Game Six (33 page)

When asked if this defeat felt more disappointing than the last World Series the Red Sox had lost, in 1967, their grim but resolute captain Carl Yastrzemski shook his head, trying to correct and set the tone. “This is tough, but we’ll put this one behind us. We have a good, young team. Let’s start thinking about next year.”

But he also thought back to a conversation he’d had with Tom Yawkey years earlier, when in a brutal on-field collision he’d suffered two broken ribs and a lacerated kidney during the 1965 season. Yawkey had come to visit him every day during his nine days in the hospital after surgery; that was when Yaz felt he’d really gotten to know his employer, and they’d been extremely close ever since. Yawkey was never comfortable talking much about himself—he kept
the focus on his young ballplayer and how he was progressing—but one day he opened up to him. “Yaz, you have no idea what it would mean to me to win it all. Just once.”

Slumped on a bench in the corner of the locker room, Coach Johnny Pesky, who’d spent more years in a Red Sox uniform than anyone else in the room, had tears in his eyes: “I just feel so badly for Mr. Yawkey that we couldn’t win that seventh game for him again.”

TOM YAWKEY
, who’d remained in his private rooftop box until most of the crowd had filed out of Fenway Park, walked out haltingly, ashen but with his head held high. A single reporter stood outside in respectful silence, waiting for him to speak first.

“Three times for the World Series Championship, three times into the seventh game…three times a loser.” His voice trailed away, and then he tried to rally. “But I’m proud of my players. They gave it everything they possibly could.”

His wife Jean gripped his arm and helped her ailing husband slowly toward the stairs.

“I guess it just wasn’t meant to be,” he said quietly.

T
HAT THESE TWO TEAMS HAD JUST PLAYED THE MOST
competitive World Series in baseball history remains beyond dispute; five one-run games, five come-from-behind wins—including all four won by the Reds—and two extra-inning affairs, including the unprecedented drama and spectacle of Game Six. The Red Sox had outscored the Reds in the Series by a single run, 30–29, while logging sixty hits to the Reds’ fifty-nine. The Red Sox pitching staff had recorded an ERA of 3.86, to the Reds’ 3.88. Both teams had played extraordinary defense; of those fifty-nine runs scored, only three in the entire Series were unearned. The numbers confirm that never had two teams in a championship been more evenly matched, but there had been much more than routine excellence on display; stars had delivered under pressure, unknowns had turned into heroes, and millions of fans with no rooting interest in either team had been brought back to baseball by the extraordinary drama the two teams had created. As a result, more people had watched the 1975 World Series on television than any ever played—NBC banked record revenues for their good fortune—and the excitement it generated, if only temporarily, lifted the spirits of a country in dire need of distraction from hard and troubled times. Professional baseball benefited more directly: The 1975 World Series ignited a
major revival in both ratings and live attendance for the sport that would last throughout the decade. And due to its exposure during the broadcasts, Fenway Park began its transformation from a battered old local landmark to a beloved national baseball mecca.

Based on the strength, guts, and experience of their rosters, both teams now seemed poised to dominate their respective leagues for years to come, but the fairy tale ending promised by Game Six for the long-suffering Red Sox and their fans died hard and fast. The World Champion Reds returned to Cincinnati in triumph, and while that city turned out in force to celebrate their ascension with a daylight parade that lifted civic pride to levels unseen in two generations, Boston was about to endure a long, cold winter of discontent, dominated by headlines of racial strife in its forcibly integrated schools and furious political protest on its streets. Politicians in Washington grudgingly admitted that the nation’s economy was mired in its second year of the most serious recession since the Great Depression—resulting in a combination of runaway inflation and economic stagnation that the press dubbed “stagflation”—while all Western democracies confronted not only the continued tensions of the Cold War but a new threat posed by a cartel of hostile oil-producing nations called OPEC; a darker global reality had dawned. On the heels of the disastrous Watergate disgrace, and only six months after the last American military forces had withdrawn in defeat from Vietnam, America’s image and standing in the world appeared suddenly and shockingly diminished. Gerald Ford, the nation’s unelected president, his own image indelibly tarnished by his controversial pardon of Richard Nixon, faced a serious challenge within his own party for the coming bicentennial-year election from a retired movie star, California’s former governor Ronald Reagan, a man long considered too radically conservative and outside the mainstream of political discourse for national office. Late that fall, almost unnoticed, an obscure one-term governor of Georgia and peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter declared that he would seek the Democratic nomination for President in 1976.

Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey’s health seriously deteriorated after
the World Series, and the news that he was undergoing chemotherapy for leukemia slowly filtered out of the organization and into the community. Although fans and many writers preferred to believe that their team’s youth and precocious success had just sounded the overture to a certain future dynasty, this most recent defeat had delivered a mortal blow to Yawkey’s endurance and will to survive. He would spend the coming months in and out of the hospital, while his capacities to provide direction and leadership for his team steadily declined, at a moment when it turned out they were needed the most.

Because the rules of baseball, as the game had always been played
off
the field, were about to change forever.

On December 23, 1975, in the office of MLB’s official arbiter, the nearly century-long reign of baseball’s reserve clause came to a shocking and sudden end. Since its inception in the late nineteenth century, the reserve clause had stipulated that every player currently under contract to any team—traditionally one-year deals—remained under legal obligation for an option year beyond the life of that contract, during which they were compelled to negotiate and sign their
next
contract exclusively with that same team. If the team failed to come to terms with players before a season began, they possessed the unilateral right to then renew their contracts for an additional year, which triggered yet another “option” year. As the owners’ logic had evolved over the intervening decades, baseball teams therefore “reserved” the right to maintain a legal vise grip on their players, as long as any signed contract existed, in perpetuity. There had been many challenges by players over the years to this brief, stubborn legal provision, one that owners argued was the key to their ability to operate as a business, but all had been turned aside by the American judicial establishment, up to and including the Supreme Court in the case of Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood in 1969. A three-time All-Star, Flood sacrificed his career while trying to free himself from the reserve clause; when his attempt failed, he was out of baseball in less than two years. Many others had tried to buck the system before and since, but no one on the players’ side of the argument had ever before
stopped to consider: What would happen if the reserve clause was challenged by a player
without
a signed contract?

With the encouragement and support of Marvin Miller, the former labor lawyer and then director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, starting pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally—of the Dodgers and Montreal Expos, respectively—had for different reasons refused to sign contracts with their teams prior to the 1975 season. Both teams then exercised what the reserve clause maintained was their legal right and unilaterally renewed their contracts, offering small raises, for the 1975 season. Both men showed up to work in 1975—Messersmith would win nineteen games for the Dodgers that year; McNally ended up retiring before the season ended—and both were paid according to the terms of their “option year” contracts, but neither man ever put pen to paper
agreeing
to those terms in a
new
contract. At the conclusion of the 1975 season, Messersmith and then McNally—who had no plans to play again, but participated on principle alone—then filed with Major League Baseball legal grievances claiming that because they had played out their option year
without
signed contracts, they were no longer bound or obliged by the stated terms of the reserve clause to negotiate exclusively with their current teams for the coming 1976 season. The next move in this high-stakes chess match was dictated by a concession Miller had won from baseball’s owners in 1970’s Basic Agreement: that instead of being decided internally by the owners themselves, this troublesome case would now be submitted to professional arbitration. And that meant their arguments would be heard by the arbitrator retained by baseball for exactly this purpose, seventy-year-old New York attorney Peter M. Seitz.

The heart of the players’ brief was simplicity itself: The language of the reserve clause concretely stated that the rights of teams to renew a player’s contract extended “for a period of one year” beyond the life of the current signed contract. That period, in both men’s cases, had now clearly expired, and therefore they claimed the reserve clause no longer exerted any limits or authority over their ability to
seek employment elsewhere within the sport of professional baseball. And on December 23, 1975, Major League Baseball’s salaried legal arbiter, Peter Seitz, handed down his ruling—known forever after as the “Seitz Decision”—that he agreed with the players’ interpretation of the language in the reserve clause. He founded his decision on a central tenet of American contract law, that whenever a clause is ambiguous, the ambiguity should be interpreted in a manner
least
beneficial to the party who had placed that clause in the contract to begin with. That party was Major League Baseball, and if team owners had truly wanted an eternal iron-clad grip on their players—according to Seitz—they should have spelled it out in more concrete terms. Seitz didn’t find that the reserve clause was in any way illegal, he simply agreed with the players that the clause, as written, should only be legally binding for one year.

