1975: When it comes to the
World Series, 1975 was the
Greatest of them All

BY GEOFF HOBSON
The Cincinnati Enquirer

It was a series of five one-run games and two one-liners.

The morning of Game 7, Reds manager Sparky Anderson analyzed the starting pitchers.

"My guy," Anderson said of Don Gullett, "is going to the Hall of Fame. I don't know where their guy is going."

Boston's Bill Lee responded, "I'm going to the Eliot Lounge."

The Reds beat the Red Sox, 4-3, the next night to win it all, but Lee never had to buy another drink in the Eliot Lounge.

"Anal-retentive straight men always gave me my best lines," Lee says now of Anderson's analysis. "I just didn't like that image of the no facial hair."

Hardly a man is now alive -- Sparky Anderson and Bill Lee included -- who saw the 1975 World Series that famous day and year and doesn't think it is the greatest Series ever played.

It was as epic as a Longfellow poem and with the rainouts, just as long. It was Fountain Square conservatism vs. Harvard Square liberalism. It was American League power vs. National League sizzle. George "Sparky" Anderson vs. Bill "Spaceman" Lee.

For New England's Red Sox, it was another fire-and-brimstone week of denial. For the Tristate's Reds, it was validation their Big Red Machine was one of the greatest teams of all time.

"If we didn't win it," asks Reds Hall-of-Fame catcher Johnny Bench, recalling the Series losses of 1970 and 1972, "where would we be written in history? A potentially great team who ended up like the Buffalo Bills?"

Carlton Fisk hits a home run in the second inning of Game 3. He would later hit the one of the most dramatic home runs in World Series history with a game-winning shot in the 12th inning of Game 6. (Enquirer file)

Old story for Boston

Lee saw the Curse of the Bambino that has stalked the Red Sox since they sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees at work when Detroit's Vern Ruhle plunked rookie-of-the-year candidate Jim Rice with a pitch in late September.

"The fix was in when Rice broke his arm and couldn't play," Lee said. "Are you kidding me? A right-handed power hitter like that? They couldn't have pitched around people."

As it was, Anderson was able to pitch around the big boys enough to get to Cecil Cooper and Juan Beniquez for them to go 2-for-27.

For baseball, the '75 series ushered in a golden age rivaling the turn-of-the-century pennant races and the 1950s home-run chases.

And the golden era still flourishes a generation after center fielder Cesar Geronimo caught Carl Yastrzemski's fly ball, giving the Reds their third last-at-bat victory and first world title in 35 years.

The son of Ken Griffey, the man who scored the series' winning run, is currently the game's most marketable player.

Joe Morgan, the man who got the winning hit in the top of the ninth of Game 7, is the game's most recognizable TV analyst bobbing in the sea of cable.

Carlton Fisk, Boston's New England-bred catcher born in Vermont and raised in New Hampshire who immortalized the Series with his 12th-inning, Game 6 homer, just missed getting into the Hall of Fame this summer behind the once-in-a-decade class of Nolan Ryan, George Brett and Robin Yount.

Anderson remembers getting a phone call 10 minutes after the final out. It was from Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey and Anderson told him, "Mr. Yawkey, nobody lost. Baseball is the real winner. We brought the housewives back. We got people interested again."

Enquirer artist Jerry Dowling first did a drawing about the Big Red Machine in 1969. (Enquirer file)

Winning the fans

Anderson was right. Baseball had been engulfed by the NFL and labor strife until three straight rainouts moved classic games 6 and 7 from weekend afternoons to prime time weeknights. It was as if the New England elements lashed Fenway in anticipation of the first Sox world title since the last days of World War I.

If the Reds and Red Sox had one thing in common, it was their fans. Both teams claimed a region instead of just a city. The Red Sox had six New England states while the Reds had the run of the Ohio River Valley. And both had waited so long.

"That's one of the reasons it was so special," Bench says. "Both towns hadn't won in a long time and you could sense the excitement. To walk into that clubhouse knowing that all 25 guys are world champions, they are all going to get a ring, it was euphoric. And then the reception at Fountain Square on top of that."

But in the moments after Game 6, after the Reds had blown a 6-3 lead with four outs to go, the white-haired Anderson had turned gray. There was Pete Rose chattering about what a great game it had been.

"There was Sparky saying, 'Great game, hell. We've got to win tomorrow,' " Bench says. "We told Sparky we'd win. We knew it."

To this day, Anderson is aghast.

"You can say you'll win, but who knows?" he said. "At that time, I didn't want to be like the Dallas Cowboys. You know, couldn't go all the way. I didn't sleep much, I'll tell you."

Joe Morgan beats the throw to Boston first baseman Carl Yastrzemski in Game 4 of the World Series. Morgan would later score on a Johnny Bench double. (Enquirer file)

Series of big moments

Everyone remembers the signature moments:

• The Fisk home run.

• Bernie Carbo's pinch-hit homer that tied Game 6 for the Red Sox, against the Cincinnati franchise that brought him to the bigs.

• Reds second baseman Joe Morgan's two last at-bat RBI.

• Boston right fielder Dwight Evans' leaping catch off Morgan in the Fenway corner in the 11th of the incredible Game 6.

• Luis Tiant bobbing and weaving for 163 pitches to even the series for Boston in Game 4.

• Tony Perez taking Lee's eephus pitch over Fenway's left-field wall to bring the Reds within a run in Game 7.

