Pain has been an inescapable part of being a Red Sox fan for many years also because the Red Sox have had so many capable individuals. Remember Frank Malzone, Eddie Bressoud, Chuch Schilling, Dick Stuart, Bill Monboquette, Felix Mantilla? All good ballplayers, in their way. Yet despite their presence the Sox had long languished in the depths of the American League.
The reason for their lack of success, and the astounding performance of the 1967 Red Sox, is as hackneyed as it is true. The old Sox were cursed by a losing mentality. So what if you finish eighth or ninth, whether you win this game or lose it? It's not going to help anybody's paycheck. The players had one overriding interest: themselves. Such self-interest obviously hurt the team, and it puts incredible pressure on the individual players. They are fighting a battle alone.
If the game against California had taken place in 1965, and Boston was already assured of ninth place, what would Mike Andrews have done? He would have tried to knock the ball over the fence, heeding the maxim that home run hitters drive Cadillacs, and singles hitters drive Chevrolets.
The Red Sox' general manager, Dick O'Connell, who was elevated to that post in 1965, could see as well as anybody what was wrong with the team. He and his predecessor, Mike Higgins, had a vision of the sort of club they wanted to build. A young, enthusiastic team, with powerful hitting, speed, hustle, solid defense, intelligence and a winning attitude. In the process of building it, the Red Sox management looked like a bunch of idiots.
They traded loveable Felix Mantilla for a lame-armed utility infielder. They traded home-run hitting Dick Stuart for a lame-armed pitcher. They virtually gave away a .290 hitter, Eddie Bressoud. They virtually gave away their best pitcher, Earl Wilson.
Desperate moves made by morons, the fans thought. But there was method to O'Connell's madness. Waiting in the wings were a host of good, young ballplayers--kids like Joe Foy, Rico Petrocelli and Andrews who had potential which was obvious to the Sox management. However, they were not going to get a chance to develop this potential by staying in the minor leagues, or sitting on the bench while older players went out there and didn't try to win.
Sacrifice Year
"We sacrificed last year to build a ball club," O'Connell said. Given a chance to play, the youngsters slowly began to develop their skills.
But it took Dick Williams, the new Boston manager, to turn these poten- tially good players into a cohesive unit. Boston has long had the reputation as an undisciplined, live-it-up team, and has been a graveyard for managers. When Williams came onto the scene, he laid down the law: no overweight players, no sore-armed pitchers, no lazy self-centered attitudes. He showed he meant business by benching his good players when they started to lapse back into their old habits.
The Sox started playing .500 ball, and have not been far out of first place since the season began. With a young team, it was easy for a winning attitude to develop, and Williams did not have to work any psychological miracles. When Boston went on a road trip and came back home with a 10-game winning streak, this winning attitude turned into a virtual mania.
Six thousand ecstatic fans met the team at Logan Airport. Yastrzemski, the team's unofficial spokesman, announced, "Nothing can stop us now." Like the hero of Synge's "Playboy of the Western World," the Red Sox seem to have become so convinced by their own boasts that they are living up to them.
Contrary to Yastrzemski's statement, however, there is something that can stop the Red Sox.
When you look at their hitting, the Sox appear invincible. They have four of the top ten hitters in the league--Yastrzemski, Scott, Petrocelli, and everybody's darling, Tony Conigliaro--and the rest of the lineup has been coming through with the clutch hits when they are needed.
Then you look at Boston's pitching, and you wonder how the team has gone so far with so little. Jim Lonborg, it is true, has been phenomenal, and is the winningest pitcher in the majors. Gary Bell, who was acquired from Cleveland in a trade, has won six games for the Sox, but it is highly doubtful that he will keep it up. The other starters--Lee Stange, Gary Waslewski, and Darrell Brandon--run the gamut from mediocre to awful.
Boston's series with California clearly demonstrated the team's pitching ineptitude. On Tuesday Waslewski got bombed. On Wednesday, Brandon was bombed. On Thursday, Stange was bombed. And yet, despite this, Boston won two of three games from a third-place team which had come into the series on the crest of a six-game winning streak. In Thursday's game, played before a larger-than-capacity crowd, Boston scored three runs in the last of the ninth to tie the game, and won it in the tenth, 6-5.
The baseball purists will say that pitching is 75 per cent of the game, and thus the Red Sox are a fluke team and will inevitably collapse. But Bostonians will hear none of this heretical talk. The Red Sox, after all, have been defying all logic since April. Why can't they do it for a little while longer