Page 8 - 1975 BoSox

Memories of a Summer
Mark Armour
BASEBALL WAS DYING IN 1975, or so many people thought. e game was badly trailing pro football—a
television ratings monster even in prime time—and was widely viewed as less hip, and less relevant, than its rival. e Oakland Athletics, admirable three-time champions between 1972 and 1974, dished up steady servings of 2-1 victories, which so stirred their fans that the team couldn’t even sell out its home World Series games.
Among the storied seasons in Red Sox history, the 1975 team is often overlooked. Coming just eight years after the “Impossible Dream” and three years before the greatest Red Sox team many of us have ever seen stumbled and sputtered its way to a gut-wrenching denouement, the 1975 Red Sox sit in comparable obscurity. Sure, we all remember the classic World Series with the Reds, but what of the summer that led up to it? What of its players? What of its legacy?
For those of us in New England, the magic of 1975 was apparent early in the season. e failed comeback of Tony Conigliaro was a bump in the road, but the summer was lled with wonderful subplots and moments: the spectacular emergence of rookies Fred Lynn and Jim Rice, highlighted by Lynn’s great night in Detroit; the dramatic return from injury by Carlton Fisk, the team’s leader and best player; the double- header shutout of the Yankees by Bill Lee and Roger Moret in Shea Stadium; the daily human interest story of the beloved Luis Tiant and his family; and the biggest victory of the season, Tiant’s September 16 blanking of the hard-charging Orioles (“Loo-EE ... Loo-EE ...”).
e rest of the country caught on in October. e canonization of the 1975 World Series was not the retroactive doings of baseball’s marketing department; it began while the games were still being played. By
the middle of Tiant’s ve-hit masterpiece in the rst game, the fans tuning in had become aware that they were watching something special. By the sixth game, the players were conversing about it on the eld.
Darn the luck, the Reds won the World Series in seven games. is was a big disappointment, I grant, but losing a seven-game series to that great team, one of the best teams ever, was not remotely comparable to the crushing defeats that lay ahead for the faithful. e relationship between the team and its followers had not yet become bitter, as it would in 1978, or hostile, as it would after 1986.
Roger Angell, writing in the New Yorker after the 1975 season had ended, tried to capture what it all meant. His lead:“Tarry,delight,so seldom met ... e games have ended, the heroes are dispersed, and another summer has died late in Boston, but still one yearns for them and wishes them back, so great was their pleasure.”
Hope sprung anew for the game of baseball. We had just seen proof (as if proof were needed) that baseball could still be magical, could keep the country riveted for seven games, could leave us all wanting an eighth. In Boston, it was even better, since our team was suddenly awash in young, star players. Lynn and Rice, the freshman sensations, and Fisk, whose dancing Game Six image has become the season’s symbol, were sure to be spending their Hall of Fame careers together in Boston, accompanied by several other good young players. No Red Sox team, it is fair to say, has ever looked to have a better future than this one did during that o -season. What could go wrong?
What rst went wrong took place on December 23, just two months after the last out of the season, when baseball arbiter Peter Seitz, ruling in favor of the plainti in Andy Messersmith’s grievance, e ectively ended baseball’s reserve clause. With the death of
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