Game Six (21 page)

Tiant went back to the slow curve on the outside corner. Crowley swung and blooped a soft liner off the handle that appeared to move in slow motion toward Burleson at short. The ball bounced once, Burleson fielded it cleanly, and then he turned to make the throw for the force-out at second on Geronimo.

But Denny Doyle wasn’t on the base. With the left-handed Crowley at bat, Doyle had been playing deep in the hole, shaded toward first, and he didn’t have time to get to second ahead of the speedy Geronimo, who had left for second with the crack of the bat. When he realized Doyle wasn’t there, Burleson held up his throw, and by then it was too late to catch Crowley at first.

Runners on first and second now, with two outs, for the Reds.

Since no obvious error had been committed on the play—although Burleson could have been held accountable for not recognizing that Doyle was out of position and making a throw immediately to first—the game’s official scorer up in the press box awarded Crowley with a single, the Reds’ seventh hit of the game.

“Talk about a wholesale base hit,” said Garagiola. “That’s one of those eighty-nine-cent jobs.”

A recognizable shade of red flared up around the Rooster’s neck; he was angry with himself again as he tossed the ball back to Tiant. But Tiant appeared calm and unflappable, even with Pete Rose—now 2–3 against him, seeing the ball well out of Tiant’s hand and
hitting it hard—coming to the plate.

The air taut with tension in Fenway, Darrell Johnson stepped up to the edge of the Red Sox dugout again; had he made the right call? Tiant missed with his first pitch, a fastball, inside and low. Rose, alert and focused, now looked for a pitch to hit; when Tiant threw him the slow curve—the same pitch he’d abused for a single in the fifth—it came in a little high and Rose fouled it into the left field stands.

Tiant tried another fastball, again up in the zone; Rose was ready and spanked it hard up the middle just to the left of the mound, but Burleson, stationed close to second to hold Geronimo close to the bag, glided to his left, scooped it up one-handed, and stepped on second, cleaning up his own mess for the force on Crowley to end the inning.

El Tiante
had dodged another bullet.

IN THE BOTTOM
of the sixth inning the Cincinnati Reds’ fifth pitcher of the game took the mound: twenty-eight-year-old Pedro Rodriguez Borbon. Another discovery of super-scout Ray Shore, the young Borbon had been managed by him during a season in his native Dominican Republic’s Winter League in 1967. Signed initially by the Cardinals before being claimed by the Angels, Borbon appeared in a few games for California late in the 1969 season, but the Angels didn’t hold him in high regard; Shore had Borbon targeted as one of the twenty American League pitchers he liked the most, and Bob Howsam acquired him in a trade after the ’69 season. When Sparky Anderson took over in 1970, he realized that Borbon, as he put it admiringly, was “an absolute animal”: He had the arm to pitch every day, he was fearless on the mound, strong as an ox, and he could literally—as his Reds bullpen mates once discovered on a bet; Borbon took peculiar pride in the strength of his teeth—bite the cover off a baseball. Teammates never needed a bottle opener in the clubhouse; they just handed their bottles to Pedro. In the first inning of his first major-league start, the back half of a doubleheader against
the Padres in 1970, Borbon gave up a three-run home run, then on his first pitch to the next batter tattooed fearsome slugger Nate Colbert with a fastball in the ribs. When Colbert took a few steps toward the mound, Borbon dropped his glove and walked right at him, ready to rumble and God knows what else, before teammates separated them. Sparky just shook his head in wonder; he hadn’t given Borbon the order to throw at Colbert, and rookies just didn’t behave that way in baseball, but Pedro Borbon was an altogether different breed of cat.

Dwight Evans stepped in to open the inning against Borbon, who had only pitched an inning in two appearances in the Series so far. A perfect reflection of his personality, Borbon was a power pitcher who didn’t mess around, going right after hitters with fastball, sinker, slider—all of them thrown hard, all of them moving, most of them in or near the strike zone: He dared you to hit him. Evans watched Borbon’s first fastball, a called strike that appeared to land below his knees; Evans turned and stared at Satch Davidson in disbelief at the call, but said nothing. He watched the next two come in low and outside to take the count to 2–1.

Dwight Evans talked to himself quietly and constantly when he was at the plate, small encouragements—
Come on, let’s go
—and he swung hard at Borbon’s next pitch, a fastball down the middle that he fouled straight back, evening the count at 2–2.

