Game Six (28 page)

Bench did exactly that, but Darcy’s best fastballs had movement on them, and this one tailed away from the left-hander, and Bernie swung hard again and missed again, strike three, and the Red Sox were done in the bottom of the tenth. For the moment, Pat Darcy had answered Sparky’s prayers.

So transported had Bernie Carbo been by the ecstasy of his eighth-inning pinch-hit home run that for decades afterward, until he turned sixty, he wouldn’t remember that he’d even batted a second time in Game Six.

A
FTER MIDNIGHT NOW, THE BRIGHT FULL MOON HUNG
in a cool clear sky over Fenway. The wind had faltered some, the air felt electrically charged. A momentary lull in the lurching swings of momentum left the crowd quieter than they’d been since the ninth inning, worn out by surges and screeching halts of adrenaline. Sparky began to allow himself to think that his Reds might have just weathered the storm, maybe they could steal this one back now to take the Series; in support of that hope he had the top of his lineup coming to the plate as the eleventh inning began.

For the last two weeks Pete Rose had never seen the ball better:
It looked like a beach ball,
he said. He’d hit everything Boston had thrown at him on the screws since Game One. And through all the whipsaw charges, retreats, and reversals of fortune on this night, being the competitor he was, he’d never enjoyed himself more. He turned to Carlton Fisk as he dug into the batter’s box to open the inning and said: “This is some kind of game, isn’t it?”

At least three other members of the Red Sox and an umpire remember Pete saying to them, at one point or another in the long eventful evening:
How much fun is this? What a great game. Can you believe this?
In all sincerity. This wasn’t just about winning, it was the lure of the arena, the juice, being in the action; a night like Game Six was what Pete Rose, with all his contradictions and complexities, had lived for and hoped to experience his entire life.

Dick Drago began his third inning of work with a slider that popped off of Fisk’s glove outside for ball one. It wasn’t nearly as much fun for Drago at this moment. Twenty-seven pitches in now—one of his longest stints of the season—he would have to rely on the stamina and guts he’d developed during his years as a starter to get through this inning, surely his last; he was due up to lead off the bottom of the inning.

Drago came back with a low heater, and Rose, seeing it all the way, fouled it back for strike one.

Rose had gone 2–5 on the evening, and now led all hitters on either team for both hits and average; he’d do anything to get on base now, anything to ignite the stacked lineup behind him and get his Reds that last, elusive win.

Another low fastball—Drago still had his good stuff—and another foul, as Rose tried to take it to left field, behind in the count 1–2. Fisk dropped one finger to signal fastball and set up inside for the strikeout.

Anything, anything to get on base now, by any means possible.

Drago came inside with his fastball, high, toward the right elbow, and Rose spun around to his left to avoid it, but umpire Satch Davidson immediately and floridly gestured:
It hit him, it hit him!
Rose flipped his bat toward the dugout and sprinted for first; the ball hadn’t even grazed him, but he wasn’t about to argue a gift. Fisk yanked his mask and got up into Davidson’s face again, veins popping in outrage; the crowd booed, and Darrell Johnson came running out from the dugout to join in.

Nowhere near him!
shouted Fisk.
That’s a horrendous call!
Johnson laid into him as well, and as umpires have been doing since the dawn of time, Davidson stood his ground and ignored them both.

Rose stood on first base, grinning, and tried out his line about what a great game this was to Carl Yastrzemski. Yaz wasn’t buying.

Sparky began pacing in the Reds dugout again, clapping his hands.
Here we go, here we go.

Davidson claimed later that he’d seen the ball tick the sleeve of Rose’s shirt. NBC’s slow-motion replay revealed no obvious intimate
or incidental contact between ball and any part of Peter Edward Rose or his uniform. Below the stands, feeling the momentum swing again, Tony Kubek moved over to the Cincinnati clubhouse and started down the tunnel toward the visitors’ dugout.

Dick Drago barked at Satch Davidson, too, but had to eat it, knowing it was a lousy call, and that Rose had sealed the deal with the way he ran to first; he did everything but ask for a tourniquet.
That’s baseball; you have to take the bitter with the bad.
Back to work.

Right fielder Ken Griffey came to the plate. The Red Sox expected him to sacrifice the runner to second; Yaz and Rico crept in at the corners as Rose took his lead. Drago spun around out of his stretch for a pickoff, realized Yaz wasn’t on the bag, then had to soften and alter his throw. Yaz reached back for it, and Drago just avoided what would have been a disastrous balk.

