Free Game Six by Mark Frost Page A

out of the way, standing behind the top row of press box seats as game time approached, and prepared to drink it all in.
     
    ON GAME DAY before his scheduled starts nobody talked to Luis Tiant. Before every other game, on any other day, Luis was the clubhouse clown, the prankster who kept the whole team loose. As his friend Tommy Harper liked to say about him, Luis “woke up funny,” and his sly, corner-barbershop perspective punctured all pretension; take yourself too seriously around El Tiante at your own peril. His elaborate practical jokes had become the stuff of legend in Fenway, and there was no limit to the lengths to which he’d lie in wait to exact revenge for any retaliation. A major-league club’s locker room chemistry is the submerged end of the iceberg the public seldom sees, but has as much to do with its success as what happens on the field. Every squad is hierarchical and naturally forms a pecking order, immediately apparent to everyone on the roster, that dictates deference and ritualizes daily routine—stars at the top, scrubs at the bottom—for better or worse. But Tiant had tweaked the Red Sox status quo from the day he first arrived in Boston in 1971—at that point a broken-down former star, buried in the bullpen, trying to resurrect his career after two lost, injured seasons—and his first target had been the team’s dour veteran captain, Carl Yastrzemski.
    By virtue of his talent, work ethic, and decade-long tenure, Yaz was the Red Sox’s unquestioned leader, but although as intelligent and articulate about the game as any man playing it, he didn’t tend to say much. Intimidated by Yaz’s intensity and smolderingself-containment, the team’s younger players went out of their way to avoid ruffling his feathers, which created an unintended air of tension around the captain and their locker room. Although deeply talented, the Red Sox of that moment hadn’t come together as a team, and were succinctly described as “twenty-five players taking twenty-five cabs.” Tiant immediately sensed that the driven, reticent Yastrzemski was also simply shy, and when he responded to the first prank Luis pulled on him with roars of laughter—and soon after retaliated with a prank of his own—the ice was broken. Tiant dubbed Yaz the “Great Polacko”—nobody else could get away with that—but he made even more fun of himself; everybody laughed at Luis. The squad had grown steadily closer off the field ever since, with the good-natured Tiant as its unifying center; his ability to accept the bad with the good—and laugh at both—had given these Red Sox a guiding philosophy.
    And during that time, regaining arm strength and control after nearly losing his career, Luis Tiant had reclaimed his status on the field as one of the most respected starting pitchers in the game. He’d won seventy-nine games for the Red Sox since, winning twenty in three consecutive seasons, if you counted his recent postseason wins, a feat no Boston pitcher had accomplished since the dawn of the twentieth century. As Darrell Johnson had predicted when they signed him, Tiant was now the number one starter on the Red Sox staff, but his recent performance during their drive to the pennant in 1975 had elevated him to the revered status of a Boston folk hero.
    Twice in the previous three seasons the Red Sox had squandered substantial late-season leads in the East Division and let a postseason berth slip from their grasp; in 1974, their epic collapse had been one of the most wrenching any team had suffered in twenty years. With that heartbreak fresh in their minds, the Red Sox reached September of 1975 with a six-game lead, and New England’s fatalistic fans began glancing over their shoulders, certain that another specter of doom must be gaining on them. Misfortune seemed even more certain when later that month their power-hitting rookie left fielderJim Rice was lost for the year, his left hand fractured by an errant fastball.