GaryMrMets
08-01-2003, 02:27 AM
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’78: A season to remember
http://www.yesnetwork.com/photos/pepes_small.jpgBy Phil Pepe
Special to YES Network Online
July 19, 2003
Like the twin cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul, the 1978 American League East season was divided into two parts, separate and distinct, but equal. The first half belonged to the Boston Red Sox, who terrorized baseball and ran roughshod over the league while their arch rivals from New York, in defense of their world championship, sputtered and stumbled, beset by injuries and internal strife. But in the second half it was all Yankees. Their injured returned; their turbulent waters calmed while Red Sox tripped over themselves, broke down physically and unraveled.
As Bucky Dent stood in the batter’s box in Fenway Park facing Mike Torrez on the afternoon of Monday, October 2, the Red Sox had seen a lead that had reached 14 ½ games in August, melt away like ice on the equator.
By the afternoon of October 2, Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson, who had almost come to blows the previous year in the Fenway Park dugout, had reached an uneasy truce after Jackson smacked three home runs on three successive pitches in Game 6 and helped the Yankees win their first World Series in 12 years. Hostilities between Martin and Jackson resumed the following July when Jackson ignored an order to bunt and was suspended for five games. The day after Jackson returned, without exchanging a word with the manager, as the Yankees were preparing to fly to Kansas City, Martin exploded in an off-the cuff tirade to reporters at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, impugning Jackson and Yankees owner, George Steinbrenner. The following afternoon in Kansas City, his back to the wall, Martin offered a tearful resignation only to be introduced five days later at Old-timers Day festivities in Yankee Stadium with the shocking announcement that “…the manager for the 1980 season and hopefully for many years after that will be Number One, Billy Martin.”
Into this bizarre scenario, to replace Martin as Yankees manager on July 25, had stepped Bob Lemon, a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Cleveland Indians who had served previously as Martin’s pitching coach and who had been fired 26 days earlier as manager of the Chicago White Sox. Where Martin was fiery, feisty and intense, Lemon was laid back and low key. Where Martin created tension in the clubhouse, Lemon brought a relaxed atmosphere. Where Martin was suspicious, Lemon was friendly, outgoing and likable. He called everybody “Meat,” and everybody called him “Meat” or “Lem.”
Lemon was not one for rah-rah speeches, rules, throwing things or disciplining players, whom he treated as adults, not children. His idea of strategy was to write the names of his players on the lineup card, then sit back and watch. He set the tone of his regime in his first meeting with the team.
“You guys won last year, which means you must have been doing something right,” he said. “So what do you say you go out and play just like you did last year, and I’ll try to stay out of the way?”
He did, and they did. When Lemon took over the team on July 25, the Yankees were 10 ½ games behind the Red Sox (after falling a season-high 14 games back on July 19, they had won five straight under Martin) and things were already beginning to change.
“We had a lot of injuries early in the season,” said Bucky Dent. “Catfish (Hunter) was hurt. Mickey Rivers was out. I was out. There were a bunch of guys who were hurt. Then, all of a sudden, we started getting one guy back, then another, and Boston’s team started getting hurt. (Rick) Burleson got hurt, (Fred) Lynn got hurt, and it was the opposite, we started getting momentum. Catfish came back and won six games in a row. We started getting closer and, as we got closer, everybody knew then that we had a shot at catching them.
“It’s hard to explain. The ’78 team had a tremendous drive to be successful. Those guys just did not want to lose. As we started getting closer, we’d pick up one or two games, and guys were saying, “We’ve got to win every series, and if we pick up one game a week until September when we play the Red Sox we’ve got a shot.
“And then we went to Boston for four games. We went in there on a Thursday (September 7), and it was the weirdest feeling. We were four games back, and there was a different intensity about how our club came out, the way they went about their business. You could feel it, and you could sense it.”
It was called the Boston Massacre and it started immediately, the Yankees spraying hits all over Fenway Park. They started hitting in the first inning of the first game and they never stopped. In the first game, Willie Randolph, the Yankees leadoff hitter, batted three times before the Red Sox number nine hitter batted once. The Yankees went on to a 15-3 rout in Game 1 and followed it up with a 13-3 blowout in Game 2, a 7-0 shutout behind Ron Guidry in Game 3, and completed the four-game sweep with a 7-4 victory.
For the four games, the Yankees outscored the Red Sox, 42-9, and out-hit them, 67-21.
