by Howie Mooney
In the 1977 NLCS, the Los Angeles Dodgers hit three home runs in the four games. Dusty Baker had two of them. He also drove in eight of the team’s 22 runs while compiling a batting average of .357. He scored four runs by himself as well. He was the series MVP. Tommy John was great in the series as well. He started two of the games, accumulating 13 2/3 innings and allowing just a single earned run.
In the four games, the Dodgers banged out 35 hits and earned another 14 walks. Steve Garvey and Ron Cey each batted .308 and each had an on-base percentage of .400. Davey Lopes was a guy the Yankees might have to watch out for as well. He had the ability to get on base and he stole 47 bases over the season, so, given the choice, Yankee pitchers might want to keep him off the bases as much as possible.
The question for the Yankees was whether or not the hit that Reggie Jackson got in the last game of the ALCS was an omen of things to come or if his struggles would continue into this World Series. On the mound it would be free agent acquisition Don Gullett going for the Yankees and Don Sutton pitching for the Dodgers. The Yankees had not won a game in the World Series since 1964.
Gullett struggled early when he walked Lopes to lead things off. Then he gave up a triple to Bill Russell that scored Lopes. Then Reggie Smith walked on five pitches. With runners on the corners and nobody out, Ron Cey hit a fly ball to Lou Piniella in left field that allowed Russell to score. Then, with the count 3-and-1 on Steve Garvey, Gullett threw a strike to make the count full. But Smith took off on a steal attempt. Munson’s throw to second arrived in time and they got Smith out. Garvey walked. But then Gullett got Dusty Baker on a first-pitch fly ball out to end the inning.
But the Yankees were in an early hole, down 2-0. They didn’t really look at pitch counts the way they do today, but it had to be a little troubling that Gullett needed 25 throws to get the Dodgers out in that first frame.
In the bottom of the inning, Sutton got Mickey Rivers and Willie Randolph to ground out. But then he gave up consecutive singles to Munson, Jackson and Chris Chambliss. The last hit scored Munson with the Yankees’ first run. Graig Nettles then grounded out to Bill Russell at short to end the inning. The concern in the Yankees’ dugout during the top of that first inning had been replaced with hope after they saw that they could dent Sutton’s armour.
Gullett settled down and got the Yankees in order in the second inning. He did that on just ten pitches. He went on to keep Los Angeles off the board in each of the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth innings. But Don Sutton was doing the same thing to the Yanks, at least through the fifth. In the sixth, New York would cause some concern for the Dodgers and their fans.
Gullett may have gotten away with one in the top of the sixth. After Cey had hit a fly ball to left field that Piniella caught, Steve Garvey laid a great bunt down the third base line. He was safe at first on the play. Baker came up next and he hit a soft fly ball to centre. Rivers was able to get to that one easily. Gullett got ahead of Glenn Burke 1-and-2. Next pitch, Garvey took off. Burke reached out and punched the ball to the right side and through the infield.
Garvey was chugging. He rounded second and he rounded third. Rivers picked up the ball in right-centre and threw it home. It hopped once and Munson caught the ball on the bounce and dove toward where the Dodgers’ runner, the foul line and the plate all met. The Yanks’ catcher arrived just in time to tag the sliding Garvey and end the inning. The Dodgers’ star wasn’t happy with the decision.
“There’s no doubt I was safe. He tagged me on the thigh. I thought my right ankle was in there touching the plate. I had the angle.” Tommy Lasorda thought the umpire, Nestor Chylak, was wrong as well. “He was possibly screened out. He was on the other side of the plate.” No matter. It was a 2-1 game, and the home team was coming to bat.
The first man up for the Yankees in the bottom of the sixth was Willie Randolph. Depending on where you look, Randolph was listed at 5-feet-11 and around 160 pounds. Whatever. He got all of a Sutton 2-2 offering and placed in into the seats in the left field bleachers to tie the game at 2-2. You talk about a momentum swing. The Dodgers felt they should have been up 3-1 a moment before and now the game was knotted up.
It stayed that way through the seventh and through to the middle of the eighth. Gullett looked quite formidable in getting the Dodgers out in the top of that inning. He threw eight pitches and got Reggie Smith, Cey and Garvey out 1-2-3. Coming up to face Sutton in the bottom of the inning was Willie Randolph again.
Randolph worked Sutton to a full count. He fouled off a pitch and then, on the seventh pitch of the at-bat, Sutton missed the zone and the Yankees’ second baseman was aboard. The next delivery from Sutton, which was the first pitch to Thurman Munson, was hit hard down the left field line. When the play ended, Munson was standing on second and Randolph was in his dugout, having scored the go-ahead run.
Sutton’s night was over after Munson’s big hit. Lance Rautzhan replaced the Dodgers’ starter. He lasted three batters. When he left the game, he had managed to get an out but there were Yankees aboard every bag as well. Reggie Jackson was on third, Chris Chambliss was on second and Graig Nettles, who had walked, was on first. Elias Sosa came on in relief of Rautzhan. He struck out Piniella and got Bucky Dent to ground out.
