Fenway Park

by John Powers

  Given the dismal denouement of the previous campaign, expectations for the coming season were modest by the players and less-than-modest by oddsmakers, who listed the Red Sox as 100-1 long shots. “If our pitching holds up, we’ll finish fifth,” reckoned Yastrzemski, the club’s perennial cockeyed optimist. “No kidding. I think we can make it to the first division.”

  That’s precisely where the Sox found themselves in mid-July after a 10-0 home loss to the Orioles. Though none of them predicted what was about to occur—a 10-game winning streak that lifted Boston to second place, a half-game behind Chicago, and bestirred a fandom that long ago had been lulled into somnolence.

  “Our mouths were open,” shortstop Rico Petrocelli said after 15,000 Sox fans turned up at Logan Airport to salute the players upon their return from a four-game sweep of the Indians in Cleveland. “We were shocked. That’s when we started believing.”

  The summer of 1967 was a revival, a daily salvation show for both the Sox and their supporters, whose souls had been deadened by decades of disappointment. It was the wildest ride in memory as the club went from first place to ninth to first to eighth, all before Memorial Day. Attendance was on its way to doubling to more than 1.7 million—the franchise’s highest ever.

  In the annual Father-Son Game, on July 24, 1966, Mike Yastrzemski, 4, threw a pitch as dad Carl offered support. Vin Martelli, 5, godson of Sox outfielder Tony Conigliaro, was the batter, while George Thomas of the Red Sox caught and umpire Hank Soar called the balls and strikes.

  BALLPARK BACKDROP ENDURES

  For nearly five decades, Red Sox fans have watched home-run blasts over the Green Monster soar against the backdrop of a Boston landmark. When the Citgo sign in Kenmore Square was first illuminated in 1965, it replaced a 1940 neon sign that displayed the shamrock logo of Cities Services, the predecessor to Citgo.

  The pulsating, computer-controlled design of the 60-by-60-foot sign was an immediate hit in the psychedelic age, and an avant-garde filmmaker made a critically acclaimed three-and-a-half-minute film in 1967 called Go, Go Citgo, in which he set the sign’s display to music by the Monkees and Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar.

  The sign became so renowned that even opposing managers knew it well. In 1978, with Sox slugger Jim Rice on a particularly torrid stretch, Royals manager Whitey Herzog deployed a four-out-fielder shift. “What I’d really like to do is put two guys on top of the Citgo sign and two in the net,” Herzog quipped. Rice beat the shift by hitting one over the left-field wall and the netting for a home run.

  Bostonians have taken their skyline pretty seriously ever since Robert Newman placed two lights in the tower of the Old North Church in 1775 as a beacon to Paul Revere. This may explain why plans to tear down the Citgo sign caused an uproar in 1982.

  In September 1979, at the urging of state officials, Citgo had turned off the sign to set an energy-conservation example, even though it cost only $60 a week to light. By November 1982, Citgo was preparing to tear it down.

  The public was outraged. The sign’s supporters even urged the Boston Landmarks Commission to make it an official landmark. A man who testified before the commission said, in complete seriousness, “Paris has the Eiffel Tower, London has Big Ben, and Boston has its Citgo sign.” On November 16, the Landmarks Commission issued a cease and desist order.

  “We had no idea it would receive such a response. Now we know how much people in Boston love that sign,” Citgo spokesman Kent Young later said. By August 1983, the sign was again aglow.

  In 2005, more than 1.7 miles of LED lights replaced the existing 5,878 glass tubes of neon, which saved thousands of dollars in energy costs. But when those LED lights went out of production in 2010, crews replaced the sign’s 218,000 lights with brighter, more weather-resistant versions.

  Citgo is a division of Venezuela’s government-owned oil company, and in a 2005 relighting ceremony, Mayor Thomas M. Menino of Boston flipped the ceremonial switch with Juan Barreto, then mayor of Caracas, and former Red Sox shortstop Luis Aparicio, the only Venezuelan in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

  The sign continues to glow, part symbol of roadside culture, part Boston icon, and some fans still call out “See it go!” (C-IT-GO) when a Red Sox player blasts a home run in its general direction.

