Game Six (8 page)

Tiant came right at him with a fastball, taken, strike one.

At Sparky’s urging, Cincinnati’s hitting coach, fifty-one-year-old Ted Kluszewski—one of the greatest pure sluggers in Reds history, a sequoia of a man with Popeye biceps—had counseled Griffey that day to be more patient at the plate and wait for his pitch. Home run hitters didn’t historically have a strong record as hitting instructors—power was still regarded then as more an instinct than a coach-able skill—but Kluszewski, a sensitive, patient, and intelligent man, had worked wonders with the Reds lineup; one could argue that he had also been given an embarrassment of wonders with which to work. But Ken Griffey had been one of “Klu’s” best projects.

Outside, fastball, ball one.

Griffey had been playing organized ball for only six years, and as a kid had hardly even been schooled in the game’s fundamentals. He was a football and basketball star in his hometown of Donora, Pennsylvania, and he played baseball primarily to have something to do during the off-season. A Reds scout, there to check out another player at one of his high school games, put a stopwatch on Griffey and was astonished to realize he motored from home to first base faster than any player he’d ever timed. The Reds drafted Griffey in the twenty-ninth round in 1969 for that one reason: They had just made an organization-wide commitment that, because of the artificial carpet they were installing in their new home, Riverfront Sta
dium, their club would be built on speed. Although he had college football scholarships on the table, Griffey decided to accept the Reds’ offer of immediate cash: $500 a month to join their team in the rookie league. Their long-shot bet on Griffey’s potential paid off quickly; by 1973 he’d earned a late-season call-up to the big club and hit .384. By 1975, his rapid development had made possible Sparky’s shuffle of Rose to third base, and Griffey responded to his promotion by hitting .305, stealing sixteen bases, and most important, getting on base enough to be driven in ninety-five times by the big guns batting behind him.

Screwball, breaking away from the left-handed Griffey, outside and low, 2–1.

He had also, at Kluszewski’s insistence, started to learn patience at the plate. Drawing sixty-seven walks in 1975, Griffey’s on-base percentage nearly reached .400, the most reliable indicator that he had arrived as a major-league talent.

Griffey swung at a high off-speed curve, fouling it back near the broadcast booth, where Tony Kubek almost caught it barehanded. Griffey chopped the next sidearm breaking ball foul off first base.

Kubek mentioned on the air that Luis Tiant often reminded him of Juan Marichal, the star of the San Francisco Giants’ pitching staff in the 1960s. Marichal, one of the first players to reach the major leagues from the baseball-crazed Dominican Republic, had been known for his high leg kick, which had a similarly distracting effect on hitters. He also possessed extraordinary control and the ability to adapt his pitching style to whatever the circumstances of a game required, all qualities he shared with Tiant. Only a few years apart in age, Marichal and Tiant had briefly crossed paths as teammates in Boston the previous season; after one last stint with the Dodgers, Marichal had recently announced his retirement, and eight years later he would become the first Latin-born pitcher to enter the Hall of Fame.

Tiant’s next pitch, another screwball that Griffey resisted, just missed the outside corner to run the count to full. Griffey’s patience
paid off when the payoff pitch missed inside, the first time Tiant had come inside to him during the entire at bat. Griffey trotted to first with a walk.

Second baseman Joe Morgan came to the plate. Standing a trim, compact five foot seven, he looked like a school kid beside the imposing, battle-geared Carlton Fisk, but Morgan was only weeks away from being named the National League’s Most Valuable Player for the 1975 season. Born in Bonham, Texas, Morgan had come of age in Oakland, California, where despite his small stature he’d made himself into one of the toughest players to ever come out of an extremely tough neighborhood. Signing after high school as a low-level prospect with the National League’s new Houston Colt .45s franchise, Morgan shocked everyone in that organization by making it all the way to the big-league club by the end of his first full season in professional ball. Within two years, at the age of twenty-one, he had established himself as the team’s everyday second baseman, the same year they changed their name to the Houston Astros. A pattern had been established that would persist for much of his career, and indeed his life: Joe Morgan striving to overcome the limits imposed on him by other people’s inaccurate perceptions. Morgan’s size played a considerable part in those prejudicial opinions and in those days, in baseball and the South, so did his race. His confidence in himself then had a lot to make up for—and in the opinion of many often turned to arrogance—but it never wavered. And this season, in 1975, as he played for Sparky and the Reds, that great talent had come to full fruition.