In the top of the ninth, the Dodgers were down to their last three outs. Billy Martin made the choice to take Reggie Jackson out from right field and replace him with Paul Blair. Gullett was still on the mound but he was running out of gas. The first man he faced was Dusty Baker. Baker worked the count full and then got a base hit to left. Glenn Burke was due up next, but Lasorda sent Manny Mota to bat for him. Mota hit a soft fly to Blair in right for the first out of the inning.
When Gullett walked Steve Yeager on four pitches, Martin made the move to bring Sparky Lyle in. While Lyle was throwing his warmup pitches, Lasorda sent Rafael Landestoy in to pinch run for Yeager. He also sent Lee Lacy up to pinch hit for Elias Sosa. After a strike from Lyle, Lacy lashed the next pitch to left for a single, scoring Baker. The game was tied.
Lyle got Lopes and Russell to end the inning, but there was life in the Dodgers’ dugout again.
Lasorda brought Mike Garman in to pitch in the ninth. He faced Lyle, Rivers and Randolph and got them all out on nine pitches. Lyle did him one better getting the Dodgers in order in the top of the tenth on eight pitches. Garman was back out in the bottom of the inning and, after walking Munson on four straight throws, he got Paul Blair, Chambliss and Nettles on six more.
Lyle continued his torrid performance by sitting Baker, Rick Monday and Jerry Grote all down without a ball leaving the infield. In the bottom of the eleventh, Garman allowed a first-pitch single to Lou Piniella, but then he got Dent, Lyle and Rivers on five pitches. Then Sparky Lyle showed that he was in a zone getting pinch-hitter Vic Davalillo, Lopes and Russell quickly and efficiently.
Davalillo had pinch hit for Garman, so Rick Rhoden was in to pitch the bottom of the twelfth. The first pitch he threw to Randolph was pounded down the left field line for a double. Munson was up next and was intentionally walked. Next man up was Paul Blair. He was sent up to bunt and move the runners up 90 feet. His attempts didn’t work though. He had worked the count to 2-and-2.
On the second attempt, Blair missed that the bunt sign had been taken off. Dick Howser was the third base coach and he shouted at Blair to swing away. I was still gonna bunt with two strikes, but I stepped out of the batter’s box and Dick Howser yelled for me to hit.” Rhoden’s next pitch was a fastball. Blair “got in front of” it and deposited the ball through the left side and into left field. Randolph scored and the Yankees had a one-game lead in the World Series.
Howser talked after the game about that situation during Blair’s at bat. “He was so mad at bunting at a bad pitch. I could tell he didn’t see the sign I gave him. I yelled at him because I wanted him to know that Billy had taken the bunt sign off.”
Martin was effusive in his praise for his starting pitcher, Don Gullett. “Gullett was sensational. I think a healthy Gullett changes the whole complexion of the Series.” That first inning had to be a bit scary though? Martin went out to visit his pitcher during that struggle. “I had no intentions of pulling Gullett. He was throwing hard…if he gets hurt, he gets hurt.” What message did Martin give Gullett? “You’re overthrowing the ball. Calm down!”
While Martin was praising his starter, Lasorda was complimentary of the Yankees’ closer. “Lyle came in and did an outstanding job.” Lyle had pitched in four of the five games in the ALCS and now again in the first game of the World Series. What did that mean for Martin’s faith in the rest of his bullpen? Lasorda wasn’t going to bite on that, necessarily. “I don’t know what the condition of Billy’s bullpen is. He’s coming off a tough series. He knows his bullpen and he knows what he needs to do. I just manage my team.”
Losing this game in twelve innings had to be tough. What was the mood in the Dodgers’ club house? “I told them to hang in there,” Lasorda told reporters. “We’ll bounce back and get the game tomorrow. Remember, we lost the opener to Philadelphia. And you have to win four games in a World Series, not one not two.”
There was no rest time for the two teams after their nearly 3 ½ hour marathon in the first game. They would go back at it the next night. A pair of right-handers would face each other in the second match of this World Series. It would be Burt Hooton for the Dodgers and Catfish Hunter for the Yankees.
Hunter had been nursing a sore right arm and hadn’t pitched in a month. This game would be played on October 12. His last outing in a real game was on September 10. Hunter lasted 3 1/3 innings, allowing seven hits and six runs – all earned – in a 19-3 loss to the fledgling Toronto Blue Jays. He was told he would pitching in Game Two the previous morning.
“It will be like spring training all over again. The skipper (Billy Martin) told me I was to pitch, and I said ‘okay’. I don’t know how it will come off. I haven’t pitched in a month. I threw about a hundred balls in Toronto (in a side session) but that wasn’t pitching.” His arm wasn’t the only thing that had been bothering him though. “My side hurts me more than my arm. I went to the doctor last week and he pronounced my arm okay. I don’t have any pain. It’s just that I don’t know how sharp I’ll be.”
Hmmmm……
It wasn’t a good night for the Catfish. It wasn’t a good night for any of the Yankees, really. Hunter didn’t get out of the third inning. By the time he left, the Dodgers were leading by a score of 5-0. In the first inning, Ron Cey homered off Hunter. In the second inning, Steve Yeager hit a solo shot off him. In the third, Reggie Smith hit a two-run dinger that mercifully ended Hunter’s outing. Hooton looked quite comfortable as he went all the way in the Dodgers’ 6-1 win.
