60 Moments: No. 4, The home run before the Home Run and Carlton Fisk waves it fair

Now that baseball has returned, Joe Posnanski will count down his top 10 moments in baseball history across the 10 weeks of the scheduled regular season — think of it as a companion piece to The Baseball 100 — with a series of essays on the most memorable, remarkable and joyous scenes of the game. This project will not contain more words than “Moby Dick,” but we hope you enjoy it.

Bernie Carbo (and, yeah, Carlton Fisk) hits a home run
Oct. 21, 1975

Pat Darcy was not nervous. He has always suspected that people think that, especially after he saw “Good Will Hunting.” Remember the Carlton Fisk home run scene in that one? Robin Williams’ Sean Maguire was telling Matt Damon’s Will Hunting the story of getting tickets to Game 6 of the 1975 World Series and then giving them away because he had fallen in love with a woman who walked into the bar before the game started.

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“Sorry, guys,” Maguire said to his friends. “I gotta see about a girl.”

You remember that scene, right?

Darcy mainly remembers the way the movie showed him warming up and walking nervously around the mound before the home run. The way he saw it, the movie made it seem like he was a frightened rookie pitching against a future Hall of Famer in the 12th inning of perhaps the greatest baseball game ever played.

True, he was a rookie pitching against a future Hall of Famer in the 12th inning of perhaps the greatest baseball game ever played.

But the larger point is that he wasn’t frightened — or nervous.

“I’d already thrown two scoreless innings,” Darcy said. “Everybody forgets that. I wasn’t nervous at all.”

He paused.

“I was gassed,” he said.

The thing about Game 6 of the 1975 World Series is that there were too many epic, absurd and wonderful things: Fred Lynn’s three-run homer; Luis Tiant’s early-inning swagger (with his father in the stands); Ken Griffey Sr.’s triple as Lynn crashed into the wall; Johnny Bench’s epic single off the Green Monster; the Reds’ perpetual changing of pitchers; George Foster’s monster double off the center-field wall; César Gerónimo’s insurance homer that put the Reds up three; Bernie Carbo hitting what should be remembered as one of the most famous homers in baseball history; Denny Doyle tagging up to try to score the winning run because he heard third-base coach Don Zimmer yelling, “Go, go, go!” (Zimmer was actually yelling “No, no, no!” and Doyle was thrown out); Dwight Evans making an absurd catch in deep right field and then doubling up Griffey …

And, you might know, there was one other moment.

People can argue all they want about the greatest game in baseball history. There are plenty of good answers. The 1986 playoffs alone have three awesome contenders: Game 6 of the World Series (ball goes through Bill Buckner’s legs), Game 6 of the NLCS (16 innings, Billy Hatcher’s homer in the 14th, the Astros almost came back) and Game 5 of the ALCS (Dave Henderson’s game). Game 2 of the 2017 World Series between the Astros and Dodgers was a Universal Theme Park ride, and Derek Jeter’s Mr. November game was larger than life, as was Jack Morris’ 10-inning shutout to end the 1991 World Series, and so on.

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But let’s be blunt about it: No game in baseball history had as many unlikely, dramatic and seemingly impossible things happen as Game 6 of the 1975 World Series.

Everything about the game was dreamlike. The Reds had taken a 3-2 lead in the series on Oct. 16, and just as the series returned to Fenway Park, the rain began to fall. It rained in Boston for three straight days, postponing the game on Oct. 18, 19 and 20. The anticipation was overwhelming. Scalpers charged the highest ticket prices for any game in baseball history to that point. Everybody talked baseball; Games 6 and 7 of the 1975 World Series would be the highest-rated back-to-back baseball games in television history.

The outfield was entirely drenched when the players took the field.

And then all this stuff happened — too many things to remember. In the 11th inning, Pete Rose led off, and before the pitch, he turned to Fisk and said, “Wow, this is some kind of game, isn’t it? We’ll be telling our grandkids about this game.” And then Dick Drago hit Rose with a pitch — maybe. Fisk didn’t think so. And while Fisk argued that the ball definitely did not hit him, Rose ran to first base, where the legendary and taciturn Carl Yastrzemski waited.

“This is the greatest game I’ve ever played in,” Rose said.

And Yaz, despite himself, couldn’t help but nod.

The Carbo homer — much like Nikola Tesla, the Nicholas Brothers, Gillian Jacobs and Hal Smith’s home run in the 1960 World Series — should be so much more famous. The homer has a whole backstory. Carbo had been drafted in the first round by the Cincinnati Reds in 1965 when he was just 17. He was overloaded with talent, but it didn’t seem to mean all that much to him. He seemed headed for baseball oblivion when a hot-headed car salesman and minor-league manager named Sparky Anderson made him a personal project in Asheville, N.C., in 1968.

