Game Six Read online

  Yawkey’s forty-four years as the sole owner of a professional major-league franchise had now become the longest tenure of any owner in the history of his sport, and the futility of his quest for a World Series title remained equally unmatched. In his service as vice president (now emeritus) of the American League, a post he’d held for twenty years, Yawkey stood tall as a stabilizing figure in a sport evolving through uncertain times. Most of the men who played for him remained fiercely loyal to Yawkey because of his personal kindness and undying private generosity. Although no longer his contemporaries or partners in crime, the Red Sox players had always provided the nearest thing he would ever know to an extended family; those closest to him, like Ted Williams or Carl Yastrzemski, could accurately be described as his surrogate sons. By 1975 the people of New England had bestowed upon both Yawkey and his ballpark the respect and affection they had historically shown to any person or place that in their long memories had stood the test of time; they embraced them both as local monuments. All past sins and transgressions forgiven, the Sox’s benevolent monarch had at last become beloved in his adopted town. His team hadn’t suffered another losing season since their “Impossible Dream” year; they were a perennial front-line contender now, and winning a World Series was no longer just an achievement that Red Sox fans craved for themselves; they had embraced it as a sacred and sentimental responsibility: “Let’s win one for good old Tom Yawkey.”

  AT EIGHT O’CLOCK, Yawkey escorted Duffy Lewis from his rooftop perch down through the stands to the playing field for the opening rituals of Game Six. Red Sox officials parted the crowd ahead of them, but as always, Yawkey stopped to offer a soft hand and exchange smiles or encouraging words with the admiring fans he greeted along the way. When they finally reached the field, the proceedings were called to order by Fenway’s longtime PA announcer Sherm Feller, who greeted the crowd with his signature phrase, offered in his familiar gravelly baritone: “Attention please, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to Fenway Park.” After “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played by veteran organist John Kiley on his Hammond X-66, Duffy Lewis hobbled toward the mound to throw out the ceremonial first pitch for Game Six, and his introduction was greeted by a long and emotional ovation.

  Lewis had thrown out the first pitch on Opening Day for the 1975 season back in April, when the Brewers came to Boston with Hank Aaron, making his debut in the American League after breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record, in order to finish his career back where it began in Milwaukee. After his own playing days ended, Duffy had put in twenty-five years as traveling secretary for the Boston Braves, the city’s longtime National League franchise—which moved to Milwaukee in 1953—and he had known Aaron when they were both with the Braves. Now, after the Red Sox’s dramatic charge to this World Series, Tom Yawkey had brought Duffy back as a good luck talisman for the difficult task ahead in Game Six. Whispered stories passed between the generations in the stands, revived memories of this half-forgotten ghost of greatness past—See that old man down there? He knew Babe Ruth, they were teammates together. That’s right, Babe Ruth played for the Red Sox back then, and Duffy saw the Babe hit his first home run. Duffy could hit, too; he hit over .400 in the Series in 1915. The consensus seemed to be that surely his presence augured well for the business at hand, and the crowd cheered wildly as Duffy’s throw reached Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk on the fly.

  Tom Yawkey watched quietly, seated beside Commissioner Bowie Kuhn in the front row, just to the left of home plate, before returning to his private box upstairs. Every person in that crowd knew how badly their team’s owner wanted a World Series trophy, and seemed ready and determined to will their Red Sox to victory that night. Yawkey had traveled to Oakland for the one-game conclusion of their surprising sweep of the A’s in the League Championship, and had also gone with the team on their recent trip to Cincinnati, but he had been taken ill there and instead of braving the cool night air in the stands at Riverfront Stadium had watched Games Three and Four on television in a room off the visitors’ clubhouse. He then flew back to Boston early on the day of Game Five, which he watched from his suite at the Ritz. It was explained to the press that Yawkey was suffering from the same heavy chest cold that had hit many of his players, including Luis Tiant and Red Sox right fielder Dwight Evans.

  With the exception of his wife, Jean, and a few team executives, no one else in the stadium that night of Game Six knew that this year’s quest for a championship had taken on an even starker urgency: The seventy-two-year-old Yawkey had recently been diagnosed with leukemia, was already undergoing chemotherapy at New England Baptist Hospital, and had less than nine months to live.

  THREE

  Baseball is a private game.

  GEORGE PLIMPTON

  FOR GEORGE “SPARKY” ANDERSON, HALF OF THE JOB OF managing a game was over by the time the ink was dry on his lineup card.

