Game Six (13 page)

“Burleson comes to the ballpark mad, and he goes home mad,” said Pesky. “I always played as if somebody better might come along, and that’s the way Burleson plays. He’s never satisfied, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”

Burleson watched a Nolan fastball catch the inside corner for a called first strike.

During fielding practice before a game in 1974, Pesky’s fellow Red Sox coach Don Zimmer—another former major-league infielder known for his short fuse—hit a succession of tough grounders at Burleson that he had trouble handling. The hotter the shot, the more he struggled, and the angrier he got at himself, until Zimmer noticed that Burleson’s neck had turned a radioactive red, and when he ripped off his cap and tossed it to the ground in disgust at himself his hair stood straight up in a comblike tuft.

“Look at that little bugger out there,” said Zimmer, admiringly. “He looks like a bantam rooster.”

That’s how nicknames are born in the big leagues. The “Rooster” had hit .252 and led the Red Sox in thrown bats, umpire confrontations, and slammed doors in 1975, bringing a street fighter’s scrappiness to the team that it had been missing for years and sorely needed. Johnny Pesky had offered the ultimate compliment to their new shortstop before the Series: “We wouldn’t be here without him.” Burleson had more than backed up those words during the World Series, playing errorless ball in the field, and leading the team in hitting at .389, another performance that had earned the praise of the Reds.

Burleson fouled Nolan’s next pitch—a roundhouse curve—wide of third, into the face of the left field grandstand that jutted out
sharply to meet the third base line about halfway between third base and the Monster. He resisted the next one, a fastball that missed just outside, and the count was 1–2.

Burleson’s gritty performance in the Series against the Reds had also drawn frequent comparisons to Billy Martin, the blustery, troubled manager—who had recently been hired by their new owner George Steinbrenner to manage the Yankees; the first of Martin’s five tempestuous tenures with the team—who had played mid-infield with similar intensity for the great 1950s Yankees teams. A career .257 hitter, Martin had capped his playing career with three outstanding World Series performances, winning the Series’ MVP award in 1953. Burleson possessed the same kind of red-hot nuclear core, but, unlike the tragic Martin, confined it to the field, living quietly with his wife in suburban Boston.

Burleson went into his crouch and lined another outside fastball pitch sharply toward first base, where Tony Perez deftly picked it up and trotted over to touch the bag. Out by twenty feet, Burleson continued digging down the line, hitting the bag at full speed even after Perez had begun to toss the ball around the infield.

The crowd rose to its feet again as Luis Tiant came to the plate; Kubek remarked that Luis was leading the World Series in standing ovations, and nobody was going to catch him. Since the American League’s adoption of the designated hitter rule in 1973, Tiant had recorded only one official at bat in a game until this World Series, but prior to that, since his sandlot days, he had always prided himself on his hitting. Blessed with exceptional hand-eye coordination, he had hit five home runs in the bigs while knocking in forty runs, and during his season with the Twins in 1969, albeit in only thirty-two at bats, had hit for an amazing .406 average. He had also surprised the Reds in this Series, going 2–6 while drawing a couple of walks, for an on-base percentage of .500. Tiant had singled and come around to record the first, and what turned out to be the game-winning, run of a tense, scoreless Game One, when the Red Sox exploded for six runs in the seventh inning, then went back out to finish nailing down the complete-game shutout.

Eager to get the inning over with, Nolan threw a fastball down the middle that Tiant watched for a strike. Nolan came back with a big bender that started inside and gave Tiant a serious case of jelly leg; he stepped halfway out of the box and waved at it for a second strike.

After recording another single in the fourth inning of Game Four, Tiant again scored what turned out to be the game-winning run of that game. Given Tiant’s success at the plate so far, Bench had decided not to show him too many fastballs, and he took Nolan’s next bender low and outside for a ball, as NBC cut to the field-level view from their camera inside the left field scoreboard. Bench signaled curveball again, and Nolan whisked the outside corner for a called third strike, his second punch-out of a sharp and effective 1–2-3 inning. Tiant turned and trotted back to the dugout, to another big hand from the crowd.

Gary Nolan had started six World Series games for Sparky Anderson and the Reds since 1970, but had yet to win one. He had bounced back effectively after a shaky first inning, but wouldn’t win this one either; Nolan had just thrown his last pitch of Game Six.

