by John Powers
Nobody said it would be fair, either. In Game 3, umpire Larry Barnett, misinterpreting the rules, called Fisk for interfering on pinch hitter Ed Armbrister’s 10th-inning bunt. The Reds, who’d led 5-1 before a Sox comeback, won it, 6-5, on Joe Morgan’s single. “This is brutal,” declared Fisk. “I never saw anything like it in my life.”
Fortunes were reversed the next night. It took a five-run inning and 163 pitches by Tiant, but Boston hung on for a 5-4 victory. Then came another shift in momentum: Gullett mastered his opponents, 6-2, in Game 5 and the Sox returned home on the brink.
A three-day nor’easter gave them time to regroup and allowed Johnson to start Tiant instead of Lee. “Tiant is our best,” he said. “We’re down 3-2. We have to win the sixth game first.”
It took the Sox until after midnight to do it and Tiant was long gone when they did. But after pinch hitter Bernie Carbo’s two-out, three-run homer in the eighth brought Boston back even, Fisk won it in the 12th with a homer that bounced off the left-field foul pole and set church bells ringing in triumph in his hometown of Charlestown, New Hampshire. “I straight-armed somebody and kicked him out of the way and touched every little white thing I saw,” said Fisk after his celebratory gallop around the bases through fans and teammates on his way to touch the plate.
For five innings the next night, the faithful could envision a championship flag flapping as the Sox took a 3-0 lead. But Lee served up a looping, ill-timed “Leephus” pitch with two out in the sixth to slugger Tony Perez, who launched it over the Wall for a two-run homer. “Lee threw it to the wrong guy,” Morgan mused years later. “He could have thrown it to me, Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, anybody. But Perez was the best off-speed hitter on our team.”
ATTACK OF THE GREEN MONSTER
Game 6 of the 1975 World Series was noteworthy for, among other things, one catch that was made (by Dwight Evans, to steal a possible home run from Joe Morgan in the 11th inning) and one that was not (by Fred Lynn when he slammed into the left-field wall in pursuit of Ken Griffey’s two-run triple).
As part of the modifications for the 1976 season, the wall was stripped of its metal skin and fitted with a smoother, Formica-like covering. Protective padding was added to the wall’s base to prevent serious injury, a move swayed at least in part by Lynn’s scary World Series collision.
The new surface made caroms off the wall more predictable, and the Jimmy Fund, the Red Sox-supported charity, was made a little richer. The green sheet metal of the old façade was turned into paperweights and sold to fans to benefit cancer research.
The biggest change, however, was the addition of a huge electronic message board and scoreboard in center field—a first in Major League Baseball. The manually operated left-field scoreboard was reduced in width, with the elimination of the section of the board devoted to National League scores (which would instead be shown intermittently on the message board).
The new scoreboard cost $1.5 million, which was more than the cost of the complete stadium overhaul that took place in 1934. The board was 40 feet wide and 24 feet high, flashed 8,640 lights and was equipped to show both film and videotape, including instant replay.
Did the new scoreboard affect the game? A flagpole stood in center field for much of Fenway history. Jim Rice was the last man to hit a ball completely out of the park in that direction when he homered to the right of the flagpole off the Royals’ Steve Busby in 1975. It’s nearly impossible to do now because of the center-field scoreboard, the 2011 version of which is even larger.
Bill Lee showed teammates Carlton Fisk and Rico Petrocelli the blister on his thumb that would force him to leave Game 7 of the 1975 World Series in the seventh inning. The Red Sox lost the game, 4-3, after holding a 3-0 lead.
Lee left with a blister in the seventh. Then Rose tied it up. After Johnson yanked reliever Jim Willoughby for pinch hitter Cecil Cooper and brought in rookie Jim Burton for the ninth, Morgan won the game and World Series with a two-out blooper to center. “It was a slider low and away, and I couldn’t have asked for a better location,” Burton said as his teammates glumly put on their street clothes. “He didn’t even hit it well.”
The Sox were honored the next day at City Hall Plaza by thousands of fans for their gallant run, but second place in October brings no reward. “We’re going to win that Series yet,” vowed Yastrzemski.
