Page 156 - 1975 BoSox

’75—THE RED SOX TEAM THAT SAVED BASEBALL 149
would be swinging. I wasn’t going to be taking. I knew I would commit myself to where it would be di cult to stop my swing. I got the pitch, and I hit it. When I started running to rst base, I didn’t know if the ball was going to go out of the park, because I knew that center eld was a long ways. I gured it might be o the wall, and I ran to rst and started for second, and I could see Geronimo turn his back, and that’s when I knew the ball was gone. e game was tied.”
“Bernie,” Bill Lee waxed eloquently in Gammons’ book Beyond the Sixth Game, “is the only man I know who turned fall into summer with one wave of his magic wand.”
After striking out in the 10th inning of Game Six, having gone into the eld for the rst time in the Series, Carbo was awarded a start in left in Game Seven. Hitting in his customary 1975 leado position in the batting order, Carbo doubled in the rst o Don Gullett. In the third he drew a base on balls and scored the rst Red Sox run on a single to right by Yastrzemski in a three-run third, the only runs the Sox would muster in a 4-3 Series clincher for the Reds. In the fourth Carbo grounded out to second. In the sixth he made his nal Series appearance as he grounded out to rst base and was replaced in the eld by Rick Miller in the seventh. Carbo concluded a Series in which he hit .429 (3-for-7 with two big pinch-hit home runs). Carbo’s sixth-game heroic blast was commemorated by the Red Sox at their November 10, 2004, Hall of Fame induction as a memorable moment in Red Sox history.
e 1976 Red Sox got o to a start that was inconsis- tent with their status as defending American League champions. e team lost 10 in a row from April 29 to May 11. ings got so bad that a practicing witch from Salem named Laurie Cabot appeared at Fenway Park with two goals in mind: getting Carbo out of a slump and stopping the Red Sox’ losing streak. “I unhexed Bernie Carbo’s bat to end a 10-game losing streak,” she said, as reported by Bill Nowlin and Jim Prime in their book Blood Feud. On June 2 the team’s record stood at 19-23. After an 0-for-4 night against the Yankees, Carbo and his.236 average (13-for-55 in
17 games) were traded to the Milwaukee Brewers for pitcher Tom Murphy and out elder/DH Bobby Darwin. He spent the rest of the 1976 season with the Brewers, hitting .235 over the full season.
Carbo’s former minor-league manager Don Zimmer (Knoxville) took over the Red Sox during the 1976 season and was instrumental in getting Carbo included in a December 6, 1976, trade back to the Red Sox along with former Red Sox fan favorite George Scott in exchange for Cecil Cooper. Carbo became a member of the “Crunch Bunch,” a loaded 1977 Red Sox of- fensive lineup that hit a then-team-record 213 home runs (the 2003 club is the current record-holder with 238). Five players hit more than 25 homers. Butch Hobson, who hit mostly in the seventh and eighth spots in the lineup, swatted 30. e club hit 33 homers over one 10-game stretch and 16 in three games against the Yankees.
ey hit eight homers against Toronto on July 4, setting a Red Sox record for most homers in a game that still stood in 2014 and a major-league-record seven solo shots, and hit ve or more homers in a game eight times. Carbo contributed 15 of the team’s then-record total and hit .289 with a .409 OBP in 86 games. ree of his homers came in pinch-hitting roles, further solidifying his reputation in the clutch. One came in the July 4 home-run derby. A two-run pinch-hit homer o the Angels’ Dyar Miller tied up an August 10 game won by the Red Sox. His third pinch-hit homer came at the end of the season against the Orioles. Carbo also homered in consecutive at-bats on June 18 against the Yankees’ Mike Torrez in a 10-4 Red Sox win that is better known for a dugout brawl between Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin broadcast on NBC television.
Carbo’s ability to come in cold o the bench and deliver a key hit, and his ability to do so without thinking too much about the game situation, served him well. Bill Lee, in Peter Golenbock’s Red Sox Nation, shared the following memory: “I remember in the Hall of Fame game at Cooperstown, Bernie was out behind the fence sleeping ... during the game because it didn’t mean anything and he was getting