Game Six (37 page)

Meanwhile, in Boston, the old familiar aura of pending disaster returned to Fenway with bad intent. Although they had squandered most of their commanding lead over the previous eight weeks, the Red Sox still led the Yankees—who had charged back from the dead under Bob Lemon—by four games at the start of September, when the Yankees came into Boston for a crucial four-game series. The Red Sox lost the first three games without putting up any visible fight. Tony Kubek, broadcasting one of those games for NBC, remarked in wonder: “This is the first time I’ve ever seen a first-place team chasing a second-place team.” Don Zimmer had both Bill Lee—whom he had banished to the bullpen because of their intractable personality clash—and Luis Tiant available to start the final game of the series, both confirmed Yankee-killers, but he stubbornly refused, sending instead an untested rookie fresh from Pawtucket named Bobby Sprowl to the mound. The Yankees predictably de
stroyed Sprowl—who in his career would never win a
single
major-league game—completed their sweep and moved into a tie for the lead in the East Division; in New York, sportswriters gleefully dubbed their march through New England the “Boston Massacre.” The deflated Red Sox tumbled three and a half games behind the Yankees but then, on the verge of elimination in mid-September, gamely battled back in a manner not seen since the glorious summer of the “Impossible Dream” Boston won twelve of their last fourteen games, including the last eight in a row, to catch the Hated Ones at the finish line and force a one-game playoff at Fenway for the Eastern Division Championship.

Which only succeeded in adding, then, to the list of Boston’s tragic messengers of doom (“Pesky, Gibson, Armbrister…”) the name of Yankees shortstop Bucky “Fucking” Dent. When the light-hitting shortstop’s long pop fly to left field in the seventh inning caught a suddenly refreshed outgoing breeze and just cleared the Monster for a three-run home run, Boston lost their 2–0 lead, the playoff game, the Division Championship, and, many believed, their will to live. And for the third time in three elimination games in the last eleven years, Carl Yastrzemski—a man who deserved so much better—recorded the Red Sox’s final out.

Boston’s new front office team kept Don Zimmer in their dugout but at his insistence dispatched the last of the bedeviling Buffalo Heads: For a warm body named Stan Papi, Bill Lee—seventy-five wins in six seasons—was traded to Montreal, where he would flourish and become a favorite new teammate of Tony Perez. To thirty-eight-year-old Luis Tiant, who had just completed his eighth straight outstanding season for Boston, and most recently pitched a brilliant two-hit shutout against the Blue Jays in the do-or-die final game of 1978 that moved them into the playoff against the Yankees, the Red Sox now offered only a lowball single-year contract. Buddy Leroux, the former Red Sox trainer who had wormed his way into Jean Yawkey’s favor as a partner in the team’s new ownership group, told Tiant bluntly that he was now too old to justify a longer or larger
investment. His fierce pride cut to the bone,
El Tiante
turned his back on Boston and signed a two-year deal with the Yankees for $840,000. Since the day he arrived, Luis Tiant had not only been the most important presence in the Boston clubhouse, he was the greatest money pitcher in the history of the franchise—31–12 lifetime in September and October—and the Red Sox had just shown him the door without so much as a pat on the back.

Carl Yastrzemski wept when he heard the news.

“They’ve torn out our heart and soul,” he said.

In Cincinnati, at around the same time, new hard-line president Dick Wagner let the almost thirty-eight-year-old Pete Rose know that if he wanted to remain a Red he would have to accept a pay cut for the coming 1979 season. Rose made it clear he would have been willing to take a smaller raise than what he could land on the open market to stay with the Reds, but this insult was too much to bear. Privately, the Reds had also begun to hear unsettling reports about Pete’s off-field problems with bookies and gambling losses, the first shadows of the coming scandals that would bulldoze Rose’s last decade in baseball, and decided it was more prudent to cut their ties to him. Embracing his freedom with the enthusiasm of a born hustler, Rose broke off negotiations, made a public relations show of shopping his services around all of baseball, and a few weeks later signed with the Philadelphia Phillies for more than twice what the Reds had just refused to pay him: $810,000 a year for four years.