  Hell, we played a hundred and sixty-five games already—and we won a hundred and eleven of ’em, by the way—you know what your fellas can do, just let ’em go out there and play!

  It didn’t hurt that four of the men in his everyday lineup would amass Hall of Fame–level credentials, and three of the other four, at one time or another in their careers, were or would be All-Star-caliber players. The Reds had been called the “Big Red Machine” since the phrase first appeared on their yearbook in 1970; Pete Rose always claimed he’d jokingly coined the name to distinguish the team from an antique Ford he had dubbed the “Little Red Machine.” Whatever its genesis, the “Machine” tag stuck—and became a key to Cincinnati’s extraordinary marketing of the team—but 1975 was the first year people began to refer to Sparky’s starters out on the field as the “Great Eight.”

  Pitchers—now, they’re a different category—their own category, if you know what I’m saying—and they were Shep’s responsibility, Cincinnati Reds pitching coach Larry Shepard. If Sparky needed to know something about one of them during a game, Shep was always right there sitting on the bench to Sparky’s right. Shep had been a pitcher himself; he spoke their language, knew all their peculiar mechanics and goofball tendencies, and he rode them hard, calling everyone “dumb ass” whenever they screwed up.

  Pitchers—what are you gonna do?

  From the men on Anderson’s pitching staff’s perspective, it seemed that at some level their manager didn’t even think of them as ballplayers, not in the same way he did his everyday players. As far as they were concerned, Sparky was in the superstar business, taking care of Rose, Morgan, Bench, and Tony Perez, the team’s glamour guys and poster boys. Unless they came to him first, practically the only time Sparky ever talked directly to a pitcher was when he called one into his office to tell him he was or wasn’t starting—or he was being sent down or traded or released, not exactly pleasant prospects for either party—or when Sparky marched out to the mound to pull one of them out of a game.

  Which Anderson had done in 1975 more frequently than any other manager in the history of baseball—277 times, to be exact. They’d started calling him “Captain Hook” a few years before for just that reason. At one point during the ’75 season the Reds staff had set a major-league record by going forty-five straight starts without one of their pitchers throwing a complete game.

  And that pitcher better not say word one once Sparky got out there to pull him.

  I’m your boss, I’m not out here for your opinion—unless I ask you for it—and I sure as hell ain’t interested in your opinion about the soundness of my judgment.

  Sparky always kept his hands stuffed in his back pockets whenever he went out on the field; that way if he lost his temper during an argument with an umpire, he wouldn’t end up strangling the man, which he’d nearly done once during his fiery minor-league days. Nor did he want to show up the pitcher he’d come to yank—if he protested—by means of an eloquent gesture. Sparky had strict rules about decorum for everything that took place, on or off the field—and he made doggone sure from the first day of
spring training on that every last Red knew them.

  Don’t you hand me that damn ball until I reach out and ask you for it. We’re professionals out here. We’ve got another man coming in to do this job now, and we’ll all damn well stand here together like a team and wait until he’s on his way.

  As soon as the summoned reliever reached the edge of the infield, Sparky reached out, took the ball, slapped his departing pitcher on the ass to start him toward the showers, then handed it to the next guy once he got there, laid out the situation and what he expected of him, slapped him on the ass, and trotted back to his place on the bench.

  What the hell am I gonna tell anybody about pitching? I played one season in the majors and hit .218! That’s what we’re paying Shep for, and if I need another opinion, hell, I got Johnny Bench behind the plate. Think he don’t know how a guy’s throwing? You want to know how good and smart Bench is? God reached down and touched his mama when she was carrying him, that’s the only way to explain it, because he plays his position better than anybody else played theirs in the history of the game. Period.

  Sparky, of course, knew a great deal more about pitching and his pitchers than he let on, but he never second-guessed his catcher; a glance, a gesture, a quiet word from Bench (“He’s done”) was all he needed to reach for the hook. Sparky was a worrier, by nature; and nothing provoked more of it than the mysterious souls of pitchers.

  But the source of his torment that Tuesday afternoon, and during the previous night’s fitful sleep, the reason he’d fretted over this lineup for an hour as he chain-smoked in his little rat-hole cubby off the cramped visitors’ clubhouse at Fenway, was right there near the top of the card, just below the name he’d written in almost every day for the last six years: “PETE ROSE.”

