by Mark Frost
After four years in the Cincinnati system, twenty-three-year-old Will McEnaney had spent the last half of the 1974 season with the Reds, and in the first half of the 1975 season had emerged as their most effective stopper, leading the team—and the National League—in saves at the All-Star break. A free-spirited Ohio native, McEnaney had been drafted by the Reds on the day of his high school graduation, after being thrown off his high school’s team earlier in the season for extracurricular carousing. Pitching effectively wherever he played, McEnaney also maintained his reputation as the class cutup. While playing for gruff, no-nonsense manager Vern Rapp at Triple-A, McEnaney patrolled the outfield during rain delays with a comic novelty stiff-but-empty “dog collar” so often that Rapp finally screamed at him to get off the field and “take that god damned dog with you.” But McEnaney had enough talent to get away with pushing back at the Reds’ regimented ways; he earned his way to the big leagues within four years and had been promised that the Reds would renegotiate his contract after he was named an All-Star in 1975; he was making $14,500 and asked for a bump to $22,000. The Reds countered: We’ll give you $15,000 for the rest of this season, then two additional years at $22,000. Negotiating for himself without the counsel of an agent or lawyer, the headstrong McEnaney refused their offer. Even Sparky tried to convince him to sign, which McEnaney resented, causing him to further dig in his heels. None of which endeared him to Bob Howsam and the Reds’ front office, and all of which contributed, along with the unexpected emergence of Rawly Eastwick, to McEnaney recording only five more saves for the rest of the 1975 season.
But if the Reds had given McEnaney the cold shoulder then, they desperately needed him now. His job was simple: After walking Fisk, all he had to do was strike out the man he had specifically been brought in to face, Rookie of the Year, and soon to be named as the American League’s Most Valuable Player, Fred Lynn. This was McEnaney’s fourth appearance in the Series: four and two-thirds innings of work, allowing two runs, striking out five, without yet figuring in a decision. But the most important stat as far as Sparky Anderson was concerned: McEnaney had faced Fred Lynn twice, and struck him out both times.
“Here we go, Red Sox! Here we go, Red Sox!” the crowd chanted and clapped. And, once again, they predictably booed all four of the ensuing outside pitches to Carlton Fisk. Fisk tossed his bat to the bat boy and trotted down to first to load the bases.
Bases loaded, nobody out, bottom of the ninth.
Up came Fred Lynn. Sparky shifted his outfielders around; Geronimo and Griffey crept in to shallow center and right field. George Foster, playing a little deeper in left, edged closer to the left field foul line. All four of the Reds infielders moved in onto the edge of the grass; any ball on the ground, their play was at home to force Doyle. Anything deep and in the air, game over.
And with the fastest men on his team—outfielders Juan Beniquez and Rick Miller—in the dugout and available to pinch run for one of the slowest—Denny Doyle at third, representing the winning run—stone-faced Red Sox manager Darrell Johnson never moved from his perch in the dugout.
Bench called for a slider, McEnaney’s out pitch, hoping that Lynn would chop something into the ground, but McEnaney, almost the only pitcher on the Reds staff who occasionally ignored the game’s best signal caller, instead went right after Lynn with a fastball, high and tight. Lynn, looking first-ball fastball, something he could drive, swung hard and got under it, slicing it inside out.
The ball arced high over third down the left field line. George Foster drifted over, waiting for it just inside the foul line, only a few inches from the stands and less than two hundred feet from home plate. The crowd rose to its feet, all around Fenway, screaming and yelling.
Setting a foot against the edge of third base, Denny Doyle turned and glanced over his shoulder just long enough to see that Foster was settling into position to make the catch.
The Red Sox scouting report had said they could run on Foster, and had with success been doing so throughout the Series, but Don Zimmer, the Red Sox third base coach, didn’t like the odds: way too risky on such a shallow ball, take the out here, hold the runner; with an out to spare they could still drive in the run they needed with another fly ball.
Zimmer watched the ball all the way into Foster’s glove, then ran right to the bag and shouted at Denny Doyle: “Don’t go, you can’t go! No, no, no!”
Having difficulty hearing his coach over the wall of sound issuing from the stands, Doyle thought he heard Zimmer shout: “Go, go, go, go!”
Foster gripped the ball. Doyle took off for home. Zimmer’s jaw dropped.
