Ken Griffey Sr. can still see in his mind's eye his two-run double rocketing off the Green Monster in left-center field at Fenway Park in the ninth inning of Game 2 of the 1975 World Series.

        It put the Reds up to stay, 3-2.

DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN

Reliever Will McEnaney celebrates with Johnny Bench and Pete Rose.   The return of baseball's “Subway Series” is historic ... and so is the 1975 World Series, arguably the greatest one.   In celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Fall Classic between the Reds and Boston Red Sox, The Enquirer will run game-by-game wrapups that will appear on the day the corresponding game story is reported in this year's Subway Series.   To wit: Today's World Series opener at Yankee Stadium will be reported in Sunday's Enquirer ... and so will the synopsis of Game 1, which was played Oct.10, 1975, in Boston.

        There had been a lot of talk about the Green Monster going into the 1975 World Series, and most of it was about the Reds' right-handed hitters, such as Tony Perez and Johnny Bench.

        But it was Griffey, a left-handed batter, who hit it first.

        More important, it was the winning hit in a game the Reds desperately needed to have.

        The hit was probably bigger than 25-year-old Griffey knew.

        “Ken wasn't with us in 1970 and 1972, when we lost the first two games in each of those World Series and weren't able to come back,” Perez recalls.

        “We sure as heck didn't want to fall behind two games to nothing our third World Series.”

        It'd be the Big Dead Machine.

        “Going on to win that World Series meant everything to us,” Perez says. “If we'd lost it, I know I would have been traded (before the 1976 season). They wouldn't have kept us together.”

        And if Perez had been traded, maybe there wouldn't have been another World Championship in 1976 (a four-game sweep of the New York Yankees). Perez was traded before the 1977 season, and there were no more titles until 1990.

        Where did it all start? Game 2.

        “Fastball up and away from Dick Drago,” Griffey recalls.

        “We were trailing 2-1 going into the ninth. Bench doubled to right, (Davey) Concepcion singled him home and stole second, and that's when I came up. I hit that ball pretty good. I knew it was going to hit the wall, but I didn't know how high up.”

        Perez has gotten a lot of credit — especially in recent years when he was waiting to be elected to the Hall of Fame — for his two-run homer in Game 7 in 1975 that cut Boston's lead to 3-2. Joe Morgan has always been given credit for his RBI that put the Reds up to stay, 4-3, in Game 7's ninth inning.

        Bench had some big hits, and Pete Rose hit .370. But if one goes through the game-by-game reports in 1975, one name keeps popping up: Griffey. Even in the great Game 6 — the game Carlton Fisk won with his dramatic 12th-inning home run off the left-field foul pole - it was Griffey whose two-run double to deep center in the fifth inning started the Reds' rally from a 3-0 deficit that ultimately got them up 6-3 before the sky began falling.

        Remember the image of Boston centerfielder Freddie Lynn slumping on the warning track at Fenway in the fifth? The deep drive by Griffey led to that.

        Who scored the winning run in Game 7? Griffey. He had three doubles, a triple and two stolen bases in the Series. It was his first full year in the bigs.

        The Reds were being called the Big Red Machine six years before that, but history will note that it wasn't until George Foster moved into left field (allowing Pete Rose to go to third base) and Griffey was moved into the second spot in the batting order (ahead of Morgan) that the Machine took off.

        “I think it's important to look back and appreciate how things came to pass,” Perez says. “If they hadn't come together like that, we don't win the rings.”

        And if the Reds don't win the rings, Perez doesn't make the Hall of Fame. Same for Reds manager Sparky Anderson.

        As for Griffey, what does he think of it all now?

        “Guys like me, (Cesar) Geronimo, Foster, (Danny) Driessen, (Ed) Armbrister - we were just young kids who came in, and all we wanted to do was play baseball,” Griffey says. “It was a great series; we had a lot of fun.”

        He admits that he and the younger guys weren't thinking about the need to win Game 2 from a historical standpoint.

        “We were just glad to be going home tied up at one game apiece, hoping to take two of three in Cincinnati, and that's just what we did,” Griffey says.

        In Cincinnati, the Reds won Game Three (the Ed Armbrister “bump” of Bosox catcher Fisk on Armbrister's bunt), lost Game Four (Tiant again, althogh as Griffey Sr. noted, “it was those right-handers he gave problems, not us lefthanders!”) and won Game Five (two home runs by Perez to break out of an 0-for-15 slump).

        Then came the great Game Six and very good Game Seven. Griffey Sr. was right in the middle of it all. If baseball had a “best supporting actor” award in a drama, the way the movie industry does, the Oscar would have had to go to Griffey in 1975.

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