Game Six (3 page)

Simmons then received a more welcome call from Carl Lindeman, president of NBC Sports, telling him that this World Series had averaged a robust 43 percent share of the viewing audience during its first five games, winning six out of seven nights and the week for NBC and lifting them into a narrow lead for the young season over CBS. The three midweek night games had performed surprisingly well, climaxing in a 48 percent share on Thursday’s Game Five in Cincinnati. Night games, introduced into the World Series only in 1971 and still a subject of bitter debate for baseball purists, were clearly the wave of the future. The math was simple: A sixty-second spot during any prime time Series game cost advertisers $100,000. Only after any World Series moved beyond the four games of a dreaded sweep were the network’s baseline investments covered, and every nickel banked after that was pure profit. Since NBC first broadcast it in 1947, the World Series had perennially retained its title as the biggest ratings event of the television year. This year’s balance sheet looked rosy for NBC, and that was very good news for Chet Simmons.

But all was far from well in baseball. The previous three World Series had been won by Charles Finley’s colorful, small-market Oakland Athletics. Great for Charles Finley, one of the game’s last and most flamboyant showmen/owners, but not necessarily good for the sport; since the late sixties, for the first time in decades, both live attendance and television ratings had begun to deteriorate. Not coincidentally, the game’s bellwether big-city franchise New York Yankees—winners of nearly half the World Series played in the last fifty years—had suffered through a decade of disappointment and decline. Hard to believe now, in a modern world that daily serves up hundreds of viewing choices—and the complete daily schedule in baseball, if you care to pay for it—but in 1975 the multiple channels offered by cable TV penetrated less than 10 percent of America’s top media markets, so relatively few games outside of local broadcasts were ever seen. The three major networks still held an ironclad monopoly on the nation’s viewing options, and NBC owned the baseball contract, and since the 1950s NBC had determined that during the regular season Americans should consume only one nationally televised game a week.

Trouble of a more ominous nature threatened from the heart of the game itself. Encouraged by the radical social turn much of the country had taken since the late 1960s, baseball players were becoming increasingly vocal about the gross inequity of baseball’s reserve clause, a restrictive, almost medieval legal provision that allowed teams to retain their rights to any player they had under contract for a year after that contract expired. As a result, bargaining power for the player hardly existed; few used agents or lawyers to represent them, which in most cases meant accepting whatever salary their owners saw fit to hand them. These annual “negotiations,” usually conducted face-to-face by the player himself with the team’s legal hatchet man, amounted to little more than ritualized humiliations. Professional baseball players, from the lowliest scrub to those considered national treasures, had all the legal status of indentured servants.

The players union, led since 1966 by a former labor lawyer named
Marvin Miller, was determined to change this, and in 1970 the union had fought for and won the right to submit stalemated contract negotiations to independent arbitration. Then in 1974, when A’s owner Charles Finley reneged on a contractual annuity he owed his star pitcher, Jim “Catfish” Hunter, Marvin Miller took the case to arbitration; baseball’s arbiter Peter Seitz ruled that as a result of Finley’s breach Hunter had the right to walk away from his contract and offer his services to any team of his choosing. Overnight he became baseball’s first “free agent,” and the New York Yankees immediately signed him to a five-year, $3.5 million contract. That number sent a blast wave through the game at every level—the average major-league salary in 1975 was $45,000 a year—but the game’s plutocratic owners, secure that baseball’s sacred antitrust exemption would continue to protect them from the evils of socialist labor practices, had long ago ostracized the A’s owner as an oddball exhibitionist, and viewed the Hunter case as a onetime aberration brought on by Finley’s hubris. They remained convinced, almost fanatically so, that the biggest challenge to baseball’s continued supremacy came from another sport whose season overlapped baseball’s by only a few weeks.

