Bat in the Night

One of the most memorable games in postseason history took place in the 1975 World Series, a contest that came to its dramatic conclusion with a post-midnight swing in which the batter willed the ball fair.

On Oct. 21, 1975, in Game 6 of the World Series, Boston catcher Carlton Fisk socked a walk-off homer on a 1-0 pitch leading off the bottom of the 12th inning that gave Red Sox a 7-6 victory over the Cincinnati Reds before a capacity Fenway Park crowd of 35,205. Using hand signals and body English to prevent his hit off pitcher Pat Darcy from going foul, the baseball ricocheted off the left field foul pole while euphoric fans poured on the diamond from the stands as Fisk rounded the bases and the Series headed to a seventh game.

It’s a moment that will live forever in Cooperstown – retold in the Museum’s Whole New Ballgame exhibit.

“Fisk’s reaction was the greatest individual replay we’ve had in World Series history,” said the game’s director, Harry Coyle, who had handled almost 30 Fall Classic broadcasts at that point for NBC dating back to 1947. “It tops [Yogi] Berra leaping into the lap of [Don] Larsen after the perfect game.”

The famed bat Fisk used to hit his impressive homer will be one of many artifacts that will part of Whole New Ballgame, a new exhibit on the second floor of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum that will be open to the public on Nov. 7. Whole New Ballgame, which reimagines baseball history from 1970 through today, will feature new video displays and many rarely-seen artifacts.

The bat Fisk used that night – a Louisville Slugger 34 inches long and weighing 30 ounces – was a Rick Burleson model two ounces lighter and a half-inch shorter than that catcher’s usual bat. Fisk, who also used the bat in Game 7, was attracted to this new piece of lumber from his team’s shortstop as the game wore on because it was lighter and easier to control.

Other Boston Game 6 highlights included outfielder Dwight Evans’ acrobatic catch of Joe Morgan’s drive to right field in the 11th that turned into a double play and Bernie Carbo’s dramatic three-run pinch-hit homer with two outs in the eighth that created a 6-6 tie.

“It was a fantastic game,” said Fisk, the 27-year-old native of Vermont, of the game postponed three days by rain. “You’re not exactly on top of the world when you’re trailing a club like the Cincinnati Reds, 6-3, with four outs to go. Pete Rose came up to me in the 10th and said, ‘This is some kind of game, isn’t it?’ And I said, ‘Some kind of game.’

“Look, you’ve been hearing about Johnny Bench for five years or so. But tomorrow you’re gonna be reading about me.”

“And all of a sudden the ball was there, like the Mystic River Bridge, suspended out in the black of the morning,” was the lead paragraph 2004 W.G. Taylor Spink Award winner Peter Gammons wrote in the next day’s Boston Globe.

Gammons’ colleague at the Boston Globe, columnist Ray Fitzgerald, called it the best game ever, surpassing Game 7 of the 1960 World Series in which Pirates second baseman Bill Mazeroski’s walk-off homer in the bottom of the seventh inning gave the Bucs the championship over the Yankees.

“Now, the Mazeroski game is No. 2,” wrote Fitzgerald. “Last night was a Picasso of a baseball game, a Beethoven symphony played on a patch of grass in Boston’s Back Bay.”

With a national television audience of 50 million or so, the climactic shot heard around the baseball world even led to church bells being rung in Charlestown, N.H., where Fisk’s parents lived. David Conant, who rang the bells in the Episcopal Church after the game, said the noise woke up the minister, who thought the bell ringing “was a hell of an idea.”