Morgan dug in, took his stance, oversized bat held high, and snapped his left elbow up and down like an airplane flap, one of the most imitated batter’s box tics in baseball. Tiant made a couple of tosses over to first base, trying to keep Griffey close to the bag. Tiant’s stretch windup was every bit as eccentric as his full one; bringing his hand and glove together at chest level as he straddled the rubber, he brought them down to his waist in a series of small bounces, as if they were being lowered by a ratchet. The routine never looked the same way twice, and at any point in the process he
might whirl and fire to first; the Old Man had indeed helped teach him a superb pickoff move, one of the best for a right hander in either league.

Morgan had managed only two hits off Tiant while facing him nine times during the Series, but he’d also worked him for two walks. No one had to remind Morgan to be patient at the plate—with his small strike zone and good eye, he led the majors in bases on balls with 132—and he worked the count full against Tiant now. Morgan not only led the Reds in steals with 67, with Sparky’s blessing he’d become their de facto base running coach, with Ken Griffey, the runner at first, his number one disciple. Morgan ran clinics during their practice sessions, showing his teammates how to measure and hold a precise lead, how to read a pitcher’s motion for tells on when best to break for second, and how to use the
threat
of stealing to disrupt his concentration. But oddly, for most of the season, with Griffey batting ahead of him, Morgan had forbidden the fleet young outfielder to attempt to steal or even
feint
toward second while he was at the plate, claiming it distracted him while he was trying to hit, a large part of why, despite Morgan’s tutelage, a man with Griffey’s extraordinary motor had stolen only sixteen bases that season. Although Joe had supposedly “given Sparky the green light” to send runners ahead of him during the Series—more on their unusual relationship to come—Griffey never made a move toward second during Morgan’s first at bat, which ended when he popped a
high foul up above the screen that drifted on the wind blowing steadily toward center and died quietly in Fisk’s mitt.

Reds catcher Johnny Bench stepped in. Although more circumspect in his public comments about it than Pete Rose, Bench had been similarly frustrated by the steady diet of off-speed stuff he’d seen from Tiant during the Series. One of the greatest fastball hitters the game had ever known, he felt he was seeing Tiant’s ball well but just couldn’t get his bat on it; he’d had no more success against him to date than Pete Rose, going 1–8 with only one RBI. Still bothered by his cold, his injured left shoulder aching in the cool New England air, Bench took a fastball for a strike, fouled the next one off, and then missed a low slider that broke out of the zone for Tiant’s first strikeout.

The crowd rose to their feet again, Tiant trotted to the dugout, and the Red Sox came in for their first turn at bat.

F
OR ALL THEIR SUCCESS IN
1975,
WINNING ONE HUNDRED
games to this point, the Red Sox had reached Game Six of the World Series without the presence or benefit all season of a single “traditional leadoff” man. Since the advent of the personal computer in the 1980s, a new breed of baseball statisticians has revolutionized the way players are viewed and evaluated. Although these analysts were initially amateurs working outside the professional structure of the game, most teams have embraced their findings and many now employ at least one full-time “sabermatrician,” after the Society for American Baseball Research, or SABR, founded by Bill James, who is currently a consultant for the Red Sox. Baseball is a game exquisitely suited to measurement by numbers, with a vast trove of available—and, before these passionate wonks came along, previously underutilized—historical records. As they sifted through this remarkable database, breaking down every aspect of the game into new arcane definitions of value—like True Defensive Range, or the number of actual Runs Created—their formulas for the first time provided a solid scientific understanding for many of the game’s traditions, and called into question most of its conventional wisdoms.

