Page 269 - 1975 BoSox

262 ’75—THE RED SOX TEAM THAT SAVED BASEBALL
By 1975, after a half-century of domination by great baseball cities like New York and St. Louis, baseball’s best teams, like Oakland, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore, had a K-Mart-like park, drew poorly, and played far from Manhattan’s creative colony. In the next 12 years, the Red Sox played three of arguably the ve best games of any age: Game Six of the 1975 World Series; 1978’s playo against the Yanks; and Game Six of the 1986 Classic. (Other contenders include Bobby omson’s shot and Bill Mazeroski’s walk-o .) Never before had the Republic seemed so a xed to the Boston American League Baseball Company. “ e Red Sox by themselves didn’t save the game,” said Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. “ ey did, however, help,” starting now.
A common thread of the era is how Boston’s Voices deemed baseball less slam-bang than ballet. Stockton used statistics frequently, but e ectively. Harrelson became a Southern-fried TV analyst, Hawkspeak his forte. Martin and Woods eclipsed even Rowan and Martin. A Boston hue colored most of the 1975 Series radio/TV — the last before the new ABC-NBC pact split regular-season, All-Star Game, LCS, and World Series coverage. e new pact also ditched partly localteams for just network mikemen. NBC had done Series TV and radio since 1947 and 1957, respectively. “With NBC, I had a chance. e new pact gave me none. Prior to the networks taking over in ’76, I snuck in under the wire,” Martin said, making the World Series at 51.
e 1975 Reds-Red Series walked a high wire. “ e action took me along for the ride,” said Stockton, turning 43. Aiding Ned and Dick: Gowdy, Boston’s 1951-65 prosopopoeia; Cincinnati radio duce Marty Brennaman, whom the Sox almost hired in the 1980s; Joe Garagiola, NBC play-by-playman and Cardinals catcher who got four hits at Fenway in Game Four of the 1946 Series; and NBC analyst Tony Kubek, serving as a “rover.” Had Cincinnati added TV Voice Ken Coleman, four of seven would have had a Townie tilt. As it was, three of six did, the Sox refusing to drop Martin or Stockton, respectively, on radio and TV.
Each team’s Voice worked at home, Ned and Dick sharing Games One, Two, Six, and Seven at Fenway.
e night of Boston’s LCS clinching, the team took a red-eye ight home. By then, NBC executive Chet Simmons told O’Connell of the new broadcast ar- rangement.“AsakidtheSeriesmeantsomuch,”said Stockton, “and now to do one — imagine.” Leaving Oakland, Dick’s plane seatmate asked if he had a legal pad. Stockton said yes. “With that,” Dick said, “Hawk gave me a brie ng for the next ve hours on players from the Red Sox and Reds I could never get elsewhere. Not just basic stu but nuance, strengths and weak- nesses, inside dope,” Dick laughed, “like listening to a big-league Bible. By morning, arriving home, I’d graduated from Hawk’s Doctoral School of Baseball — a terri c boost to my self-con dence. I knew the Series.”
Before Game One at Fenway, Dick recalled the 1954 opener at the Polo Grounds, “immortalized by Willie Mays’s great catch o Vic Wertz and Dusty Rhodes’s game-winning tenth-inning homer,” Dad and son playing hooky from job and school, respectively, sitting eight rows behind the Indians dugout. e Series lured scribes, celebrities, and baseball royalty: bigger than Ike, brassier than Milton Berle, bonnier than Our Miss Brooks. America “stopped to pay attention,” wrote Heywood Broun, to Gillette’s Blue Blades March (“Da- da-da, da-da-da-da-da”), Sharpie the Parrot (“Mister, how ya’ xed for blades?”) and voice-over (“Look sharp. Feel sharp. Be sharp.”). Connie Mack wore a high-starched collar. Yanks skipper Casey Stengel nally had a Series to watch, not win. Tallulah Bankhead and George Raft held court. Photographers snapped pregame pictures, Stockton Sr. saying “Do you know who that gentleman is sitting behind you? Douglas MacArthur. ey think you’re his son.” Only later did ls grasp how the game “proved baseball’s unpredictability. Rhodes hit a 257-foot homer; Wertz, a 460-foot out.”
Cincinnati’s 1975 All-Star team included Hall of Famers Sparky Anderson, Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, and Tony Perez, should-be Dave Concepcion, and once-cinch Pete Rose. None helped: El Tiante, 6-0. Next day Boston led, 2-1, when a rain delay broke