Any chance that Boston had of a reprise vanished early in 1976 when the owners locked out the players in March after the Basic Agreement had expired and Lynn, Fisk, and Rick Burleson held out. “The togetherness, it wasn’t there,” Johnson would say at the conclusion of the club’s most turbulent season in memory. “With those men playing out their options, I could see something was different, right from the start.”
“There’s nothing in the world like the fatalism of the Red Sox fans, which has been bred into them for generations by that little green ballpark, and the wall, and by a team that keeps trying to win by hitting everything out of sight and just out-bombarding everyone else in the league. All this makes Boston fans a little crazy and I’m sorry for them.”
—Bill Lee
Senator Ted Kennedy and nephew Joe were faces in the crowd during 1975 World Series play.
Resilient Red Sox Nation returned to its “wait till next year” philosophy in the wake of the ’75 loss.
SIZING UP THE WALL
The sign at the base of Fenway Park’s famous left-field wall long indicated that the fence was 315 feet from home plate. Yet, from the day that sign was posted, batters insisted that the wall was less than 315 feet from home plate.
No doubt some of this skepticism was due to the height and breadth of the wall. Its imposing dimensions make it appear closer than it really is. But it turns out there was more to it than perception—there was proof.
In 1975, Globe sports editor Dave Smith was presented with aerial photos of the park, accompanied by the report of an expert who flew reconnaissance in World War II. The military man concluded that the distance from home plate to the left-field wall was 304.779 feet. Smith made a formal request to the Sox to have someone from the Globe measure the foul line. The team refused to comply, and the next day it was Page One news in a story by Monty Montgomery. Original blueprints from the Osborn Engineering Co.—which built Fenway in 1912—indicate that the wall is 308 feet from home plate.
Citing various reasons, the Red Sox for years had been reluctant to let anyone measure the debated distance. It was part of the Fenway mystique. Author George Sullivan once used a yardstick and came up with a distance of 309 feet 5 inches. It turns out that Sullivan was darned close.
One day in March 1995, in broad daylight, armed with a 100-foot Stanley Steelmaster measuring tape, the Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy vaulted the railing and measured the line. He found it to be 309 feet 3 inches, give or take an inch, and he said so in a story on April 25. In May, the Red Sox surreptitiously admitted to their longstanding fib. Groundskeeper Joe Mooney re-measured the distance, and after huddling with Sox management, quietly changed the numbers on the wall to “310” feet. For a while, it went unnoticed.
“I was sitting in the stands before the game wondering when someone would come up and ask about it,” said Mooney later. “Nobody did.”
When Shaughnessy’s estimate of 309 feet 3 inches was mentioned, Mooney said, “That’s about what it is. We rounded it off. It came out in that story, so why hide it?”
After all those years, why indeed?
Even at 310 feet, Fenway’s dimensions would be against the rules if the ballpark were being built today. The league now stipulates that fences must be no less than 325 feet from home plate.
By autumn, Johnson had been fired, Yawkey had died, a blockbuster deal with Oakland had been voided and the Sox, who never spent a day in first place, had to make a magnificent closing surge just to finish third as they posted their fewest number of victories (83) in a decade. Ten straight losses, half of them at Fenway, buried the club in sixth place and it never recovered.
The troubles in the ’76 season began early. Eight days after a brawl-filled May meeting in the Bronx that put Lee on the sidelines for two months with a torn shoulder ligament, the Sox met the Yankees at the Fens, where extra security was added in case the fans sought retribution. Though Boston dropped two of three and sank to fourth, prospects seemed markedly brighter when O’Connell made a bold deal with the cash-strapped Finley, buying A’s pitcher Rollie Fingers and first baseman/outfielder Joe Rudi for $1 million apiece.
“We had to make up our minds that we’re trying to win the pennant this year,” said the general manager. The deal, though, seemed too good to be true, and it was. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn soon nixed the sale “in the best interests of baseball.”
“Bowie Kuhn is acting like the village idiot,” fumed Finley, whose sale of Vida Blue for $1.5 million to the Yankees also was voided.
