by Mark Frost
Jim Edward Rice, who missed the 1975 World Series because of his broken wrist—thereby setting up one of the greatest “what ifs” in all of baseball history—inherited the left field position in Fenway from Carl Yastrzemski when he returned the next spring, and upheld the extraordinary standards established by the only two men who’d preceded him there over the previous four decades: Yaz and Ted Williams. One of the strongest men ever to play the sport, Rice dominated American League pitching for the decade that followed, at one point joining Ty Cobb as the only player to lead the league in total bases three years in a row. He also worked hard to turn himself into an excellent defensive outfielder—mastering the fine points of baseball’s most eccentric corner—made eight All-Star teams, and finally led the Red Sox back to the World Series they lost in 1986 and the American League Championship Series they lost two years later. When he finally retired after the 1989 season, only six men had played more games as a left fielder in American League history. Continuing his post-retirement career in a Red Sox uniform, Rice served as the team’s hitting coach for six years in the 1990s and is now part of their hugely successful NESN television network coverage team. His prodigious power numbers finally earned Jim Rice a ticket to baseball’s Hall of Fame in 2009 in his last year of eligibility for inclusion by baseball’s writers, the third and most recent Red Sox teammate who was on hand for Game Six that night to get there. His number 14 has since been retired by the Red Sox.
Dwight Evans, the second member of that great young Red Sox outfield, spent nineteen seasons in Fenway Park, and you could easily argue that Evans fulfilled Sparky Anderson’s prediction that he would become the best player of that remarkable trio. Dewey led the American League in home runs during the 1980s—he hit 385 in his career, 79 more than Lynn and 3 more than Rice—and drove in nearly 1,400 runs, only 67 less than Rice. He also won eight Gold Gloves in that time—only five outfielders in history have ever won more, and only two of them played right field—and to the end of his career he remained the same modest, selfless, dedicated team man he had always been. Only Carl Yastrzemski has ever played more games in a Red Sox uniform, and if Evans has any regrets about baseball, they concern the one last year he spent playing for Baltimore; like his role model, Yaz, he wishes now he had ended his career where it began, in Fenway Park. After his playing days, Dewey spent a few years working for the White Sox and the Rockies, before Boston’s new owners restored sanity to their front office and brought Evans back where he belongs. He has been an important member of the Red Sox organization ever since, as an instructor, hitting coach, goodwill ambassador, and living example of how a good, talented, decent man with solid values and a properly balanced ego should conduct himself in public life. Those responsible for voting veteran players into the Hall of Fame, please take note.
The third member of the Red Sox outfield triumvirate, Rice’s fellow rookie “Gold Dust Twin” Fred Lynn, had set the bar so high with his amazing first season that the two that followed—after he finally signed his initial long-term deal—disappointed Boston’s impossibly demanding fans; he suffered some nagging injuries, and although his astonishing defense never faltered, Lynn’s power numbers declined. After undergoing off-season weight training, Freddy bounced back in 1978–79 with monster years that first equaled and then surpassed what he’d done in 1975. In 1980, his last year under contract to the Red Sox—while making his sixth straight All-Star team, and winning his fourth Gold Glove—Lynn’s season ended in August, when a foul tip fractured his toe. Then Boston’s Keystone Kops management team went to work driving off bridges. Under the terms of Lynn’s expiring deal, Boston was still entitled to an option year, but, worried that they couldn’t afford what he would undoubtedly be asking for, they tried to deal him to a number of different clubs. Those efforts failed. After some protracted legal wrangling about arcane clauses that had found their way into both Lynn’s and Fisk’s 1976 contracts, Major League Baseball officials ruled that both men were not in fact bound by an additional option year, and both were entitled to arbitration for the upcoming 1981 season as long as they received their contracts in the mail by December 20. Boston’s front office did mail out the contracts, but because of numerous missteps and miscommunications, not until December 22. Afraid of losing him now without any compensation, due to their bungling, the Red Sox finally traded Fred Lynn to the Angels a month later, for nothing close to fair value. Playing ten minutes from where he’d grown up in Southern California, Lynn spent four typically productive years with the Angels, before moving on to the Orioles and the Tigers, and then ended his career after one last season with the Padres in 1989, the same year his old teammate Jim Rice retired. So Fred Lynn practiced his craft for sixteen more seasons in the major leagues after his stunning debut, a number of them sadly shortened or diminished by injury, and if voters have decided that he falls somewhat short of the cherished formula that would justify a plaque in Cooperstown, few men have ever played the game with such consistent grace on the field, or exhibited more intelligence and personal integrity off it. He has since done work as a television analyst for ESPN, CBS, and FOX, still lives in Southern California, and in 2002, Fred Lynn joined the Red Sox Hall of Fame.