A
FTER EACH OF THE FIRST TWO SEASONS HE PITCHED FOR
the Mexico City Tigers, Luis Tiant returned home to Cuba for the off-season. He had established himself as a rising star during his second year, in 1960, going 17–7 and leading the Tigers to the Mexican League championship. That summer at a coed softball game he also met Maria del Refugio Navarro, a young beauty who worked for the Social Security office and was playing left field that night, the start of a traditional yearlong courtship that would lead to their marriage. During the winter of 1960–61, as young Tony Perez prepared to spend his first season on a Reds farm team in upstate New York, Luis pitched in the Cuban League. One of the oldest and most storied baseball organizations in the Western Hemisphere, the Cuban League had developed dozens of players who went on to play in either the majors or the Negro Leagues. Since 1900, the Cuban League had also been baseball’s only fully integrated league, where white American players were regularly sent by their major-league owners for seasoning against top competition from around the Caribbean. But the anti-American policies of Cuba’s newly installed leader Fidel Castro ended that arrangement before the 1960–61 season; when President Eisenhower broke off diplomatic relations, major-league baseball was told that players from the United States were no longer welcome. Luis Tiant went 10–8 for “Habana” that year, a famous franchise that had been founded during the league’s first year, in 1878, and the same team his father had starred on more than
twenty years earlier. “Lefty” Tiant watched all of his son’s starts with pride, and Luis was named the Cuban League’s Rookie of the Year.

Luis returned to Mexico City for his third season with the Tigers in May of 1961, just as Castro put into place the rigid anti-emigration policy many Cubans had feared was coming. More than a million people—10 percent of the country’s population, many from the middle and upper classes—had fled the country since Castro took power, and he now imposed a three-year waiting period for anyone else who wished to leave; during the wait they would have to forfeit their jobs and all personal property, and would be treated as enemies of the state. Whether anyone would actually be allowed to leave at the end of that purgatorial ordeal remained to be seen. The policy had the desired effect: The flood of people legally leaving Cuba came to a sudden halt. Castro also announced that there would be no more “professional” baseball in their country; the ninety-year-old Cuban League had played its last game. Cuban-born players would now enjoy the privilege of playing baseball only for the glory of the state, in a new league that Castro organized personally.

Luis Tiant’s third straight winning season for the Mexico City Tigers in 1961 led directly to his first minor-league deal with the Cleveland Indians, who purchased his contract outright and told Tiant they planned to bring him to spring training the following year. Luis and Maria married that summer, but put off their honeymoon until after the season ended in September. To celebrate both their marriage and his new opportunity in baseball, he had planned to introduce Maria to his parents and spend a week together with them at an island resort off Cuba’s southern coast. When he called his father to finalize the arrangements, Luis received the shock of his life.

The Old Man told him not to come home. The United States’ newly elected president, John F. Kennedy, had taken office in January, and an ill-fated, CIA-backed invasion at the Bay of Pigs by Cuban exiles had failed miserably in April; hundreds died and thousands of suspected sympathizers had been thrown into Cuban prisons, pushing Castro ever closer to socialism. Life in Havana had
grown more oppressive ever since, and under no circumstances was Luis to return now, not if he had any hope of ever leaving again and fulfilling his dreams.

Stay in Mexico,
his father said.
Make a good life for your family now.

But when will I see you again?
Luis asked.

The Old Man hesitated.
I will let you know.

Less than three months later, Fidel Castro officially announced to the world that he was an avowed Marxist-Leninist and that Cuba would become a client state of the Soviet Union and a communist country.

Luis Tiant would not see his father again, and the Old Man wouldn’t set eyes on his three grandchildren, for the next fourteen years.

REDS CENTER FIELDER
Cesar Geronimo faced Tiant to begin the top of the third inning. The twenty-seven-year-old native of the Dominican Republic had enjoyed the most success of any Reds regular against Tiant in his first two outings, going 3–5 with two walks. The left-hand-hitting Geronimo had come over to the Reds from the Houston Astros before the 1972 season, as part of the blockbuster Joe Morgan trade. The Reds had lost their starting center fielder Bobby Tolan the season before to a torn Achilles tendon; Sparky had been forced to use seven different men in center after Tolan went down, and the team desperately needed a long-term replacement. Geronimo’s last-minute inclusion in the Morgan deal, which seemed like an afterthought to Houston at the time, was actually a key component for the Reds, and a tribute to the due diligence of their GM, Bob Howsam, and his super-scout Ray Shore, and manager Sparky Anderson’s ongoing commitment to speed and defense.

Tiant started him with a hard fastball on the outside corner for a called strike.

Cesar Francisco Geronimo hadn’t played a lot of formal baseball growing up, but he discovered while playing softball for his high
school seminary that he’d been blessed with a freakishly strong throwing arm. On the strength of that alone he’d been scouted and signed in 1967 by the Yankees, who tried and failed to make a pitcher out of him. They moved him to the outfield, but when he didn’t show much promise at the plate, the Yankees let him go to the Astros, who were impressed by his speed and that spectacular arm, qualities they desperately needed in the cavernous, artificial-turf outfield of the Astrodome.

Tiant came right back with another fastball down the middle for another called strike, challenging Geronimo now, ahead in the count 0–2.

