Game Six (19 page)

Tiant’s fourth pitch to Armbrister finally caught the outside corner for a strike, 3–1.

Red Sox manager Darrell Johnson came back out of the dugout to pull his pitcher Jim Willoughby from the game and bring in left-hander Rogelio “Roger” Moret to face Pete Rose, while Curt Gowdy, who had been handed the baseball rule book by his producer Jay Scott—who was himself a part-time Triple-A umpire—read the relevant rule 7.09 in its entirety on the air. After hearing the rule out loud, Tony Kubek reiterated his opinion that Armbrister had clearly interfered with and/or impeded Fisk’s ability to field the ball. While Rose waited as Moret warmed up, he heard Fisk and Barnett continuing to jaw at each other, and later said, “Fisk was the maddest I’d seen anyone in a long time—and he had a right to be—so for once in my life I decided to keep my mouth shut.” Once Rose stepped into the box, Fisk got his head back in the game and remembered they had decided to put Rose on first with an intentional walk to load the bases with nobody out. After Moret’s four throws, Rose sprinted down to first, tossing his bat to the bat boy, and Sparky sent up his best right-handed pinch hitter, Merv Rettenmund, to bat for right fielder Ken Griffey. After Moret struck out Rettenmund for the inning’s first out, Darrell Johnson moved the Red Sox infield back to double-play depth and waved in his outfielders toward the edge of the grass, giving them a chance to double-up Geronimo at home on any ball hit in the air to the shallow outfield. Joe Morgan came to the plate, worked the count to 2–1, then drove an outside fastball into the gap in left center field, where it landed well past the drawn-in
Fred Lynn. Geronimo trotted home with the winning run, and just like that the Reds had won Game Three, 6–5, and taken the lead in the Series.

Tiant’s fifth pitch missed high again, and Ed Armbrister trotted down to first without ever having taken the bat off his shoulder, the second man Tiant had walked in the game.

The incident that ended Game Three in Cincinnati’s favor generated enormous controversy, and divided opinions along strict party lines: Boston’s players and fans saw only injustice; Reds supporters said Barnett’s decision was by its very nature a judgment call and couldn’t be questioned. Passions ran hot in the Red Sox dressing room afterward; a furious Carlton Fisk repeatedly slammed his mask into a wall, while many of his teammates stomped around screaming and shouting. In the postgame press conference, Fisk and Darrell Johnson continued to rip Barnett, with Fisk saying it was time to look around for better umpires while Johnson ill-advisedly suggested that Barnett might want to buy a “personal insurance policy.” Sparky Anderson admitted in the press conference that had the same call gone against him he “probably would have gone insane, but it’s over and the issue is closed.” Larry Barnett and his umpiring crew, who reviewed the play on video for an hour after the game, continued to defend his call. The next day Ed Armbrister continued to maintain his innocence, after repeatedly viewing the replay on television. Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee, always good for a pithy quote, said bitterly that “the Series is now even: one for us, one for the Reds, and one for the umps.” Editorials around the country used the incident as exhibit A for the argument that baseball should employ a policy of instant video replay. Sparky’s last wry word on the rhubarb put it all in perspective: “The fact that guys all winter in bars will be arguing over this play is good for baseball.”

The Armbrister-Fisk collision had overnight become the most scrutinized six seconds of footage since the Zapruder film—the case was reviewed the next day in criminal law classes at Harvard and Yale—but the fact remained that for the second time in a row
the Red Sox had let a World Series game slip away from them in the final inning, and the outrage all the Boston players voiced afterward had as much to do with their frustration at themselves as it did with Larry Barnett. The more uncomfortable truth was that Fisk didn’t have to make that aggressive throw to second, a low-percentage play at best with the speedy Geronimo running from first on contact, and he also could have easily tagged Armbrister right there out in front of the plate or thrown him out at first. The probability remained that Fisk had tagged Armbrister in any case while trying to move him out of the way—and that Barnett missed that part of the play as well—but this was hardly even mentioned in the postmortems. If Barnett had made that call and Fisk had held on to the ball, Geronimo would have stopped at second with one out; that would have allowed the Red Sox to walk Rose, create a double-play situation, and pitch more aggressively to Griffey. They might still have gone on to lose the game, we’ll never know; as it happened, all that bile and anger stirred up about Barnett’s actions would soon have a very real and regrettable consequence.