After the game, Martin was asked if he regretted using Hunter as his starter in this game over someone like Dick Tidrow who had been used mostly as a long reliever but also started some games. “Of course not. I need Tidrow in the bullpen. My two coaches and Thurman Munson said he was throwing as hard as ever. He hung three sliders and all three were hit for home runs. He was the only pitcher I had to go to.”
Hooton was one of those pitchers who was known for his breaking ball. But he didn’t use it as much as he might usually have. That may have crossed up the Yankees’ hitters. “He didn’t throw it that much,” Reggie Jackson told reporters. “He threw his fastball in the right spots. I think we were looking for the knuckle-curve more than we should have.” Lou Piniella spoke well of Hooton’s performance. “I was more impressed with his fastball than his knuckle-curve.”
The next day would be a rest day, then the teams would go back at it at Chavez Ravine on the evening of October 14, which was a Friday. The pitchers would be the lefty Tommy John for Los Angeles and the righthander Mike Torrez for the Yankees. The Yankees got Torrez in a trade at the end of April, 1977 that saw pitcher Dock Ellis, infielder Marty Perez and outfielder Larry Murray go to Oakland.
But on a day that was supposed to reserved for travelling and recharging one’s batteries, the newspapers were full of stories of vitriol between a certain Yankee manager and his right fielder. It arose out of a response that Reggie Jackson gave to a reporter who asked what the problem was in the second game of the Series.
Jackson was direct. “If you hadn’t pitched in a month, what do you think the problem would be? How do you send a man in to pitch the World Series when he hasn’t pitched in over a month?” Martin appeared to lose it when he was given the quote from Jackson. “It seems to me he (Jackson) has got enough problems trying to play right field than to be second-guessing the manager. A true Yankee doesn’t criticize another Yankee or another Yankee manager.”
Will Grimsley of the Associated Press, wrote in a story headlined “Yankees Coming Apart At Seams”, that not only were Martin and Jackson at loggerheads, but Jackson and Munson were upset at the tickets that friends and family had been given while in Los Angeles.
Munson apparently wanted out of the Big Apple, saying that he no longer felt like he was the captain. He wanted to be relocated closer to his hometown of Canton, Ohio. Mickey Rivers apparently wanted to be dealt to a west coast team. Graig Nettles wanted his contract renegotiated and Mike Torrez was set to become a free agent after the Series was done. Club president Gabe Paul was with the team. He called a meeting for the morning of the game and his message could be summarized as “Shut up and play baseball!”
Okay……
The Yankees bats that had slumbered through the second game had received their wake-up calls before the third contest. Mickey Rivers swatted the second pitch he saw from John out to right field for a quick double. After Willie Randolph grounded out to Lopes at second, which moved Rivers up 90 feet, Munson got a double that drove in the first run.
Reggie Jackson then poked a base hit to left that brought Munson home. Jackson moved up to second when Dusty Baker allowed the ball to get past him. Lou Piniella the stepped in and got a single to centre that scored Reggie. After that John settled down and got Chambliss and Nettles to end the inning but the Yankees had made a statement after their dismal offensive performance on Wednesday in the second game.
Torrez’ first inning was kind of up-and-down. He started Davey Lopes with a walk, and then Lopes swiped second on the first pitch to shortstop Bill Russell. But Torrez struck Russell out looking. Reggie Smith grounded out, moving Lopes to third. Ron Cey walked on five pitches but then Steve Garvey hit a ground ball to Randolph to end the inning.
Neither team scored in the second inning even though each team put a man in scoring position. John struck out Jackson to start the bottom of the third inning. But then he hit Piniella with a pitch. He then induced Chambliss to hit into a 3-6-3 double play to end the inning.
In the bottom of the third, things unraveled for Torrez. He got Russell to ground out to start the Dodgers’ third, but then Reggie Smith singled. Ron Cey then lined out to Rivers in centre. But Garvey’s single put runners on the corners for Dusty Baker. He worked the count full before lofting a ball over the wall in left field, atoning for the error he made in the first inning. Baker’s homer tied the game and enabled Tommy John to breathe a little.
But the Yankees wasted no time in grabbing their lead back. In the top of the fourth, Graig Nettles and Bucky Dent smacked back-to-back singles. That brought Torrez to the plate. He executed a successful sacrifice bunt to move his teammates to second and third, respectively. When Mickey Rivers’ ground ball went to Lopes at second, Nettles scampered home with the go-ahead run. That was it for the Yanks in the inning, but they had reassumed their lead.
Torrez had settled down and he got Yeager, John and Lopes 1-2-3 in the bottom of the inning. Meanwhile, John had allowed a bunch of pinstripes on the bases to this point and the fifth inning was no exception. After Munson grounded out, Reggie stepped in, and he walked on four pitches. Piniella got on on an infield single. That brought Chris Chambliss to the plate. Chambliss lashed a single to right which plated Jackson and doubled their lead.
