Game Six (36 page)

The most consistent man on the team’s troubled pitching staff remained the remarkable Luis Tiant, who at the age of thirty-five went 21–12, with a 3.06 ERA, and finished fifth in the voting for the Cy Young Award, on a team that hadn’t spent a single day in first place all season. Luis had treated all of the season’s insanity with his customary calm, and simply gone out every fifth game and done his job. In light of the monstrous distractions swirling around him, Tiant’s stellar performance in 1976 has to be considered as perhaps his most remarkable achievement. His parents, Luis Senior and Isabel, were there to watch it all unfold. They never did return to their native Cuba when their visas expired; Luis wouldn’t allow it, knowing how negligible the chances of ever seeing them again would have been, and the family had spent an idyllic year at their home in
Milton, three generations under one roof, when for the first time in his adult life Luis spent many hours talking about the art and craft of pitching with his father. Then, not long after the 1976 season ended, after suffering through a few weeks of poor health, Luis Senior was diagnosed with an advanced, aggressive and inoperable form of cancer; there was nothing they could do, doctors told Luis, but try to make his father’s final weeks as comfortable as possible. With his family around him, very much at peace, Luis Senior left this life on December 9 at Carney Hospital in Boston.

“When my father passed away,” said Tiant a while later, “I had a feeling something would happen to my mother. She felt it, too, but she didn’t want to make me feel sad.”

Three days later, the day before the funeral, during a small gathering with friends and family at their home in Milton, Isabel excused herself and went upstairs to her bedroom, saying she wanted to sit in her favorite chair by the window and spend some time alone with her thoughts. They found her there a short while later; although she had been in good health, Isabel had died quietly of a heart attack or, perhaps more accurately after thirty-six inseparable years with her husband, a broken heart. The end, because they all must end, of a beautiful love story.

So their only son, Luis Tiant, buried his beloved parents together two days later, in twin bronze coffins, side by side at Milton Cemetery. Luis’s teammates Carlton Fisk, and his wife and oldest daughter, and Rick Burleson and his wife, were there, along with hundreds of others to share and mourn his loss. In his eulogy for them, Monsignor John Day said that during their fifteen months in America the Tiants had done “more for international peace and goodwill than all the diplomats put together.” The cheers thundering around Fenway Park on the night that Luis Senior threw out the first ball after their reunion had been offered as “a sign of love and respect for this man and his family—for their devotion and love of family, which had prevailed against all obstacles.” The monsignor closed the service by offering a prayer for the Tiant family, asking that they be given the strength to bear this terrible double blow. Most people,
even close friends and teammates, didn’t know or realize what a deeply religious man Luis Tiant was; it sustained him now.

“I just thank God for answering my prayers,” he said afterward. “To bring them here, and share my best hours, and not be away from them at the end. I have my faith. I accept God’s will.”

ON THE STRENGTH
of free agency, the average major-league salary took another quantum leap forward in 1977, from $52,000 to $74,000, but as the Red Sox had already started to do, now the Reds began to trend downward. In the wake of the Tony Perez trade, what goodwill remained between Reds players and management from the championship years in Cincinnati evaporated like summer rain; the new economic realities had almost instantly reduced the team game of baseball to every man for himself. With only Johnny Bench signed through the coming season, every negotiation became fraught with tension generated by the rising financial tide; Bob Howsam managed to work out three-year deals with Morgan, Foster, and Griffey, and a five-year, $1 million contract for Davey Concepcion, the only Jerry Kapstein client now left on the Reds’ roster. But thirty-five-year-old Cincinnati native Pete Rose, the public face of his franchise now for more than a decade, held out for a better deal all through spring training, trading barbed insults with team officials in the press. Not until the night before Opening Day—which baseball traditionally observed with an afternoon game in Cincinnati, home of the first professional team—did Rose and the Reds reach agreement on a two-year deal. With Rose back on board, the Big Red Machine’s vaunted offense, they had every reason to believe, would continue to roll.