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Then Carbo made it to the Reds and was good enough to be named Rookie of the Year by The Sporting News, but then he began to goof around again. The Reds’ manager was Sparky Anderson, and he had Carbo traded away. “I never loved a player more than I loved Bernie Carbo,” he said that day.

Eventually, Carbo made it around to Boston, where he became an effective fourth outfielder and pinch hitter. He’d homered against Sparky and the Reds as a pinch hitter in Game 3. In Game 6, he was sent to the plate with two runners on and the Red Sox trailing by three in the bottom of the eighth. He was a last-ditch hope for Boston.

Rawly Eastwick, a terrific right-handed reliever, was pitching for the Reds. He was Anderson’s sixth pitcher of the game — that year, Anderson had earned the nickname “Captain Hook,” as he set a big-league record for pulling his starter in 45 consecutive games. It was unheard of then; starting pitchers were supposed to finish games in 1975. But Sparky simply had no faith in pitchers. Jack Billingham, a big and powerful Reds righty, had a theory that Anderson hated pitchers because he couldn’t hit them.

Whatever the reason, when Carbo was sent up as a pinch hitter, everybody expected Anderson to go to his top lefty reliever, Will McEnaney. Carbo rather famously couldn’t hit lefties; he’d hit .190 off left-handed pitchers that year and had not hit a homer off a lefty since 1973. Plus, when there was a pitching move to make, Anderson always made it. It was his trademark, after all.

“I feel good,” Darcy once remembered saying when Anderson came to the mound.

“Yeah?” Anderson grumped. “You’ll feel better in the shower.” And he took away the ball.

So, it was pretty stunning when Anderson left Eastwick in to pitch to Carbo. Eastwick quickly got two strikes. And that’s when Sparky felt a twinge, like a disturbance in the force. He needed to get Eastwick out of there. He walked up to the top step and prepared to bring in McEnaney to get the third strike, but something stopped him. Eastwick threw a pitch that seemed to be strike three, but somehow Carbo fouled it off with what Johnny Bench would later call “the weakest swing you ever saw.”

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Then Eastwick threw a fastball up and middle, and Carbo blasted it for a three-run homer to deep center field to tie the game, and Fenway Park shook and danced and crumbled and rose again.

Yes, that should be the most famous home run of the decade. Of the half-century.

And as you know, it isn’t the most famous home run of the game. It isn’t even close.

When Fisk led off the bottom of the 12th inning with the score tied 6-6, everybody was spent. Too much had happened. Darcy had thrown mush balls in his warmup; he knew that he was through. But the Reds had no one else. Darcy was the eighth pitcher used; the only pitcher left was Don Gullett, who had started Game 5 and would have to start Game 7 if the Reds lost.

Bench would remember catching Darcy’s warmup pitching and thinking, “There’s no way we get out of this inning.”

As Fisk watched Darcy warm up, he, too, had a feeling that the Red Sox were about to win. And he knew exactly who would be the hero: Fred Lynn.

“He was the best hitter on our ballclub,” Fisk said. “I was hitting in front of him that day for some reason, and so I’m in the on-deck circle getting ready, and I don’t know why I said this — it was just one of those feelings that comes across. I said, ‘Freddy, I’m gonna hit one off the wall. Drive me in.'”

Darcy threw a ball, and then he threw the pitch, and Fisk turned on it. He knew right away that it wasn’t going to hit the wall.

“I knew it was high enough and hard enough and deep enough and long enough,” Fisk said. “But I didn’t know whether it was going to stay fair or not. It started curving. And usually those balls down the line do curve.”

Fisk began to wave at the ball. He didn’t think about it. He certainly didn’t know that the camera on top of the Green Monster was following him closely and that his waving the ball fair would become one of the most famous images in the game’s history. All he knew was that the ball straightened out and stayed fair.

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Pete Rose turned his back on it before it went over the wall. “I knew it was not going foul,” he said. “He hit it too hard.”

In Charlestown, N.H. — Carlton Fisk’s home town — church bells rang.

There’s something sweet and poetic and ironic about Fisk’s home run: His Red Sox lost the World Series anyway. They lost in Game 7 when Joe Morgan drove in the game-winner with a bloop single. That’s baseball, right?

Follow the rest of the 60 Moments series on our topic page.

(Photo of Fisk: Bettmann)

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