The game would end 5-3 for the Yankees and they would take a 2-1 series lead. The Dodgers never got a man past second base the rest of the game. Torrez retired the last seven Los Angeles hitters as he went all the way in this one to earn the victory. He also enabled the Yankees’ bullpen to rest after Catfish Hunter’s short outing back in the Bronx on Wednesday.
Soooo, how was everybody feeling after this one?
Billy Martin: “I just think our ballclub is closeknit no matter what is said or written about them. We have togetherness and I think we showed that in the first few innings.”
Reggie Jackson: “I’m disgusted with all the talk. I don’t think talking is important when the game starts. This is no time to talk – it’s time to play ball.”
Martin about a reported pre-game meeting with Jackson: “We got it all cleared up. That’s history.”
Jackson on the ticket issue: “When the game starts, you can’t think about where your friends are sitting. But you would like to have your mother sitting where Frank Sinatra is sitting.”
Steve Yeager on his opponents: “You can’t judge the Yankees by what they do off the field. Look at Oakland in 1974, ’73 and ’72. They fought each other in the club house all the time and beat everyone around. It’s what you do on the field that counts – nothing else.”
Dusty Baker, when asked about “the thrill” of hitting his first ever World Series home run: “That wasn’t much of a thrill. I made an error that cost us a run and the Yankees won the game. How can a home run be a thrill when that happens?”
Oh, and speaking of Frank Sinatra, it seemed like the two managers and their teams were in competition for something other than baseball games. Before the game on Friday night, Martin spotted Sinatra sitting behind the Yankees’ dugout. Martin went over and delivered a Yankee cap to the ‘Chairman of the Board’. Seeing that, Tommy Lasorda went over and handed Sinatra a Dodgers’ hat. The crooner accepted the gifts, smiled and said thanks!
For the fourth game of the series, it would be Ron Guidry against Doug Rau. Rau was 14-8 on the season and pitched an inning in relief in the League Championship Series against the Phillies. Guidry was 27 at the time and thought of as the ace of the staff. He went 16-7 in 1977 and won a game in the LCS but lasted only into the third inning of the fifth and final game of the series.
Rau went into this game with a steadfast mindset. He called this game “a must win”. If only his pitching performance had matched his attitude. Mind you, his first inning of work was darn fine. In that little window, he retired Mickey Rivers, Willie Randolph and Thurman Munson on just five pitches. Rivers did get single on the first pitch of the game, but after Randolph popped out, Munson hit into a 6-4-3 double play.
Guidry had to work a little harder, but he also got out of the first unscathed. The second inning though, was Rau’s undoing. The trio of Jackson, Piniella and Chambliss were scheduled. Jackson led off with a double. Piniella singled to bring Jackson home. Then Chambliss doubled moving Piniella to third. Lasorda, feeling a sense of desperation watching this unfold, came out to give Rau the hook.
Replacing Rau was Rick Rhoden. Rhoden was a very good pitcher. He won 151 games over the course of his major league career. But he might have been an even better golfer. Anyway…it’s a lot to ask of a guy to come into a ball game with nobody out and runners on second and third. The first man Rhoden saw was Graig Nettles. Nettles hit a ground ball to the right side and grounded out to Lopes. But he did bring home a run as Piniella scored and Chambliss moved to third.
Bucky Dent was next up. He went the other way and drove a ball into right field. His single scored Chambliss and the Yankees had a 3-0 lead in just the second inning. But after a Guidry sacrifice bunt that moved Dent up ninety feet, he got Rivers on strikes to end the ugliness. Guidry and Rhoden exchanged three-up-three-down innings. It was the bottom of the third and the Dodgers were sending up their 8-9-1 hitters.
Guidry quickly got ahead of catcher Steve Yeager 0-and-2. He got him to pop up to Munson in foul territory. His mound counterpart, Rhoden, was up next. Rhoden who had batted over .300 in 1976, clubbed a Guidry pitch into left field that went for a ground rule double. Then, to the top of the order and Davey Lopes. Lopes got to a 2-and-2 count and fouled a couple more off. The next pitch was struck mightily by Lopes and ended up beyond the fence in centre field.
Home run. We’ve got a ball game again.
But Guidry got Russell to ground out to Dent and Reggie Smith went down on strikes. It was 3-2 for the Yankees after three. It was from this point that both pitchers went to work. Through the fourth and fifth innings, neither pitcher allowed a base runner. Then in the top of the sixth, the Yankees punctuated the scoring when Reggie Jackson hit a 1-and-1 Rhoden offering deep over the wall in left-centre. It was 4-2.
That was how it would end. Through the rest of the game, each team’s pitcher would only surrender a hit. Guidry got the complete game victory. The Yankees led the Series 3-1 now. Words like “commanding” and “stranglehold” come to mind. But the Series is only won when a team wins four games. Not three.
Ron Guidry was feeling pretty good about where his team stood at this point. “I’d say we’re in an unbeatable position.” Lou Piniella was discounting any talk about this Series being considered easy or a romp. “I don’t think it’s been easy. All the games have been close, except for the second one and the Dodgers won that. The key for us is to score a lot of runs early. Then our pitchers are tough. Sometimes we have a tendency to let our bats get lethargic. So, the key for us is pitching and defense.”
