Page 300 - 1975 BoSox

The 1975 World Series
by Matthew Silverman
FENWAY PARK WAS BACK IN THE October sunshine. It was not just a good thing for Boston, for New England, it
was a tonic for baseball fans across America. Since the Red Sox had last been in the World Series in 1967, new multisport facilities had proliferated throughout baseball, the arti cial turf creating truer hops and higher temperatures for those on the eld, but giving baseball an antiseptic feel not all that attering to the game. With Cincinnati claiming its third pennant in six seasons, the 1975 World Series would mark the fourth time that the fall classic was played on arti cial turf since the introduction of the stu at the Houston Astrodome in 1966. In 1975 “home eld” was determined on a rotation basis, so the three games on turf in Cincinnati would be held under the lights — night games were another World Series “innovation” added since the last time the Red Sox glimpsed October.
e feeling of old and new emanated not only from the stadiums but from the teams that called them home. Since moving into Riverfront Stadium in 1970—the same year Sparky Anderson was named manager—the Reds had transformed into the Big Red Machine. And the 1975 division title was the club’s fourth. It was not even close. Cincinnati won a franchise-record 108 times to claim the National League West by 20 games, and then swept the Pittsburgh Pirates in the Championship Series. Yet the Reds were still looking for their rst world cham- pionship since 1940, a year before America entered World War II. e Red Sox had to go back to World War I for their last world championship, when Babe Ruth appeared on the mound and in the out eld in the World Series. He won two games as a starting pitcher and recorded the next to last out of the 1918 World Series, hauling in a yball in left eld in the ninth inning of Game Six. Red Sox pitcher Carl Mays
got the next Chicago Cub, Les Mann, to ground out to clinch the title. Fenway rejoiced.
Boston had seen two World Series since 1918, both seven-game losses to the St. Louis Cardinals. ere had also been great seasons with hard-luck nales: 1948, in a one-game playo loss to the Cleveland Indians; 1949, losses on the nal two days to the rival New York Yankees; and 1972, when a strike cut short the schedule and left the Red Sox an agonizing half- game behind the rst-place Detroit Tigers. But 1975 was di erent. Boston stayed in rst place from July until season’s end. e Red Sox were infused with youth –superb rookies Fred Lynn and Jim Rice manned the out eld next to third-year, cannon-armed right elder Dwight Evans. Hard-nosed Rick Burleson was already the leader of the in eld at age 24, while 27-year- old Carlton Fisk—following an injury-marred 1974 — re-established himself as one of the American League’s top catchers.
Was Fisk any match for Cincinnati’s Johnny Bench, the National League’s best backstop? How would Boston’s rotation, starting with Luis Tiant, deal with the potent bats of the Big Red Machine? Could the Red Sox make up for the absence of Rice, whose brilliant rookie season came to a premature end when his left hand was broken by a pitch in the nal week of the season? Would Rico Petrocelli and the incom- parable Carl Yastrzemski, the lone holdovers from the 1967 Impossible Dream pennant team, still shine eight Octobers later?
It would all play out on a stage that not only elevated the players’ games, but the game itself. For those watching the World Series for the rst time in 1975, that fall classic would forge a lasting appreciation for the rights of October. For those who had lost touch with the game, the 1975 World Series brought many fans back to baseball — and made them wonder why they’d ever drifted away.
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