• Fisk and Reds hitter Ed Armbrister getting tied up after a bunt in Game 3 that led to a no-interference call and a Reds victory in 10 innings.

But talk to the players and it's the little things they remember, for it's the little things that win baseball games no matter how big or great they are. Starting with Bench's lead-off double in the top of the ninth off Lee in Game 2 and the Sox poised to take a 2-0 lead in the Series.

"That's the one Don Zimmer always talks to me about," Bench says, speaking of the Cincinnati native who coached third base for the Red Sox in '75. "He'd been pitching me away and I made up my mind to take him the other way."

Lee had been brilliant, frustrating the Reds with his precision left-handed junk in taking a 2-1 lead into the ninth. But Bench shot a knee-high screwball just off the plate into the right-field corner, igniting a two-run rally that tied the series.

Bench's double had a ripple effect.

Reds statistics
Player	r	hr	rbi	sb	avg.
Morgan	107	17	94	67	.327
Rose	112	7	74	0	.317
Griffey	95	4	46	16	.305
Foster	71	23	78	2	.300
Bench	83	28	110	11	.283
Perez	74	20	109	1	.282
Driessen	38	7	38	10	.281
Concepcion	62	5	49	33	.274
Flynn	17	1	20	3	.268
Geronimo	69	6	53	13	.257
Rettenmund	24	2	19	5	.239
Chaney	18	2	26	3	.219
Plummer	17	1	19	1	.182
Totals	840	124	779	168	.271
Pitcher	w	l	so	bb	era
Gullett	15	4	98	56	2.42
Eastwick	5	3	61	25	2.60
C. Carroll	7	5	44	32	2.63
Borbon	9	5	29	21	2.95
Nolan	15	9	74	29	3.16
Darcy	11	5	46	59	3.57
Norman	12	4	119	84	3.73
Billingham	15	10	79	75	4.11
Kirby	10	6	48	54	4.70
McEnaney	5	2	48	54	4.70
Totals	108	54	663	487	3.37

Hearing footsteps

Lee blames that hit and Zimmer, of all people, for what happened in a key play in Game 7. Remember, it was Lee who called Zimmer "a gerbil," when he was his manager during the 1978 pennant race the Sox lost to the Yankees.

"After he gave New York the division, the Yankees gave him a job," Lee says. "That was after he gave Cincinnati the Series. Because Bench went to right field, he pulls (second baseman) Denny Doyle around to the right and out of double play range. Bench hit a grounder to short, but Doyle had to hurry to the bag, didn't get off a good throw and it got by. No double play."

Bench: "I slid into (Doyle) hard an inning or two before and I think he was hearing footsteps."

That was in the sixth inning and the Red Sox led 3-0. That allowed Perez to come to the plate, and Lee hung his big breaking ball for the two-run homer -- a pitch Bench couldn't believe because, "no human waited on an off-speed pitch better than Tony Perez."

"You think a pitching coach would have come out and calmed me down," Lee said. "I was upset about not getting the double play ball and I didn't get that curve where I wanted it."

But that's not the Perez homer Boston's Rico Petrocelli remembers. He goes back to Game 5 in Cincinnati, when Gullett was in the process of blowing down 16 straight Sox in one stretch. Petrocelli was standing at third base when Perez broke his 0-for-the-series slump with the first of his two homers in a 6-2 Reds' win.

"That seemed to wake them up," Petrocelli says. "It woke up their dugout and the crowd. You could see it on their faces. We had kept Tony pretty much down until then, and the place went nuts."

Better team won

But for all the breaks and bounces, the Reds won simply because they were better. They harnessed the power, speed, and finesse that won them 108 regular-season games. The Sox didn't steal a base while the Reds stole nine. The Reds made two errors to Boston's six.

"Other teams always seemed to make themselves better by getting bench guys or guys who could run, and we kind of stayed the same as just a power team," Petrocelli says. "They just had a lot of great players. I know Pete was the (Series) MVP and Morgan could have been the MVP, but the guy who killed us was Griffey (seven hits, three doubles, four runs, four RBI, two steals). Every time you looked up, he was doing something."

It's funny what you remember. During the rain delay before the ninth inning of Game 2, Lee was looking to use the bathroom in the dugout. Except Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was using it.

Sparky Anderson remembers going upstairs to Fenway to meet Yawkey before the Series. He was taken with the wrinkled little man who loved his team and loved baseball and money had nothing to do with it.

He agrees in part with the estimable baseball writer Peter Gammons, whose thesis of his book Beyond The Sixth Game is that the '75 Series marked the end of the old era, because free agency dawned the next year.

Anderson's Reds owner, Louise Nippert, would come to the games with a picnic basket and he dubbed her "The Picnic Lady." Anderson knows there are no more Yawkeys and Picnic Ladies.

"Sure, we thought we would be back," Petrocelli says. The Red Sox had young stars in Rice and rookie MVP Fred Lynn, and a young core up the middle in Fisk, shortstop Rick Burleson and Lynn in center. Plus, Evans and Cecil Cooper.

"But it never happened," Petrocelli says. "We couldn't keep it together with free agency. If you do look at that series, you think of the old-school guys. Yaz. Tiant. Bench. Pete. Morgan. Guys who just negotiated a contract and went out and played hard, no questions asked."

Lee is thought to have delivered another one-liner after the Series. Something about 800 million Chinese not caring.

Except, after the Series he went on a goodwill trip to China.

"I go into the Shanghai Library," Lee says, "and there's a paper in the rack. There I am on the front page throwing that pitch to Perez."