And Billy Martin would have none of that either. “Naturally, we’re in a good position, but we haven’t won anything yet. I want to win it tomorrow. Nothing against our New York fans, but I just want to celebrate on the way back. I want to go back to New York a winner.”
As the Yankees stood on the precipice of winning their first World Series since 1964, Joe Sullivan of the Morristown (NJ) Daily Record went where a lot of people were hoping he might go – Reggie Jackson. Jackson has been different things to different people. To some, he is the centre of the universe. To others, he is the eye of the storm.
Given how high his highs are and how short his lows run, Sullivan perhaps surmised that the controversies that follow him around must not bother him, especially given that in the fourth game of the series, he had a double and a home run and figured prominently in the result. But Jackson may not necessarily agree with that.
“It wears me down mentally. Still, it doesn’t bother my play, or anyone else’s because you’re dealing with men here. We’re professional businessmen who do their job when they come to the ballpark. Just because Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson have a disagreement, or Billy Martin and George Stenbrenner have a disagreement doesn’t matter. The people don’t care. The people just want to see the Yankees win.”
With the recent speculation dealing with all the discontent on this Yankees team, the big question for many was how many members of this group would be back in 1978? What about Jackson? “I have to sit back and see what has transpired. I’ve got to see what the circumstances and the consequences all mean. I have to wait until it’s all over with before I can make a decision. Look at the whole picture. Right now, I’m looking forward to playing in New York next year. I just hope things will go as smoothly as they have gone today.”
Given what went on in Oakland, Baltimore, Montreal and New York, has anything ever gone as smoothly off the field as it appeared to go on the field where Reggie Jackson was concerned?
The starters for the fifth game of the 1977 World Series would be the same men who started the first game – Don Gullett and Don Sutton. That game went twelve innings and so neither figured in on the decision. Both of ‘The Dons’ pitched well enough in that game though. Doug Rau had termed the fourth game of the Series as a “must-win” game. But seriously, this was an elimination game for the Dodgers, so it was truly one of those Doug Rau situations now.
The fact that this game was being played on a Sunday meant that it would be an afternoon start time. Now, Billy Martin might have wanted to go back to New York as a World Series winner, but the Dodgers wanted to get a word in there about that possible outcome first. They would start speaking in the first inning and they wouldn’t stop talking as the game wore on.
Sutton gave up a single in the first inning but that was all. The Yankees got nothing more than that in their half of that opening frame. Gullett got behind Lopes 3-and-1 to start the Dodgers first. On the next pitch, he slammed a ball into left field that rattled around sufficiently to allow him to end up safe at third with nobody out. A Bill Russell single, a few pitches later, gave Los Angeles a 1-0 lead. But then Gullett got Reggie Smith on a roller. He struck out Cey and Garvey to end the threat.
In the Yanks’ second, Sutton used just six pitches to get Chambliss, Nettles and Piniella. In fact, in the entire second and third and the top of the fourth, there was only one base runner. These two pitchers seemed dialed in. But in the Dodgers’ half of the fourth inning, they made their move.
The middle of the Dodgers’ order was coming up in the bottom of the fourth. Ron Cey led things off. He took the count full before hitting a fly ball to Piniella in left for the first out. Then Garvey worked the count full before slapping a double to right-centre field. Dusty Baker then singled to left driving Garvey home. A Piniella error allowed Baker to advance to second. It was Lee Lacy’s turn to spin the wheel and he hit a ball to Graig Nettles at third that rolled up his arm for a rare error. Baker held at second.
Yeager was the next man up. Remember, there was still only one out at this point. With the count 2-and-1, Gullett threw his 26th pitch to Yeager. It hung and the Dodgers’ catcher belted it high and deep over the left field wall for a three-run homer. After getting Sutton on strikes, Gullett allowed a Lopes single before retiring Russell, the eighth man to step to the plate in the inning, on a comebacker to the mound. When the dust settled after that bat-fest, the score was 5-0 for Los Angeles.
In the bottom of the fifth, Gullett faced three hitters. After the third man, Garvey, singled, there was one out, runners on the corners, and Martin was calling for Ken Clay to come out and mop this mess up. The first man Clay faced was Dusty Baker. Baker singled and brought Smith home and moved Garvey to second. Then Lee Lacy singled to right-centre to score Garvey and advance Baker to third. A Yeager sacrifice fly plated Baker and made the score 8-0. It was officially a whitewash now.
A two-run homer by Reggie Smith in the sixth off Dick Tidrow made the score 10-0. The Yankees scored a couple of runs in their half of the seventh and then, in the top of the eighth, solo home runs by Munson and Jackson made the final score 10-4. Those runs were academic, but they did provide some foreshadowing to what we might get to see when the teams resume their hostilities back at Yankee Stadium on Tuesday, October 18.
