Page 81 - 1975 BoSox

74 ’75—THE RED SOX TEAM THAT SAVED BASEBALL
e day after Bernie Carbo and Carlton Fisk hit Game Six homers to keep the Series alive, Lee started Game Seven of the World Series. He pitched 61⁄3 innings, shutting out the Reds through ve until he gave up a prodigious two-run homer to Tony Perez on an ill-advised blooper pitch that Lee forever claimed “is still rising.” He recalled the sequence of events that led up to the pitch and the resultant homer: “We were leading 3-0 in Game Seven of the World Series. e Reds had a runner at rst in the sixth inning. For some reason, [coach Don] Zimmer waves Denny Doyle a few feet away from second base, making a double play impossible. Sure enough, Johnny Bench hits the ball to Burleson at short and Doyle is out of position to make the pivot. e ball goes by Yastrzemski and Bench is safe at second. I lost it and threw the blooper. Two-run homer. Someone should have come out and calmed me down. No one did. e next inning I get a blister and walk the leado man and he scores the tying run. e rest is history, but it should never have reached that point.” Lee left with a 3-2 lead, but the Red Sox went on to lose the game and the World Series.
e next season, 1976, was a disaster for Lee and the Red Sox. On May 20 Lee was trailing 1-0 to the Yankees at Yankee Stadium when Lou Piniella and Graig Nettles struck for back-to-back singles. Otto Velez then singled to right, where Dwight Evans elded the ball and eyed Piniella trying to score. Lou was thrown out by a country mile. A melee ensued at the plate, and Lee was blindsided by Nettles and fell awkwardly on his shoulder. He left the game crippled, unable to appear in another game until July 15. e Red Sox won the May 20 game but at great cost to their playo hopes. “We won the battle, but lost the war of 1976,” said Lee. He never lost his bitterness about Nettles’ perceived cheap shot. Recently, when he met the former Yankee at a baseball function, he said, the former All-Star third baseman didn’t even bother to get out of his chair. “He hasn’t aged at all well,” commented Lee. “He looked like a duvet cover.”
Lee was pitching poorly at the time of the ght. He was 0-3 with a 7.31 ERA, and never really fully got
back on track. He nished 5-7, with a disappoint- ing 5.63 ERA.
e following year, 1977, Bill was used sparingly, getting only 16 starts. He posted another winning record, but it was just 9-5 (4.43 ERA) in 128 innings of work, a far cry from the totals of 1973 through 1975, when he pitched more than twice as many innings each year.
In 1978 things seemed to have turned around. Lee won his rst four games, and was 10-3 in early July. ere were underlying tensions, though, that racked the Red Sox. His relationship with management can only be described as tumultuous. A founding member of a Red Sox faction known as the Bu alo Heads, the purpose of which seemed to be making manager Don Zimmer’s life miserable, Lee famously referred to Zimmer as “the gerbil” and openly questioned many of the strategic moves made by the beleaguered manager. “Zimmer wouldn’t know a good pitcher if he came up and bit him in the ass,” suggested Lee.
Lee enjoyed tweaking the powers that be and crafting controversial quotes. He once bragged about sprinkling marijuana on his organic buckwheat pancakes so that when he jogged to the ballpark he would be “impervi- ous to bus fumes.” He explained to the club doctor that a foreign object sighted on an X-ray of his foot was “an old Dewars cap” that he had accidentally ingested. He angered the California Angels by sug- gesting that they could conduct their batting practice in the lobby of the fanciest hotel in town “and never chip a chandelier.”
Lee was intensely loyal to his teammates and naīvely expected the same from management. When friend Bernie Carbo was traded on June 15, 1978, Lee was so angry that he stomped out of the Red Sox clubhouse the following day, shouting, “Today just cost us the pennant.” ( e team had a six-game lead at the time, and Carbo had only 47 at-bats.) Lee angrily announced that he was retiring from baseball. He was in a rough patch at the time, taking two losses while having 16 runs scored against him in the prior three games (only six of them earned). A day later, Lee returned (sporting a T-shirt that read “Friendship rst, competition