Three weeks later Yawkey, who’d had no problem opening his pocketbook if it would have meant another pennant, died at 73 after battling leukemia for several years, ending an era both in Boston and in baseball. “He gave so much to this city,” said Mayor Kevin White. “Over the years so much pleasure. Last year so much excitement. And always so much class.”
The Fenway grounds crew caught a few Zs in July 1978.
“I love Fenway. I love it in spite of the things about it that I hate.”
—Stephen King, author
The Sox soon went into free fall, losing 11 of 13 games on the road to drop to fifth. That meant the end for Johnson, who’d been Manager of the Year in 1975, but couldn’t find a way to keep his club in contention in 1976. “What happened? I just ran out of answers,” he said. It was easier, O’Connell conceded, to change the manager than the team, “which would be practically impossible.”
So Don Zimmer, the Sox third-base coach who’d previously managed the Padres for two years, took over as skipper and the club caught fire as summer turned into fall, winning 15 of their final 18. “Third place is no big thing,” Zimmer acknowledged, “but it was an outstanding finish.”
Except for signing Twins reliever Bill Campbell to a seven-figure deal, the front office opted not to shop in what it deemed an overpriced bazaar during the first year of MLB free agency, instead bringing back George Scott and Bernie Carbo from the Brewers for Cecil Cooper. That created a cadre of wallbangers that rivaled the 1927 Yankees for percussive power.
The 1977 club set franchise records for homers, hitting 124 at home and 213 in all, with Rice contributing 39, Scott 33, Hobson 30, Yastrzemski 28, and Fisk 26. Its most jawdropping—and delightful—display came on a mid-June weekend in Fenway when Boston cranked 16 round-trippers off the Yankees amid a three-game sweep in which the hosts outscored their archrivals by a combined 30-9 on national television.
The shelling began immediately as the Sox battered Cat-fish Hunter for four homers in the first inning of the opener, and then added two more in a 9-4 bashing. “They beat the hell out of us tonight,” acknowledged New York’s Reggie Jackson. “They were sending bombs everywhere.” Unfortunately, the triumph was marred by bleacher oafs who pelted New York center fielder Mickey Rivers with metal bolts. “If it happens again, I’m going to pull my team off the field,” vowed Yankees Manager Billy Martin. “We won’t stand for that kind of stuff. Somebody could get killed.”
The Sox were doing enough damage to the visitors with horsehide, thumping another five homers (with two apiece from Carbo and Yastrzemski) in a 10-4 drubbing on Saturday that was equally notable for a dugout confrontation between Martin and one of his star players, Jackson, who chafed at being pulled from the game because the skipper thought he’d loafed on a fly ball.
The Yankees left the Fens both squabbling and reeling after dropping the finale, 11-1, on Sunday in a game highlighted by another five Boston homers. “We just had our men playing in the wrong spots,” observed Martin, whose own club didn’t manage a single shot. “We should have stationed them in the screen.”
It was the most rewarding home stand in memory for the Red Sox, who went 9-1 and vaulted from third to first place. Nobody who’d witnessed the humbling of New York would have bet that the Yankees would come back to win the division or that the Sox soon would turn into a white-knuckle carnival ride. They lost nine in a row, and then won seven of eight. During a West Coast road trip in late July and early August, they won nine straight as part of a 16-1 surge, and then lost seven straight to fall into second place.
Despite winning 11 of 13 to start September, Boston never again was atop the pile and the season ended with an ironic twist as the Sox gave up six homers to the Orioles in an 8-7 loss that eliminated them and let the Yankees spray champagne. “Just like the horses I bet on, I came up a little short,” Zimmer joked in a telegram to Martin. “Congratulations.”
While the Yankees went on to beat the Dodgers to win the World Series for the first time since 1962, the Sox were left to ponder yet another near miss. “You start out in April and you hope to be in a pennant race when it ends,” mused Yastrzemski, after Boston had finished in a second-place tie with Baltimore. “We were in this one until the end and I have no regrets. The better team won.”