The win in the fifth game took a lot of the pressure off the Dodgers, at least for a couple of days. Steve Yeager was asked about his three-run homer that gave the home team a 5-0 lead. “I try to have fun playing baseball. The only way to enjoy the game is to play as I did as a kid of nine or ten. We had our backs to the wall – do or die. My home run came while we were up by two, and three more took a lot of pressure off the other guys.”
The Dodgers had held a team meeting before this victory. Steve Garvey was asked what was said in the assembly. “He (Lasorda) said he was proud of us and that we had given 100 per cent all year. He said he had a lot of pride in us and, really, he didn’t have to say anymore.” He also told reporters that the team did pretty well after such meetings. “We’re 8-and-0 after meetings. I think we’ll have another one Tuesday night in New York.”
As expected, Billy Martin was not in a jovial mood after that butt-kicking. He announced that his pitcher in the sixth game would be Ed Figueroa. Someone had the initiative to ask Martin who might pitch if there was a seventh game in the Series. “We’re only going to play six!” Martin snapped. But Figueroa had been nursing an injury and no one was really sure of his availability. It was later announced that it could be Figueroa or Mike Torrez.
But one of the biggest stories that came out as the teams were flying back east for the sixth game came from, of all places, Time Magazine. It reported that Reggie Jackson had gone to George Steinbrenner and demanded that he choose between Billy Martin or him. Both Jackson and Martin categorically denied everything in the story. But given everything that had come out about and around the Yankees in 1977, how could anyone doubt that at least some of it was true?
One thing reported in the piece was a quote from Martin that said, “Jackson has cost this club a lot of games this season. He’s a decent, smart man, but he’s baseball dumb.” During the time the Yankees were in Los Angeles, according to Jackson, he and Martin “had a nice little talk this week. I can’t wait to play for the man.”
As far as the “him-or-me” demand from Jackson to Steinbrenner, the slugger told United Press International, “I haven’t had a meeting with Steinbrenner all year, except to talk to him about getting tickets. But nothing else. I have purposely stayed away from talking to the owner because I knew someone would come up with some weak story like this and create controversy.”
Martin seemed on the border of annoyed and apoplectic. “I’m flatly angered by all those stories. I don’t want any part of it anymore. We are a well-knitted club now. We need no more of this sh**. You have to give the New York writers credit for this. I’m sick and tired of it. I’m not ever going to fight back anymore against it.”
The murmurs began to rumble after the second game of the World Series when Martin used Catfish Hunter to pitch when he hadn’t seen any action for a month and Jackson questioned that decision. Martin was upset and figured that Jackson should stay quiet and just play baseball. But after the fourth game, when the Yanks won 4-2 to take a 3-1 Series lead, the two apparently talked and resolved their differences.
“Billy Martin deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for managing this damn team,” Jackson told the press. Martin seemed to be on Team Jackson as well. “I’m proud of him. He’s a battler. He roots for his teammates when he’s not in the game. He’s all right. He’s not different than any of us who have their ups and downs, who live with emotion.”
Back to The Bronx for Game Six!
The flight back from Los Angeles sounds like it was hopping! On the Tuesday morning after the Sunday night loss, the Yankees called a press conference to make an announcement regarding Billy Martin. Dick Young wrote about it in his column for the New York Daily News. There were about 199 other reporters from all across the country at this gathering as well. Young wrote about the flight and the reason for the announcement.
First, we’ll talk about the announcement.
According to Young, “Gabe Paul gets up and says into the microphones that Billy Martin will continue to manage the Yankees in 1978 and 1979.” The funny thing about this is that his contract already ran through 1978 and 1979. Even if George Steinbrenner chose to fire Billy Martin before his contract ended, Martin would still get paid as if he were managing the team in 1978 and 1979.
What Young surmised from all this is that Martin got a monetary bonus, and he also got a ‘pat on the back’. Sorry, he didn’t get a ‘pat on the back’, he got a ‘pat on the back in recognition of the fine job he has done’ in front of the nation’s reporters and television cameras. And that meant more to Martin than the (possible) $50,000 bonus for getting the team this far. But how did a media get-together like this come about? Young wrote about that as well. And what he wrote was revealing!
“If we are to believe what we are told, Gabe, not Steinbrenner, made the decision to strengthen Martin’s position publicly. But the entire charade was set in motion when Martin and Paul and Steinbrenner sat side by side in the nose of the Yankees charter plane winging back to New York and let it all hang out. Steinbrenner told Martin that, in order for him to continue as Yankee manager, Billy must stop knocking the hand that feeds him.”
Young continued, “Fine, Martin agreed. But George must stop second-guessing him, and George must stop leaking little undermining stories, and George must stop letting Reggie Jackson believe he can shoot over the manager’s head.”
Martin told the assembled press members, “We had a complete understanding. Things will be much better next year.” Uh…okay. And as Pee Wee Herman once said on his old Saturday morning show, “Let’s go see how the ant farm’s doing!”
In 1968, Joe DiMaggio was the batting coach of the Oakland Athletics. That was also Reggie Jackson’s first full major league season. DiMaggio was the man who would be throwing out the ceremonial first pitch before Game Six of the 1977 World Series. Before doing any of that and before batting practice, ‘The Yankee Clipper’ pulled up a stool and sat next to Jackson in the Yankees’ club house where the two men had a little chat.
