Authors: Mark Frost
Dwight Evans would have something to say about that. He’d faced Eastwick three times in the Series, striking out swinging to end a late threat in Game Two, then tagging him for his dramatic two-run ninth-inning home run that sent Game Three into extra innings, and flying out to deep center in Game Four. Evans liked the matchup, felt he saw the ball well out of Eastwick’s hand, and the success he’d had earlier against him filled him with confidence.
Sparky handed Eastwick the ball, left him to the moment, and the pitcher completed his warm-up tosses out of the stretch to Bench.
Lynn at second, Petrocelli at first; both had a feeling Dewey Evans was about to come through, and so did the rest of the Red Sox lined up along the top step of the dugout. The crowd shared that feeling, and most rose to their feet as Evans stepped into the box.
The Reds and their coaches moved around restlessly, prowling the dugout; Pedro Borbon couldn’t bring himself to abandon this confrontation for the clubhouse and stayed on the bench to watch. The game’s unique pendulum swing of desultory lulls and tense, anticipatory highs had reached its zenith in Fenway Park.
Eastwick’s first pitch betrayed a hint of butterflies, an incomplete delivery that sent his fastball flying high and tight. He was a classic power pitcher, threw a hard fastball with movement in the zone that tailed or even seemed to rise, and when he was on—as he had been for much of the last three months—Eastwick was as close as a pitcher can get to unhittable.
Eastwick challenged Evans with his second fastball, and Dewey swung from his heels, a home run cut that nearly knocked off his helmet, but he missed it low for strike one. Eastwick came back with the same pitch and same location—running in on Evans’s hands—and he fouled it back to fall behind in the count, 1–2.
Eastwick had pleasantly surprised the Reds with his dominant second-half surge; most of Bob Howsam’s brain trust had thought he was a season or two away from meaningful innings, but every so often “the light just goes on”—as Sparky put it—and a major leaguer suddenly arrives. Eastwick’s confidence snowballed, and he explained his surprising success this way: “I never have a negative thought. This radiates to the hitter. He can feel it when you know you’re going to get him out.”
Evans fouled Eastwick’s next fastball back as well, a more defensive swing to stay alive against Eastwick’s pure smoke. Eastwick really leaned into his next pitch, another fastball that missed just outside, and cracked into Bench’s mitt with an audible thump: 2–2. Bench signaled he wanted the next one inside, and the runner snaked in on Evans’s hands, and again he fought it off foul to stay even in the count.
Then Eastwick came back with a dart, his first low pitch of the at bat, a fastball that appeared to crease the zone right at Evans’s knees, but Satch Davidson wasn’t buying; Bench and Eastwick looked dis
appointed—Bench appeared ready to dispute Davidson’s sanity, but bit his tongue—and the count went full to 3–2.
The whole stadium was on edge now. Eastwick reared and delivered a searing fastball toward the outside corner. Evans couldn’t lay off it, swung hard, and missed.
Down on strikes, one out.
The burden now fell to Red Sox shortstop Rick Burleson, but the stakes changed; nowhere near the home run threat that Evans represented, he’d hit only six all season. The Rooster would have to go station to station, manufacture something, poke it past the infield, get Lynn around from second, score one run at a time.
In the home dugout, manager Darrell Johnson walked over to his reserve outfielders Bernie Carbo and Juan Beniquez and told them each to grab a bat. He ordered the left-handed-hitting Carbo out into the on-deck circle, to pinch hit for Roger Moret if Burleson avoided a double play and the right-hander Eastwick stayed in the game. If Sparky played the percentages, as Johnson expected him to, and brought in his own left-hander McEnaney to face Carbo, the right-handed Beniquez would be sent to the plate in his place. Carbo had been periodically swinging a weighted bat and stretching back in the clubhouse since the fifth inning; the routine of the dedicated pinch hitter. Although he’d only been to the plate two times in the Series against his former teammates, Carbo had already contributed: In the seventh inning of Game Three in Cincinnati, pinch-hitting for pitcher Reggie Cleveland, Carbo had homered off Reds right-hander Clay Carroll, bringing the Red Sox within two runs and setting the stage for Dwight Evans’s game-tying home run two innings later. Surely Sparky wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice; Carbo felt certain he was on the field primarily as a decoy to force Sparky’s hand.
