Free Game Six by Mark Frost

Three through Five, he’d slotted Griffey back in between Rose and Morgan. With their speed restored at the top of the lineup, the Reds had won two of those three games and seized the Series lead. Now, back at Fenway for Game Six, especially after the weekend’s torrential rains had muddied the track, percentages dictated he should go back to Morgan batting behind Rose, and drop Griffey to the seven hole again. Griffey had come through with a timely ninth-inning hit to win Game Two but had been struggling at the plate since—Sparky thought his budding young star was feeling the pressure of his first Series—and even the rock-steady Morgan had been pressing a little, trying to make things happen, although he’d started to come around in Cincinnati. Anderson needed power more than speed on the damp field at Fenway tonight, and nobody set the table for the meat of his lineup like Little Joe. Morgan himself hadbeen lobbying for the move since the playoffs began, and Sparky gave everything his best all-around player said a lot of weight.
    But something ate at him. Every time he picked up the pen that afternoon to write in Joe’s name under Pete’s, he hesitated. Sparky lived and died with percentages, but he also trusted his gut, and right now it was burning a hole through him.
    He knew it had something to do with that pitcher the Sox were throwing at them again tonight. The man this damn rain delay was letting them bring back a game earlier than they otherwise would have been able to, the one who’d single-handedly won the only two games the Red Sox had taken in this Series, the second one—Game Four, one that Sparky felt the Reds should have grabbed—on sheer guts and willpower alone. Their ace, the only man in a Boston uniform who really unnerved him, the wild card in this whole mysterious equation.
    That damn Tiant.

FOUR
    When we play, we play. Forget the excuses.
    R ED S OX SHORTSTOP R ICK B URLESON
    O N THEIR WAY UP TO THE BOOTH TO PREPARE FOR THE broadcast, Tony Kubek and Dick Stockton made a pass through Fenway’s rooftop press box and grabbed a quick bite to eat at the buffet. Boston Globe beat writer Peter Gammons came over to say hello to Kubek, and introduced his colleague Lesley Visser, the comely, wide-eyed young woman at his side. Gammons explained that Lesley was the beneficiary of the press pass that Kubek had graciously procured for him that day. Trying not to gush, Lesley thanked Kubek profusely. Kubek, in turn, introduced her to Dick Stockton, whom Lesley knew from television as the Red Sox play-by-play man.
    Stockton responded the way most red-blooded American males did upon meeting Lesley; he began figuring out how he was going to end up with her phone number by the end of the conversation. Not without cause, Dick had developed a bit of a reputation around town as a ladies’ man—he was a high-profile bachelor and this was the mid-seventies—and pressed as he was for time, he threw caution to the wind and asked her out to dinner. Accustomed as any attractive young woman is to fielding male attention, Lesley might have demurred, but this was her first visit to the fabled Fenway press box, with scores of the nation’s best sportswriters preparing to man rows of typewriters arrayed like a battery of guns toward the playing field. The room was flooded with lifelong heroes from her improbable chosen field, and this was the first time she’d ever laid eyes on most of them: Dick Young, the irascible dean of baseball beat writers, from New York’s Daily News; the Los Angeles Times’ s wry humanist Jim Murray; the New Yorker’ s elegant essayist Roger Angell. The whole experience left her “feeling a little like Dorothy after crash landing in Oz.” An unknown walking into the commissary at MGM wouldn’t have felt more starstruck.
    So she said yes to dinner. Stockton pocketed her phone number, excused himself, and hurried after Kubek to the NBC broadcast booth; so far, so good. Lesley stepped back