As far as the Red Sox were concerned, Carlton Fisk’s second contract dispute went even worse than Fred Lynn’s, if that’s possible, when arbiters ruled in early 1981 that the best catcher in Boston’s history—a celebrated local hero who should have been the face of that franchise for decades—was now an unencumbered free agent, and their bruising legal wrangling had left him completely alienated from the team’s fractious, incompetent front office. The Red Sox then offered Fisk a $2 million deal; the Chicago White Sox offered him $3.5 million. After watching teammates Rick Burleson, Fred Lynn, and Butch Hobson get dealt away, the thirty-three-year-old Fisk made the most difficult decision of his life and left New England for the Midwest. If he never looked quite right in the strange retro White Sox uniform of that era, Fisk worked just as hard for his new team and was also determined to eliminate the nagging injuries that had often marred his career to that point. Following a ferociously disciplined workout regime, Fisk ended up playing thirteen years in Chicago—twenty-four major-league seasons in all—while establishing every career record for his position worth tracking in baseball history. Fisk was forty-five years old when he finally hung ’em up, and if he eventually surpassed Johnny Bench’s numbers with the sheer mass of his accomplishments, which man was the greater catcher in his prime remains one of the liveliest debates in baseball. Whomever you favor, if you believe such questions require answers, what’s not in doubt is that between them they occupy the top two spots in that argument—Mike Piazza’s hitting prowess notwithstanding; as a catcher he’s not part of the same conversation—and that seeing them both at their best during the 1975 World Series remains one of its deepest pleasures.
Carlton Fisk wisely reached back out to his native New England after he retired, mending fences with the diligence of a Down East stonemason, and when he was elected to the Hall of Fame in his first eligible year—2000, when he received just less than 80 percent of the votes—Fisk announced that he would enter its hallowed corridors wearing a Red Sox cap. By then he was working as a special assistant to Boston’s new general manager, Dan Duquette, who in turn announced that the team would now permanently honor and retire Fisk’s old number 27. As part of their ongoing reconciliation, Fisk had earlier joined the Red Sox Hall of Fame in 1997, and in 2005 he was further enshrined in Fenway Park, when they decided to officially name that towering yellow left-field foul standard the Fisk Pole. (The fragment of the original pole that Fisk hit with his Game Six home run, which had been replaced during one of the park’s recent renovations, was reclaimed from the scrap heap and now hangs on display inside Fenway’s Hall of Fame.) As proud, principled, and dedicated to the things that matter as he has always been, Fisk retains his New Hampshire selectman’s aversion to nonsense, fuss, outsiders, and phonies of any stripe. If he learned th
e hard way during his career that in the professional precincts of sports the once-cherished American concept of “team” no longer occupies the same high place as “family, state, and country,” the remaining three ideals, in his mind at least, have not suffered the slightest diminishment at all.
WHEN AFTER twenty-three seasons his playing career finally ended in 1986, Tony Perez stayed on with the Reds organization as a coach under both Pete Rose and his successor Lou Pinella. He briefly managed the Reds in 1993, and when they let him go after only forty-four games, Perez joined the staff of the National League’s newest expansion team, the Florida Marlins. Moving his family to Miami, Perez has worked with the Marlins in various field and front office capacities ever since, helping guide them to two World Series wins, in 1997 and 2003.
After two up and down seasons with the New York Yankees, Luis Tiant was released, and he pitched in the major leagues for parts of two more years. Having spent the first half of 1981 with the old minor-league team in Portland that he’d starred for nearly twenty years earlier, he spent the end of the season with the Pittsburgh Pirates and the following year joined the Angels. He won his last game for them in 1982, against the Boston Red Sox, and then finally faced the music at the age of forty-one. Luis wandered for a while, working as a scout for the Yankees in Mexico, and then as a minor-league coach for the Dodgers and the White Sox. He also spent four years coaching a college team in Savannah, Georgia, but all this time he kept Maria and their three children at home in Boston. The Red Sox elected Luis to their Hall of Fame in 1997, and when the team passed to its new ownership team in 2001, Luis Tiant was one of the first old soldiers they reached out to, bringing him back as a minor-league pitching coach and as part of their Spanish-speaking radio broadcast team. In addition to his continuing and varied work with the Red Sox, Luis today runs a successful cigar business with his oldest son, and a number of other smaller businesses, including El Tiante’s sandwich shop just outside Fenway Park. Luis Tiant is a fixture in the Boston area again, recognized and revered wherever he goes, friendly and funny and genuinely approachable as he has always been. At least once a week he still visits the nearby graves of his parents, and recently made his first trip back to his native Cuba, an emotionally wrenching experience that did nothing to make him regret the decision he’d made as a young man to seek his fortune in America.
Despite the measurable fact that his record favorably compares with many pitchers who are already enshrined, during Luis Tiant’s first fifteen years of eligibility for the Hall of Fame, the baseball writers of America never saw fit to grant him more than 31 percent of the ballots cast, when 75 percent remains the threshold for admission. His only route there now will be through the Veterans Committee, who should have a better appreciation of his true worth as a player and teammate, but to date nothing has come of it.