One of the most stubbornly enduring ideas in baseball had been that you stick your speediest player at the top of the lineup, turn him loose, and hope that a lot of stolen bases translate into runs, a notion that for a number of reasons the game’s new statistics had largely discredited. (The last man to fit that profile for the Red Sox, outfielder Tommy Harper—who’d set a team record for steals with fifty-four in 1973—had been traded after the ’74 season to make way for promising rookies Jim Rice and Fred Lynn.) A more refined philosophy had begun to emerge that you should send the man with the best on base percentage (hits plus walks plus hit-by-pitches, divided by at bats plus walks plus HBP plus sacrifices) to the plate first in the hopes of then bringing him around, as Sparky Anderson was able to consistently do with Pete Rose, who stole not a
single
base in 1975, but reached first more than 40 percent of the time.

In 1975 Boston’s manager Darrell Johnson didn’t possess that luxury; the highest OBPs among his regulars belonged to Fred Lynn and Carlton Fisk, men he wanted and needed deeper in his lineup because of their ability to drive in runs. His Red Sox had stolen only sixty-six bases all season, and the co-leaders on Johnson’s squad were Lynn and the disabled Jim Rice, both with ten; Sparky’s Reds had
six
regulars with as many as or more steals than that, including catcher Johnny Bench. Johnson’s best option was probably reserve outfielder Bernie Carbo, who’d drawn a lot of walks and performed well in the leadoff spot earlier in the season, but he had been injured and gone cold down the stretch; Johnson decided to hold Carbo in reserve as his number one left-handed pinch hitter in the Series. The fastest man on the Red Sox was Juan Beniquez, a onetime shortstop, utility outfielder, and sometime designated hitter whom they had recently tried to convert to third base, with little success. But baseball had decreed that the American League’s new and still controversial designated hitter rule would not be used in this Series. (In response to charges that this was unfair to teams that had depended on it during their regular season, starting in 1976 the DH was allowed in the Series during even-numbered years, until 1986, when the current rule of using it only during home games in
American League parks in
every
Series went into effect.) With the DH position unavailable to him, Johnson preferred to use the right-handed Beniquez in platoon duty against left-handers, and had penciled him in as his leadoff man in Games Four and Five, against Reds southpaw starters Freddie Norman and Don Gullett. In Game One, also against their ace Gullett, Johnson had somewhat randomly used his power-hitting right fielder, Dwight Evans, as the leadoff man. In Games Two and Three, against Reds right-handers Jack Billingham and Gary Nolan, left-handed first baseman Cecil Cooper went into the top slot. None had proved markedly successful. For Game Six, Johnson decided to go back to Cooper again.

The twenty-five-year-old Cooper, a tall, rangy line-drive hitter, had batted a solid .311 for the season, with respectable power numbers in 305 at bats. A quiet, unassuming, and intelligent team player from the Houston area, he was the youngest of thirteen children and had been taught the game by his father and two uncles, who had all played in the Negro Leagues. Drafted by the Red Sox in 1968, Cooper finally earned a spot with the parent club in 1974, but found himself struggling for playing time after the splashy emergence in ’75 of Fred Lynn and Jim Rice. Rice’s big bat won the left field job early in the year, which allowed Johnson to permanently install Carl Yastrzemski at first base—a transition for their gracefully aging captain that had been gradually under way for two years—which pushed Cecil Cooper out of his everyday position. A streaky hitter, Cooper had gotten hot and stayed that way throughout the summer, fighting for and finally earning his spot as the team’s regular DH against right-handed pitching. He had appeared in only thirty-five games at first, a solid if unspectacular defender whenever Yaz needed a day off, but when Rice’s hand was broken by a pitch in late September, Cooper saw a lot more action at first when Yastrzemski shifted back to left. Cooper had had his own brush with danger in the batter’s box on September 7, when he was hit in the face by an inside fastball and had to be carried off the field on a stretcher. He returned to the lineup a few games after the beaning, but his productivity at the plate tailed off dramatically for the rest of the season. In
the ruthless arena of the batter’s box, pitchers quickly discovered that they could pitch Cooper inside, where the human instinct for self-preservation hindered his ability to make a committed swing just enough to throw off his superb professional hitter’s timing.