Drago came to the plate with a fastball, outside for a ball, and Griffey showed bunt. Rico and Yaz remained drawn in; the percentage play, that was Sparky’s MO: He would give up this out to advance that runner to second for his RBI men, Morgan and Bench. Griffey confirmed the sign with coach Alex Grammas at third.

Another high fastball, outside, Drago giving him nothing off-speed he could kill into the dirt, and another show of bunt by Griffey, ahead in the count now, 2–0. Anxiety for the infield: Would Sparky take the sacrifice off and let Griffey swing away, try to punch something past the drawn-in corners? The Red Sox stood pat.

Drago came back with the fastball again on the outside corner, and Griffey laid it down, almost too softly into that brick red New England clay; the ball died just inside the third base line, and with mask already flying, Fisk pounced out from behind the plate like a cougar, gathered it up barehanded, and fired to Burleson rushing over to cover second…and Rose, flying in with that reckless trademark headfirst slide, was forced out by the slightest measurable fraction.

Brilliant play by Fisk, the crowd whipped to life again. The sacrifice had failed. Sparky’s stomach turned over.

Griffey on first. One out. Joe Morgan came to the plate. The sacri
fice bunt was off the table now, but the steal or hit-and-run might be in play. A throw to first from Drago checked Griffey back to the bag, then another. Harry Coyle punched up the split screen again for NBC, detailing the action at home and first.

Drago missed outside with heat for ball one. Morgan glanced down at Grammas again for the sign, made sure Griffey wasn’t running. This was his second look at Drago in the game now; he’d been watching closely from the bench and thought Drago was losing velocity. Morgan wanted that fastball again, and he wanted it inside, knowing he could turn on it.

Drago came back with the fastball, but outside, on the corner, popping into Fisk’s glove for a called strike, 1–1. No loss of velocity there.

Drago gathered himself, deep breaths. How many more of those heaters did he have in him?

Morgan saw something he couldn’t quite decipher in the signs from Grammas and left the box, walked down toward third to clarify with his coach; both covered their mouths:
Is he going? No, Joe, look for your pitch.
Morgan turned back to the box.

Denny Doyle saw Fisk flash the sign to Drago for the cutter and shifted to his left, and he signaled back to Dwight Evans so he knew that the hard breaking ball was coming inside. Behind him in right field, Dwight Evans took two steps to his left.

And through Evans’s mind’s eye flashed an isolated, fleeting vision he’d had in a dream some days earlier: making a catch of a Joe Morgan drive that prevented a home run from reaching the seats.

Drago went into his stretch and unleashed his cutter, a two-seam fastball that ran in on a left-hander’s hands and often sawed off the bat at the handle, and the moment he let it go Drago knew he’d made a mistake; the ball was headed inside toward Fisk’s glove but not far enough, and instead of breaking toward Morgan it was running back to the right.

Morgan turned on it.

Dwight Evans saw the flash of Little Joe’s bat in the bright lights and immediately picked up the track of the ball. He’d played right
field in Fenway now for three years, and this one looked like trouble from the jump, if not a home run then at least a line shot off the short right field fence. Normally whenever a left-hander hit an inside pitch this hard toward him, it turned over toward the line, hooking like an errant golf ball, and that’s where Evans headed on instinct.

Where’s he think he’s going?
thought Morgan.
He’ll never get to that ball.

Griffey took off for second at the crack of the bat. Drago’s heart sank as he spun around to watch the ball rocket toward right; he was reduced for a dreadful heartbeat to just another spectator.

But as Evans sprinted toward where his heightened senses had told him this ball was going to land, his chest facing the foul line, he was already on the warning track when he realized it wasn’t breaking toward the line at all, it was headed straight for him; he’d taken the wrong path, and in another split second the ball would be behind him, over his head, right where the Reds’ bullpen ended, three hundred and eighty feet from home plate, where the fence dropped down to little more than a yard high. This ball was about to end up in the seats.

Fred Lynn raced over from center field to back up the play, toward the section of the field he and Yaz called “Death Valley” because the ball just didn’t seem to carry there, but this one had looked gone from the moment it left Morgan’s bat.

Griffey rounded second, motoring for third.

And somehow, at full speed, even losing sight of the ball for a split second, Dwight Evans adjusted in a single step back toward center, threw his glove hand up behind his head, leapt into the air, and came down somehow in balance, with his left knee and hip bumping up against the lowered wall, and, to his infinite surprise and delight, the baseball stuck firmly in the webbing of his glove.

The front row of fans and ushers in the right field bleachers jumped to their feet screaming, the first and so far only ones in Fenway to realize he’d pulled off the impossible grab, and Reds pitcher Clay Kirby—the lone man now in their bullpen, less than ten feet
from the play—flung his arms down in disgust.