Foster, he of the strong but erratic arm, had made the catch just inside the foul line, and as he stepped back and wound up to throw, he had the benefit of sighting straight down the chalk that pointed toward home plate like a rifle scope. The ball bounced once, about twenty feet shy of home, just inside the base path, by which point it had already caught up to the scrambling, hurtling Doyle. The bounce kicked it high and to the right, and Bench reached out for it, standing directly in front of home plate in fair territory. Fifteen strides down the line, only ten feet from the plate, and victory, Doyle saw Bench stretch for the ball and took two awkward steps to evade him, coiling into a crouch, reaching out his left hand toward home as Bench swung his glove around. Two feet before he got there, with Doyle still not fully committed to a headfirst dive, Bench slammed the tag onto Doyle’s left shoulder and knocked him clear off his feet, all the way over the plate, where Doyle rolled in the dirt. Bench ended up on his hands and knees, the ball firmly in his glove. Umpire Satch Davidson, who had positioned himself perfectly to observe the action from less than a yard away from the violent collision, raised his right arm and signaled out.
Double play. A strong throw from Foster, a textbook reaction at home by the best catcher in the business, who had just tagged his fourth runner out at the plate in the six games of this Series. As he got to his feet, Bench glanced down at his old friend Zimmer and shook his head: What the hell were you thinking?
Will McEnaney, backing up the play behind home, walked over to retrieve the ball from Bench. Bench instead escorted him back toward the mound, quietly chewing out his pitcher: He had called for the slider, and McEnaney had thrown a fastball. The only man on the Reds staff who could get away with ignoring Bench’s signs was Pedro Borbon, and only because not even Johnny wanted to argue with him, and he wasn’t sure Pedro completely understood the signs anyway. Bench knew that good relievers were as he put it, “rare and necessarily insane,” but this wasn’t the first time McEnaney had crossed him up, and Bench, who had long ago mastered the art of conducting a completely private conversation in front of forty thousand people, gave him a royal reaming.
“He called me everything but a white man,” McEnaney recalled later.
“I mean, come on, what the hell, Will?” Bench said as they finally reached the mound. “I gave you the slider sign. You know the damn sequence.”
“Yeah, okay, maybe I screwed up,” admitted McEnaney. “But I guess it turned out all right, didn’t it?”
Satch Davidson walked out after them to ask what was going on. Bench shook his head and started back to the plate. Left-handers.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” said Bench.
Just like that, two outs and almost dead silence: A dagger stuck in the heart of the crowd at Fenway. Oh yes, you could hear the reminders echoing through their minds, I nearly forgot; these are the Red Sox.
At third, Pete Rose turned to his flummoxed old buddy Don Zimmer. He had clearly heard Zimmer’s exchange with Doyle—apparently better than Doyle had—and said to him now, not without sympathy: “How many times can you say ‘no’ to a guy?”
Sparky trotted out to have a little chat with his pitcher and infielders. Fisk at first, Yaz at third, let’s everybody be clear about their assignments now: As often happened at their infield confabs, after Sparky spoke first, Joe Morgan did most of the rest of the talki
ng.
The Red Sox’s starkly diminished hopes rested now with Rico Petrocelli. The crowd tried to rally and urged him on as he dug in. McEnaney started him with a hard fastball that Rico barely got a bat on, sending it back foul, 0–1.
McEnaney, pitching from the stretch, looked off Fisk and came in with another fastball. Fisk broke for second on the pitch.
A nasty slider, breaking low and outside. Rico reached out and smashed it hard into the dirt wide of third; Rose dug to his left to snatch it cleanly and then made an extremely careful throw to get Petrocelli easily at first for the third out of the ninth inning.
Two weeks earlier, McEnaney’s wife had given birth to their first child; watching at home in Cincinnati she hopped out of bed now and cheered loud enough to wake the baby. His sister Kathy, a navy nurse watching the game at a mess hall in Japan, where it was two o’clock Wednesday afternoon, stood up and screamed. Will McEnaney had pitched out of an impossible jam, calling it later the inning of his life, and the Reds had dodged certain death. Already down behind the Red Sox dugout, wired up with his wireless mic to interview the winners, Tony Kubek suddenly had no one to talk to.
The Reds poured into their dugout, clapping hands all around, new life.
Game Six was going to extra innings.
EIGHTEEN
My whole career has been a struggle just to stay in the lineup.