Eastwick came in low to Burleson—Bench was looking for that ground ball and double play again now—and missed for ball one.
Then, a flash of hope: fastball up in the zone, a hard swing from Burleson, and a line drive toward the Green Monster. But hope died
quickly; he’d caught only half of the ball on the bat, and George Foster scarcely had to move to gather it in for the second out.
Two on, two out, bottom of the eighth, down three runs. Four outs left in the game and their World Series.
From the public address system booth, Sherm Feller announced “Pinch-hitting for Moret: Bernie Carbo.” Fully expecting Sparky—whom he knew very well—to now emerge from the dugout and pull Eastwick for McEnaney, Carbo hesitated in the on-deck circle, anticipating the move from Sparky for so long that umpire Satch Davidson finally growled at him: “Come on, get in here, time to hit!” Looking across at the Cincinnati dugout, Carbo finally realized that Sparky wasn’t coming out for his pitcher; he was unaware that Sparky, concerned that the right-handed pull hitter Beniquez might hit one to the wall on McEnaney, had made the decision to stay with Eastwick and take his chances with the erratic Carbo. Struggling to quickly gather himself, Carbo turned to his old friend Johnny Bench.
“Wow,” said Carbo. “I’m gonna hit.”
Only twenty-eight and already in the eleventh year of his professional career, Carbo had been such a highly regarded prospect coming out of high school in his native Detroit that the Cincinnati Reds had made him their number one pick, and sixteenth player taken overall, in the first amateur free agent draft in 1965—one round ahead of that superstar playing catcher for them now, Johnny Bench. Two years later, Bench had already established himself as the Reds’ starting catcher, while Carbo was still languishing in the minors, where teammates on his first two teams had nicknamed him the “Idiot” and the “Clown.” As those labels suggested, Bernie suffered from some educational shortcomings and concentration issues. He appeared to be a loose, fun-loving, and lovable working-class kid, but his baggage also included an ungovernable temper, an insidious substance abuse problem, and enough personal demons to populate a psych ward; Bernie had grown up with an abusive, alcoholic father and, by his own reckoning, had become an alcoholic himself by the age of sixteen. But baseball, in those days, had its own habit of
looking the other way as long as players produced on the field; amphetamine use to fuel flagging energies through baseball’s marathon seasons remained an established part of major-league locker room culture. Jars of amphetamine “greenies” stood readily available—often even a designated water cooler was juiced—at the trainer’s table in every clubhouse. “Don’t go out there alone” was the veterans’ coded phrase for taking their boost. And if the boys needed or wanted to wind down afterward by spending their recreational hours drunk, high, or any combination thereof, nobody was going to say boo about it. In other words, Bernie fit right in.
And Carbo soon began to produce. He recorded his best season in the Reds’ system in 1968, for Sparky Anderson’s pennant-winning team in Triple-A Asheville. Sparky insisted on calling him “Bernardo,” moved him from third base to the outfield, and for the first time in his life treated the boy like a man—Sparky came to regard Bernie almost as a son—while expecting him to act like one in return. He disciplined Bernie hard, drilled him on the fundamentals, sure of his natural talent, equally determined not to allow this screwup kid to let it go to waste. Although he initially rebelled under Sparky’s tough love, Carbo credited Anderson with teaching him to grow up, how to approach and play the game like a professional; Sparky single-handedly turned the class stooge into a ballplayer. The first in a series of surrogate fathers Carbo desperately needed and would find in baseball, Sparky frequently invited Bernie into his home, where Sparky’s wife Carol and their two young sons and daughter adopted him as well. One season later, after an exceptional year in Triple-A, Carbo made the big club during Sparky’s first year at the helm in Cincinnati and more than fulfilled the organization’s high expectations of him; he hit .310, with twenty-one home runs and sixty-three RBIs, played in his first World Series with the Reds, and the
Sporting News
named him the National League Rookie Player of the Year. A storybook beginning and a once wayward promise fulfilled, but it went nowhere but downhill from there.