Then, on November 27, a week after their negotiations with Rose collapsed, and the team had just returned from an exhibition tour of Japan, Dick Wagner flew out to Los Angeles and asked Sparky Anderson to drive down and meet him for breakfast at the LAX Marriott. Sparky assumed that, with Bob Howsam gone, they were finally going to discuss the possibility of signing some free agents during the off-season to fill the team’s widening roster gaps. After a quick meal, Wagner asked Sparky to come up to his room, where Sparky took a seat and Wagner went into the bathroom for a moment. When he came out, Wagner dropped a bombshell.

“I’m not bringing you back,” said Wagner.

Too stunned to speak, Sparky didn’t even ask why, and Wagner offered no explanation. He hugged Sparky when they parted, with tears in his eyes. Sparky drove home to Thousand Oaks in a daze.

Baseball managers have always known they live on a razor’s edge—in the pro game’s three centuries only four managers have lasted with a single franchise for as long as twenty years—but Sparky had just set the Reds’ franchise record for career wins. In nine seasons he had captured five division titles, taken the team to four World Series and won two of them, half of Cincinnati’s total in a hundred years. There was talk that Sparky had lost his once firm grip on his men, or that he was going to quit rather than yield to a front office demand that he make changes on his coaching staff, but none of those issues ever even came up in meaningful discussion. Instead, just like that, nearly tripping over Pete Rose as he made his own way out the door after sixteen seasons in red, Sparky Anderson was gone.

MANAGER DON ZIMMER LOST
his job after the 1979 season. A year later, by late 1980, the triumvirate of Carlton Fisk, Rick Burleson, and Fred Lynn would all be gone from Boston. The Red Sox, flailing under their incompetent, feuding new management, would not seriously compete for or win another American League pennant until 1986. As Peter Gammons then summed it up, the expected dynasty of the great team that the Red Sox had assembled in the mid-seventies lasted exactly one night, from the end of Game Six to the end of Game Seven. Jim Rice and Dewey Evans were the last remaining members of the ’75 squad to participate in 1986’s memorable World Series, which ended in yet another tragic fall for New England’s fans after a less fondly remembered Game Six carved the name “Buckner” into their wall of infamy. Around this time a fanciful, long-suffering Boston sportswriter decided that the Red Sox’s multiple twentieth-century disappointments could only be the product of a Stephen King-like “curse” that sprung from the sale of Babe Ruth—
King himself, fittingly, is a passionate, lifelong Red Sox rooter—and a colorful, half-baked urban legend crept into popular culture. Perhaps the fable provided some irrational comfort for New England’s perpetually bereaved, but it was never more than poppycock; the harder truth behind the Red Sox failures lay in Tom Yawkey’s often willfully obstructionist tendencies as the team’s lord and master—his blind loyalty to front-office sycophants, his early distrust of a “farm” system, his insupportable holding of the color line a decade after Robinson—and the comic-opera mess that his widow and her proxies quickly made of the best roster the team had ever assembled. Most of that sorry legacy was overlooked in favor of his longevity and service to the game when, in 1980, five years after his death, Tom Yawkey became the first man involved with Game Six to be inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame.

The Cincinnati Reds, baseball’s dominant franchise of the 1970s—without question one of the greatest teams of all time—would not make it back to the World Series until 1990, when that endearing underdog edition unexpectedly won a fifth championship title, drawing even with Boston’s all-time mark. But the Reds haven’t been back to the Series since, a small-market team struggling in a deep-pockets game, a victim of the unbalanced business environment that Bob Howsam had so accurately predicted for baseball.