And so it did, but scoring runs remained only half of the game’s complex equation; Cincinnati’s underappreciated pitching staff had suffered crippling losses. With ace Don Gullett gone, none of their aging veterans or new acquisitions stepped in to fill the void, and as the season began, both Gary Nolan and Rawly Eastwick—fed up with team management for different reasons—announced that 1977
would be their last season with the Reds. Ineffective early in the season, Woodie Fryman, the veteran starter obtained in the Perez trade, walked away from his guaranteed contract rather than accept a demotion to the bullpen. With the rising Los Angeles Dodgers off to a blazing start under their new manager, Tommy Lasorda—an old Dodger farmhand friend of Sparky’s—the Reds found themselves already nine and a half games out of first place by the end of May. Despite being desperate for pitching help, the team sent Gary Nolan packing to the Angels before the June 15 trade deadline for a minor leaguer who never panned out. Their closer, Rawly Eastwick, followed him out the door to the Cardinals, for an untested youngster named Doug Capilla, who returned nothing close to equal value. Both trades attracted far less attention on deadline day because in a trade with the Mets Bob Howsam also managed to bring over Tom Seaver, the first legitimate superstar pitcher that Sparky Anderson had ever managed. The intelligent, disciplined Seaver came through for the Reds as advertised, going 14–3 over the remainder of the season, but he couldn’t carry an otherwise woeful pitching staff alone; gutted by the team’s disposal of all Jerry Kapstein’s clients, the arsenal of reliable bullpen arms Captain Hook needed to succeed was empty. Despite banner years by George Foster—who tied Willie Mays’s National League record with 52 home runs, drove in a Reds’ record 149 runs, and won the MVP trophy—and Johnny Bench, a mid-season swoon coupled with the Dodgers’ continued hot play effectively ended the pennant race by the end of July. Cincinnati finished the 1977 season in second place, ten games behind Los Angeles. By the end of the year—the rockiest behind the closed doors of their clubhouse that the Reds had suffered since Sparky’s arrival—even Bob Howsam acknowledged that the absence of the stalwart, stabilizing Tony Perez had wrecked his team’s once perfectly balanced chemistry. The other superstar egos that Big Doggie had always helped deflate and keep in check clashed repeatedly, while the younger players coming up felt continually disrespected by both management and teammates. Meanwhile, for his new team in Montreal, all Tony Perez did was bring the same solid leadership qualities
to their locker room, and drive in ninety-plus runs for the eleventh straight year.

The Red Sox faced startlingly similar problems in 1977. Their offensive prowess as a team hit an all-time peak, as they launched 213 home runs while scoring 859 runs, both franchise records. Carlton Fisk turned in the finest campaign of his long and distinguished career: 26 home runs and 102 RBIs while hitting .315. Second-year player Butch Hobson wrested the third base job from Rico Petrocelli, who announced his retirement during spring training, and knocked 30 homers with 112 RBIs. George Scott banged 33 round trippers, and Bernie Carbo, back home and comfortable in Fenway again, returned to form with 15 home runs off the bench, while hitting .289. Jim Rice’s remarkable talent came to full fruition and he simply dominated the league, 39/114/.320. The wondrous Yaz (who turned thirty-eight during the season) hit 28 homers, with 102 RBIs, and averaged .296. In New York, the arrival of the Yankees’ egocentric free agent Reggie Jackson (prefaced by his infamous “I’m the straw that stirs the drink” comment) led to inevitable clashes with their unstable, alcoholic manager Billy Martin, which climaxed in a nationally televised near fistfight between them in the dugout. Boston had built a six-game lead over New York by midsummer, but ineffective pitching and manager Don Zimmer’s erratic handling of his staff proved their undoing. Following a spring holdout for a long-term contract—which, citing his age, the team’s front office refused to give him—Luis Tiant ended up going only 12–8 on the season, but he still led the team’s starters in wins; Rick Wise won eleven, Ferguson Jenkins only ten, Bill Lee only nine. Due to Zimmer’s incessant tweaking of his rotation, every starter but Tiant and Jenkins ended up spending time in the bullpen. The Red Sox’s expensive free agent reliever Bill Campbell justified his pricey contract by winning thirteen and leading the league in saves with thirty-one, but Zimmer burned out his arm with shortsighted overuse; Campbell would never produce another comparable season.