“When we swept them,” said Dent, “it was like, we’re going to beat these guys. We got it now. We knew we were going to win.”
The Yankees had moved into a tie with the Red Sox for first place, but there were still 20 games to play.
A week after the Boston Massacre, the teams met in a three-game series at Yankee Stadium. For the second time in six days, Guidry shut out the Red Sox to win the first game of the series, 4-0. When Catfish Hunter beat Mike Torrez, the Yankees suddenly had a 3 ½ game lead, and it was Boston’s turn to come back. The Red Sox salvaged the final game of the series in New York, and their season.
A week later, the Yankees’ lead was down to one game with seven games remaining. The Yanks won six straight, but the Red Sox matched them win for win and they went to the final game of the season still trailing the Yankees by one game. Luis Tiant beat Toronto on the final day and Rick Waits and the Indians beat the Yankees at Yankee Stadium, 9-2, and the Yankees and Red Sox had finished the regular season tied, necessitating a one-game playoff the following day in Boston by previous determination in a coin flip. It was only the second playoff in American League history, the Red Sox having lost the other one to Cleveland 30 years earlier, also in Fenway Park.
Monday, October 2, came up crisp and sunny in New England. Ron Guidry, with a record of 24-3 and two consecutive shutouts of the Red Sox, started for the Yankees on three days’ rest. Mike Torrez, who had won Game 3 and the clinching Game 6 for the Yankees in the 1977 World Series, but who had signed with Boston as a free agent after the season, started for the Red Sox. His record was 16-12.
The Red Sox reached Guidry for a run in the second and another in the sixth, and the Yankees were helpless against Torrez, who hadn’t won a game in six weeks, but was being a big game pitcher once more.
In the seventh, Chris Chambliss and Roy White hit back-to-back singles with one out. Jim Spencer, batting for Brian Doyle, who was playing because of a hamstring injury to the Yankees regular second baseman Willie Randolph, flied out for the second out. That brought up Dent, the ninth place hitter.
In the press box, New York writers looked to the dugout, expecting a pinch-hitter for Dent. But that wasn’t Lemon’s style. He had gotten the team this far by letting the players play and staying “out of the way” and he wasn’t about to change now.
Dent took Torrez’s first pitch, then fouled the second pitch down on his foot and dropped to the ground in pain. While trainer Gene Monahan sprayed the injured area with ethyl chloride to deaden the pain, the on-deck hitter, Mickey Rivers, had picked up Dent’s bat and examined it.
“Mickey and I had taken only a couple of bats up there,” said Dent, “so I was using one of his bats in batting practice and I broke it, a hairline crack. When I went up for that at bat, I mistakenly pulled that bat out of the rack, so when I fouled the ball off my foot and Monahan was spraying the stuff on my ankle, Mickey came over and said, ‘Hey, homey, you’re using the wrong bat, man. That bat’s cracked.’ And he gave me the other bat he had.
“I got back in there with the new bat and the next pitch he (Torrez) threw a fastball. He tried to get it in on me, but he got it down.”
Said Torrez: “I pitched a great game. I have nothing to be ashamed of. I wish he hadn’t fouled that ball off his foot because I had great concentration, but the three or four minutes, whatever it took for him to do whatever he had to do, freezing it, knocked my concentration off.
“It wasn’t a bad pitch, but I didn’t get it where I wanted to. I could have thrown him the slider because I was ahead, two strikes and no balls. What I was going to do was come in on him and knock him off the plate, then come back with a slider away. It was a fastball that tailed back over the plate. It was going to be more of a waste pitch, but I didn’t really throw the ball. It was the difference between throwing the ball because that’s what you want to do, or guiding it. I guided it, and I didn’t get the ball in deep enough.”
Said Dent: “When I hit the ball, I never did see it go into the net. I knew it was on a line, but I didn’t know if it was high enough. I thought it was going to hit off the wall.”
“I didn’t think it was going out,” said Torrez, “because I saw Yaz pop his glove, and anytime you saw him pop his glove, the ball is catchable. ‘Good,’ I said. ‘I’m out of the inning.’ Then Yaz kind of backed up, and backed up, and then he hit the wall and I said, ‘Damn.’”
“As I rounded second and third and was trotting home,” said Dent, “Fenway was dead silent. You could hear a pin drop, except for the few Yankees fans. You could hear them clapping.”
