Alaska Employment Law

It has an awkwardly long title, but as game 6 of this year’s World Series approaches, I just finished reading Game Six: Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America’s Pastime, by Mark Frost.  Now I have to say, I was at Game 6, me, my brother and someone named Eileen from my office, whoever she was.  We sat in Section 22, Row 17, behind home plate, a little to the third base side.  I know this because I looked at my $12.50 ticket to the game the other day.  Game 6 was beyond any doubt the most exciting sports event I have ever attended.

Frost approaches this story in the way many writers approach baseball books:  each inning is recounted, and as new faces enter the story, their histories, and their place in the tale, are explained, sometimes at considerable length.  The story of Luis Tiant and his father Luis, Sr., one of the great Cuban pitchers, is beautifully recounted.  We learn that Senator Ed Brooke wrote  a personal letter to Fidel Castro, which was hand delivered to the Cuban leader by Senator George McGovern while on a trade mission, in order for Tiant’s parents to come to America to see their son pitch in the major leagues (surprise, they defected).  Frost’s story of the very troubled life and eventual salvation of Bernardo Carbo, former drug addict, is likewise very moving, and there are strong depictions of rival managers Darrell Johnson and Sparky Anderson.  (My brother and I actually met Sparky Anderson while standing in the check-in line at a hotel in Cincinnati in 2005.  Ever gregarious and social, Sparky let someone take a picture of the Boston boys with him after we told him we hadn’t seen him in 30 years.)

Midway through Game Six, I was surprised to discover that I could hardly remember anything about the first half of the contest, except that Tiant started the game and struggled − nothing, really, until Fred Lynn’s brutal, scary collision with the center field wall.  And then Carbo’s incredible pinch hit three-run homer in the 8th, Dwight Evans’ that’s-not-possible catch of Joe Morgan’s apparent three-run homer in the 11th, and Carlton Fisk arcing one off the foul pole (now named for him) in the 12th and last inning, as church bells rang out in some Massachusetts and New Hampshire towns.

Frost got one important detail right:  when the game ended, John Kiley, playing organ at Fenway, turned up the volume and hit the “Halleluiah Chorus” big time.  No one would leave the park.  At the conclusion of the very first night World Series game ever played in Boston, people − old, young, black, white − hugged each other, jumped on each other, screamed and yelled.  This was a great relief, a great uniting event.  (Boston was in the middle of forced busing at the time; we were not a happy city.)  And John Kiley played “Stout Hearted Men,” and people cried and yelled some more, finally filling the lunatic streets shouting down to Kenmore Square.  I never saw anything like it before, and I don’t expect I will again.  Game Six is a fine book, by the way.  The 35,205 fans at the game and the rest of New England awake that night won’t forget it.