Page 102 - 1975 BoSox

’75—THE RED SOX TEAM THAT SAVED BASEBALL 95
more than $10,000 after the season he’d had, and his many years of service to the Phillies. Carlton was having di culties with team owner August Busch in St. Louis. “We each got what we wanted from our new teams,” Wise recalled in 2005. “But I loved Philadelphia. My family’s from Philadelphia. My kids were born in Philadelphia. I didn’t want to leave.” He wasn’t quite as sanguine about it at the time. He represented himself in negotiating with Quinn and couldn’t get the GM to budge. He did express some frustration to a reporter: “Why, the Phillies paid Dionne Warwick $15,000 to entertain before a game last season, and she was guaranteed the money even if it rained and she didn’t have to appear.”7
Leave he did, however, and Wise posted back-to-back 16-win seasons for the Cardinals in ’72 and ’73. Wise led St. Louis in victories, and also was the starting and winning pitcher in the 1973 All-Star Game. But in late October he was traded again, this time going to the Boston Red Sox along with out elder Bernie Carbo in exchange for out elder Reggie Smith and pitcher Ken Tatum. “I was stunned when I got traded again,”Wise confessed.“ e Cardinals felt they needed hitting, and Boston apparently felt they needed pitch- ing, so the trade was consummated.”
Injury struck for the rst time in 1974. Wise was direct and unequivocal about how it happened. “[Manager] Darrell Johnson was the cause of that. [In] ’74, I came over and I was supposed to start the third game of the year behind the incumbents [Luis] Tiant and [Bill] Lee, in Milwaukee. We got the rst two games in but it was very cold. So, Sunday I open up the blinds to go to the park and it was snowing. It snowed out the game, so we go home to Boston and the snow followed us. Snowed us out there. To make a long story short, when good weather nally gave us the opportunity to play, Darrell Johnson bypassed me and went back to Tiant and Lee. ey traded for an All- Star pitcher, and it’s the third game of the year — I never gured that out. at’s why they traded for me, to pitch. So nally it had been 12 days since I left spring training. I was pitching in Fenway, I think it was the backup Game of the Week, and it was a drizzly,
dreary 37-, 38-degree day and I pitched a complete game, not having pitched in 12 days. I tore a triceps muscle and that basically ruined my whole season. I never could recover from it.
“It was my attitude to complete what I started. I had 138 complete games in my career so I knew what that was about. In retrospect, it wasn’t too smart to pitch a complete game after not pitching for so long. I just kept pitching. at was my mentality.” e injury pretty much made 1974 a lost season. ere was a bit of disappointment in coming to the American League, too. “I missed the hitting. I always gured I had an advantage over my opponent because I could swing the bat pretty well.” Wise hammered 15 career home runs, despite playing six seasons in the AL, where pitchers rarely pick up a bat.
e year after the injury, 1975, was an exceptional one. Wise led the Red Sox with 19 wins, one more than Tiant’s 18 and two more than Lee’s 17. At one point, he won nine games in a row as the Red Sox rolled toward the AL East division title. On July 2 he almost had himself another no-hitter, pitching 82⁄3 innings of no-hit ball against Milwaukee. With two outs in the bottom of the ninth, Wise walked Bill Sharp and then gave up the rst hit of the game — a home run by George Scott. ese kinds of near-misses were not uncommon for Wise. Back on June 13, 1973, he’d lost a shot at another no-hitter, in a game against the Reds when Joe Morgan singled with one out in the ninth. Wise’s rst near no-hitter had come back on August 8, 1968, against the Dodgers in Los Angeles. e only play of the game scored a hit was a third-inning single by Bart Shirley, a three- or four-bouncer to Roberto Pena at shortstop. Pena booted the ball, but the o cial scorer (a substitute “guest scorer” from San Diego) ruled it a hit, and wouldn’t change the ruling even after Pena called upstairs to say, “ e ball bounced to me and I booted it. It was an error.”8
Wise not only won 19 during the regular season in 1975, but also won the clinching game of the American League Championship Series, beating the A’s 5-3 in Oakland, holding them to six hits and two earned runs over 71⁄3 innings. In the World Series, Darrell