’78: A season to remember
http://www.yesnetwork.com/photos/pepes_small.jpgBy Phil Pepe
Special to YES Network Online
July 19, 2003
Like the twin cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul, the 1978 American League East season was divided into two parts, separate and distinct, but equal. The first half belonged to the Boston Red Sox, who terrorized baseball and ran roughshod over the league while their arch rivals from New York, in defense of their world championship, sputtered and stumbled, beset by injuries and internal strife. But in the second half it was all Yankees. Their injured returned; their turbulent waters calmed while Red Sox tripped over themselves, broke down physically and unraveled.
As Bucky Dent stood in the batter’s box in Fenway Park facing Mike Torrez on the afternoon of Monday, October 2, the Red Sox had seen a lead that had reached 14 ½ games in August, melt away like ice on the equator.
By the afternoon of October 2, Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson, who had almost come to blows the previous year in the Fenway Park dugout, had reached an uneasy truce after Jackson smacked three home runs on three successive pitches in Game 6 and helped the Yankees win their first World Series in 12 years. Hostilities between Martin and Jackson resumed the following July when Jackson ignored an order to bunt and was suspended for five games. The day after Jackson returned, without exchanging a word with the manager, as the Yankees were preparing to fly to Kansas City, Martin exploded in an off-the cuff tirade to reporters at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, impugning Jackson and Yankees owner, George Steinbrenner. The following afternoon in Kansas City, his back to the wall, Martin offered a tearful resignation only to be introduced five days later at Old-timers Day festivities in Yankee Stadium with the shocking announcement that “…the manager for the 1980 season and hopefully for many years after that will be Number One, Billy Martin.”
Into this bizarre scenario, to replace Martin as Yankees manager on July 25, had stepped Bob Lemon, a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Cleveland Indians who had served previously as Martin’s pitching coach and who had been fired 26 days earlier as manager of the Chicago White Sox. Where Martin was fiery, feisty and intense, Lemon was laid back and low key. Where Martin created tension in the clubhouse, Lemon brought a relaxed atmosphere. Where Martin was suspicious, Lemon was friendly, outgoing and likable. He called everybody “Meat,” and everybody called him “Meat” or “Lem.”
Lemon was not one for rah-rah speeches, rules, throwing things or disciplining players, whom he treated as adults, not children. His idea of strategy was to write the names of his players on the lineup card, then sit back and watch. He set the tone of his regime in his first meeting with the team.
“You guys won last year, which means you must have been doing something right,” he said. “So what do you say you go out and play just like you did last year, and I’ll try to stay out of the way?”
He did, and they did. When Lemon took over the team on July 25, the Yankees were 10 ½ games behind the Red Sox (after falling a season-high 14 games back on July 19, they had won five straight under Martin) and things were already beginning to change.
“We had a lot of injuries early in the season,” said Bucky Dent. “Catfish (Hunter) was hurt. Mickey Rivers was out. I was out. There were a bunch of guys who were hurt. Then, all of a sudden, we started getting one guy back, then another, and Boston’s team started getting hurt. (Rick) Burleson got hurt, (Fred) Lynn got hurt, and it was the opposite, we started getting momentum. Catfish came back and won six games in a row. We started getting closer and, as we got closer, everybody knew then that we had a shot at catching them.
“It’s hard to explain. The ’78 team had a tremendous drive to be successful. Those guys just did not want to lose. As we started getting closer, we’d pick up one or two games, and guys were saying, “We’ve got to win every series, and if we pick up one game a week until September when we play the Red Sox we’ve got a shot.
“And then we went to Boston for four games. We went in there on a Thursday (September 7), and it was the weirdest feeling. We were four games back, and there was a different intensity about how our club came out, the way they went about their business. You could feel it, and you could sense it.”
It was called the Boston Massacre and it started immediately, the Yankees spraying hits all over Fenway Park. They started hitting in the first inning of the first game and they never stopped. In the first game, Willie Randolph, the Yankees leadoff hitter, batted three times before the Red Sox number nine hitter batted once. The Yankees went on to a 15-3 rout in Game 1 and followed it up with a 13-3 blowout in Game 2, a 7-0 shutout behind Ron Guidry in Game 3, and completed the four-game sweep with a 7-4 victory.
For the four games, the Yankees outscored the Red Sox, 42-9, and out-hit them, 67-21.