The National Football League was coming on fast as the favorite attraction of the American sports fan, riding a wave accelerated five years earlier by ABC’s
Monday Night
gamble. The sport was ideally suited to television’s rapidly evolving technology—multiple cameras, slow motion, zoom lenses, and instant replay broke down its brief bursts of choreographed violence into mesmerizing spectacle. The NFL’s championship Super Bowl, only nine years old—Roman numerals had from the second year on amplified its self-mythologizing importance—now threatened to surpass the World Series as sports’ biggest show, and television’s biggest payday. Blaming their loss of audience shares on the decline of offense during the late sixties when the game was dominated by pitching, baseball’s owners responded by rolling out reforms designed to put fireworks back on the field: lowering the pitcher’s mound to even the odds for hitters, breaking the sport’s long-established leagues into two divisions
apiece to increase the number of postseason games, and, in the most radical and controversial rule change since the advent of the “live ball” in the 1920s, the American League had taken the bat out of the pitcher’s hands by adding the designated hitter. The prospect that baseball might lose its almost century-long standing as America’s Pastime—and what that implied for the increasingly complex, splintering demographics of the United States—had become a major obsession of both the chattering classes and the game’s grandees. But, to date, as always in baseball, the numbers didn’t lie: Less than 25 percent of Americans now listed baseball as their favorite sport, and most of those were over fifty, lower-income folks, a demographic that the television age had decided was headed for the sociological scrap heap.

Waking to the reality that a seismic shift in viewing habits was under way, NBC had recently—and for the first time since 1947—declined to renew its exclusive contract with Major League Baseball. Starting in 1976, for the next four years, NBC would now alternate covering the World Series with ABC. (So eager had ABC been to get into the baseball business that the perennial third-place network had ponied up considerably more than half of the $92,000,000 bill.) In the meantime, hedging its bets, NBC began quietly looking for ways to turn around the money it had saved on baseball into an increased commitment with the National Football League.

The bright lights of Fenway appeared in the distance and Chet’s step quickened; the sight of any ballpark still put a charge in him. Simmons, New York–born and a lifelong Dodgers fan, lived for his favorite sport of baseball. He’d had more than a little to do with its past success as a televised sport, but on any other morning he would’ve gladly stopped to watch a bunch of kids play a sandlot game with a taped ball.

Seventy engineers at triple time versus $100,000 a minute in ad revenue.
Yes, he could live with that.

In truth, this World Series so far had seemed heaven-sent. Easy to identify and follow story lines, a boatload of marquee names performing to the level of their All-Star reputations, three one-run
games out of five played between clearly defined antagonists: New England’s scrappy, scruffy, counterculture underdog Red Sox pitted against the Teutonic, clean-shaven Big Red Machine of the conservative heartland’s Cincinnati Reds. Critics and fans agreed that to date this had been the most entertaining Series since the New York Mets’ miraculous win over the Orioles in 1969. In the cutthroat, competitive world of network television, you couldn’t have overpaid some Hollywood hack to concoct a more perfect scenario.

And if the percentages played out, the Red Sox would win Game Six tonight—Simmons was comforted by knowing that a Series hadn’t
ended
in six games since 1959—and deliver the golden coin of sporting events, for both the executive and the fan in Chet Simmons:
a Game Seven.

DICK STOCKTON
needed a tie. Living out of a suitcase in the Lenox Hotel on Boylston for the last six months had wreaked havoc with his stylish wardrobe. The dapper and affable thirty-two-year-old had recently concluded his first effective season as the Red Sox television play-by-play announcer—alongside flamboyant former Red Sox outfielder Ken “The Hawk” Harrelson—and his clothes were hopelessly spread out between the hotel in Boston, his New York apartment, and two different dry cleaners. Only weeks earlier, during the final home stand of the regular season, just after the Red Sox clinched the American League’s Eastern Division title, Stockton had received a telegram that delivered the biggest break of his young career:

Bringing an announcer from each home team’s broadcast unit into the booth with NBC’s national two-man team, for both television
and radio, had been just one of the network’s many innovations for the 1975 Series. The idea behind it: that their familiarity with the club they’d covered all year would add an informed local perspective to the broadcast. Stockton and Marty Brennaman—the Reds’ outstanding young play-by-play man, just finishing his second year with the team after replacing Al Michaels, who had moved on to the Giants—both immediately accepted Chet Simmons’s offer. Ten days earlier, Stockton had worked Game One from Fenway with his idol, NBC’s Curt Gowdy—a former Red Sox announcer himself, and for the last decade the network’s number one baseball voice—and Tony Kubek, the ex-Yankee shortstop, widely acknowledged as the game’s sharpest “color” commentator, and one of the most widely liked and admired human beings in the baseball universe. Both veterans did their gracious best to make Stockton feel at home, and the broadcast, by all accounts, had gone perfectly, with Stockton earning positive reviews. After traveling to Cincinnati to work Game Four for NBC Radio, Dick had flown home to New York and then back up to Boston for the scheduled broadcast of Game Six on Saturday. But after three days of rain he had burned through all the clothes he’d brought with him or had on hand.

Stockton had a deserved reputation to uphold as a clotheshorse and man about town and he rifled through the racks at Filene’s Department Store that afternoon, searching for a tie to complement his orange plaid sport coat, the height of fashion in ’75, improbable as it sounds today. He was slated to work tonight’s Game Six alongside Kubek and Joe Garagiola, NBC’s number two baseball play-by-play man, and was more than a little apprehensive about the prospect.

Joe Garagiola made it to the big leagues after World War II as a highly touted prospect, and in his rookie season helped lead his hometown St. Louis Cardinals to victory over the Red Sox in the 1946 World Series. That turned out to be his high-water mark as a player; he bounced around the league for the rest of his nine-year career as a journeyman backup catcher on three other teams. A few
years after he retired, while working Cardinals games as a broadcaster, Garagiola turned a mostly ghostwritten, humorously self-deprecating collection of anecdotes about his mediocre playing years into a surprise best seller, which he then parlayed into one of network television’s unlikeliest success stories. NBC signed him and brought him to New York, where he refined his folksy broadcast personality working as a game show host, moving up eventually to become cohost of the network’s long-running early morning flagship,
The Today Show.
Recently replaced after nine years on
Today
—and less than happy about what he perceived correctly as a demotion—the forty-nine-year-old Garagiola had returned to baseball broadcasting in 1975 on the network’s perennial Saturday
Game of the Week.

Belying his on-screen image as an enthusiastic, slightly goofy Everyman—a personality he shared in part with, and perhaps slightly shaded toward, his colorful childhood friend and teammate Yogi Berra, who had gone on to much bigger things as a player—away from the cameras Garagiola was better known for his sharp elbows and insecure ego. Marty Brennaman, who had worked World Series Games Three and Four in Cincinnati while sharing the booth with Garagiola, had tipped Stockton off that, although Tony Kubek had graciously worked him in throughout their broadcast, Garagiola had been less than welcoming, reacting to the addition of a third voice in the booth as a challenge to his turf. Stockton felt fairly certain that another good outing during the game tonight might lead to a network job, but if Garagiola froze him out that could jeopardize his chances. Stockton’s response, as it was to every adversity he faced, had been to double his intense preparation for Game Six.

After buying a tie—black, with pumpkin-orange and white stripes—Stockton hurried on to Fenway Park for the network’s afternoon pregame meeting. Two long trailers tucked under the ancient right field bleachers near the players’ parking lot served as NBC’s broadcast and command center. Chet Simmons welcomed everyone
back to work, then stepped aside to let his creative and technical producers Scotty Connell and Roy Hammerman run the meeting, and they walked their team through the night’s featured story lines. Having already worked the first two games of the Series from Fenway, much of what they discussed was boilerplate stuff to the most experienced and professional baseball broadcast crew alive. Crew chief Harry Coyle, a laconic World War II bomber pilot, had directed every World Series broadcast for the network since 1947, and these were all his handpicked guys. He spoke only occasionally, chain-smoking brown cheroots, but he got a laugh when he reminded veteran cameraman Lou Gerard that he’d drawn the short straw again and would be working the lonely camera position behind a hole they’d found in the scoreboard on Fenway’s signature left field wall, the Green Monster.