According to a SABR piece, Reggie Becomes Mr. October written by Scott Ferkovich on sabr.com, one of the things that DiMaggio stressed to Reggie was he thought he was a “great ballplayer”. To that point in the Series, Jackson had compiled a batting average of .353. He had banged out a couple of home runs as well. But this talk with the great DiMaggio was exactly what Reggie loved and it invigorated Jackson.
He went out to the batting cage with a new spring in his step. The fans that had already assembled in the Yankee Stadium seats were treated to a power show courtesy of Number 44. With every homer he hit out of the cage, fans would serenade him with chants of “Reg-gie, Reg-gie, Reg-gie”. Noted baseball writer Roger Kahn was there, and he estimated that out of forty pitches that Jackson hit during BP, twenty of them went out. Decades later, Reggie himself figured that he had hammered out 35 long balls out of fifty.
Whichever you wish to believe, Reggie had a good round of batting practice. Back to game action.
To begin with, Mike Torrez was on the mound for the Yankees. Burt Hooton was pitching for the Dodgers. Torrez struggled to get through the first inning. He did manage to get both Davey Lopes and Bill Russell to ground out to the middle of the infield. But then Reggie Smith bounced a roller to Dent at shortstop and he mishandled it. Smith was aboard on the error.
That brought Ron Cey to the plate. Torrez got ahead when his first pitch was strike one. But his second pitch was muffed by Thurman Munson for a passed ball. Torrez ended up walking Cey. Steve Garvey was the next man up. He watched two Torrez offerings miss the strike zone. On the 2-and-0 pitch, Garvey laced the ball the other way, down the right field line for a triple. Smith and Cey scored. It was very quickly 2-0 for the Dodgers on a pair of unearned runs. Torrez then got Dusty Baker looking at strike three.
The Yankee Stadium crowd was hushed quickly. They got even quieter in the bottom of the first when Hooton got the Yankees top three of Rivers, Randolph and Munson out on just eight pitches. Torrez did manage to regroup, and in the top of the second, he got Rick Monday, Steve Yeager and Hooton out on six tosses.
In the bottom of the inning, it was the middle of the Yankees’ order that would wake the crowd up. And Reggie Jackson would get things started when he worked Hooton for a four-pitch walk. Chris Chambliss was in the fifth spot, and he got ahead 2-and-1. Hooton tried to get a pitch in the zone, but he hung it, and Chambliss crushed it to deep right-centre field. Hooton got Nettles, Piniella and Dent to end the inning. But the Yankees tied the game up 2-2.
Torrez managed to get the first two men in the Dodgers’ third – Lopes and Russell – but Reggie Smith powered a ball over the right-centre field wall for a solo shot, restoring the Los Angeles lead. The score stayed at 3-2 for the visitors into the bottom of the fourth. That was when Burt Hooton allowed Munson a base hit, putting a Yankee on the basepaths with nobody out.
The next man up was Reggie Jackson. One pitch later, the Yankees had the lead for good. On the first pitch, Hooton’s aim was to get a heater past him. “Hooton tried to come in with a fastball,” Jackson told George A. King III of the New York Post in a 2004 article entitled The Homers That Made Reggie Mr. October. “As soon as I hit it, I knew it was gone.” Jackson went up looking for a fastball and he got it. In fact, he got all of it, sending a line drive directly into the seats in the lower right field grandstand.
Burt Hooton was removed by Tommy Lasorda after that Jackson homer. Elias Sosa replaced him. The first man Sosa pitched to was Chris Chambliss. Sosa got behind with a 3-and-1 count. Chambliss tapped the next pitch into left field and wound up on second with a double. Graig Nettles hit a roller to Bill Russell for the first Yankee out of the inning. That moved Chambliss over to third. After Lou Piniella hit a sacrifice fly to Baker in left, Chambliss came home with another Yankee run. It was now 5-3, New York, after four innings.
Having the lead seemed to give Torrez a little bit of juice. He mowed down Lopes, Russell and Reggie Smith on eight pitches. Then, it was back to the Bronx Lumber Company show again. Sosa was still out there for the Dodgers. He gave up a single on his first pitch to Mickey Rivers. Randolph’s sacrifice bunt attempt failed, and Yeager jumped out from behind the plate, grabbed the ball and fired it to second to get the force on Rivers.
Thurman Munson was next man up. He smacked a liner into centre field, but it was right at Rick Monday for the second out of the inning. Next up was that man again…Reggie Jackson. Jackson stepped in looking for a fastball. Sosa obliged with a ‘number-1’ on the inside half of the plate. Jackson hammered it hard and, similarly to his first homer off Hooton earlier in the game, it flew on a line into the seats in the lower tier of the right field stands.
The cameras followed Jackson into the dugout after he rounded the bases. He was all smiles and he held up two fingers and mouthed, “Hi Mom! Two!” After five full innings, it was now 7-3. The Yankees and their fans were not only giddy, they had all the momentum now.