  Who hits behind Peter Edward in the two spot tonight, Morgan or Griffey?

  Second baseman Joe Morgan was about to be named the National League’s Most Valuable Player for the 1975 season; he was the engine of Cincinnati’s offense, the man whose acquisition by trade from Houston in late 1971—a move Sparky requested and campaigned hard for from the Reds’ front office—had proved to be the missing piece that kicked the Big Red Machine into overdrive. Sparky had slotted Morgan into that second spot in the order since the day he arrived, and the results had been stunning—they reached the Series in Morgan’s first season with them, losing in seven games to Charles Finley’s A’s—but they’d fallen short the next two years. They lost to the Mets in a bare-knuckle National League Championship Series in 1973, and although they still won ninety-eight regular season games in 1974, an emerging Dodgers team had edged them out of the Western Division Championship by four games.

  And in case anyone needed reminding, the Reds hadn’t won this Series yet either, even if they did lead three games to two.

  One radical lineup change Sparky made earlier in the 1975 season had propelled the Reds to the National League pennant and a club record 108 regular season wins, the most racked up by any National League team since the 1909 Pirates. The Reds had limped to a disappointing start that spring, stuck at .500 through the first five weeks, for a reason that Anderson readily identified but couldn’t find the right player to solve. Third base had been the weak link in his formidable everyday lineup for three years, on both sides of the ball; the Reds were also flush with a group of promising young outfielders who needed a place to play and develop. In a flash of inspiration during infield practice before a game in early May, Sparky asked his perennial All-Star left fielder and team captain Pete Rose—he always called him “Peter Edward”—if he’d consider moving to third.

  “I’m not telling,” said Sparky. “I’m just asking.”

  Instead of laughing or scoffing or brushing off the suggestion—the prerogative of any star of his stature then, and the automatic response of almost any player today—Rose instantly grasped the big picture.

  “When?” asked Rose.

  “Tomorrow too soon?” asked Anderson, then adding what he knew would be the clincher. “We’re on Game of the Week.”

  “Whatever you need, Skip,” Rose said, and went looking for an infielder’s glove to borrow.

  Rose had come up through the Reds farm system as a second baseman, and began his big-league career there, but he hadn’t played the infield in nine years, and only a handful of games ever at what he called “the coffin corner”—which he’d hated at the time—way back in 1966. Positioned as much as twenty-five feet closer to the batter, third base is a much more instinctive defensive position than second, making greater demands on a player’s reflexes, hands, footwork, and arm. Pete characteristically charged straight at the challenge, pestering Reds first base coach George Scherger—and wearing him out in the process—into hitting him hundreds of grounders. Exhibiting a lot more enthusiasm than skill, Pete attacked the ball like a commando trying to throw himself on a hand grenade. (Reds announcer Marty Brennaman said that in his first game at third Rose “looked like a monkey playing with a football.”) Black and blue from the pounding he’d taken—wearing a heavily padded jockstrap because of it—within a week Rose told Sparky he loved playing third because it put him right in the middle of the action. He took relentless ribbing from his teammates for his Cro-Magnon fielding style—that infield already included three smooth, perennial Gold Glovers in Bench, Morgan, and shortstop Dave Concepcion—but Rose was an all-world trash talker who always gave as good as he got, and all their provocation did was make him work even harder. Penciling Rose in at third solved Sparky’s other problem by opening up left field for twenty-six-year-old George Foster, a prodigious bat and decent fielder with a powerful but erratic throwing arm who’d always seemed slightly out of his depth in right or center. Putting Foster in left allowed Sparky to install twenty-four-year-old second-year man Ken Griffey, a phenomenal athlete and former football star who was still relatively new to baseball, as his everyday right fielder.

  And with that, voilà: Particularly on the artificial turf of their home field, Riverfront Stadium, adding Griffey’s speed near the top of the lineup, between Rose and Morgan—and Foster’s power in the sixth spot, after Bench and first baseman Perez—revitalized the Reds’ dormant offense, and the Big Red Machine kicked into overdrive. They won forty-one of their next fifty games; by the All-Star break Cincinnati led the National League’s West Division by twelve and a half games. Winning 96 of their final 138 games, the Reds clinched their division by 20 during the first week of September, then marched right on to dust the powerful Pittsburgh Pirates in a three-game sweep of the National League Championship, to reach their third World Series in six years.

  And Pete Rose, just as he’d predicted when he switched positions, made the 1975 National League All-Star team and would spend most of the rest of his career at third base.