In the 1973 postseason, after establishing himself alongside Clay Carroll as one of the anchors in Sparky’s bullpen, Pedro Borbon achieved a different kind of respect from his teammates during the infamous Pete Rose-Bud Harrelson dustup in Game Three of the National League Championship Series. They already knew he wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody. When he saw the bench-clearing brawl break out after Rose’s hard slide into Harrelson, Borbon immediately tried to rush in from the bullpen, but in his haste couldn’t get the gate to open, so he simply ripped it off its hinges and tossed it to the ground. Borbon ran to the infield and charged into the melee like a berserk marauder—in the middle of the resulting scrum he allegedly bit one of the Mets on the leg—and by the time four teammates could pull him away, his jersey had nearly been torn off. He
put on the cap he’d picked up in the scramble, thinking it was his, and when his teammates pointed out to him that he was wearing a
Mets
cap, Borbon took it off, ferociously ripped it apart with his teeth, spit it out on the field, and for good measure stomped on it. Ever since that incident his teammates had called Borbon “Vampire.”

Borbon came back with the hard slider on the outside corner. Evans leaned in, went with the pitch, and smacked it hard to the right side. Morgan moved to his left to deftly grab the hot shot and throw Evans out at first. One out. Shortstop Rick Burleson stepped in next, and Luis Tiant, wearing his warm-up jacket, moved into the on-deck circle. Bench waved Ken Griffey in a few steps in right field, then called for a sinker, which bounced in the dirt and nicked off of Bench’s right hand for a ball. Although he stood six-one and weighed in at a solid 210 pounds, Johnny Bench had the biggest hands most people had ever seen on a human being, freakishly outsized, almost as if he had an extra knuckle on each finger. He had been photographed a number of times demonstrating one of his favorite stunts: holding
seven
baseballs in each hand. On at least two occasions during his early career—once when his glove got snagged on his shin protector, another time when he was trying to show up a pitcher who wasn’t throwing as hard as Bench thought he should be—Bench had simply reached out and caught major-league fastballs with his massive bare right hand.

Reflecting his hyper-charged metabolism, Pedro Borbon worked fast, hitting the outside corner for a called strike, then missing the same corner low twice in a row to fall behind in the count to Burleson, 3–1. When he missed again high and outside, Burleson trotted down to first with a free pass.

Sparky Anderson immediately popped out of the Reds dugout and walked toward the mound, as always stepping gingerly over the third base foul line. Bench met him at the mound as Sparky reviewed the situation with Borbon—one out, one on—but he was really there to stall for time as he waited to see who Darrell Johnson was going to send up to pinch-hit for Luis Tiant. Assuming Johnson
would bring up a left-handed bat to face Borbon, Sparky had already told Larry Shepard to call the bullpen, where left-hander Will McEnaney was on his feet throwing to backup catcher Bill Plummer. To Sparky’s surprise, he glanced back at home plate over Bench’s shoulder—and did a double-take when he saw Tiant stepping into the batter’s box.

Okay, that makes it easy.

Sparky immediately ended their “conference” on the mound and headed back to the dugout. One out, with a runner on first in the bottom of the sixth, tie game, his entire bench available to him, and his pitcher obviously running out of steam, and Darrell Johnson had decided to let his pitcher bat and, clearly, intended to send him out to start the seventh inning. A few of the Red Sox quietly shook their heads at the decision, questioning their manager’s judgment.