Starting in 1969 Geronimo had played three part-time seasons for the Astros, primarily as a defensive replacement, getting to the plate only 138 times. He still hadn’t hit much and showed almost no power, but he’d caught the Reds’ attention with his nine-foot stride and howitzer arm. Sparky had been preaching the importance of defense ever since he arrived, particularly up the middle; he considered the catcher, the two middle infielders, and the center fielder to be the heart of any defense. With Bench and Concepcion already in place, Sparky figured that Morgan and Geronimo—who wouldn’t have to hit much if he patrolled center like they thought he could on the carpet in Riverfront—would give him the strongest defensive quartet in the league. Not only did the Reds’ bet pay off on Geronimo’s defense—he had just won his second straight Gold Glove as one of the National League’s best defensive outfielders; all four of the Reds’ defenders up the middle took home that award in 1975—under coach Ted Kluszewski’s sound tutelage he’d grown into a much better and more patient hitter than they’d ever anticipated, giving them bonus production out of the eighth spot in the lineup.

Tiant came back in with a live fastball inside that just missed for a ball, then another that Geronimo just caught a piece of with a late, defensive swing, fouling it back to the screen.

The Reds’ most effective pinch hitter, Terry Crowley, had moved out to the on-deck circle, to bat in the pitcher’s spot, officially indi
cating that Gary Nolan was done for the night. Sparky hadn’t said a word to Nolan when he came in, and didn’t have to; even though he’d shown much better stuff in his second inning, Nolan knew they couldn’t afford to fall any further behind. Although he felt dejected about being pulled from the game so early, Nolan didn’t hang his head, and instead of staying in the clubhouse after his shower, he put on a fresh uniform, walked back down the tunnel to the dugout, and grabbed a seat on the bench, hoping to see his team come back.

Having set the table with a steady diet of fastballs, Tiant gave Geronimo the full-throttle windup and then pulled the string on a slow outside curve that Geronimo swung at and missed by a foot for Luis’s third strikeout of the game.

Without a runner on base, Sparky called Crowley back to the dugout, saving him for later in the game, and sent up Darrel Chaney in his place. The twenty-seven-year-old Chaney was a Reds lifer, a slick-fielding switch-hitting infielder who had shared the starting shortstop job with Davey Concepcion until he won the job outright in 1972. Chaney had become one of the leaders of the Reds’ second stringers who occasionally cracked the lineup of the “Great Eight” during the regular season, but who disappeared almost completely in postseason play. This self-deprecating group of scrubs banded together off the field and played an important role in the Reds’ positive team chemistry, keeping one another loose, never complaining about their limited roles, good soldiers in Sparky’s reserve corps. They prepared for their sporadic appearances with diligent professionalism and took an almost perverse pride in the degree to which the press and anyone outside of the most fanatic Reds boosters completely ignored them. They decided to call themselves, not for public consumption, the “Big Red Turds,” and even had T-shirts made bearing the phrase, which they wore under their uniforms. Chaney had made one previous pinch-hit appearance against Tiant, in Game Four, striking out with a runner on base.

Chaney’s appearance here in Game Six was even briefer, as he lifted a first-pitch fastball into the prevailing wind in deep left field,
where Yastrzemski hurried back to the base of the Monster and snagged the ball over his head for the second out of the inning.

Both Larry Shepard and Ted Kluszewski had noticed something in the team’s chart of Tiant’s pitches and pointed it out to Sparky just before Chaney’s at bat. Instead of the dizzying array of off-speed offerings they’d seen from Tiant during his first two games—which had caused most of the Reds to lay off his first pitch—they’d noticed that tonight he was starting almost every batter he faced with a fastball around the plate, trying to sneak in a strike and get ahead in the count. Armed with that information, Sparky had warned Chaney to be looking for a first-pitch fastball, and sure enough Tiant had thrown him one in the zone; Chaney, with a grand total of seven home runs in his seven major-league seasons, had hacked at it and driven the ball to the warning track.

Word spread quietly through the Reds dugout. Back to the top of the order, Pete Rose came to the plate for the second time, looking fastball, and when Tiant came at him with one, Pete nodded and watched it land outside for a ball. Now expecting him to come with something off-speed, Rose sat back, and Tiant served him one on a platter, a soft change that broke down over the heart of the plate; Rose whacked it into center field for the Reds’ first hit of the game.

Sparky got up on his feet, clapped his hands, and climbed the first step of the dugout, as Rose rounded first; no one else in Fenway might have agreed at that moment, but Sparky felt the stirrings of a shift in momentum.

Ken Griffey came up for his second at bat, as Rose took a short lead; no threat to steal in this situation—Sparky was more interested in continuing to field-test his new theory about Tiant.

And there it was, another first-pitch fastball; Griffey swung and stung it back up the middle of the box. Tiant reached down low to his left, the direction his follow-through was already carrying him, and the ball just ticked off the webbing of his glove. That redirected it right to where Denny Doyle was drifting to his left off second, and he scooped it up and fired to Cooper at first, beating the swift Griffey by a step for the third out, to end the inning.

The Reds were still down three runs, had only one hit through the first third of the game, and Darrel Chaney’s at bat wouldn’t amount to much in the game’s final box score, but in the eternal chess match between pitcher and batter, Sparky had found his first exploitable edge against the baffling Tiant.