The Deeper Meaning of Bucky Dent

“I didn't feel much pressure the night before the game…but I felt the pressure when I actually came into the game. More pressure than I've ever felt.” Rich “Goose” Gossage, New York Yankees relief pitcher, reflecting on October 2, 1978

The weather in Boston that Monday was perfect: sunny and 68 degrees. Normally, on Yawkey Way, the sun would have beaten down on abandoned grandstands, but this wasn’t normal. The day before, the Yankees lost their final regular season game, while the Red Sox won theirs, leaving the bitter rivals tied for first place at the completion of a bitterly fought regular season, creating a one-game showdown. Boston won a coin toss for home field advantage, and 35,000 adrenaline-stoked fans crammed into Fenway, all on an unplanned holiday.

Until this surprising, specially-scheduled event, the biggest surprise of the season had been New York’s recovery; by mid-season they were so far behind the first place Red Sox that a late-70’s political resurgence by Richard Nixon would have been more believable than a Yankees comeback. New York’s 14-game deficit on July 19 looked historically insurmountable—no deficit that large had ever been overcome that late in the season.

There’s a first time for everything. On September 7th, when New York came into Fenway for a four-game series, they were only four games behind Boston. The Yankees swept the series. It’s still known as the Boston Massacre. The Yankees left town tied with the Red Sox for first place, exactly where they would be again, 22 days later.

So, on that first Monday afternoon of October 1978, time stood still. Carl Yastrzemski’s home run and Jim Rice’s RBI single gave the Red Sox an early 2-0 lead. The score held. By the seventh inning, the Fenway crowd was high on hope.

In the top of that inning, weak-hitting Yankees shortstop Bucky Dent faced Mike Torrez with two men on. He fouled Torrez’s second pitch off of his foot and hopped out of the batter’s box, an eighty-second interlude that altered baseball history. During the timeout, on-deck batter Mickey Rivers handed Dent a bat to replace the one Dent didn’t know was cracked. On the next pitch, Bucky Dent made contact.

Yastrzemski slumped against the Green Monster. Dent’s home run catapulted New York to a 3-2 lead and launched a long-lived Boston epithet that has forever paired Bucky Dent’s name with a rhythmic cursing, as if its repetition could dispel the curse under which Red Sox fans lived.

In the ninth inning, down now by a score of 5-4, Boston had the winning runs on base, with one out and alpha slugger Jim Rice at the plate. Goose Gossage, the Yankees closer— surrounded by Fenway bedlam—got Rice to fly out just 25 feet shy of the wall. Up came Yaz, seeking to reprise his earlier homer.

Gossage stared in, suddenly free of the disabling pressure he felt upon entering the game: "I was facing Carl Yastrzemski for the final out when it occurred to me that the worst thing that could happen was that I'd be in the Colorado mountains the next day. A real calm came over me."

From within that calm, Gossage threw his most famous pitch, getting Yastrzemski to pop out to third, triggering another Boston Great Depression.

Last week, Goose Gossage was the only player from this year’s candidates inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Jim Rice missed being elected by just 16 votes, possibly because of a long fly ball that just missed leaving the park by 26 feet nearly 30 years ago.

But there’s always tomorrow, as the Red Sox have since proven. In 2004, 26 long years after that October 2, and after additional devastating meltdowns, the Red Sox faced the Yankees once more. This time though, it was Boston’s turn to do what no Major League Baseball team had ever done before. Down three games to none in a best-of-seven series, they won four straight, grabbed the pennant from the Evil Empire, and then (after that, it seemed an afterthought), swept the Cardinals in the World Series.

Futurist George Gilder surveyed the current economic scene recently and commented, “This is a supreme moment of contrarian upside promise.” It always is. The microcosm of the ball field—performance-based, risk-oriented, home to the pressure cooker and the upside surprise—is also home to the American spirit. We don’t need another special program. Just let us play ball. If we lose today, we may yet win tomorrow.

Is this a great country, or what?

Matt Kinnaman’s Getting it Right column appears every week in the liberal epicenter of Massachusetts and in various online outlets.