Red Sox turning back time to the memorable 1975 season and the best World Series ever, and other thoughts

Boston Globe

04-04-2025

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They wore two-toned, red-and-blue caps, won 95 regular-season games, swept the three-time defending Series champion A's in the ALCS, then took the 108-win, Big Red Machine to a seventh game in a Series that temporarily rescued baseball. In a hot Boston summer pepped with busing-stoked racial tension, the colorful and talented Sox gave us daily thrills and a common cause.
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'That was a great time,' recalled Dwight Evans, who hit a homer, knocked in five runs, and
'It was magical,' added Bill Lee. 'I'm looking forward to seeing everybody, especially the Buffalo Heads. That'll be Rick Wise, Bernie Carbo, and Jim Willoughby. We're all alive and we're ancient. I'm deaf, Carbo is dumb, and Willow is blind.'
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There'll be a moving tribute for Tiant Friday. El Tiante captured the imagination of Baseball America in the summer of '75 and is remembered for his five-hit shutout of the Reds in Game 1, then throwing 163 pitches in a complete-game victory in Game 4 in Cincinnati.
'He was the brains, the bard, and the conscience of the team,' said Lee. 'All he had to do was look at you and you knew. I still see him every day in my mind. Every day drives his Cadillac up to my house and we go for a drive and we kick ass and take names forever. He kept our team alive in '75 and now I keep him alive in my head.'
Future Hall of Famer Rice and Lynn were mere rookies in 1975. MLB had never seen more impact from two first-year teammates. Rice hit .309 with 22 homers and 102 RBIs and Lynn copped MVP and Rookie of the Year with .331, 21, and 105. Local hero Tony Conigliaro hit the team's first homer of the season before retiring for good, and New Hampshire-raised Fisk batted .331 on his path to Cooperstown.
Rookies Fred Lynn (left) and Jim Rice were known as the Gold Dust Twins in 1975.
Associated Press
Yaz? At the age of 36, eight years after his seminal 1967 MVP season, the captain/first baseman moved back to the outfield against Oakland, made a spectacular catch and batted .455 with a homer in the ALCS sweep.
Yastrzemski is 85 and rarely seen around Fenway these days. His appearance would bring down the house.
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'I hope he comes,' Evans said. 'Maybe he'll slip in through a side door like he always does.'
Former Globe great Peter Gammons, who turns 80 next week, was at the height of his prose powers in '75, pounding out this lead on his Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter mere minutes after
'And all of a sudden, the ball was there, like the Mystic River Bridge, suspended out in the black of the morning … '
Gammons's lead became New England's answer to Grantland Rice's 'Four Horsemen," classic in the New York Herald-Tribune after a Notre Dame-Army game at the Polo Grounds in 1924.
A couple of days earlier, a couple of 22-year-old Globe correspondents named Dupont and Shaughnessy had a dual tagline in a World Series notebook cobbled together from a hospitality hotel ballroom before Game 6.
Clipping from Dan Shaughnessy and Kevin Paul Dupont's World Series notebook in the Oct. 18, 1975, Boston Globe.
Boston Globe
The young scribes wrote that 87-year-old former Sox outfielder Duffy Lewis was scheduled to throw out the ceremonial first pitch before Game 6. With Tris Speaker and Harry Hooper, Lewis was part of a legendary Sox outfield trio outfield that last played together in 1915.
We couldn't believe Lewis was still alive, never mind throwing out a Fenway first ball.
'Ridiculous,' we said to ourselves. 'He's so old! Who could possibly remember anything he ever did?'
It turns out that a lot of people live to remember things that happened
50 or more years ago
.
Like all of you who played for, wrote about, and cheered for the 1975 Boston Red Sox.
▪ Quiz: 1. Name six players with more than 1,000 career RBIs for the Red Sox; 2. Name MLB's top six active career home run leaders.
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⋅ Bob Kraft, perhaps trying to court favor with those who keep snubbing him for the Pro Football Hall of Fame, finally caved Tuesday and announced that
⋅ The NBA is a better place when the Knicks are good, but the 2024-25 Knicks (48-28) look like frauds. They are 0-8 against the Celtics, Cavaliers, and Thunder. Look for the Celts to KO them in five games in the second round.