The moment he landed, Evans was already working on regaining his composure—knowing they had Griffey dead, he didn’t want to wheel around to his left, which would delay the throw back in by a beat—so he pushed back off the top of the wall with both hands, turned to his right, and unsheathed his rifle arm, firing the ball back toward the infield twenty feet wide of first in foul territory, where Yaz slid over to pick it up on one hop and tossed to Rick Burleson, alertly backing up the play and covering first base all the way from short…and Ken Griffey, who had slammed on the brakes after the catch but only just now made it back around second base, might as well have been out by a mile on the double play that had just abruptly terminated the Reds’ eleventh inning.

Yeah, that’s right,
thought Dick Drago, as he walked to the dugout, his work done for the night, the most relieved man in North America.
Another routine double play.

Oh my God in heaven,
thought Sparky.

Jubilation in Fenway Park.

“Nice
throw,
Dewey,” said Fisk, needling him as they made it back to the dugout.

By answering George Foster’s double play in the ninth, he had saved a certain run, if not two, and if Dwight Evans had not just made the greatest catch in the history of the World Series—as Sparky was the first to say afterward—no man had before or ever since made a better one at a more important moment.

T
O LEAD OFF THE BOTTOM OF THE ELEVENTH, RED SOX
manager Darrell Johnson sent reserve outfielder Rick Miller to pinch-hit in pitcher Dick Drago’s spot. A light-hitting left-handed defensive specialist, the twenty-seven-year-old Miller had seen action in only one World Series game, four innings of work in Game Four, replacing Juan Beniquez in left field to successfully help protect Luis Tiant’s lead. He had grounded out then to Joe Morgan in his only at bat.

As Miller stood in, the crowd, whipped into a frenzy by Evans’s extraordinary catch, clapped and cheered in rhythm, trying to will their Red Sox to get this thing over with
now.
Pat Darcy, beginning his second inning of work, missed outside with a fastball, and then another in the same spot, falling behind to Miller, 2–0.

Miller had attended Michigan State on a scholarship as a pitcher, but after converting to the outfield, he won the Big Ten batting title in his junior year, was named an all-American, and signed with the Red Sox after they made him their number two draft pick in 1969.

Darcy came back with the fastball, and Miller fouled it back, 2–1.

Working his way up through the Red Sox organization at Pittsfield and Pawtucket, Miller became good friends with minor-league teammate Carlton Fisk, and was introduced to Fisk’s younger sister Janet Marie. They began dating, and married three years later, the first full season that Miller joined his now famous brother-in-law on the Boston roster. He believed he was about to earn a spot in the everyday lineup in 1975, but the stunning arrival of Rice and Lynn
had rendered Miller the forgotten man in the Red Sox outfield; dispirited by a lack of playing time, he had nonetheless made valuable contributions through the team’s stretch drive, with key hits and sound defense.

Miller fouled another Darcy fastball down the left field line to even the count at 2–2, then another in the same spot to stay alive.

Joe Garagiola, back in charge of calling play-by-play since the top of the inning, finally made reference to Tony Kubek’s absence—calls had been coming into the NBC switchboard from viewers, concerned about his sudden disappearance—explaining that he was shuttling back and forth between clubhouses, waiting to interview the winners. Down below the stands, Vinnie Orlando—Fenway’s longtime visiting team locker room attendant—opened the door for Kubek and, bending the rules a little for one of his favorite guys in baseball, waved him on in.

Darcy’s fastball appeared to be losing some steam; Miller got good wood on his next outside pitch, spraying it to left field, but right at George Foster, who barely had to move to make the catch for the inning’s first out. After they’d tossed it around, Pete Rose walked the ball back to Darcy, pumping him up with chatter: “Keep it up, kid, you’re doing great. What a game, huh? I’d pay to see this one.”

Red Sox second baseman Denny Doyle followed Miller to the plate, and Darcy started him with a fastball, high for ball one. The crowd had grown quiet again; they needed a rest, or another spark to jump-start them.

Tony Kubek and his NBC soundman Aaron Traeger—lugging the heavy equipment required by Kubek’s cumbersome radio frequency microphone—now crept along the dank, low, ancient tunnel that cut down from the visitors’ clubhouse through the fens toward the Cincinnati dugout.

Darcy followed his first-pitch fastball with a second one, on the outside corner for a called strike. Bench asked for another in the same spot, and Doyle fouled it back for strike two.

As Kubek approached the dugout, he was surprised to find Sparky, standing back down in the shade of the tunnel, watching
the game and sneaking a smoke out of sight of NBC’s roving cameras. Sparky never wanted kids to see him with a cigarette, but a man with this much tension and nervous energy to discharge could only chew so much damn gum.