That trend had continued into the World Series; Cooper stepped in as Boston’s first batter in Game Six with only one hit in thirteen at bats.

Opposing Cooper on the mound was Reds starting pitcher Gary Nolan. In its broad outlines, the twenty-seven-year-old Nolan’s career bore a more than passing resemblance to that of Luis Tiant. He had arrived in the major leagues in 1967 as a highly touted eighteen-year-old prospect, after less than one full season of minor-league ball, and won fourteen games as a rookie while striking out more than two hundred batters. By 1970, when Sparky took over and the early edition of the Big Red Machine made its first trip to the World Series, Nolan had established himself as the staff’s ace and one of the premier power pitchers in the National League. He continued to enhance that reputation through 1972, when the Reds returned to the Series against the A’s; Nolan turned in his finest performance to date that year, going 15–5 with a 1.99 earned run average. But a minor flaw in his mechanics finally caught up with him late in that season; after coming down with a sore shoulder, he discovered that years of throwing slightly across his body had seriously frayed his right rotator cuff. At a time when the soundness of pitchers’ arms was under much less scrutiny—one of the most frequent prescriptions for arm trouble then was still to “throw through it”—Nolan was encouraged by the team to gut it out for the remainder of the season. When the injury persisted into 1973, he went to see Dr. Frank Jobe in Los Angeles, just then establishing his reputation as the country’s first orthopedic surgeon with an enlightened understanding of—and operating table solutions for—damaged throwing arms. Jobe recommended immediate surgery; once again the Reds counseled Nolan to hold off and see if he could rehab the injury with a regimen of physical therapy. He complied but was able to throw only ten innings in ’73 before shutting it down for the season,
and finally went under the knife in the spring of 1974 to remove what turned out to be a large calcium deposit that had been ripping a hole in his shoulder muscle.

After almost two years on the sidelines, Nolan had returned to the Reds rotation in 1975, and gone 15–9 in his thirty-two starts, but he was a less dominant pitcher now, and in his absence twenty-four-year-old Don Gullett, a flame-throwing left-hander, had stepped in to replace him as the Reds’ number one starter. Nolan no longer threw anything like the same blazing fastball, but he could still spot the one he had, as well as a sharply breaking curve, for strikes, and he retained command of his best “out” pitch, an exceptionally well-disguised changeup. Like Luis Tiant—even more so—he now relied on control, guile, and skill instead of sheer speed. Both men had confronted the fate that awaits almost every professional pitcher: when the unnatural strain of repeatedly throwing a five-ounce sphere as hard as you can for sixty feet, six inches causes the sinew and bones of your arm, shoulder, or elbow to break down. These two, unlike most, had worked their way back from devastating injury to the winner’s circle, but unlike Tiant, Nolan had never lost the support of his team. A highly intelligent student of the game, family man, stand-up guy, and committed team player, Gary Nolan embodied more than any other man on their roster the straight-arrow values that the Reds prized and projected as an organization. He never griped to the press about his injury or bemoaned the bad luck that had befallen him, soldiering on to do whatever Sparky and the team asked of him, but since the injury, all through the ’75 season, and for the rest of what remained of his career, he pitched in constant and considerable pain.

Nolan had been the Reds’ starter in Game Three back in Cincinnati—his fifth career World Series start—throwing four strong innings while allowing only a single run on a Carlton Fisk home run. When his neck and shoulder tightened up, Nolan left the game with a lead the Reds would eventually yield and then reclaim for the win in the bottom of the tenth inning, after one of the most controversial plays, also involving Fisk, in Series history. It had appeared as if
that would be Nolan’s only action in the Series—the nature of his arm trouble made it impractical for him to be used out of the bullpen, where he might have to warm up more than once—when Sparky named Jack Billingham as his starter for Game Six and, if necessary, Don Gullett in Game Seven. The extended rain delay over the weekend changed all that.

Nolan snuck an inside fastball past Cooper for a called first strike, then came right back at him with another down and away that Cooper swung on and missed.

