As Bernie Carbo rounded the bases that electric October night 50 years ago, spreading his arms like the condor as if his feet were not touching the Fenway Park ground, one wonders what went through his mind. Could he have imagined the moment, that pinch-hit three-run homer, tying Game 6 of the World Series, would live forever?
“No, not at all,” Carbo, said during his appearance at the World Series Club of Hartford County this week. “We lost. We should have won. … Game 7, we didn’t turn the double play.”
That’s not the most remembered play of a classic World Series that included Carbo’s shot and Carlton Fisk’s walk-off homer in Game 6. Then there was a controversial no-call on possible interference in Game 4, Tony Perez’s homer on Bill Lee’s blooper pitch and Joe Morgan’s game-winning bloop single in Game 7, won by the Reds, the historic “Big Red Machine.” The botched double play preceded Perez’s homer and the Reds’ comeback from a 3-0 deficit to win in the deciding game, 4-3.
Bill “Spaceman” Lee and Bernie Carbo, forever friends, forever 1975 Red Sox, forever “Buffalo Heads.” At the World Series Club of Hartford. (Dom Amore/Hartford Courant
Bill Lee, “the Spaceman” and Carbo, long-time friends, came for a night of bawdy stories, 1970s-style, irreverent, anti-establishment. (If you’re too young to remember the period, it’s hard to explain it.)
Lee had his own moment stuck in the craw. A fan called to Lee that he was still heartbroken over that Series, and Lee hollered back, “You’re heartbroken?”
“Greatest World Series of all time, one run separates us,” Lee said. “Should’ve won Game 2. Then I probably would’ve been dead, with more money, I’d have been drunk. … If I was managing instead of Darrell Johnson, I get taken out of Game 2 after the rain delay. He sent me out for the eighth inning with a 2-1 lead, and I got three outs on five pitches, but all three of them were hard hit balls. I did not have it after the (delay), then to come out in the ninth and have to face (Johnny) Bench, Perez and (George) Foster, what left-hander would do that nowadays?”
The Reds rallied in that ninth inning and tied the series after the Red Sox had won Game 1 behind Luis Tiant.
It is common for old ballplayers to remember the details and plays the rest of us don’t, or to be curmudgeonly about today’s game, but make no mistake, Bill Lee and Bernie Carbo are not common old ballplayers. Lee, looking like he just now made it back from Woodstock in a smoke-filled Volkswagen bus, pulled a dilapidated Graig Nettles baseball card from his wallet, tucked in next to his “expired” driver’s license (wait, was he serious?). He keeps it there as a reminder of the big brawl with the Yankees in 1976, when Nettles body-slammed him.
“It’s been up against the right cheek of my butt for 56 years,” he said. “I carry it so the smell and the view do not change.”
Lee and Carbo, both 78, became the best of friends, bonding with a group of “Buffalo Heads” in 1977 who drove crusty manager Don Zimmer crazy by posting photos of a buffalo with Zimmer’s face on it. But baseball in the 1970s was not all laughs and pranks.
“Turmoil,” Lee said. “I was owned by Tom Yawkey, but I worked for (union chief) Marvin Miller. I was a labor guy. We fixed the field when Freddy Lynn hit the wall, we padded Fenway Park. We took care of the players. We were locked out, and we struck three times between 1969 and ’81 and I was involved in all of them, and every player playing right now owes their salary to us holding together.”
Carbo today runs Diamond Club Ministries, which he founded in 1993, using evangelistic camps and his love for baseball to share his Christian faith and minister to families, the next one coming up in Fayetteville, N.C., Sept. 19-21.
Lee still gets out and throws once in a while, the Savannah Bananas craze right up his alley, albeit a few decades late. He survived a cardiac episode warming up in the Bananas’ bullpen in 2022, but has returned and laughs it all off with a mischievous old iconoclast’s laugh, as though he’d gotten away with something, cheating Mr. Death and all. Lee is planning to relocate from Vermont to Canada.
When they get together, as they did on Wednesday night, the stories pour the way the beer used to in the clubhouses of the ’70s, but now, as then, there was an edge. When a fan tried to ask their opinion of trades made by the Red Sox management after the ’75 Series, one of the mistakes he cited was trading Cecil Cooper. Carbo jumped all over him. Cooper was traded to reacquire Carbo in ’77. The Red Sox twice traded Carbo, though he loved playing in Boston, especially before Yawkey, long-time owner, died in 1976.
Berne Carbo, ever remembered in New England for his clutch home run in the 1975 World Series, signs memorabilia for members of the World Series Club of Hartford County this week. (Dom Amore/Hartford Courant)
“When Tom Yawkey died, my career died,” Carbo said. “I took him to arbitration looking for a $10,000 raise and I lost. When I saw him, I told him I had a new baby coming and really needed the money. The next day, there was a check for $10,000 in my locker — and he gave me a $25,000 raise. You think I didn’t want to play for Tom Yawkey? It was the first time in my life I ever wanted to play for a uniform.”