It should not surprise anyone to learn that the first person to lose his job as a result of this ruling was Peter Seitz. Major League Baseball immediately filed an appeal with what they thought would be a sympathetic district court in Western Missouri, but on February 4, 1976, Judge John Oliver upheld the Seitz Decision. When the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals followed suit shortly thereafter, Major League Baseball ran out of legal options; the Seitz Decision now stood affirmed as the law of the land. Paralyzed since Seitz’s initial ruling, the owners responded by locking players out of spring training, and players answered by saying they wouldn’t show up anyway without a new Basic Agreement that incorporated the seismic ramifications of the Seitz Decision; the 1976 season, and the future of baseball itself, appeared to be in jeopardy. After the players rejected what the owners threatened would be their final offer, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn ordered both sides to shut up, sit down, and figure it out—and show up for work in the meantime until they did. Both sides—thanks to the credibility and influence of a more or less “independent” commissioner—complied. The lockout ended and the games began again, as the brutal negotiations between management and labor to craft a new Basic Agreement that incorporated these radically altered legal dimensions into baseball dragged on until after
America celebrated its two hundredth birthday in July. But in the interim, this new reality remained beyond dispute: Any player under contract in 1975 who now played through the 1976 season—the so-called “option year”—
without
a new signed contract would at the end of the season immediately become a “free agent”—a freshly minted term that now dominated the lexicon of baseball—and would possess the right to then offer his services and negotiate freely with any team for any price he could get for the 1977 season. Teams tried to circumvent the issue by scrambling to sign their best players to multiyear contracts, but before the Basic Agreement could be hammered out, nearly sixty players—all now represented or advised, many for the first time, by professional agents—announced that they intended to take advantage of the Seitz Decision and enter the 1976 season unsigned. As far as baseball’s twenty-four owners were concerned, this was a doomsday scenario: Their employees had been granted the right to a level playing field. The inability, or stubborn unwillingness, of many of them to accept the game’s new social and economic paradigm would soon consign many of its franchises to disaster.

None more notably than the Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds.

FIVE DAYS AFTER
America celebrated its bicentennial with the most lavish and elaborate nationwide party in its history, Tom Yawkey passed away in his sleep at New England Baptist Hospital, early in the morning of July 9, 1976. The flag flew at half-mast in Fenway Park that night, John Kiley refrained from playing his usual version of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” when the Red Sox took the field, and the home crowd observed a reverent moment of silence before the game. The eulogies in Boston’s papers elaborately detailed Yawkey’s four decades of devotion to the city’s beloved team. Much was made of his legendary kindness to players, past and present, and tributes poured in to honor his accomplishments as a philanthropist, conservationist—he designated that most of his vast South Carolina estate should become a natural game reserve—and “gentle
man sportsman,” an archaic term that with Yawkey’s passing had lost one of its last connections to the current age. Tom Yawkey had been nearly the last of a vanishing breed in professional baseball, the individual owner who wrote all the checks because he loved the game more as a pastime than a business. If his team lost money through the lean years, and there were many, so be it, Yawkey’s fortune could well afford red ink, and the good years, the pennant runs, the three World Series they’d fought their hearts out for in his accounting more than balanced the ledger. The two stars with whom he’d been the closest—Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski; he always called them his “two sons”—were both moved to tears as they recollected the years they’d spent in Yawkey’s company and employ. Yaz recalled the particular kindness that Yawkey had shown his mother, Hattie, during her own battle with cancer the previous year, when he had seen to it she was treated by the best doctors available, even giving up his seat in the owner’s box in Cincinnati for Game Five so Hattie could be closer to the field.

Tom Yawkey took his leave from life and the game he loved at a moment when baseball was about to become unrecognizable to him. He had moved far beyond the restless rich dilettante who’d bought the team as a shiny new toy in the depths of the Depression, the silver spoon tycoon who had so desperately craved the company and friendship of the working-class athletes on his payroll. He had been raised in strange and splendid isolation, a multimillionaire many times over since his teenage years, and had only grown steadily richer, through no visible effort of his own; nothing had ever been denied him but a parent’s love, and perhaps that’s the Rosebud at the heart of America’s sporting Citizen Kane, a soft, shy puzzle of a man with no apparent gift for intimacy, or interest in a family life, who’d received or expressed most of the affection he’d known with people on his payroll. After carefully selling off over half of his diverse holdings in the months before he died, and distributing their worth to his heirs in order to avoid estate taxes, Yawkey still bequeathed a fortune in excess of $50 million to his widow Jean. The ownership of Fenway Park and the Red Sox he also passed, through
the instrument of a complicated trust, to the control of Jean Yawkey. Tom Yawkey’s only daughter, Julia, from his first marriage, received $10,000.