Game Six (23 page)

Reds 5, Red Sox 3. George Foster, the only man on Cincinnati’s roster who had figured out Luis Tiant in each of his previous starts, had delivered again with the Reds’ biggest hit of the game.

The life sluiced out of the crowd in Fenway; that old familiar feeling of delayed but inevitable doom that had first appeared when Fred Lynn crashed into the wall in the fifth inning crept further into their collective spirit. Luis Tiant had given up ten hits and five earned runs now. Watching stone-faced from the silent Red Sox dugout, Darrell Johnson made no move; a second trip out to the mound
would make Tiant’s removal mandatory under the rules. Dick Drago was more than ready, but Johnson didn’t want to bring his closer in now with his team behind. He told Don Bryant to call the bullpen and get left-hander Roger Moret up and throwing.

Davey Concepcion came to the plate with Foster standing on second. The Red Sox on the field appeared almost as stunned as the crowd. Foster took a huge lead off second with no one covering the bag, and when Tiant threw a sidearm fastball outside for ball one, Foster nearly broke for third, more than halfway down the line. Fisk held on to the ball and looked him back to second.

Tiant came back with a slow sidearm curve to Concepcion that missed high for ball two, ahead in the count. Dead silence in the park continued. Concepcion fouled Tiant’s next pitch, an outside fastball, straight back for a strike, 2–1.

The only sounds issuing from the fans now were the lonely cries of Fenway’s vendors, hawking their wares to a frozen congregation. One of Sparky’s early prime objectives had at last been achieved: The Reds had taken Boston’s boisterous home crowd completely out of the game.

Tiant came inside with a slider to Concepcion, and he pulled it hard, deep into the hole at short. Rick Burleson, playing Concepcion that way, fielded the ball cleanly, wound up with two short skipping steps, and threw it as hard as he could on a line to Cecil Cooper, beating Concepcion to the bag by less than half a step.

The inning ended, but the damage was done. At the seventh-inning stretch the home team was two runs down and the Cincinnati Reds were nine outs away from winning the World Series.

How would the Red Sox respond?

H
ALFWAY THROUGH THE SEVENTH INNING OF GAME SIX,
the contrasting cultures of the two teams in the 1975 World Series, rooted in their histories, had begun to reveal their deepest natures. After the disastrous tenure of owner John Taylor had resulted in a new uniform and nickname and the construction of Fenway Park, in 1912 the Boston Red Sox embarked on the most glorious era in their history, winning four World Series in the next seven years, all in dominating fashion. They did it on the strength of their stalwart Hooper-Lewis-Speaker outfield and the singular presence of a young star pitcher who was about to dominate American sports with a personality as outsized and childlike as a folk hero: George Herman “Babe” Ruth. When recruiting for World War I thinned the ranks of their better hitters, the Red Sox experimentally stuck Ruth in the outfield as an everyday player. Ruth was and always would be a mess off the field, a big, sloppy maladjusted kid with unquenchable appetites, but with a bat in his hand on a regular basis he revolutionized baseball as the game’s first home run hitting machine; he whacked twenty-nine of them in his first full season as an outfielder in 1919, an unheard-of total during the dead ball era, when single digits usually led both leagues. At the age of nineteen, fresh out of a Catholic reform school, Ruth had been signed as a pitcher by a middle-aged minor-league owner named Jack Dunn. Because he signed his prospects so young, seasoned baseball men used to call
them “Dunn’s babes.” Like most southpaw pitchers, Ruth arrived as “Lefty,” but during his first training camp the “Babe” nickname stuck as a better fit; in time the Italian immigrants from Boston’s North Side who grew to worship him would translate that into
Bambino
. In mid-season of 1914 Jack Dunn’s team—the Baltimore Orioles of the International League—nearly went bankrupt, and he was forced to sell off his best players to stay afloat; Ruth and two others went to the Red Sox for $25,000 and a legend was soon born in Boston. With Ruth going 18–8—and hitting four titanic home runs; the league’s leader, an everyday player, hit only seven—the Red Sox won the pennant and the 1915 World Series. Four years later, just as the “Babe” had joined the outfield and established himself as the coming wonder of the age, he was packaged and sold again, when his immense, emerging talent was matched by the biggest blunder in baseball executive history.