  Jim Lonborg laid down the bunt for a base hit that triggered the winning Red Sox rally in the final game of the 1967 “Impossible Dream” season. The Red Sox trailed the Minnesota Twins, 2-0, in the sixth when Lonborg set the table for a five-run inning and an eventual Boston victory. The Red Sox edged the Twins and Tigers by one game for their first pennant in 21 years.

  WHEN RED SOX NATION WAS BORN

  They listened on transistor radios in the clubhouse for the crackling report from Detroit’s Tiger Stadium. It was October 1, 1967, and the Red Sox had held up their share of the deal by defeating the Twins earlier in the day, clinching no worse than a tie for the AL pennant. Fans had stormed the field to hoist pitcher Jim Lonborg onto their shoulders, and players bathed in adulation from success-starved Bostonians who couldn’t quite believe that their longtime American League doormats could be going to the World Series.

  The Red Sox had started that 1967 season with a victory on Opening Day—before a mere 8,234 fans. It turned out to be the Summer of Love nationally, but in New England, it was the summer when the lovable losers of Fenway became a team that mattered, a team that played meaningful games in late summer and fall. Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy, who was 13 years old that year and had never seen a decent Sox team, years later wrote: “The Red Sox of the new century are still beholden to the Impossible Dream crew.”

  Red Sox teams of that era didn’t fall out of the pennant race in the final weeks—no, they were usually out of any consideration by the Fourth of July. The Boston clubhouse was known as a “country club” where star players had only to run to the owner, the benevolent Tom Yawkey, if they thought a manager wasn’t treating them fairly. They had coasted to eight consecutive losing seasons, finishing eighth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and ninth in a 10-team league the previous five seasons.

  Now, as the “Age of Aquarius” dawned, a rookie manager named Dick Williams was in charge, and it seemed he had some backing from above. The Sox, a collection of retread players and youngsters led by two stars who were having the seasons of their lives, had reawakened a generation of Red Sox fans. By July, they were in first place, a totally unexpected perch. They hung on with improbable determination and entered the season’s final weekend with two home games against the Minnesota Twins, who led them by one game in the standings. Win two, and the Sox could do no worse than tie for the pennant with the Detroit Tigers.

  Boston fans were wild for “Gentleman Jim” Lonborg’s pitching, and yet he triggered a game-changing rally with—of all things—a bunt single, as Boston defeated the Twins on the season’s final day. It was Lonborg’s 22nd victory of the season, and it would help earn him the Cy Young Award, the first such honor for a Red Sox pitcher.

  The tale of Don Quixote was all the rage on Broadway that season, and, thus, the Red Sox rebirth was tagged—forever and always—as the Impossible Dream season. They won their first pennant in 21 years in the culmination of baseball’s best-ever pennant race, which was finally settled when the radio told the tale and the champagne was uncorked: the Tigers had lost, and no playoff game was necessary. They would finish the season one game behind the Sox with Minnesota. With 44 homers, 121 RBI, and a .326 batting average, Carl Yastrzemski won the Triple Crown (no one has done it since, or even come close). He capped the year with a 7 for 8 hitting performance in the last two games. That season was the launching pad for all of the team’s success since then. After eight straight losing campaigns, the Red Sox would go on to have 16 straight winning seasons and establish the base of Red Sox Nation.

  The annual Bat Day promotion at Fenway Park was just one more reason to love 1967.

  October ’67, as seen through a fish-eye lens.

  For one terrifying moment o
n August 18 at Fenway, when Angels pitcher Jack Hamilton hit Tony Conigliaro in the face with a fastball that left him motionless in the dirt, the magic vanished. “I thought I was going to die,” said Conigliaro, who suffered a fractured cheekbone, a dislocated jaw, and a damaged retina that prevented him from playing again until 1969. “Death was constantly on my mind.”

  Yet his shaken teammates won, 12-11, that night and swept the Sunday doubleheader, coming from eight runs down to claim the nightcap, 9-8. From then until the end of the season, Boston was never more than a game out of the lead. “We were doing the impossible,” said Petrocelli, “and we were doing it together.”