BERNIE CARBO
RED SOX FANS—CONNOISSEURS OF DESPAIR—HAD A NEW flavor to reckon with: Usually they just break our hearts and get it over with; now they’re torturing us. Fenway Park felt like a hospital waiting room when you know you’re there for bad news that’s inevitable but refuses to arrive. Too many “what ifs” to even comprehend, but while we’re on the subject, Why did Doyle run on that ball to Foster with nobody out? What in the name of all that’s holy was he thinking? No one knew yet about the miscommunication at third between Doyle and Zimmer. And why oh why wasn’t Beniquez or Rick Miller pinch-running for Ducky to begin with? Well, on the bright side, at least now they’d have plenty to bitch about in the bars of New England all winter.
Dick Drago hopped up out of the Boston dugout and walked back to the mound. Only moments before, inches from thinking he had a win in a World Series game, and Bench makes the tag for the double play.
“Now it’s real simple,” said Drago afterward. “We’ve still got business to do here. We can’t lose this game. This is a team and it’s your turn to go to work.”
Tony Kubek remained stuck in limbo beneath the stands, awaiting word from director Harry Coyle. In the broadcast booth as the tenth began, after Chet Simmons and Coyle had decided that their two remaining men should now alternate play-by-play duties each inning, Joe Garagiola turned over the mic to young Dick Stockton.
And as so often seems to happen in baseball, the man making the key play in the inning just ended now came up first to the plate: George Foster.
As Drago prepared to throw, Foster immediately went into his familiar delaying tactics, stepping out of the box, asking for time. The crowd booed. Irritated, Drago retaliated when Foster stepped back in, staring in at Fisk’s signs without moving, until Foster, uncomfortable, finally stepped out again; advantage Drago.
Finally, the first pitch, inside fastball, one hop smash toward Burleson at short, easy play, Foster’s out at first by three strides. One out.
Dave Concepcion, hitless in four at bats, stepped in. Fastball, high, ball one. Fastball, inside, ball two.
The usually voluble Joe Garagiola, consigned to “color” commentary for the inning, had gone curiously silent, perhaps unhappy that he’d been asked to yield the mic to the rookie at such a crucial moment. Smooth and professional, relying on his exceptional preparation, Dick Stockton continued to carry and fill out the narrative of events on the field.
Fastball, high, ball three to Concepcion.
Rookie left-hander Jim Burton began throwing in the Boston bullpen, preparing, if they needed him later in this inning, to face Griffey and Morgan.
Taking all the way, Concepcion watched a strike down the middle run the count to 3–1. Fisk called for a slider in the same spot, and Concepcion smacked it into the dirt and out past second for a single, the Reds’ twelfth hit, and his first of the game.
Center fielder Cesar Geronimo came to the plate, and Garagiola finally broke his silence, commenting that Concepcion might be running in this situation. Drago, conscious of the fleet shortstop’s threat, threw three times to Yaz at first, driving Concepcion back to the bag, before coming in to Geronimo for a called strike on the outside corner.
Concepcion continued to take his lead, digging in to get a jump and leaning toward second, when Drago drove him back with another throw to first. Under Joe Morgan’s aggressive tutelage, Concepcion had become an exceptional thief on the bases, stealing seventy-four over the past two seasons, successful on 86 percent of his attempts.
Drago’s next pitch just missed outside to even the count at 1–1.
Another throw to first, his best yet, and Drago nearly picked Concepcion off; there’d been so much action at the bag that director Harry Coyle now called for a split-screen shot—Drago on the right, Concepcion on first on the left—and when Drago finally made a throw to the plate Concepcion lit out for second. Fisk handled the fastball well under Geronimo’s missed defensive swing, but his throw sailed high and wide of the bag to the right, and Concepcion slid safely into second under Rick Burleson’s tag with the stolen base.
One and two to Geronimo, with the go-ahead run now at second. The crowd, waking to the Reds’ scoring threat, came to life and tried to urge on Drago. Geronimo fouled off the next two tough fastballs, staying alive. Looking and feeling out of place, Reds pitcher Will McEnaney swung a bat in the on-deck circle; almost out of reserves—and pitchers—Sparky had not yet committed to replacing him.
The crowd groaned as Drago’s next pitch missed just outside, 2–2 now to Geronimo. They shouted their disapproval when the next one missed as well, low and inside, a full count to Geronimo.
