And 28 years before they put seats on the Green Monster.
To be fair, Game 6 of the 1975 World Series between the Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds actually began on October 21st, 1975 but went into extras.
While the timekeeping may not have been as detailed or meticulous back then, it's well known that it was past midnight when Reds reliever Pat Darcy took to the mound in the bottom of the 12th to face leadoff hitter Carlton Fisk.
The thing is that as much as Fisk's walkoff homer propelled him into Red Sox lore, Boston still lost the series in 7 games, the fleeting triumph doing nothing to stem the rise of a cottage industry of 'curse' folklore that persisted until 2004.
In 1975, the NFL was only a few seasons into their merger with the nascent American Football League and this whole 'Super Bowl' thing. There was real concern at the time that football's meteoric rise would marginalize baseball and replace it in a number of markets once considered safe. The 1975 World Series, put those concerns to rest pitting the upstart Red Sox against what many say was the best baseball team in the postwar years- Cincinnati's Big Red Machine.
It will be another National League powerhouse in the Midwest that the Red Sox will face tomorrow- a somewhat familiar one, as Boston and St Louis have already met three times in the World Series since the end of WWII. In fact, out of all the current members of the National League Central, the only club Boston hasn't faced in the World Series is Milwaukee.
Yet, to look at the 2013 Boston Red Sox, with their 12 walkoff wins and defiant bravado in the face of the carnage that was wrought on another Boston sports institution one fateful April afternoon, one can't help but sense that this may very well be only the beginning of something special.
No comments:
Post a Comment