The Red Sox’s latest owner, New York theatrical producer Harry Frazee—a name that still lives in New England infamy—found himself strapped for cash after a series of flops and sold Babe Ruth in 1919, after the last of Boston’s five World Series wins, to the—until this fateful moment—hapless New York Yankees. At which point the two teams’ fortunes reversed directions and never took a backward glance: The Yankees went on to win twenty of the next fifty-six World Series played. In 1975, appearing in just their third World Series since losing Ruth, Boston was still looking for their sixth World Championship. Red Sox fans, once the proudest in early baseball history, by this time suffered from a collective form of posttraumatic stress disorder. Psychologists are just now beginning to study and understand the long-term hazards of emotional involvement with woeful sports franchises and the real deleterious effects that such perceived “social defeat” can have on a community’s emotional equilibrium and self-image. By 1975, Boston, it’s fair to say, was the first American city to have its case history so thoroughly identified and diagnosed; the city’s discerning, intelligent fans had already suffered and exhibited the symptoms for three generations. As the Reds roared back to take the lead in Game Six, and now
threatened to abruptly end the 1975 World Series with one of their patented late charges, the fatalistic, internal bargaining that was such an established part of rooting for the Red Sox had already begun throughout Fenway Park.

Fenway’s organist John Kiley, who had begun his career accompanying silent pictures in the ornate movie palaces of the 1920s and knew a little bit about how to establish or change a mood, tried to bolster their spirits with his seventh-inning-stretch rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” The “stretch”—one of baseball’s oldest traditions, dating back at least a hundred years—probably began in Cincinnati as a spontaneous gesture inspired by nothing more complex than the physiological necessity to move after two hours of sitting. The song came out of vaudeville in the early 1900s, written by lyricist Jack Norworth and composer Albert Von Tilzer—neither of whom at that point in their lives had actually
seen
a ball game—but was not wedded to the “stretch” until the 1940s, and wouldn’t become an annoying, compulsory sing-along until the Chicago White Sox’s announcer Harry Caray (by this point in the game often pixilated) began leading fans at Comiskey Park in 1976—a routine quickly standardized at the insistence of the Sox’s maverick owner Bill Veeck that then spread throughout baseball. Not many New Englanders in Fenway felt like singing at this point of the night; emotionally leveled, their minds began drifting to the mundane realities of how to beat traffic home at the end of another crushing season-ending defeat. They could walk away from this latest disappointment carrying at least some residue of hope for the team’s future, with all those rising young stars on their roster, and once Jim Rice was healthy—well, if only he
had
been healthy, why, we could’ve beaten
these
guys for sure—and so on, and so on; the tragic inner life of a Red Sox Fan.

In the Cincinnati dugout, attention—already keen—cranked up another notch as the Reds took the field, all their movements sharp, organized, and purposeful. The contrast between the two organizations could not have been more apparent. Cincinnati’s systemic obsession with playing the game the right way, with instilling discipline
off the field—the short haircuts, the strictly enforced uniform code, the suits and ties on road trips, the insistence on polite public relations—had created a remorseless and efficient killer on the field. No one ever strayed very far off the line in Cincinnati, not even the superstars. During their mediocre start to the 1975 campaign, after Johnny Bench and Reds broadcaster Marty Brennaman had burned the candle at both ends during a night in Montreal—and Bench showed up for the day game that followed the worse for wear—Brennaman had made the mistake of telling Sparky about their eventful evening. Sparky ripped both of them a new one in front of the team; Bench homered in that game and the Reds responded with their longest winning streak of the season, going 41–9 and running away with the West Division. Boys will be boys, but Brennaman learned never to confide in Sparky about their nocturnal adventures again. Bench had always kept a vivid memory of walking through the teams’ hotel during their Series matchup with the Oakland A’s in 1972 and catching a whiff of marijuana outside the room of one of the biggest A’s stars. “I guess we’re not in Kansas—or Cincinnati—anymore,” said Johnny.

The fractious Red Sox, who had nearly risen in revolt against their manager earlier in the season, seemed almost adolescent by comparison; richly talented but emotionally undisciplined, not truly unified in the regimented, shoulder-to-shoulder way of the Big Red Machine. No player on Boston’s roster exemplified this more than their gifted starting pitcher Bill Lee, who had won seventeen games for them now three years in a row, an unheard-of achievement for a left-hander in Fenway Park. Witty, well educated, supremely self-possessed and intelligent, Lee was a USC graduate who had played for and adored the great Rod Dedeaux, becoming the winningest pitcher in school history. Lee was also one of the first committed members of America’s baby boomer counterculture to reach stardom in the major leagues. He was descended from two generations of outstanding baseball talent, including his aunt Annabelle Lee, perhaps the greatest pitcher of the women’s professional baseball league that briefly flourished during World War II.
A confirmed Southern California kid, Lee enjoyed the intellectual stimulation Boston offered but spent his off-seasons hanging out in Malibu with rock stars like Warron Zevon and the Eagles, dating Hollywood starlets, living the high lifestyle. Very much a product of his time—but way ahead of it in pro sports—Lee was by nature an inquisitive searcher, a committed anti-establishmentarian with articulate socialist leanings. Like most other young red-blooded American athletes he also liked to party, but whenever you handed him the ball he was as fiercely competitive on the mound as any pitcher in the game. No less an authority than teammate Carl Yastrzemski thought that at this point Lee was the best left-handed pitcher in the American League. Lee remained single-mindedly devoted to the game of baseball and its history, particularly the art of pitching; he could, and gladly would, expound on any aspect of his craft for hours. And most of the hidebound, conservative men who had grown up in and now administered or reported on the old school world of baseball—which included most of the people long connected with the Red Sox—thought he was completely out of his mind.