Through the sixth and seventh innings, the score stayed at 7-3. Mike Torrez had retired every Dodger hitter he faced going back to the last out of the fourth and through the eighth. He was on cruise control. As the Yankees were coming up in the bottom of the eighth, Dodger knuckleballer Charlie Hough was entering his second inning of work. The first man he would see in that frame was the man of the night – Reggie!
Willie Randolph was in spectator mode now as were everyone in the stadium and so many people at home watching on their television screens. Years later, Randolph told an interviewer, “Once he (Jackson) hit the second home run, I knew he was going to hit another one, because he was in such a good groove.”
Remember, Jackson’s first two home runs of the night came off fastballs. Hough threw almost exclusively knucklers. He was confident that he could get Reggie out. Sadly, for him, he did not. Of course, Jackson was looking for the dancing knuckleball – or as the former Quebecois major leaguer, Claude Raymond, used to call it, la balle de papillon, which translated to “the butterfly ball”.
Hough’s offering did not dance so much as float. “It was a knuckler, a perfect pitch for him to hit,” a downcast Steve Yeager told Lowell Riedenbaugh of The Sporting News, afterward. To say the ball was well-hit would not be doing it justice. After he clubbed Hough’s pitch over the centre field wall and into the black batter’s eye, Jackson stood and watched the ball for a few seconds, although it felt like minutes.
Jackson was somewhat surprised after the game that he was facing the man he faced. He told George King, “I hit knuckleball pitchers very well and I couldn’t believe they had brought in Charlie Hough. He threw me a ‘hit-me’ knuckleball and I dropped a bomb.” When he got to the dugout, his teammates were there to shake or slap his hand. Some were there with hugs. As the cameras found him in the dugout, Jackson held up three fingers and this time, said, “That’s three, Mom!”
His three home runs were all hit on the first pitch of the respective at bats. Three homers on three straight pitches! Jackson’s third home run gave us the final runs of the game and the Series. The Yankees took the game 8-4 for their first World Series victory since 1964. Afterwards, of course, all the talk was about one man.
Once the final out, a Lee Lacy pop up to Torrez, was recorded, fans began filling the field. It was mayhem. Jackson was wearing a flapless batting helmet in right field, and he took it off, tucked it under his arm, and like Earl Campbell running through a defensive backfield, he ran over, around and through the cascading rush of fans toward his own dugout.
The only other man to have hit three homers in a World Series game had been George Herman Ruth and he did it twice. No one had ever hit more than four round-trippers in a Series. It was one of the most memorable nights in baseball history. Jackson knew it too.
And, just as in the game, he gave the people there exactly what they wanted. “Nothing can top this!” he told reporters as the champagne was flowing and flying in the Yankees’ club house. He listened to their questions while swallowing gulps of the bubbly stuff. “This showed what kind of men we have, what kind of human beings we are.”
Jackson was asked how this fits in with everything that happened over the course of the 1977 season. “I really don’t want to talk about everything that’s happened this year. It’s dead. The Bible says that the weak man is he who cannot stand adversity. There’s a God out there someplace. I had tremendous odds against me, and He helped me. This shows everybody can get up no matter how far down you are.”
Someone asked him about whether or not there’s a great Yankee in the sky. Jackson took issue with the question. “No. Don’t make fun. I try to be a good Christian but I’m not perfect. I sin all the time.” There was a sense in the room that many of these Yankees players were feeling more relief than satisfaction with their big victory. Jackson still showed a jolt of happiness every so often.
He repeated what he had said earlier. “Nothing can top this. Who’s gonna hit three home runs in the deciding game of the World Series?”
The night was a culmination of a bunch of things. He had some good information, whether it was relayed to him or it was something he figured out on his own. Five homers in six games was plenty good. Good enough to make him the Most Valuable Player in the World Series.
“I hit the ball good in batting practice. Real good. I knew they’d pitch me inside and I was just trying to keep the ball in the playing field. The first two home runs were on balls inside. They were trying to pitch me in all Series. I was thinking about a home run the last time (at bat), but really, I was more or less thinking about a hit. I had a good swing at it and BINGO! I couldn’t really believe it.”
Jackson’s father was at the game but had been dealing with health issues in the days leading up to the World Series victory. Someone let Reggie know that his father was at the door to the club house. He reacted immediately. “Bring my Dad over. Where is Dad? Dad! Dad!” They brought Reggie’s father over. He was a little man in a dark three-piece suit with a black tie. They pushed him into the small area where Reggie was holding court.
Reggie threw his arms around his father. “Get a picture of me and my Dad for television, for the newspapers and for the magazines. I must have a picture with my Dad.” Reggie got emotional and began to speak softly. “I can’t say too much for this man. He has been behind me all the way, even in my darkest moments, and there were plenty of them. But he has not seen me play much this year. He has not felt well. He had a fire in his house, and he lost a daughter. I am only happy that on this night, I could bring a little happiness to him.”
* * *
Howie’s latest book MORE Crazy Days & Wild Nights, eleven new stories of outlandish and wild events that occurred in sports over the last fifty years,is available on Amazon. It’s the follow-up to his first book of 2023, Crazy Days & Wild Nights! If you love sports and sports history, you need these books!
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