  It was the Impossible Dream, a quixotic adventure that swept up all of New England in its giddy unlikelihood. No ball club ever had come from ninth place to finish first in one season. But as Boston remained in contention into September, the possibility created both anticipation and anxiety. “I can remember people saying, ‘How can you stand the pressure?’” said Yastrzemski, who found himself on the cover of Life magazine. “I’d say, ‘Pressure? This is fun. This is what the game is about.’”

  “The Yaz Song,” radio humorist Jess Cain’s ditty, became the summer’s refrain as the slugger defied the game’s laws of probability. “I was in the zone,” Yaz recalled decades later. “You usually stay in it for 10 days, but I was in it for a month.”

  As the season came down to its final week, the Sox still were very much in the chase with Minnesota, Detroit, and Chicago. The standings shuffled by the hour. “You were in first place or fourth, depending on the time of day,” said Williams.

  Scoreboard-watching became an obsession, particularly in the home dugout. “At Fenway we had the best way of keeping score—the guy in the Wall,” ace pitcher Jim Lonborg noted. “You would see that number disappear and wait for the next one to come up. It wasn’t like it was being blurted out on a Jumbotron.”

  Even the improbable numbers worked for Boston in the last few days. After the club was beaten, 6-3 and 6-0, by Cleveland at home, the players figured they were out of the race. “We thought it was over,” conceded Yastrzemski. “Everyone was saying, ‘Well, we had a great year.’”

  But when the Twins lost at home to the Angels that same day and the Athletics swept the White Sox in a doubleheader, the Red Sox realized they were still alive, tied with the Tigers and only a game behind Minnesota, with the Twins coming to town for the final two games. “We got up the next morning and said, ‘You know, we still have a chance,’” Yastrzemski said.

  What the hosts needed was for Detroit to lose two of its four at home to the Angels while Boston took both games from a Minnesota club that had beaten them in 11 of 16 meetings and that had aces Jim Kaat and Dean Chance scheduled to pitch. The Sox won the first meeting, 6-4, on a three-run homer by Yastrzemski, and then pinned their hopes on the gentlemanly and scholarly Stanford grad who’d won 21 games for them.

  “This is the first big game of my life,” Lonborg mused Saturday evening. “I haven’t seen a big one until tomorrow. Never.” To prepare for it, he borrowed teammate Harrelson’s room at the Sheraton-Boston and fell asleep reading The Fall of Japan.

  After such an enchanted campaign, it was inconceivable that the finale would be without drama or quirkiness. With his team trailing, 2-0, in the sixth, Lonborg began the comeback with a leadoff bunt that ignited a five-run rally marked by a two-run single by Yastrzemski, two wild pitches, and an error. With victory imminent, Fenway organist John Kiley played “The Night They Invented Champagne” and after Rich Rollins popped up to Petrocelli to end things, Fenway erupted in joyous disbelief. As youngsters tried to scale the backstop screen, the crowd rushed the diamond and hoisted Lonborg atop its shaky shoulders on a hero’s ride, ripping off parts of his uniform for souvenirs.

  Since Detroit had won the opener of its doubleheader, the celebration in the clubhouse was exuberant yet restrained as the Sox drank beer and smeared each other with shaving cream. If the Tigers won the nightcap, there would be a one-game playoff at Detroit for the pennant.

  Carl Yastrzemski launched a three-run homer off Minnesota Twins pitcher Jim Merritt in the seventh inning of the penultimate game of the 1967 season. The Sox won their first pennant in 21 years the next day.

  YAZ MANAGED TO OUTLAST HIS DREAM SEASON

  BY BOB RYAN

  “Tris Speaker may have done it, or Duffy Lewis, or some other Red Sox giant of long ago, but Ted Williams didn’t, nor Jimmie Foxx. If any player in baseball history ever had a two-week clutch production to equal Carl Yastrzemski’s, let the historians bring him forth.”

  —Harold Kaese

  Most baseball careers are measured in years. Carl Yastrzemski’s was measured in epochs. He was in left field the day Roger Maris hit his 61st homer in 1961. He was still playing the day M*A*S*H aired its final episode in 1983 (not that there was much chance he had ever heard of Hawkeye Pierce).