Joe Morgan followed Pete Rose and Sparky out of Cincinnati at the end of his two-year contract, after the 1979 season. He would play his last five seasons in baseball for four different franchises, a proud, aging star with declining skills, reuniting briefly in 1983 with both Pete Rose and Tony Perez on a mercenary Phillies team that lost the World Series to the Orioles. Carl Yastrzemski ended his career in Boston that same fall with striking dignity and an unsurpassed outpouring of emotion both for and from this singular, taciturn man, at the age of forty-four, after twenty-three seasons in a Red Sox uniform, the longest tenure spent by any one player with only one team in all of baseball history. Yastrzemski, the last of his breed, a self-made blue-collar superstar with the work ethic of an immigrant blacksmith, embraced that last great public good-bye
and then disappeared into the private life he’d always craved, and from which he has since only seldom emerged. Of Cincinnati’s four great Hall of Fame-caliber stars, only Johnny Bench would end his career as a Red, after seventeen years. He said good-bye at the end of 1983 as well; although limited by age and injury to first and third base for his last few seasons, Bench played his last game behind the plate at home, where to this day he represents the standard by which all others must be judged for baseball’s most demanding position. Of all his contemporaries, Johnny moved the most seamlessly into life without a uniform: broadcasting, business, public speaking—all unqualified successes. His keen mind and street smarts had led him to figure out how the world worked very early on during his eventful journey out of Binger, Oklahoma; with at last a solid marriage and late fatherhood recently coming his way, it’s a pleasure to report that Johnny Bench now lives a happy, satisfied, and well-examined life. Davey Concepcion followed Bench into retirement in 1988, after nineteen seasons as a Cincinnati Red, amassing numbers that in any other era, for his position, might have secured a ticket to the Hall of Fame. But in the era he played into and that immediately followed him, when shortstops began mysteriously hitting like center fielders—for a variety of reasons, some of which will continue to haunt and shame baseball for another generation—Davey Concepcion’s exemplary career has as a result been mistakenly overlooked. Although he remains something like a god in his native Venezuela, where he now lives, an inspirational figure to kids and countrymen, Concepcion remains somewhat in the shadow of his four former teammates in America. Resigned to this fate, he said it best near the end of days for the Big Red Machine: “They are superstars: I am a Concepcion.”

In his wanderings through the wilderness of free agency, Tony Perez made a three-year stop in Boston for the struggling Red Sox before moving on to the Phillies and his brief reunion with Morgan and Rose. All three men were released after the Phillies lost that World Series, and their diaspora continued: Morgan back
home to Oakland for his final year, Rose for a single season to Montreal—where he finally passed four thousand hits—and Perez back to Cincinnati. Big Doggie finally hung ’em up there in 1986 after his last three seasons, playing part-time while functioning as an unofficial coach toward the end, for the native son who had likewise returned home and taken over as the player-manager of the Reds in 1985, Pete Rose. So Doggie was on the bench to see his old friend finally break Ty Cobb’s all-time hit record on September 11, 1985, the number that the now-forty-four-year-old Rose had been obsessively chasing for years after his skills had begun to seriously erode. Once their Captain Ahab finally killed his whale, the Cincinnati front office kept Rose on as manager, but the Reds quietly dropped him from their forty-man roster after the end of the 1986 season; by then Pete Rose had posted 4,256 hits, putting the most cherished of his many records almost unquestionably out of reach. But unlike all of his celebrated contemporaries, Rose never said good-bye, never officially retired as a player—the aging process being the least of so many truths he refused to face about himself—always keeping that door cracked open for a return that never happened. Then, in 1989, baseball’s commissioners—the outgoing Peter Ueberroth and his successor, the erudite former president of Yale University, Bart Giamatti—began their extensive investigation into allegations that Pete Rose had placed bets on baseball games. The rest of Pete Rose’s sorrowful, stuttering fall from grace has been extensively documented elsewhere. Since his release from federal prison in 1991 after serving five months for income tax evasion, Charlie Hustle has been forbidden to wear any major-league baseball uniform—although the Cincinnati Reds, in a private gesture of both respect and protest, have since refused to issue his unofficially retired number 14 to any of their players at any level—and to this day Pete Rose remains on the Hall of Fame’s “permanently ineligible” list. While doing little over the years in either print or public behavior to help his forlorn cause, Pete Rose lives in perpetual hope that his name will someday be removed
from that list and added to the longer one those walls were built to contain and honor.

Rose’s downfall was just beginning when, fittingly, Johnny Bench and Carl Yastrzemski entered the Hall of Fame together in 1989, their first year of eligibility. In his first eligible year Joe Morgan joined them there in 1990, unquestionably the greatest second baseman in baseball history, and by this time well launched in his second career as a broadcaster for ESPN. Somehow—someone please explain this—Bench received only 96 percent of all votes cast, Yastrzemski 95 percent, and Morgan only 82 percent. Foolishness in this boy’s game, we learn, is hardly confined to the field or front office. Two latecomers to the Reds and Red Sox stories soon followed them into the Hall in 1991: Ferguson Jenkins—whose candidacy was delayed by but survived a 1980 suspension for drug possession; the habits of his “Buffalo Head” days died hard—and in 1992 the splendid Tom Seaver, who tallied nearly 99 percent of the votes, which is more like it. Eight more years would pass before more members of their company from that night at Fenway Park would join them in Cooperstown, along with a couple of the men who worked Game Six behind a microphone.