⋅ In the superb nine-part 'Celtics City' documentary on HB0 (installment No. 6 drops Monday night), former GM Jan Volk reveals that during the 1960s, Red Auerbach took 'BOSTON' off the front of the team's green road jerseys and replaced it with 'CELTICS.' This was in part because of the city's slowness to embrace the team, particularly its Black stars. Russell was fond of saying, 'I don't play for Boston. I play for the Celtics.' In this spirit, it's fascinating to come across an iconic Walter Iooss image featuring the Celtics on the road vs. the Lakers in the mid 1960s. In the photo, LA's Elgin Baylor is levitating toward the basket with the ball, and he's surrounded by four Celtics — the jerseys of Russell and John Havlicek read, 'CELTICS.' The jerseys of Sam Jones and Satch Sanders read, 'BOSTON.' And hardly anybody noticed.
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⋅ The Rangers' petitioning MLB to have Kristian Campbell's Opening Day hit changed to an error for Josh Jung reminded me of an unfortunate (1992) episode during the Daddy Butch Hobson managerial era when Wade Boggs successfully lobbied a Sox official scorer to erase an error he'd been tagged with during a Roger Clemens September start. Clemens was vying for the AL's best ERA and the change raised the Rocket's from 2.24 to 2.31. Clemens said he'd lost all respect for his teammate. The Fenway Fallout was loud and prompted Hobson to call a meeting with two of Boston's all-time greats. When Alabama Butch came out of that meeting, I kidded him, saying 'A summit with you, Roger, and Wade. That must have been like Yalta.' Hobson responded with, 'Y'all what?'' I think it was the only time Butch truly understood what I was saying.
⋅ Spotted in the visitor's dugout at Globe Life Stadium in Arlington, Texas: a box of Chinook Seedery sunflower seeds, labeled, 'A collaboration with Bobby Witt Jr.' featuring Witt's signature flavor: lemon pepper. Imagine pitchers around the American League filling their mouths with Witt's signature seeds, then trying to strike him out while enjoying the lemon pepper flavor.
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⋅ Texas's Jacob deGrom taking the Globe Life mound for his Sunday start to the tune of
⋅ Yankees catcher Austin Wells is batting leadoff for the Bronx Bombers and homered at Yankee Stadium on Opening Day. Who remembers other catchers batting leadoff in the big leagues? Never saw Bob Tillman at the top of the order.
⋅ I'm already bored with the discussion about
⋅ Combative Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene evidently studied at the John McNamara school of media relations. When surly Mac heard a question he didn't like — from a reporter he didn't know — he'd snarl and spew 'Where are you from?' It was not so much a question as an accusation.
⋅ RIP Joe DePugh, Bruce Springsteen's Little League teammate in Freehold, N.J., in the 1960s and the inspiration for
⋅ Let the record show that it took less than three innings of the first game of the year for greedy NESN to miss part of a Sox game while cramming in an extra commercial. Boston fans deserve better.
⋅ Alex Bregman's mom, Jackie, is an attorney who graduated from Holy Cross with a degree in English in 1983.
⋅ Pedro Martinez and his wife, Carolina, will serve as commencement speakers and receive honorary doctorates from Fisher College May 10.
⋅ Speaking of Worcester, nice job by the WooSox naming the Polar Park press box in honor of the Worcester Telegram's Bill Ballou. Ballou covered the Boston Red Sox for 32 seasons before retiring in 2018 and knows more about Central Mass. sports than anyone alive. On the same day Ballou was honored, folks in Arlington, Texas, named the Globe Life Field press box in honor of John Blake, a Wenham native who worked for the Rangers PR department for 35 years and also had a memorable stint with the Red Sox from 2006-08.
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⋅ If you can't get enough of Boston baseball's 2024, 81-81, Romy Gonzalez All-Stars, the exhaustive, eight-episode documentary, 'The Clubhouse: A Year With the Red Sox'' drops on Netflix Tuesday.
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⋅ Rush to your local bookstore and get 'Yankees, Typewriters, Scandals, and Cooperstown,' a baseball memoir by New York Daily News Hall of Fame hardball scribe Bill Madden. It's a great walk through baseball's golden days when reporters had incredible access and were able to tell you what the owners, managers, players, and scouts were like.
⋅ 1. Quiz answers: 1: Carl Yastrzemski (1,844), Ted Williams (1,839), David Ortiz (1,530), Jim Rice (1,451), Dwight Evans (1,346), Bobby Doerr (1,247); 2: Giancarlo Stanton, Mike Trout, Paul Goldschmidt, Freddie Freeman, Manny Machado, Nolan Arenado.
Dan Shaughnessy is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at