“When we swept them,” said Dent, “it was like, we’re going to beat these guys. We got it now. We knew we were going to win.”
The Yankees had moved into a tie with the Red Sox for first place, but there were still 20 games to play.
A week after the Boston Massacre, the teams met in a three-game series at Yankee Stadium. For the second time in six days, Guidry shut out the Red Sox to win the first game of the series, 4-0. When Catfish Hunter beat Mike Torrez, the Yankees suddenly had a 3 ½ game lead, and it was Boston’s turn to come back. The Red Sox salvaged the final game of the series in New York, and their season.
A week later, the Yankees’ lead was down to one game with seven games remaining. The Yanks won six straight, but the Red Sox matched them win for win and they went to the final game of the season still trailing the Yankees by one game. Luis Tiant beat Toronto on the final day and Rick Waits and the Indians beat the Yankees at Yankee Stadium, 9-2, and the Yankees and Red Sox had finished the regular season tied, necessitating a one-game playoff the following day in Boston by previous determination in a coin flip. It was only the second playoff in American League history, the Red Sox having lost the other one to Cleveland 30 years earlier, also in Fenway Park.
Monday, October 2, came up crisp and sunny in New England. Ron Guidry, with a record of 24-3 and two consecutive shutouts of the Red Sox, started for the Yankees on three days’ rest. Mike Torrez, who had won Game 3 and the clinching Game 6 for the Yankees in the 1977 World Series, but who had signed with Boston as a free agent after the season, started for the Red Sox. His record was 16-12.
The Red Sox reached Guidry for a run in the second and another in the sixth, and the Yankees were helpless against Torrez, who hadn’t won a game in six weeks, but was being a big game pitcher once more.
In the seventh, Chris Chambliss and Roy White hit back-to-back singles with one out. Jim Spencer, batting for Brian Doyle, who was playing because of a hamstring injury to the Yankees regular second baseman Willie Randolph, flied out for the second out. That brought up Dent, the ninth place hitter.
In the press box, New York writers looked to the dugout, expecting a pinch-hitter for Dent. But that wasn’t Lemon’s style. He had gotten the team this far by letting the players play and staying “out of the way” and he wasn’t about to change now.
Dent took Torrez’s first pitch, then fouled the second pitch down on his foot and dropped to the ground in pain. While trainer Gene Monahan sprayed the injured area with ethyl chloride to deaden the pain, the on-deck hitter, Mickey Rivers, had picked up Dent’s bat and examined it.
“Mickey and I had taken only a couple of bats up there,” said Dent, “so I was using one of his bats in batting practice and I broke it, a hairline crack. When I went up for that at bat, I mistakenly pulled that bat out of the rack, so when I fouled the ball off my foot and Monahan was spraying the stuff on my ankle, Mickey came over and said, ‘Hey, homey, you’re using the wrong bat, man. That bat’s cracked.’ And he gave me the other bat he had.
“I got back in there with the new bat and the next pitch he (Torrez) threw a fastball. He tried to get it in on me, but he got it down.”
Said Torrez: “I pitched a great game. I have nothing to be ashamed of. I wish he hadn’t fouled that ball off his foot because I had great concentration, but the three or four minutes, whatever it took for him to do whatever he had to do, freezing it, knocked my concentration off.
“It wasn’t a bad pitch, but I didn’t get it where I wanted to. I could have thrown him the slider because I was ahead, two strikes and no balls. What I was going to do was come in on him and knock him off the plate, then come back with a slider away. It was a fastball that tailed back over the plate. It was going to be more of a waste pitch, but I didn’t really throw the ball. It was the difference between throwing the ball because that’s what you want to do, or guiding it. I guided it, and I didn’t get the ball in deep enough.”
Said Dent: “When I hit the ball, I never did see it go into the net. I knew it was on a line, but I didn’t know if it was high enough. I thought it was going to hit off the wall.”
“I didn’t think it was going out,” said Torrez, “because I saw Yaz pop his glove, and anytime you saw him pop his glove, the ball is catchable. ‘Good,’ I said. ‘I’m out of the inning.’ Then Yaz kind of backed up, and backed up, and then he hit the wall and I said, ‘Damn.’”
“As I rounded second and third and was trotting home,” said Dent, “Fenway was dead silent. You could hear a pin drop, except for the few Yankees fans. You could hear them clapping.”