Schadenfreude 342 (A Continuing Series)Schadenfreude Time Machine: June 17-19, 1977

Red Sox pitchers Nick Pivetta and James Paxton were credited with the wins in consecutive games against the Athletics on July 7 and 8.

Pivetta and Paxton – both born in the Canadian province of British Columbia (Pivetta in Victoria, Paxton in Ladner) – were the first Canadians to win consecutive games for the Red Sox since Reggie Cleveland and Fergie Jenkins, way back on June 18-19, 1977 against the Yankees.

Pivetta pitched the middle five innings of Boston's 7-3 win on Friday, July 7. Paxton started and went six innings the next day, as the Red Sox romped 10-3.

Cleveland (born Swift Current, Saskatchewan*) and Jenkins (born Chatham, Ontario) did their thing during one of the Red Sox's all-time greatest series against the Yankees. (Also: Pivetta's 413.2 innings are the most by a Canadian-born Red Sox pitcher since Cleveland's 752.2 innings 1974-78.)

Let's go back to that mid-June 1977 series.

*: Your correspondent was 13 years old; summer vacation had just begun and he would start high school in the fall. And 28 years later, he would find himself spending the night in Swift Current as part of cross-country drive to resettle on the west coast of Canada.

Bill Lee faced the Brownshirts in the first game, Friday night, June 17. Catfish Hunter was the Yankees' starter – for maybe 15-20 minutes. Rick Burleson led off the bottom of the first with a home run into the screen atop the left field wall. Fred Lynn followed with a home run deep into the  right-field bleachers. Hunter got two outs, but he wouldn't get the third. Carlton Fisk crushed a home run over everything in left. George Scott also crushed a home run over everything in left. Hunter was then sent to the showers  after throwing only 29 pitches (did he even break a sweat?), forced to walk off the field as the jeers of more than 34,000 Red Sox fans throbbed in his ears.

New York tied the game 4-4 in the third inning, but Boston got single runs in the fifth and sixth, and Yaz and Fisk went deep in the seventh. The Red Sox won 9-4, as Mickey Rivers of the Yankees donned a batting helmet in center field as protection from the flying chunks of metal and glass coming out of the bleachers. Ahhh, the '70s!

Cleveland started on Saturday afternoon, June 18. (I am not sure if all three games were on TV, but I know this one was.) The crowd at Fenway was reportedly the largest in 20 years; the temperature was 90 degrees. The Yankees got two runs in the first, but Yaz clubbed a three-run dong off Mike Torrez in the bottom half to give Boston a 3-2 lead. After a walk, single, and an error, Torrez got a double play to avoid further damage.

Things remained quiet until the fourth. Bernie Carbo homered. Butch Hobson singled and Denny Doyle tripled. After Doyle scored on Lynn's sac fly, Rice was HBP and Yaz singled, but Torrez again escaped additional trouble.

Carbo homered again in the fifth and Scott went deep to center off Sparky Lyle in the seventh (his MLB-best 17th of the year), but it was the inning in between that was the most interesting.

With one out in the bottom of the sixth, Lynn singled and Rice broke his bat on a hit into right field. Reggie Jackson was extremely slow to charge the ball (something the Yankee announcers said was a common practice that year). Rice hustled into second for a double with Lynn advancing to third. New York manager Billy Martin was furious. Suddenly, Paul Blair was jogging out to right field. Reggie was confused, then realized Martin was publicly embarrassing him – and on national television – by pulling him from the game mid-inning. When Reggie got to the dugout, he opened his arms, as if to say, "What did I do?" It was a scene famously echoed many years later by Alex Rodriguez, standing at second base, in Game 6 of the 2004 ALCS. It was an open question whether Martin or Jackson (or both) might begin throwing punches. It was fucking awesome.

Yaz hit another homer in the eighth. Final score: Red Sox 10-4.

Reggie had been "a center of friction" on the team for weeks, refusing to shake his teammates' hands after hitting a key home run in May and dealing with the turmoil from an interview in Sport magazine in which he said "derogatory things" about Thurman Munson, asserting that of all the good players on the Yankees, he was "the straw that stirred the drink" (which remains, quite honestly, an amazing quote).

Jackson screamed at Martin in the dugout: "You never liked me." . . . And later was sipping white wine.

That night he spoke privately to a reporter (reportedly, "every other word [was] an expletive" in the original (where's the tape?)):

It makes me cry, the way they treat me on this team. The Yankee pinstripes are Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio and Mantle. I'm just a black man to them who doesn't know how to be subservient. I'm a big black man with an IQ of 160 making $700,000 a year and they treat me like dirt. They've never had anyone like me on their team before.

Reggie was very determined never to miss an opportunity to tout his (alleged) high intelligence or his salary. When told Reggie had an IQ of 160, Mickey Rivers said: "Out of what, a thousand? He can't even spell IQ."

Jenkins got the ball on Sunday, June 19, and pitched a complete game, allowing only three hits and one unearned run. Boston toyed with starter Ed Figueroa (13 baserunners in 4.1 innings) and reliever Dick Tidrow, who allowed four hits (all home runs) in two innings. (Yankees radio broadcast)

The Red Sox did not score in the first two innings – the Yankeed actually led 1-0! – but they got runs in every inning afterwards. Diminutive Denny Doyle donged in the fourth for three runs, part of Boston's busy inning that included three hits, three walks, a stolen base, and a Reggie error! (SI: "When Doyle returned to the dugout, Yaz refused to shake his hand, saying, 'Are you kidding?'")

The Red Sox led 7-1 when they closed out the three-game whipping by taking batting practice against Tidrow. Carbo homered in the seventh and Rice, Yaz, and Scott hit bombs in the eighth, for an 11-1 win.

The Red Sox set a major league record with 16 home runs in a three-game series. Then they went to Baltimore and swept four games from the Orioles, hitting nine more home runs and outscoring the Birds 25-7. It was part of a 10-game stretch (June 14-24) in which they hit a record 33 dongs. (That was also a record.) They slugged .638 and had a team OPS of 1.008. 

BOOM!

Jim Rice told Sports Illustrated:

We've got this standard routine in the dugout now . . . When a guy comes in after a homer, someone will ask him, "Hey, man, you get it all?" The answer's always, "Nope."

Not long after, on July 4, the Red Sox hit eight home runs in a span of four innings against the Blue Jays (then in their first season). The last seven blasts were solo shots.

5th: Scott
6th: Lynn
7th: Hobson, Carbo
8th: Lynn, Rice, Yaz, Scott

I would have devoured a book about the 1977 Red Sox – my second-favourite team, after 2004.