Page 49 - 1975 BoSox

42 ’75—THE RED SOX TEAM THAT SAVED BASEBALL
over fences and take home runs away from hitters. During his career, Lynn earned four Gold Gloves — 1975 and 1978 through 1980.
In an interview with Jon Goode at Boston.com in 2004, Lynn re ected: “I am most proud of the Gold Gloves and really cherished those. I prided myself on playing defense. When I played basketball and football I always wanted to guard the toughest guy. When I played center eld, I felt like I was guarding somebody and I didn’t want any ball to fall in my area. I took it personally when balls would fall in and I didn’t catch them.”
Smooth and graceful, Lynn batted and threw left- handed. As a major leaguer he stood 6-feet-1 and weighed 185 pounds. He was modest about his ac- complishments. In the 1976 Complete Handbook of Baseball, Lynn said: “One man doesn’t make a team. All the awards are great, but they are secondary to winning. If we didn’t win, none of these awards would mean anything.”
During his magical 1975 season, Lynn staged a one-man assault on Tiger Stadium, on June 18, belting out three home runs (just missing a fourth), a triple, and a single, and driving in 10 runs in a 15-1 thrashing of the Tigers.
e Red Sox clinched the American League East on September 28. ey swept the defending three-time champion Oakland Athletics in the American League Championship Series in three games. Lynn hit .364 in the series.
In the World Series the Red Sox took on the Cincinnati Reds, winners of 108 games that season. Most baseball experts predicted that the Reds would win easily, but the Red Sox battled hard and took the Reds to a seventh game. Many baseball fans consider that Series the greatest ever played. Five games were decided by a single run, two games went into extra innings, two others were decided in the ninth inning and in six of the seven games the winning team came from behind. e sixth game was perhaps the best World Series game ever played. Fred Lynn was the on-deck hitter when Carlton Fisk blasted his classic game-ending
home run o Pat Darcy leading o the bottom of the 12th.
During that game, Lynn smashed a three-run homer in the rst inning to give the Red Sox the lead. During a Reds rally in the top of the fth inning, he crashed into Fenway Park’s then-unpadded wall in left-center chasing a triple hit by Ken Gri ey, Sr. Fenway became silent, but Lynn remained in the game after receiving attention from Red Sox trainer Charlie Moss. In the World Series, Lynn told moderator Bob Costas during MLB Network’s Top 20 games in the last 50 years, “When I went down, I had absolutely no feeling from the waist down, so I just lay motionless.”3 Lynn played in all seven games, batting .280 with a double and home run, and ve runs batted in, tying for the most on the team. After the season the Red Sox padded their out eld walls.
Expectations were high for the Red Sox in 1976, but the season was a disappointment. e league cham- pions had added future Hall of Fame pitcher Ferguson Jenkins to the roster, but won just 83 games, nishing third in the American League East. Longtime owner Tom Yawkey lost a lengthy battle with cancer on July 9. A 10-game losing streak from April 29 through May 11, a poor season by starting pitcher Bill Lee, and prolonged holdouts by Lynn, Burleson, and Fisk all contributed to a lost season.
e Red Sox red manager Darrell Johnson during the season and replaced him with third-base coach Don Zimmer. Lynn made the All-Star team and hit .314 with 32 doubles in 132 games, but the season was not fun for him. Lynn told Larry Whiteside of the Boston Globe, “For the rst time in my life, baseball isn’t fun. It was always easy to play a game. is is hard.”4
Lynn looked forward to the new season. “Last year is history and I’m not going to dwell on the past,” he said. “I didn’t sit back after 1975 and think about the past. I’m not going to sit back and do it with the 1976 season. It’s history. People are going to say we’re in it just for the money and nothing else. But that’s not true. I really like the game. It’s more than a job to me.