In 2000, his ninth year of eligibility, the baseball writers finally did see fit to elect Tony Perez to the Hall of Fame, with 77 percent of the vote. So Big Doggie sat up on the dais that late July afternoon in Cooperstown alongside fellow inductee Carlton Fisk—his teammate in Boston for one season in 1980—and the Cincinnati Reds’ longtime voice Marty Brennaman, who that year was honored with the Ford C. Frick Award.
And one other man who’d been with them that night in Fenway Park.
WHEN THE REDS fired the most successful manager in their history—and in all of baseball during the previous decade—George Anderson, that kid whose driven work ethic like that of so many of his generation had been shaped by the Great Depression, just naturally assumed he’d never work again. After spending a few weeks back home with his wife and kids in Thousand Oaks, and watching amazed as the world beat a path to his door, he began to realize that “Sparky”—that gregarious character he played in public and on TV—had become not just a celebrity but an American household name. Offers of every variety poured in, and he accepted a few to pay the bills, but he took his time about getting back into uniform. When it appeared that he was on his way to sign as the new manager of the Chicago Cubs in 1979, the owner of the Detroit Tigers—pizza impresario Tom Monaghan—swooped in and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Sparky spent the next eighteen seasons as the manager of the Tigers. To this day he remains the most successful manager in Detroit’s history as well, and in 1984, after six years at the helm, he guided them to their first World Series Championship since 1968. He did it employing exactly the same principles that he’d established and followed with the Reds, relying on power and speed and his team’s defensive strength up the middle, utilizing a strong pitching staff built from top to bottom, and assembling a seasoned, versatile bench. Along the way Sparky became just as beloved and familiar a figure to his players and fans in Michigan as he had been in Ohio. Older now and wiser—finally growing into that famous shock of white hair—as his later career progressed, he grew to resemble no one so much as the beloved baseball sage from whom he’d first learned the game, the “Ol’ Perfessor” Casey Stengel. George and Carol still live in the same simple unadorned suburban house they bought in 1967. He remains as authentic and charming and vivid an American character as Will Rogers, and no one else in the world today can talk baseball and life, philosophically intertwined and dispensed in the most original and delightfully singular syntax, like Sparky Anderson.
During Sparky’s time in Detroit, the Pandora’s box opened by the dawn of free agency changed the game of baseball almost beyond recognition. As salaries and revenues continued their meteoric rise, ugly labor disputes threatened or curtailed seasons each time the Basic Agreement between owners and players came up for renewal. A mid-season strike in 1981 wiped out nearly 40 percent of that year’s schedule and cost the sport more than $150 million in lost revenue; when the games resumed in August, all the recent gains in attendance and ratings initiated by the 1975 World Series had been lost, and a flawed split-season compromise, which erased the games played before the strikes, deprived teams with better overall records of a postseason. A two-day work stoppage marred the 1985 season, and an owners’ lockout of players in 1990 wiped out spring training. Shortly afterward, when an arbitrator ruled that owners had repeatedly colluded against players to avoid raising the price of free agent contracts in violation of the Basic Agreement, Major League Baseball had to pay the Players Association $280 million in lost wages. This permanently poisoned relations between them, caused both sides to dig in their heels, and precipitated a disaster for all concerned four years later; unable to forge a new basic agreement with owners, players again walked away from their teams in mid-season on August 12, 1994. The rest of that season, and all of the postseason, including the World Series—the first break in its history since 1904—disappeared; this time an estimated $580 million in revenue and $230 million in player salaries washed away with it. Many attributed the impasse to the absence of a strong, independent commissioner; since the owners had forced out their last one, Fay Vincent, in 1992—still angry that in salvaging the 1990 season he had unilaterally ordered owners to end their lockout—the post had been filled, supposedly on an interim basis while they looked for a replacement, by one of their own, Milwaukee Brewers owner Bud Selig, who had been a principal figure in the collusion scandal. Despite the attempted intervention of everyone from Congress to President Bill Clinton, no one could break baseball’s most bitter deadlock, and by a vote of 26–2 owners approved plans to go through spring training and begin the 1995 season with what they referred to as “replacement players.”
As the date for spring training approached, in Detroit, alone among all of baseball’s managers, Sparky Anderson notified his employers that he would not agree to manage any baseball team that used replacement players. The day before spring training began, the Tigers suspended Sparky for his courageous stance and put him on an unpaid leave of absence. Although many at the time mistakenly believed that Sparky was taking a stance in support of the players, his point of view was simpler and purer than either side’s position. According to
his hard-earned principles, to knowingly put anything less on the field than the best players in the world and charge admission and call it baseball was an unforgivable affront to the game itself. So Sparky walked away and went home to California, while all around Florida and Arizona “replacement players” filled spring training camps and played games in largely empty parks. A few days before the season was scheduled to begin, when Bud Selig finally called and asked Sparky what he would do to end the disastrous impasse, he said: “Put locks on all the doors and hide the keys until the thing is settled.”