Even while leading them to the World Series, Darrell Johnson had been through a rocky season, only his second as a big-league manager. The forty-seven-year-old Nebraska native had knocked around the minor leagues for most of the 1950s, finally sticking with the Yankees in 1957. He was on their roster, although he didn’t see any action, for both of the back-to-back seven-game World Series that Casey Stengel’s famed pin-striped squad split with Hank Aaron’s Milwaukee Braves. After falling back into the minors, and beginning his career as a manager with a St. Louis Cardinals farm team, Johnson began the 1961 season as a bullpen coach for the Cardinals but was fired along with their manager in early July. He was immediately signed as a player by the Phillies, who then traded him a month later to Cincinnati, who were still in the pennant race and in need of an experienced backstop. Johnson played well in twenty games for Cincinnati, and when the Reds clinched their first pennant in twenty-one years, he reached the World Series for the third time, this time
against
the Yankees, and started two games facing Yanks lefty Whitey Ford, going 2–4 against him. The following spring the Reds released him, and he signed with Baltimore, where Johnson’s playing career soon ended and he began working as a full-
time coach. His peripatetic journey as a baseball lifer continued until he caught on as a coach with the Red Sox in 1968. Three years later he landed the managing job on Boston’s Triple-A franchise, where he worked with and developed many future Red Sox stars: Fisk, Evans, Burleson, and Rice. After leading that team to consecutive playoff appearances, Johnson was finally tapped to succeed the popular Eddie Kasko as the organization’s major-league skipper prior to the 1974 season.

Although most of the younger players he’d gotten to know in the minors remained loyal to him, Johnson had a harder time convincing the veteran Red Sox corps he’d inherited that he was up to the job. He was a stoic, conservative man to begin with, who didn’t like to make a lot of moves on the field, and many of the team’s older players felt he managed less to win than he did not to lose. Johnson also battled a drinking problem, a not uncommon fate for men who’d spent most of their adult lives knocking around the minor leagues. Red Sox players cited at least two occasions during the first half of the 1975 season when Johnson showed up at the stadium for a road game stone drunk—once, with a black eye, at seven in the morning—and they’d had to plant him in a corner of the dugout. He often quarreled with longtime Red Sox radio voice Ned Martin, who seldom liked what he saw from Johnson on the field and wasn’t shy about saying so on the air. Even Carlton Fisk, who’d benefited more than any other current player from Johnson’s tutelage in the minors, felt he wasn’t the same manager he’d known in Louisville. Left-handed starter Bill Lee, who had a particularly contentious relationship with the old-school Johnson, felt that their bullpen coach Don “Bear” Bryant, a player-coach under Johnson during his tenure in Louisville, was in Boston largely to help wrangle the manager after hours and between bars. Tensions over strained communications had come to a head between Johnson and his team early on in the 1975 season, when an angry clubhouse meeting nearly resulted in an open player revolt. Johnson was able to smooth things over with them by promising to pay more attention to his veterans’ point of view, and when the Red Sox went on a mid-season tear to seize the East Division lead that
they never relinquished, winning, as it usually does, rendered most of those fractious disputes a memory. But many still felt they’d won the pennant in spite of their manager, not because of him, and after the Red Sox swept the A’s in the Division Series, Johnson had taken no part in their clubhouse celebration in Oakland, remaining in his office, drinking alone with his off-season hunting buddy, A’s outfielder Joe Rudi.

Once they reached the World Series, the contrast between the cautious, stone-faced Darrell Johnson and the gregarious, masterful managing style of Sparky Anderson could not have been starker. Firmly in command, acting always with conviction, but the first to admit mistakes if his proactive moves didn’t pan out, Sparky handled his team during games like a maestro at the philharmonic. Aware that he’d be facing a notoriously tough and cynical Boston sportswriting corps, Sparky invited them all into his office at Fenway before the Series, and when the
Globe’
s Cliff Keane greeted him as “Busher”—a derisive baseball term used to describe lifers in the minors—Sparky smiled, worked his way through the crowd, and kissed the top of Keane’s bald head.

“I just want you guys to know,” said Sparky, “that’s the way we National Leaguers treat you guys in the American League.”

He’d had the press eating out of his hand ever since. With his rapid-fire wit, accessible emotions, aphoristic insights, and cheerfully fractured way with words, Sparky made their jobs so easy they clamored around him like trained seals. Darrell Johnson always showed up dutifully for their scheduled joint press conferences, but appeared to enjoy them about as much as a root canal, and reporters extracted sentences from him with something near the same ease; his lack of eloquence had become something of an inside joke among the working press. For the first time in a World Series, both managers had also agreed—Johnson reluctantly—to wear wireless microphones during the games and to allow their commentary to be used in the highlight film that would be assembled afterward by Major League Baseball. Sparky, predictably, gave them an avalanche of material and insights to work with. Johnson hardly spoke, and as
the Series advanced, some of the Red Sox players made a joke out of going up to their manager and periodically cursing into the mic that had been duct-taped to the front of his jacket.