Game Six Read online

  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:

  We are pleased to advise you of your nomination and approval to work with us during the 1975 World Series for the telecast of the first and sixth game. $500 a game. Please do not include the color blue in your wardrobe. Good luck. Chet Simmons, NBC Sports.

  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.

  Stockton walked out onto the field after the meeting and caught up with Tony Kubek as the grounds crew rolled out the batting cage. The tall, striking, square-jawed former shortstop, only thirty-nine but ten years retired from the game, still looked fit enough to suit up and play. Stockton mentioned that for the last two days the mood around press headquarters at the downtown Statler Hilton had been spiraling toward indifference about this Series, and he wondered if the players would be similarly deflated by the layoff. Kubek looked out at the first players who were trickling onto the field for early stretching and warm-ups.

  “In 1962, we flew back out to San Francisco for Game Six with a three-to-two lead, just like Cincinnati has here. Rained for three straight days out there. Ballplayers are creatures of habit; during the season every minute is scheduled and regulated. Something like that breaks up your routine, it’s unnatural, makes you deeply uneasy. It got to the point where everybody just wanted to get it over with and go home.”

  Players trotted into the outfield, gingerly testing their footing in the rain-soaked turf. Others began tossing across the sidelines, stepping back to deeper range, warming up their arms.

  “What was it like to play again?” asked Stockton.

  “When we finally got back on the field, it was as tough as any Series I played in.” Stockton reminded himself that Kubek had played in six—and won three of them—as part of one of the greatest everyday lineups in history. “All of a sudden we were back out there and it dawned on you exactly how much was at stake. And it got to some people.”

  The home team Giants held off the juggernaut Yankees to win that Game Six in 1962 and tie the Series, and Stockton suddenly remembered that Tony Kubek had the next day created the only run of the contest to win Game Seven and the World Series.

  “The biggest advantage in sports is playing in your home park, and you can almost double that advantage here,” said Kubek, who had played more than seventy games in Fenway. “But those guys over there…” He nodded toward where some of the Reds—Pete Rose, Bench, Joe Morgan—had gathered around the batting cage. “They know how to play the game.” Tony paused and said it again, with emphasis.

  “They know how to play the game.”

  As the first crisp cracks of ball on bat and leather filled the air—the relaxed, preliminary rituals of any ball game—Stockton began to feel an expectant buzz build again around the stadium.

  Now we’re ready.

  LATE THAT AFTERNOON, from all around Boston and surrounding environs, lucky ticket holders for Game Six left home or work to make their way downtown and slowly converge on Fenway Park. Optimists arriving without tickets found scalpers outside offering grandstand tickets for as much as $60—face value of $7.50—while buck-fifty seats in the outfield bleachers were going for $35. Standing room along the top of the grandstands would set you back $25. When all those aftermarket transactions concluded that evening, a capacity crowd of 35,205 had flowed through the turnstiles at Fenway. Another eighty or so, mostly enterprising teenagers, found cheaper seats on the girders of a whiskey billboard atop the roof of a Lansdowne Street building, about five hundred feet from home plate.

  In the years to come, the number of people who would later claim to have been at Game Six that night would increase twenty-fold.

  TWO

  If the Boston fans will bear with me, I think I’ll eventually give them the club they deserve, the finest in the country.

  I don’t intend to mess around with a loser.

  TOM YAWKEY, 1932

  Tom Yawkey has a heart the size of a watermelon.

  TED WILLIAMS

  BEFORE THEY MOVED DOWNSTAIRS FOR THE PREGAME ceremonies, the two old men, friends for more than forty years, watched the crowd file in from the owner’s box on the roof of Fenway’s grandstand above the first base line. George Edward “Duffy” Lewis, eighty-seven, was the sole surviving member of the “Picket Line,” what had forever been thought of as the greatest outfield in Red Sox history. Playing alongside future Hall of Famers Harry Hooper in right and Tris Speaker in center, Lewis had patrolled left field in Fenway Park from the day it opened in 1912 until he entered the army in 1918 to serve in World War I. Those had been the glory days of the Boston franchise, winning four of its five World Series titles on the strength of that outfield and, during the last two in 1916 and 1918, the left arm of a phenomenal young pitcher named Babe Ruth.

  During the intervening fifty-seven years, the World Series had only come back to Fenway Park twice.

  Duffy Lewis looked out toward left field and the looming, iconic Green Monster. In his day they hadn’t painted it green yet, or dubbed it a “monster,” but an earlier incarnation of the wall had been there from Opening Day, a quirky concession to the limits of Fenway’s original land rights. Baseball was never played at night in 1912, which meant home plate had to be anchored in the southwest corner of the park so batters in late innings wouldn’t be staring directly into the western setting sun. That set the fixed line of Lansdowne Street just beyond left field, not much more than 320 feet from home, which meant no room for left field bleachers; no room for anything between the edge of the ballpark and Lansdowne Street but a sheer vertical wooden wall, built over thirty feet high at the insistence of the street’s local business owners, who didn’t want baseballs crashing through their fancy glass storefronts. Soon, plastered with a
dvertising, the left field wall morphed into the biggest billboard in town, and ever since had developed its reputation as the most distinct architectural oddity of any American ballpark.

  During Duffy Lewis’s playing days the ground in deep left field sloped sharply up to meet the base of the wall—ten feet of grade in less than thirty feet of space—from the left field line all the way across to center. So adept had Lewis become in patrolling this perilous chunk of real estate, racing up the slope to pluck line drives off the wall with acrobatic abandon and fire the ball back in with his cannon arm, that fans called the area “Duffy’s Cliff” for years after he left the game. Until, in its entirety, the quirky hillock was removed in 1934 by the man standing next to Duffy Lewis in the owner’s box at Fenway before Game Six that night.

  Thomas Austin Yawkey, seventy-two, had been the sole proprietor of the Boston Red Sox since 1933. He made a handshake deal to buy both the ball club and Fenway Park for $1.2 million only four days after his thirtieth birthday, the moment when the vast timber and mining fortune that had long been held in trust for him came legally under his control. The genesis of the Yawkey fortune reached back into the middle of the nineteenth century, a dynasty built on the paper mills and virgin pine forests of the American and Canadian west, and a story rife with enough family melodrama to fill a dozen potboilers. If Tom Yawkey’s young life had been dreamt up by F. Scott Fitzgerald, that generation’s most eloquent chronicler of the moral perils of American wealth and fame, no one would have believed it.