When Commissioner Bowie Kuhn called off Game Six on Sunday for the second day in a row both Sparky and Darrell Johnson had taken the opportunity to reassess their starting pitching assignments. Given his commanding performance in the Series to date, moving a rested Luis Tiant up from Game Seven to a must-win Game Six was a no-brainer for Johnson, although it prompted an entertaining eruption in the press from voluble Sox left-hander Bill Lee, who was pushed back to a possible Game Seven. The choice Sparky made with Larry Shepard—dropping Jack Billingham for Nolan, but keeping Gullett slated for a Game Seven—appeared to be a riskier call. Billingham had been the winningest pitcher on the Reds staff over the last three years, a tall, seasoned, rubber-armed sinker-baller who on the face of it seemed a better fit for the challenges any pitcher faced in Fenway Park: keeping the ball on the ground, to use the slow infield track to his advantage and minimize the hazards of the Monster in short left. Billingham had demonstrated he could do exactly that during his only start of the Series, in Game Two, holding the Red Sox to a single earned run through six innings, a game the Reds then went on to win with two runs in the top of the ninth.

In explaining the rearrangement of his rotation to the press on Sunday, Sparky reasoned that the rain delay had allowed Nolan’s tender arm to recover from his last start, and since he couldn’t throw out of the bullpen, giving him the ball to start Game Six was the only way to utilize one of his best men. Sparky was also privately concerned that his celebrated relief corps had begun to tire after he’d
worked them so hard throughout the year, and keeping Billingham in reserve in the bullpen should Nolan falter early seemed his best insurance policy. Having already lost two World Series, Sparky had also decided to shorten his notorious hook another notch on this night and throw every arm he had except Gullett at the Red Sox to win Game Six, anything to avoid another final, deciding contest. And Gary Nolan felt good as he took the mound; he’d warmed up without any pain or stiffness despite the cool weather, and his fastball had some visible pop in it.

Nolan came back with a change of pace perfectly set up by the first two fastballs; Cooper tried to adjust to it mid-swing, but the ball lofted off his bat for an easy fly out to center fielder Cesar Geronimo.

Red Sox second baseman Denny Doyle came to the plate. Perhaps more than any other man on the field that night, Denny Doyle was just happy to be there. A classic old-school middle infielder—he stood only five-nine and weighed 175—the thirty-one-year-old small-town Kentucky native had spent five years in the majors toiling on mediocre teams in Philadelphia and Anaheim before coming over to the Red Sox in a trade on June 13. He’d never hit much—his career average was .242—acknowledging he’d only made it this far in the game because of his glove and hustle, and that spring for the Angels he’d abruptly lost his starting job to a talented rookie from Massachusetts named Jerry Remy. Riding the pine for a last-place team, Doyle had started to worry his major-league career might be over—he had a wife and three young daughters to support, with no formal training in any other field to fall back on—when the Red Sox, desperate for a second baseman to lighten the workload of their oft-injured longtime starter Doug Griffin, pulled the trigger on the deal, obtaining Denny Doyle for cash and the proverbial “player to be named later.”

Given scant attention in the press at the time, this turned out to be general manager Dick O’Connell’s most important transaction of the season. Energized by his new opportunity, the left-hand-hitting Doyle joined the team in Kansas City and made an immediate impact, with a defensive play that preserved a win in his first start, and a
crucial home run in his second. The Red Sox went on to win their first six games in a row with Doyle at second base. Doyle’s sound fundamental abilities to bunt, execute the hit-and-run, and advance runners proved to be a perfect fit in the number two spot of their lineup, which helped compensate for the lack of an ideal leadoff man. He continued to play sound defense, turned the double play to perfection, and hit over his head all season; in his eighty-nine games with the Red Sox Doyle averaged over .300 for the first, and only, time in his career. When hard-luck Doug Griffin was seriously beaned for the second time in the season at the end of August, Doyle had the second base job to himself for most of September’s stretch run, and throughout the American League Championship against the A’s. Griffin had made only one pinch-hit appearance in the Series through five games, while the dependable Denny Doyle had hit safely in every game so far, the only man on either team to do so.