  No one has ever played as long for one team, and one team only, as Carl Yastrzemski. He is one of the select few with 3,000 hits and 400 home runs. He was handed the thankless task of replacing Ted Williams in left field in 1961, and by the time he retired 22 years later, he had found a way to create his own distinct legend.

  But perhaps Yastrzemski’s most significant achievement was that he managed to overcome the bizarre handicap of having that one transcendent season. He could have been Orson Welles, never able to top Citizen Kane. He could have been Don McLean, still waiting for the appropriate follow-up to “American Pie.” He could have let 1967 engulf him, but in due time, he allowed it to define him.

  1967. If you weren’t there, you’ll just never know. You won’t understand what Boston was like, when every night in June, July, August, and September you could follow every pitch with Ken Coleman and Ned Martin from stoplight to stoplight and front porch to front porch and business to business, because the entire city was recaptured by baseball and the Red Sox, thanks to Yaz and his teammates. Before Yaz won the Triple Crown in 1967, before the Impossible Dream season, you could pretty much have any Fenway seat you wanted at any time.

  In 1967, Carl Yastrzemski showed us what grace and determination under athletic pressure could produce, and while he never again had an all-around season like that, neither has anyone else. With his bat, glove, arm, and will, he personified the idea of the Most Valuable Player.

  Hyperbole? OK, you judge. In the final 12 games of a sizzling four-team pennant race, Yaz was 23 for 44 (.523), with five homers, 16 RBI, and 14 runs scored. Throw in the Gold Glove Award and underline the 7 for 8 hitting in the final two games of the season, and then put the exclamation point on the performance by throwing out Bob Allison trying to stretch a single to squelch an eighth-inning Minnesota rally on the season’s final day. In the ensuing years, we have not seen a more valuable Most Valuable Player.

  Manager Billy Herman told him after the 1966 season, “You can’t be a leader the way you played this year. You can be a great ballplayer if you’ll work at it.”

  Yaz hired a Hungarian immigrant fitness trainer named Gene Berde and said, “I’m yours.” No baseball player had ever done such a thing. He reported to training camp with a new body and a new sense of purpose in 1967 to play for Dick Williams, a new, energetic, no-nonsense manager. But as heroic as Yaz was in leading the Sox to the pennant, he could not win the World Series all by himself. He certainly did his part, batting .400 with three home runs, but the Sox lost in seven games to Bob Gibson and the St. Louis Cardinals.

  Yaz would go on to have good years, but never anything like 1967. What he did was last long enough at a high enough level to construct a new image, that of the ultimate grinder. His toughness, his consistency, and his unmatched work capacity—along with that unforgettable 1967 campaign—remain his legacy.

  So the players waited several more hours, listening to the play-by-play from Michigan. “For us to be sitting around a radio instead of a TV, it reminded me of an old-time movie where you were listening for news of some important even
t,” Lonborg said. When the Tigers grounded into a double play with the tying run at the plate to complete an 8-5 loss, Williams leaped up. “It’s over, it’s over,” the skipper proclaimed. “It’s unbelievable!”

  Now it was time for champagne and tears. “This is the happiest moment of my life,” declared Yawkey as he sipped Great Western from a paper cup, relishing the end of two desiccated decades. “THE SMELL OF THE PENNANT . . . THE ROAR OF THE CROWD” declared the headline on the front page of Monday’s Globe.

  Just getting to the World Series was such a miracle that few fans had time to ponder the upcoming challenge—the formidable St. Louis Cardinals club of Lou Brock, and Bob Gibson, Curt Flood, and Orlando Cepeda that had won the National League flag by a mile over the San Francisco Giants. Gibson, its glaring ace, had missed nearly two months after his right leg was broken by a line drive in July, but he was overpowering in the opener at Fenway, yielding only a solo homer to counterpart Jose Santiago in the third inning while holding hitless Yastrzemski, Petrocelli, and Harrelson, all of whom took batting practice after the 2-1 loss.

  Yastrzemski responded with two homers and four RBI the next day, but his team needed just the bare minimum as Lonborg befuddled the Cardinals, taking a perfect game into the seventh inning and coming within four outs of a no-hitter before Julian Javier smacked a double, in a 5-0 whitewash. “I hope we can end the Series on Monday,” Williams said with brash optimism.