. Wise fired a fastball on the black of the outside corner for a called strike. The moment seemed made for Concepcion; if he could drive in Perez from second, and the Reds could hold on to win this game and the Series, that might just do it—elevate him to the level of the team’s Four Horsemen, from the very good to one of the greats.

  Wise missed high with a fastball, evening the count at 1–1.

  With almost dead silence in the park, Wise went back to the outside fastball, and Concepcion sliced it into right field, with the runners a
dvancing halfway. Dwight Evans retreated a few steps to his left, pulled it in for the second out, and Perez retreated quickly to second as Evans fired the ball back to the cutoff man, Doyle.

  Sparky thrust his hands in his back pockets and paced again. Darrell Johnson ran out to talk to Wise and Fisk on the mound about their book on the next batter, Cesar Geronimo. Low and away, low and away. That’s where Wise started him, but the fastball just missed outside, 1–0.

  No one was throwing in Boston’s bullpen—Wise would have to get this done himself—but next door in the Reds’ pen the last man left got up to throw with Bill Plummer; Clay Kirby, suffering from arm trouble, hadn’t thrown a single pitch in the postseason, but he was all Sparky had now, and his current pitcher, Pat Darcy, was crouched out in the on-deck circle if Geronimo somehow got on. He was running out of pinch hitters as well; down to outfielder Merv Rettenmund—who began to swing a bat—reserve infielder Doug Flynn, and catcher Bill Plummer, still stationed out in the bullpen.

  Geronimo fouled Wise’s next fastball back to the screen to even the count. He came back to paint the low outside corner with his next fastball, just missing, 2–1. Then fastball again, hard and moving to the right, and Geronimo swung and missed, evening the count. They had him set up now; Fisk dropped the sign, slid to his right, and Wise fired the first inside pitch that Geronimo had seen, pure gas, smack dead on the high and inside corner of the zone. Still looking for something outside, Geronimo was handcuffed; Davidson rang him up and the inning was over.

  The Fenway crowd stood and cheered as his teammates sprinted in off the field to bat in the bottom of the twelfth, while Rick Wise slowly and deliberately walked toward the Red Sox dugout.

  TWENTY-ONE