Pete Rose came to the plate for his third at bat against Tiant in Game Six. It’s an old baseball adage that a pitcher holds an edge over hitters the first time through the lineup, while the second time through the odds even up as hitters adjust to the pitcher’s speed and style, and by the third time through, the advantage shifts to the batter. Rose’s at bat marked the start of the Reds’ third look at Tiant in Game Six, in their third game against him in the last eleven days; the question now was could Luis Tiant continue to outfox a lineup stacked with the most professional hitters in the world, or would this be the moment they figured him out and momentum shifted back to the Reds?

On Tiant’s first pitch, Rose tried to drop a surprise drag bunt down toward third, but fouled the low-and-away fastball into the stands above the Reds’ dugout.

Umpires for the World Series used to be selected on merit by their respective leagues, but after a one-day walkout staged by the then
two-year-old umpires union nearly upended the 1970 postseason, the men in blue had since bargained hard for better wages and working conditions. In 1974 their union pushed through a ruling that the World Series would henceforth be staffed by a crew drawn in random rotation from the pool of all umpires with at least six years of major-league experience, which in the minds of many players and managers simply ensured and rewarded mediocrity. By some strange luck of the draw, all six umpires for the 1975 World Series were working in their first Fall Classic. (Hearing that fact before the Series, Carl Yastrzemski had snorted contemptuously: “Then why don’t they just rotate the teams?”) Thirty-year-old Larry Barnett had been an American League umpire for seven years, garnering average reviews for his work, but by the time the World Series shifted back to Boston for Game Six, he had received a sack full of hideous hate mail for his controversial call in Game Three. An anonymous telegram had also been sent directly to his home in Prospect, Ohio, that threatened not only his life but that of his wife and two-year-old daughter. Local police immediately placed a twenty-four-hour guard on the Barnett house and family, and the FBI quickly came in to investigate at the behest of Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. Since arriving back in Boston on Friday, throughout the rain delay over the weekend, and that afternoon when he arrived at Fenway—even tonight, from in the stands, by agents stationed near where he was working the game at third base—Larry Barnett, scared half to death, had been under the watchful eyes of an FBI protective detail larger than the one that had protected former secretary of state Henry Kissinger at a game earlier in the Series.

Rose stepped back into the box and watched Tiant’s second pitch sail high and away for a ball. Tiant asked for another ball, stared in for the sign, and delivered an excellent low fastball that appeared to catch the outside corner, but Davidson called it a ball, 2–1. Rose and Fisk, who had been carrying on a casual, needling back-and-forth with each other throughout the Series, debated the merits of that pitch, while Fisk set up for the next one.

The FBI agents guarding Larry Barnett weren’t the only federal officers in attendance that night at Fenway. A Secret Service squad
was also in the stands guarding the oldest son of President Gerald Ford, twenty-five-year-old Michael Ford, who was there watching the game. A longtime respected congressman from Michigan and the former minority leader of the House of Representatives, Gerald Ford had been elevated to the office of vice president in 1973 by President Richard Nixon, after Nixon’s disgraced VP, Spiro Agnew, under investigation for charges of bribery, conspiracy, and extortion committed during his prior tenure as the governor of Maryland, had been allowed to plead no contest to a single charge of tax evasion as long as he resigned. Less than a year later, when President Nixon himself was forced to abdicate his office under even darker clouds of criminality and misconduct, Gerald Ford became the thirty-eighth President of the United States, the only man in American history to reach the White House without ever winning election to either executive position. Although he had already made it clear he intended to run as the incumbent in the upcoming 1976 election, Ford’s formerly spotless reputation had suffered a serious blow a month after taking office, when he issued a general pardon for Richard Nixon, indemnifying him against the threat of any future prosecution.

Tiant came back with the same pitch, a sizzling fastball that nailed Fisk’s target on the outside corner; Davidson called it a strike to even the count at 2–2.