A festering culture clash also came to a head during the summer
of ’77 between the straightlaced, old school Zimmer and a group of free-spirited souls—empowered now, it seemed, by the mere existence of free agency, to challenge all authority in their way—led by Lee, Wise, Jenkins, and Carbo. The group called themselves the “Buffalo Heads,” after their disparaging nickname for Zimmer, and although their brash irreverence provided great copy for the town’s hipper young sportswriters, the long-term effect on team chemistry would have graver consequences. Boston lost its lead in the East Division by the end of August, and in mid-September, when the hated Yankees, who had momentarily risen above their own raucous personality disputes, took two from the Red Sox in a three-game series, the issue was settled; the Red Sox and Orioles ended the 1977 season tied for second in the division, two and a half games behind New York. The Yankees and Dodgers went on to meet in a memorable World Series that the Bronx Bombers won four games to two, led by Reggie Jackson’s five home runs, including three in the clinching game. Former Red Don Gullett, who had gone 14–4 in his first season for the Yankees and won Game Five of the Series, collected his third straight World Series ring. Reggie Jackson, standing up to ungodly pressures in the toxic crosshairs of the New York media, had transformed himself into one of the sports world’s rare single-name icons. Despite Bob Howsam’s dire predictions about the advent of free agency, attendance and television ratings trended higher throughout both leagues, and given the sudden, startling success of Steinbrenner’s mercenary Yankees, the future of free agency as the shortest path to baseball championships had been affirmed.

Eighty-nine players entered 1977’s free agent draft that fall, and once again as a matter of principle only the Cincinnati Reds refused to play. In Boston, Jean Yawkey fired Dick O’Connell, the one competent general manager her late husband had ever hired, turning the team over to Haywood Sullivan, a onetime minor leaguer and former director of player personnel. That winter, Oakland A’s owner Charles Finley tried yet again to sell his left-handed ace Vida Blue before losing him to free agency, this time to Cincinnati for $1.75 million and a minor leaguer; and once again Commissioner Bowie
Kuhn voided the deal, in the interest of maintaining baseball’s “competitive balance.” At which point the Reds’ sixty-year-old president, Bob Howsam, chief architect of the Big Red Machine, had seen, and had, enough of the game’s new through-the-looking-glass rules. He announced his retirement to a boardroom position before the 1978 season, turning over day-to-day operations of the franchise to his marketing guru and longtime hatchet man Dick Wagner. The abrasive Wagner’s first move was to give away Jack Billingham, the Reds’ winningest pitcher for the last six years, to the Tigers for two middling prospects.

Both Sparky Anderson in Cincinnati and Don Zimmer in Boston announced that they planned to return to a more disciplined managerial style in the upcoming 1978 season. While Cincinnati largely stood pat, Boston made aggressive trades for the Angels’ speedy middle infielder Jerry Remy—again replacing Denny Doyle, the man whose job he’d won three seasons earlier in Anaheim—and the Indians’ dashing young starter Dennis Eckersley, and they reacquired the fiery Dick Drago to shore up their bullpen. All those moves paid off. Tiant and Lee returned to form, Jim Rice got white-hot early, carrying the Red Sox offense—he would win the American League MVP award that year—and by the All-Star break Boston had built a nine-game lead in the East Division. In Cincinnati, thirty-seven-year-old Pete Rose, playing out his final contract year, collected his three thousandth hit and then dominated every sports headline in America with a riveting forty-four-game hitting streak that tied an eighty-one-year-old National League record, during which the Reds kept pace with both the Dodgers and Giants in a tight, three-way West Division race. With his team fourteen games behind Boston, the Yankees’ Billy Martin self-destructed after an escalating string of conflicts, calling out both his star Reggie Jackson and employer George Steinbrenner in the press. (“One’s a born liar, and the other’s convicted.”) Steinbrenner demanded Martin’s resignation and replaced him with the team’s placid former pitching coach Bob Lemon. At this point, a World Series rematch that fall between the Reds and Red Sox seemed increasingly likely.

But as the season wore on, hidden flaws in both teams’ rosters surfaced. Uncertain of his reserves—which once again no longer included the erratic Bernie Carbo, banished to Cleveland in mid-season—Zimmer drove his regulars hard, trying to increase Boston’s lead and secure his own uncertain future as manager, but only succeeded in wearing them out. Despite Sparky’s efficient use of a thin pitching staff, Cincinnati’s lack of solid starters behind Seaver eventually came back to hurt them, and for the first time cracks appeared in their dependable offense: Joe Morgan and Johnny Bench broke down physically, Ken Griffey retreated from the promise of his early seasons, and while George Foster continued to produce, Cesar Geronimo suddenly lost his way at the plate and Dan Driessen proved conclusively that he was no Tony Perez. Without the same depth he’d always had on his bench to paper over those flaws, and despite one last desperate September winning streak, Sparky and the Reds won ninety-two games and finished second, two and a half games behind the Dodgers. Most longtime observers of the team agreed that in light of the problems with which he’d had to contend, 1978 might well have been Sparky Anderson’s finest season as Cincinnati’s manager.