Bench went right back to the outside fastball, and Doyle pounded it into the dirt right to Davey Concepcion, who hoovered it and threw to Perez at first for the second out. It was Yaz’s turn at the plate, and the Fenway crowd stood and cheered him yet again. Three for five on the night, Yaz watched Darcy’s first fastball catch the inside corner for a strike.

Sparky sensed someone behind him in the tunnel, turned, saw that it was Kubek, then smiled and waved him forward. Kubek, always reluctant to intrude on players or managers while they were on the job, cautiously advanced until he could just catch sight of the field.

Joe Morgan retreated all the way onto the edge of the outfield grass, playing Yaz to pull it hard to right. The veteran took a fearsome cut at Darcy’s next fastball, fouling it straight back and falling quickly behind 0–2.

Sparky dropped his cigarette, ground it out underfoot, took off his cap, and ran his fingers through his silver shock of hair. In the dim light of the tunnel, he looked weary and drained, two decades older than his forty-one years.

Darcy’s next pitch missed low in the dirt, 1–2 now to Yaz.

Sparky looked back at Kubek—he knew Tony understood—and just shook his head.
Boy oh boy.
A stolen moment alone in the tunnel, wrestling with the game’s damnable, obdurate gods. Sparky waved Tony closer, encouraged him to stay, then popped up the three steps to the dugout and went back to work, clapping his hands, prowling up and down the bench. Kubek mounted the steps to where he could see home plate but still remain out of sight from cameras and the crowd.

Yaz drilled Darcy’s next pitch on the ground right toward Concepcion, a carbon copy of the ball he’d just handled from Doyle, the kind of play he could make in his sleep.

Three up, three down for the Red Sox in the home half of the eleventh. Kubek began to wonder: Did either team have the energy left to win this thing?

RICK WISE
walked in from the Boston bullpen to pitch the top of the twelfth inning for the Red Sox. This would be his first appearance in relief all year, but they couldn’t have found a more solid or dependable man to turn to at such a point in this game, World Series, or season. The son of a talented collegiate pitcher, Wise had early on found his footing on the path of life; he’d been a baseball prodigy, leading his team to the Little League World Series at the age of twelve, and his high school team to the Oregon state championship. When he graduated, the Phillies drafted him at seventeen, and he made their club the very next year. A big, strong, durable power pitcher with excellent control, during the next nine seasons he won 129 games in the National League, 86 of them complete games, an astonishing figure by today’s standard. He swung a mean bat, too, cracking fifteen career home runs. On one amazing day at Riverfront Stadium in 1971 Wise tossed a no-hitter against the Big Red Machine and hit two home runs in the bargain, a performance unmatched in baseball history. After seven years anchoring a perpetually mediocre Phillies staff, and in the midst of a difficult contract negotiation, Wise was traded straight up to the Cardinals for starter and future Hall of Famer Steve Carlton. All Wise did over the next two years was lead St. Louis in victories, and notch a win as the starting pitcher in the 1973 All-Star Game, before he was traded again at the end of that season, to the Red Sox, along with teammate and friend Bernie Carbo. A torn shoulder muscle derailed his first year in Boston—an injury he attributed to being overworked in cold weather during the first weeks of the season by his new manager, Darrell Johnson—but Wise had bounced back as strong as ever in 1975, leading the Red Sox with nineteen wins and winning the third game of their sweep over the A’s in the League Championship Series. He had given Boston exactly what they’d hoped for when
they acquired him; a bellwether arm for their starting rotation and plow-horse durability, one of the most dependable, strong-minded men in all of baseball.

Because he had faced the Reds before—often and successfully—Wise had been held back by Darrell Johnson until Game Three in Cincinnati, where he’d no-hit them four years earlier. Although a long time in coming, the Reds that night exacted their revenge on Rick Wise: He gave up five runs, and three home runs, in only four and a third innings, before Johnson sent him to the showers. This was the infamous Armbrister game, when the Red Sox fought back bravely to tie it in the ninth before coming undone after the fateful collision in front of home plate in the tenth. No one had been more disappointed in his performance in that game than Wise himself, but Johnson hadn’t called on him again, and he had been itching to get a redemptive shot at the Reds ever since. The mortal blow during Wise’s stint in Game Three had been a two-run shot struck by catcher Johnny Bench, who was the first man he would now have to confront in the top of the twelfth inning of Game Six.