In 1978, the Sox were in the race to the end and beyond, and the payoff was the most painful October moment in three decades. There had been significant changes before the club reconvened in Florida with the Yawkey Trust shifting control of the franchise to widow Jean, former vice president and catcher Haywood Sullivan, and former trainer Buddy LeRoux. After dismissing O’Connell, management reshaped the roster, shipping out Jim Willoughby, Ferguson Jenkins and, eventually, Wise and Carbo—the bulk of the bohemian “Buffalo Heads” clique that Zimmer abhorred—and bringing in Mike Torrez and fellow pitchers Dennis Eckersley (who won 20 games), Dick Drago, and Tom Burgmeier.
GAME NO. 163
After 162 games, there was only one way to settle one of the most tumultuous playoff races in baseball history: with Game No. 163. One of the two teams—the Yankees or the Red Sox—would reach the 100-victory mark and move on to the 1978 American League Championship Series vs. the Kansas City Royals. The other would have a litany of questions to answer about a final duel that would define this six-month roller-coaster ride of a season.
That 1978 AL East battle is remembered mostly for a Red Sox collapse. What many forget is that the Red Sox actually rallied to post a 12-2 record in their last 14 games, winning their final eight, to catch New York on the season’s final day and set up the one-game playoff at Fenway.
Boston was sailing along with a 2-0 lead in the seventh inning when light-hitting Yankee shortstop Bucky Dent (who had a batting average of .140 over the previous 20 games) sent a fly ball into the screen off Mike Torrez with two men on, deflating Sox fans and surprising Dent himself, who didn’t think his hit would clear the wall. (“I couldn’t believe it,” he later admitted.) New York extended its lead to 5-2, and just as they had played it out over the long season, the Sox would be forced to rally from behind in the late going.
The collective will of more than 35,000 Sox fans, along with a couple of timely hits, brought Boston back to within 5-4, and Carl Yastrzemski, who had homered earlier in the game when the day held such promise, stepped in with two outs in the last of the ninth and Rick Burleson on third base representing the tying run. Yaz managed only a towering pop fly off the Yankees’ flamethrower Rich Gossage, and the most agonizing season in Red Sox annals was complete.
After 163 games over more than six months, the Sox had come up shy by one base, the distance between third and home plate. They had won 99 games, fourth-most in their history, but finished second to the Yankees’ 100 victories. New York would go on to win its second straight world title. “We have everything in the world to be proud of,” said Yaz afterward, “what we don’t have is the ring.”
Teammates welcomed Bucky Dent after his three-run homer in the seventh inning gave the Yankees the lead in the 1978 one-game playoff. Afterward, Yankees’ owner George Steinbrenner (right) consoled Red
Sox catcher Carlton Fisk.
It was just another rainy June evening at Fenway Park in 1977.
The result was an explosive start (45-19, 28-4 at home) that astounded even the most pessimistic Sox fans and had Boston in first place by seven games on June 17. At the All-Star break, the Sox led Milwaukee by nine games, with New York a distant 11½ astern. But in the wake of a spate of injuries, the pitching, hitting, and defense all collapsed, and the Sox began drooping by late summer.
By the time Boston met its traditional tormentors, the Yankees, at Fenway in September, New York had replaced Billy Martin with the less acerbic Bob Lemon, healed their internal divisions and closed to within four games. By the time New York left town, the Yankees had drawn even with a four-game sweep so devastating that it was labeled “The Boston Massacre.” The visitors, who’d won 12 of their previous 14 outings, teed off on Torrez, who’d won two Series games for them the previous year, and administered a 15-3 flogging that was so unsightly that thousands of fans fled early. “Maybe we tired (the Yankees) out,” Zimmer said, wryly. “They had scheduled extra hitting Friday afternoon. They called in the fifth inning and canceled it.”
There was no joking the following night when the Yankees breezed to a 13-2 decision (aided by seven Boston errors) with a scoreline—2600210—that prompted one press-box imp to dial that number in New York. “No one was home,” Peter Gammons reported in the Boston Globe. “Perhaps he was out looking for playoff tickets.”