Although an inaccurate public image of Ford as a clumsy bumbler had already taken root—he had a bad knee that occasionally buckled and resulted in awkward spills—he was actually the most accomplished athlete ever to hold the nation’s highest office; playing both linebacker and center, he had anchored the University of Michigan’s football team during back-to-back national championships in the early 1930s, and retained a lifelong fan’s interest in every major American sport. There had been talk about President Ford attending a World Series game in Boston, but his chief of staff—an ambitious young political operative from Wyoming named Dick Cheney—had discouraged the idea. Security around the entire Ford family had been tightened severely during the previous month, after
two bizarre and inept assassination attempts had been made on the President within weeks of each other in California. On September 5, a deranged former Charles Manson acolyte named Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, while dressed in a blood red nun’s habit, had pointed a loaded .45 automatic at President Ford during his appearance at a public park in Sacramento but was subdued before she could pull the trigger. Seventeen days later, on a crowded street outside the President’s hotel in downtown San Francisco, a frumpy middle-aged housewife, five-time divorcee, and professional accountant named Sarah Jane Moore fired a single shot at Ford with a .38 revolver and missed before being tackled by an alert bystander.

Tiant waited until he saw the sign from Fisk he wanted—another fastball, low and away—and Rose fought it off, fouling it out of play into the stands near third base, still 2–2.

Prior to her assassination attempt, Sarah Jane Moore had been peripherally connected to a bizarre story that had competed with the downfall of Richard Nixon as a principal obsession of American culture over the previous two years: the kidnapping in 1974 of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst. The nineteen-year-old granddaughter of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, Patty Hearst had been taken at gunpoint from her Berkeley, California, apartment by a scruffy, heavily armed left-wing group of urban anarchists who called themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army, better known in months to come as the SLA. After trying and failing to negotiate Hearst’s return for the release of some of their jailed comrades, the SLA demanded that her old-money family—guilty of countless but unspecified “crimes against the people”—establish an organization to provide food to poor Californians in exchange for Patty’s release. Her father complied by immediately creating People In Need (P.I.N.) and giving away more than $6 million worth of food to the poor and indigent in the San Francisco area. Sarah Jane Moore, reportedly obsessed with all aspects of the Hearst case, intersected the story here when she was hired as a bookkeeper for P.I.N. and quickly asserted herself into the organization’s daily operations. Instead of holding up their end of the bargain, the SLA responded by claiming
that the food hadn’t been good enough, and Patty Hearst would remain their prisoner.

Tiant came back with a fastball again, falling off to the left of the mound and missing high and away, a full count now to Rose, 3–2. Rose immediately thought that the location and Tiant’s off-balance follow-through might be an indication that the pitcher was beginning to tire.

The real shocker came a month later, when Patricia Hearst, after enduring what was later revealed to be weeks of unrelenting isolation, brainwashing, and sexual abuse, announced in a tape recording sent to the press that she had joined the SLA and would henceforth be known by her revolutionary name of “Tania” she was soon afterward photographed carrying an M1 automatic rifle during a San Francisco bank robbery committed by the group. “Tania” and the rest of the criminal SLA gang remained on the loose, considered armed and dangerous, and Patty Hearst joined them on the FBI’s ten most wanted list.

With Armbrister running on the pitch, Tiant threw another high fastball that Rose fouled straight back—it ended up in the hands of Dick Stockton up in the open-air broadcast booth, just to the third base side of home; Garagiola and Kubek wisely ducked—having confirmed Rose’s opinion that Tiant was losing his edge and might finally be ripe for the plucking.

After six of the SLA’s leaders were killed during a bloody shootout with a Los Angeles SWAT team in May of 1974, Patricia Hearst continued to elude authorities for more than fifteen months, until she was finally arrested without resistance in a San Francisco apartment on September 18, 1975. During those intervening months, the increasingly unstable Sarah Jane Moore had been forced out of her job at P.I.N., fallen in with some ex-con radicals connected to the SLA, become a part-time informant for the FBI against them, and claimed the Bureau then assigned her to go undercover into another Bay Area Marxist revolutionary cell. That group had no sooner converted the malleable Moore to their wacko radical manifesto when her FBI connection became public knowledge, both sides dropped
her like a leper, and she spiraled into a delusional state that spawned a welter of violent fantasies. Some of those apparently involved “rescuing” the recently collared Patty Hearst from federal captivity, and four days after Patty Hearst’s arrest—connecting dots that only a disintegrating mind could perceive—Moore took her shot at President Ford.