Although he was never one to complain, and his numbers had been as good as or better than his lofty career averages, 1975 had been one of Johnny Bench’s most difficult seasons. From that early car accident in his first year with the Reds organization, Bench had ever since been regularly beset by a series of injuries and odd misfortunes. Most of them were attributable to the wear and tear of the game’s most demanding physical position and the take-no-prisoners way in which he played it. But in the last month of the 1972 season Bench’s doctor had noticed a spot on his lung during a routine X-ray. Extensive tests failed to determine its nature—although he had never been a smoker, cancer was the obvious concern—and while the Reds were losing their agonizing World Series that fall to the Oakland A’s, Bench was staring down an appointment with the knife once the season ended. Although contemporary diagnostic techniques would have obviated the need for such drastic measures, doctors had to open his chest and split his ribs to get at the lesion, which turned out to be a rare, but completely benign, fungal infection
called San Joaquin Valley Fever. Bench recovered from the postoperative trauma to play 152 games the following year, but posted some of his lowest numbers of the decade.

After another excellent campaign in 1974, Bench had come into 1975 in his best shape in years, but a home plate collision in late April with Giants outfielder Gary Matthews changed all that; the blow shredded the cartilage along the top of his left shoulder. Enduring cortisone shots injected three inches into the joint every few days to dull the severe pain, Bench could barely lift his left arm and needed help just taking off his shirt. The frayed tissue constantly scraped an underlying nerve, making it difficult for him to sleep whenever the medication wore off, but he kept playing with the injury throughout the long march of the ’75 season, missing only twenty games, making the All-Star team yet again, hitting .280 with 28 home runs while driving in 110, leading the club in both categories. For his troubles, he was treated to repeated speculation by hometown sportswriters that the great Johnny Bench was washed up and his extraordinary talent had hit the downhill side. Nor could he find much relief from this bruising treatment at home, privately suffering through the messy public unraveling of his first marriage. Instead of giving in to despair, Bench treated all these slings and arrows with the same wry, privately amused, slightly removed perspective that had always sustained him, and simply went out every day and did his job.

The fourth Red Sox pitcher of the night, and the twelfth to appear in Game Six—a new World Series record—the tall, solid, bespectacled Wise consulted briefly with his catcher, Carlton Fisk, as Johnny Bench dug into the box. Wise started him with a hard fastball, outside for ball one.

Bench had slugged a fastball from Wise out of the park in Cincinnati, a pitch Wise had let stray over the plate without its usual effective movement; as a power pitcher, Wise knew that home runs were a frequent consequence of his worst mistakes, his Achilles’ heel. He was not going to make that same mistake tonight; his next fastball headed for the high outside corner and Bench swung late, skying it
foul all the way above the grandstand directly behind home plate. Fisk hurled his mask aside and raced back to the screen in front of the first row, retreating two steps when the ball spun back away from the screen on the way down, then making the difficult catch as he tumbled back onto his rear. Fisk had retired Bench—the man writers had invariably compared him with since the moment he’d arrived—and Wise had won their rematch.

Tony Perez stepped in, 1–5 on the night. Wise started him with a good-moving fastball that just missed low for ball one.

Perez had gone 0–1 but drawn a walk off Wise in Game Three, and then startled him, with Bench at the plate, by stealing second, something he’d done only once all season; but the Reds’ scouting report had said anyone could run on the deliberate Wise. Perez confirmed it, and Bench had then promptly hit his home run, giving the Reds their early lead.

Having waited patiently for his pitch, Perez watched another hard fastball catch the outside corner to even the count.

Tony Perez had done every last thing the Reds had asked of him ever since they’d signed him as a raw teenager out of Cuba—switching positions, driving in more than ninety runs for nine consecutive years, all the while providing the emotional stability that had cemented this remarkable group of athletes together—and still he had to face the harsh reality that these World Series games might be the last he ever played in a Cincinnati uniform.

Wise’s next fastball cut across the lower half of the zone—the pitch Perez was looking for—but he caught only a fraction of it, fouling it back hard, flush into Carlton Fisk’s mask, 1–2.

Tony Perez was thirty-three now, an age when many good players, so history tells us, begin their inevitable decline. Although he was a year younger than Pete Rose, the Cincinnati front office still considered him the older, more expendable player—but then everyone seemed older than the hyperactive Charlie Hustle, particularly their wise and patient first baseman.

Perez watched another fastball miss just low, evening the count again at 2–2.

No matter that the Big Dog had not yet exhibited a single symptom of decline, an old baseball axiom held that it was far better to rid oneself of a player a year too soon, when he still had marketable value, than a year too late, when the bell had already tolled. Born of the unfettered arrogance granted to baseball’s owners by their age-old, iron-clad reserve clause, such mechanical thinking often led, as it would in Cincinnati before too much longer, to downfall and ruin.