  All the experts in the national press had picked these rampaging Reds to walk all over the underdog Red Sox in this World Series, but with unexpected grit Boston had pushed them hard into this sixth game and shocked everyone in the sport, with the possible exception of George Anderson, who never took anything about his team’s prospects, or anything in baseball for that matter, for granted.

  After nearly seven years in the minors, Anderson saw his own baseball dreams crash and burn after a single mediocre season in 1959 playing second base for the bottom-dwelling Philadelphia Phillies. The only record he established was hardly one to brag about: most games ever played by a player who only spent one year in the major leagues. He hung around for four more years playing for Toronto in Triple-A, the top tier of the minors, hoping for another chance, but Sparky never made it back to the Show, picking up odd jobs to make ends meet in the off-season back home in California. Turning thirty and facing facts, but determined to stay in baseball, and without an education to provide for his young family in any other arena, Anderson decided that managing in the game he knew so thoroughly represented his best and only chance. He received crucial advice and encouragement from the last man he’d played for in the mi
nors, Charlie Dressen, who’d managed the sensational Brooklyn Dodgers in the early 1950s. Once he was given the chance, Sparky’s instincts, energy, and aptitude manifested with stunning immediacy; working his way up through the sport’s rural backwaters, the minor-league teams he managed won four consecutive pennants in four different leagues, culminating in a championship for Cincinnati’s Double-A affiliate in Asheville, North Carolina. That earned him his first ticket back to the bigs the following year, as a third base coach for the San Diego Padres in 1969, at which point thirty-five-year-old Sparky Anderson had begun to be talked about by baseball executives as major-league managerial timber, and sooner rather than later.

  An opportunity to run Gene Autry’s California Angels club appeared to be in the offing, when the Cincinnati Reds’ general manager Bob Howsam, a fan from Anderson’s winning year for them at Asheville, made a preemptive strike and offered him the Reds managerial job for the upcoming 1970 season. Sparky had seen how good the Reds looked up close during his season with the Padres and leapt at the chance, but his selection came as a shock; few people outside of baseball, and almost nobody in the Midwest, even knew who he was. And when the team introduced him that winter, Anderson rocked the conservative Cincinnati press by guaranteeing they’d reach the World Series that fall—and damn if he didn’t then go on to deliver. He’d learned to temper his public enthusiasms, and regretted that early prediction as boasting or blabbing—I talk too much when I’m nervous, and I’m almost always nervous—ever since.

  The 1970 Cincinnati Reds were a veteran squad, packed with a host of gifted players who had never quite gelled as a team, and having watched managers come and go over the years, they greeted this peppery little bush leaguer with open skepticism. After they stopped asking “Sparky who?” they called him “the minor-league motherfucker.” Sparky saw it, heard it, sensed it—he could always read people—and told them straight off: You don’t have to like me. You don’t have to respect me. I’m here to earn your respect. He started by taking the time to get to know them and their families, comprehending who each of these men was inside and what they needed not just as players but as people. From day one of spring training in 1970, Sparky installed the same rigorous, regimented training program that had been a crucial component of the Dodgers’ system in which he’d grown up. The Reds’ veterans grumbled—catcher Johnny Bench called their camp that year “Stalag 17”—but the team emerged from Florida in tremendous physical shape. Anderson also recognized the corresponding values of imposing strict discipline while maintaining each man’s self-respect, and had an unerring instinct for keeping that equation in balance. Managers in baseball then still held absolute authority; Sparky wielded his without lording it over you, although God help you if you pushed him too far. Whenever the Reds needed a shakeup, he’d call a team meeting, then single out and rip one of his superstars, who were tough enough to take it, and smart enough to realize that he was sending a message to the rest of the squad. By the end of their first season together Sparky had brought each of his men face-to-face with the mirror, and from then on they gave him everything they had. Anderson knew that he’d inherited a unique core of talent, and he was always first to acknowledge the part that luck had played in landing where he had when he had, but it took skill, toughness, psychology, street smarts, attention to detail, and bone-grinding hard work to keep adding the right pieces and then forge all that talent into a team. Sparky’s philosophy as a manager of a team this deep and strong was simple: If the clubhouse was under control, the field would take care of itself, and the Reds’ record since he’d taken over offered irrefutable evidence. The Big Red Machine had won more games during the 1970s than any other team in baseball.