Drago reached back for something and lasered a fastball at the low outside corner, the best pitch of his outing. Geronimo swung late, helplessly, ticked it ever so slightly, and Fisk hung on to the ball as it rattled around in his glove for Drago’s first strikeout and the Reds’ second out of the inning.
With two down, Sparky reluctantly called McEnaney back to the dugout, sending out the Reds’ last left-handed bat in his place, infielder Dan Driessen. Darrell Johnson trotted out to have a word with Drago, raising speculation that he might lift him for southpaw Jim Burton. Knowing that if he did make the change, in all likelihood Sparky would respond by sending up a right-handed batter in his place, Johnson simply went over the book on Driessen with Fisk and Drago, then left them to their work.
This was Dan Driessen’s first trip to the plate in the World Series. A favorite of GM Bob Howsam’s, Driessen had been signed by the Reds at eighteen just out of high school and made the parent club four years later, hitting .301 in more than a hundred games, most of them played at third. A prototypical line-drive hitter, and decent defensive first baseman, Driessen was very much the same sort of player as Boston’s Cecil Cooper. Although he hadn’t developed a home run stroke yet, the Cincinnati brain trust had such high hopes for his abilities that ever since he’d arrived there had been talk about trading the aging Tony Perez to give Driessen a chance to play every day.
Drago looked in at Driessen, glanced back at Concepcion, and delivered a slider on the outside corner for a called strike.
That trade talk had grown louder and more persistent each season, to the point where the stable and self-assured Perez, after being subjected to constant impertinent questions about his imminent departure, had during 1975 grown irritated enough to stop answering them. Driessen, an amiable, laid-back South Carolina native whose team nickname was “Sleepy,” continued to hit for a good average whenever given the chance and never complained about sitting on the bench, but had to date demon
strated none of the intangible personal qualities that made Tony Perez such a remarkable, and irreplaceable, teammate.
Drago’s second pitch to Driessen missed high for a ball to even the count.
No knock on Driessen, but Tony Perez’s superstar teammates expressed constant dismay whenever the trade talk about him periodically surfaced. Even the one waiting to hit on deck, ultimate company man Pete Rose, was on record that the Reds would have to be insane to trade the Big Dog. Johnny Bench had gone so far as to say that the day Tony Perez left Cincinnati would be the day the Big Red Machine ceased to exist. But each season the trade rumors continued to percolate.
Drago’s next fastball overpowered Driessen, and he popped it up straight down the left field line—about thirty feet in front of where George Foster had caught Lynn’s ball in the ninth—and Bernie Carbo raced over from left field just ahead of Petrocelli and Burleson for his first defensive chance of the World Series. He nearly overran the ball as the wind caught it, then he reached back at the last second, somehow directed his glove to it, and held on when it tried to pop out, to retire Driessen.
The Reds were gone in the top of the tenth, and Sparky would have to dig even deeper into his now dangerously thin bullpen.
AFTER THROWING 130 innings during the regular season, Pat Darcy had pitched only two innings in this World Series, in relief of Gary Nolan in Game Three back in Cincinnati, giving up a run, two hits, and a couple of walks, an uncertain performance that had given Sparky reason for concern. The twenty-five-year-old Arizona-raised Darcy had come over to the Reds only the year before in a trade with the Astros, put in an all-star season in Triple-A, and even won a key September call-up start for the parent club against the Braves. Tagged as a comer, Darcy then earned a spot on the Reds’ 1975 roster with an exceptional spring training. His rookie season had been a major success; he compiled an 11–5 record in twenty-two starts, with a 3.58 ERA. But along with the rest of the rookies and role players on the Big Red Machine, once the regular season ended and the team’s established veterans took the stage, Darcy turned understudy. Sparky had sound reasons for that policy. In the middle of his outing in Game Three, Darcy had looked up and realized: Oh my God, I’m pitching to Carl Yastrzemski in the World Series. He promptly walked him, then walked Carlton Fisk, and then threw a wild pitch to Fred Lynn, before giving up a sacrifice fly. He yielded one more single at the top of his next inning before Sparky took him out. After Boston tied them in the ninth, the Reds had rallied to win that game, and after Sparky pulled him, Darcy had stayed on the bench to watch it all happen. This was the Cincinnati way: Fold the young guys in slowly, protect them from situations they might not be ready to handle, let them learn how to breathe in this rarified air before you ask too much of them.