His younger Red Sox teammates gave him a pass—like fellow USC alum Fred Lynn, who greatly benefited from Bill’s generosity to him as a rookie, and thought Lee’s stream-of-consciousness style with the press was actually good for team morale—and no one appreciated him more than fellow ace Luis Tiant, who recognized and respected any man who played his heart out on the field. Lee did it in a much more vocal and excitable style than the contained and elegant fire of
El Tiante,
but the bond between them as committed warriors who loved the game for its own sake was genuine and strong. Lee just didn’t have much of an editing mechanism in place between his nimble mind and mouth, and although Boston beat reporters continually benefited from his willingness to hold court on any variety of subjects—often leading them into elaborate metaphors and tangents within the course of a single answer that pulled in references as disparate as astrophysics, Kurt Vonnegut, and Native American mythology—some of the older and more cynical
hacks also wrote many cruel and contemptuous things about him. One disparagingly dubbed him “Spaceman,” and the nickname stuck, with time and frequent use rounding into a more affectionate interpretation, and it still sticks to him today. Others liked to mock his off-field habits, like his use of ginseng and honey as an energy source before games, as if that were some kind of punkish rebuke to the old customary amphetamines. Despite all this routine abuse, Lee remained a consistently informative and engaging interview, who continued to cooperate with reporters even after they ripped him; in this way he was also one of the first contemporary athletes to understand that he was not just a performer but an entertainer, both on and off the field. He was also willing to make himself a lightning rod for critical bolts to take the heat off his teammates, as he had when, during a losing streak in the middle of the season, he publicly criticized Boston’s reactionary response to the busing crisis. A firestorm of anger at Lee’s political point of view ensued, but for the moment fans stopped ragging about the losing streak, and the team’s fortunes on the field soon turned around. Lee often answered even the simplest questions in paragraphs, but also appreciated the art of brevity: When asked what he thought of the World Series so far, after the teams had split the first two games in Boston, he simply said: “Tied.”

In most ways Bill Lee was much more representative of what had been going on within the fervid baby boomer culture than most of the blinkered athletes in professional baseball, who had been cloistered according to tradition in hermetic, tightly controlled conservative environments since signing their first contracts. That would soon change; only ten days before Game Six the boomer generation had planted one of its most prominent flags in the pop culture landscape when
Saturday Night
debuted on NBC with guest host comedian George Carlin. It’s easy to forget now, after its multiple decades as a staple of weekly American programming, that the public had never seen any network show written, produced, and performed almost entirely by and for people under the age of thirty. Savagely satirical, casually hedonistic, a howl of protest and righteous irony
against the straightjacket Nixon-era Silent Majority, the show captured a moment in American time as concretely as Mount Rushmore. By the time its second episode aired, hosted by singer-songwriter Paul Simon on the night that Game Six had originally been scheduled to play, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Gilda Rad-ner, and the rest of the original Not Ready for Prime-Time Players were already on their way to becoming household names. Bill Lee had been raving about the show to his teammates since its debut. He’d also been raving about a twenty-five-year-old singer-songwriter from New Jersey named Bruce Springsteen, who since the release in late August of his third album,
Born to Run
, had set the music world on fire. With his gruff, tender, working-class poetry and serious kick-ass chops, Springsteen and the E Street Band burst on the American scene like a supernova, articulating the hopes and busted dreams of the Silent Majority’s children, braiding the disparate strands of rock’s varied influences into a singular, inspirational vision. In an unprecedented display of his impact, on the day Game Six was played editions of both
Newsweek
and
Time
magazines—America’s top national arbiters of conventional mainstream culture—hit the streets with Springsteen on the cover. Although earnest, respectable dramas like
Dog Day Afternoon
and
Three Days of the Condor
were topping the box office on movie screens that fall, a phenomenon called
Jaws
—directed by twenty-eight-year-old Steven Spielberg—had opened in July, become the first film in history to gross over $100 million, and was still rewriting the record books; in Hollywood’s executive offices a new gold rush was already under way, with producers desperate to cash in on this revealed appetite for youthful summer blockbusters. Just ahead of that sea change, operating under the radar in London, a low-budget sci-fi film called
Star Wars
had been shooting since March. Like many others of his age and temperament, Bill Lee and his generation were at this point well on their way to finding, and raising, their voices.