Like Lee, Carbo keeps reminding all who will listen of baseball’s labor strife that eventually brought no-trade terms for veterans, an effect of Curt Flood’s 1970 lawsuit, free agency, and many other changes.
“We had to play hard, we had to win to get a raise, we were serious about the game,” Carbo said. “Bill Lee and us old guys went on strike five times, and it didn’t benefit us. It benefitted these kids making millions and millions of dollars, and they don’t know who we are. They have no idea how they’re making this money, that we suffered, but we didn’t benefit from any strike.”
At the trading deadline in 1978, they hugged, believing they were to remain teammates, but Carbo was dispatched to Cleveland a few minutes later, and Lee remembered missing him most when the Red Sox lost to the Yankees in the playoff game three months later and he felt a “Bernie Carbo wind” blowing out at Fenway.
So there are scars that linger, sure. The pain of a World Series that got away, the gravy train that left the station only after they retired. But Spaceman Lee and Bernie Carbo have this: They’ve never been forgotten, nor has their moment. Nearly 200 came out to meet, great and listen.
“We make that double play, there ain’t no home run by Perez and we win that World Series,” Carbo said. “But you can’t live by it. Errors are part of the game. You think back on it now, ‘Aw, man, it would’ve been nice.’”
More for your Sunday read:
Minding Maya Moore
SCSU women’s basketball coach Kate Lynch, in an exhibition game against UConn in 2008, had the experience of guarding Maya Moore, one of the new Hall of Famers. For the record, Lynch scored 18, with a lot of shots. Moore scored 21 in the 119-58 UConn win.
“Composed, she was super composed and really competitive,” Lynch remembered. “We were a Division II team and she took us super seriously, and for us, that meant a lot. It didn’t matter who she was playing against, she always played at that same level and tried to elevate her teammates.”
Lynch and this year’s Owls will play UConn in an exhibition Oct. 26.
Dom Amore’s Sunday Read: A UConn icon brings out best in hockey team; CT players in NFL, and more
Sunday short takes
*The last week of the minor-league baseball season will include a sentimental journey for Dan Lovallo, who partners with Jeff Dooley on Yard Goats broadcasts, and sings during the seventh-inning stretch at Dunkin’ Park. Lovallo did the Richmond Braves first game in the city’s new stadium in 1985. The Goats are sending him to on the road to Richmond to do the final game to be played in The Diamond, as the Goats play the Flying Squirrels there next week.
*Milford’s Ben James, the world’s No. 2 amateur golfer, who has played in The Travelers as an amateur and is a senior at Virginia, earned a spot on the U.S. Walker Cup team. The 50th Cup is being contested between the U.S., Great Britain and Ireland this weekend at Pebble Beach
*With each passing day it looks sillier and sillier that Juan Soto was left out of the All-Star Game.
*Windsor’s Jason Pinnock, the former Jet and Giant, is on track to start at safety for the 49ers in the season-opener. He’d been hobbled with a heel problem during camp.
*Rick Pitino, on a Hall of Fame panel at Mohegan Sun to discuss inductee Billy Donovan, coach of Florida’s back-to-back NCAA champs, recalled that when he arrived at Providence in 1985, Donovan told him he wanted to transfer to Northeastern or Fairfield. “I called Jim Calhoun at Northeastern,” Pitino said. “He said, ‘Rick, our guards are all better than Billy Donovan,’ then I called Terry O’Connor at Fairfield, he said, ‘Our backcourt is better.’” Donovan stayed, lost weight, helped Providence get to the Final Four and the rest, as they say, is history.
*Old-school comics disappeared from sports pages long ago, but the art has a rebirth one month a year online. Shofar Shoshanna puts out a daily “blast” until Sept. 23, the first day full day of Rosh Hashanah to “inspire people to look back and go forward, reflect on the past in order to start up fresh in the new year.” A huge state sports fan, the creator, Emily Kaufman, features state sports stars, politicians and media-types with a humorous look at current events. No surprise, UConn women’s basketball stars draw thousands of eyeballs.
Last word
Regarding the latest twists and turns in the Sun saga: While I do hope the Sun stay in Connecticut, despite my pessimism on the topic, I applaud the state’s efforts to facilitatethe WNBA franchise staying and abhor the ham-handed attempts by the NBA/WNBA to hijack the franchise, I draw a line at using state money to buy a stake in the team. This is a bad box to open. If state money is used for parts of a deal, like a practice facility, it should be tied to bringing all, or nearly all 22 dates to the renovated PeoplesBank Arena in Hartford. To kick in public money toward buying the team for more than $300 million, and then keep it in the 8,000-seat arena on tribal land, doesn’t make any sense to me. There does come a point where this is about business, and sentiment and emotion just have to be set aside.
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