Hoping to buy a house and make Cincinnati his home, Carbo was
bitterly disappointed when after his outstanding rookie season the hard-line Reds front office refused to renegotiate his contract. Without the benefit of counsel a good agent would have afforded, Bernie ill-advisedly held out until near the end of spring training and slumped badly when he signed and reported, out of shape both physically and mentally. His drug and alcohol use accelerated, and both his performance and playing time plummeted; this was no ordinary sophomore slump. During another acrimonious contract negotiating session the following spring with GM Bob Howsam, Carbo lost control of his senses; he reached over, grabbed Howsam by the tie, dragged him across the desk, and began to beat and choke him. People rushed in to yank him off and hustle the still raging Carbo out of Howsam’s office; at Howsam’s insistence the incident was covered up and never publicly revealed, but a month into the 1972 season, the Reds unloaded Carbo in a dismissive trade to St. Louis. After two mediocre seasons with the Cardinals, Carbo was dealt again in the fall of 1973, going to the Red Sox along with starting pitcher Rick Wise. During his first visit to the Red Sox clubhouse at Fenway, Carbo saw an old man in a tattered raincoat shuffling around, handed over a twenty, and asked him to fetch him a cheeseburger and fries. The food arrived soon afterward, delivered by a locker room attendant who clued Carbo in that he had just placed his order with team owner Tom Yawkey.
As a fourth outfielder and left-handed designated hitter, Carbo became a steady contributor to the 1974 Red Sox, hitting twelve home runs and driving in sixty-one, finding much more common ground in the team’s looser clubhouse than he had with the regimented Reds and Cardinals. Kindred free spirits Bill Lee, Rick Wise, and Jim Willoughby welcomed him into their playfully anarchic circle. Carbo found a comfort zone as the Red Sox’s informal court jester, delighting the press with his goofy, offbeat pronouncements: “If baseball execs are Nixon,” he once told them, “I’m Woodstock.” Bernie soon took to traveling everywhere with a stuffed toy gorilla that he dressed in a Cardinals uniform and named “Mighty Joe Young,” often deferring to the monkey in interviews. Hoping to now
make a home in Boston, and with his wife pregnant with their second child, Carbo made a personal appeal after the 1974 season to Tom Yawkey, who had subsequently befriended him after their awkward introduction, for a $10,000 raise. Team officials offered him $4,000—Yawkey always avoided turning players down himself—and Carbo became the first Red Sox player to file for the newly available option of independent salary arbitration. He lost the arbitration, but the next week found a check in his locker, from the personal account of Tom Yawkey, for $10,000. Bernie and his wife bought their house; he had found another father figure.
In 1975, Carbo retired the gorilla and replaced him with a statue of the Buddha, which he kept in his locker, another good luck talisman the team adopted. Carbo came out of spring training with a hot bat and helped carry the Red Sox during the first two months of the season when Carlton Fisk was injured, finishing the year with fifteen homers and fifty RBIs in 107 games. He played a solid outfield, and always had a strong, accurate throwing arm, but with the emergence of Rice, Lynn, and Evans he found it increasingly difficult to break into the everyday lineup. As his dependence on drugs and alcohol deepened, along with the severity of his hangovers, he also lacked the conditioning to go out there every day. By September, beset by a couple of nagging injuries, convinced he’d never get out of Darrell Johnson’s doghouse, Bernie hardly got off the bench and his attention appeared to drift; on occasion, while on the road, other players sometimes wondered if Bernie even knew what ballpark they were in. Bill Lee speculated that, in Bernie’s case, ignorance might actually be an asset; the less thinking he did at the plate, and the more pure reacting he could bring to bear on major-league fastballs with his lightning-quick wrists and Popeye forearms, the better.
In the Boston bullpen, Red Sox closer Dick Drago was warming up on the mound and had already been told by the dugout that he was going in to pitch the ninth. Absent the usual tension of a closer’s close-game situation, Drago had been throwing a pitch, then turning to watch the game like any other spectator, hoping against hope
they could find a way to get back in it. Back in the clubhouse, when Bill Lee saw on television that Bernie had actually made it to the plate in the bottom of the eighth of Game Six, against the fireballing Eastwick, with Lynn and Petrocelli on base, he hurried back to the Red Sox dugout to watch their confrontation.
BOSTON FANS
had developed a genuine affection for Bernie Carbo, and they cheered him wildly as he dug in at the plate; Bernie didn’t often feel in control of much at this stage of his life, but he came the closest when he had a bat in his hand.
Eastwick stared in at Bench. Fred Lynn watched closely as he took his lead off second. Eastwick surprised Bernie with a moving fastball that broke to the outside corner. Davidson called strike one.