Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk went running despite that Game 6 of the 1975 World Series was postponed due to rain.
As with financial crises and crucial elections, it is tempting to view the current World Series rain mayhem as particularly historic. But the Series has been down roads far more wet — and bumpy — than this, complete with accusations of cheating, television posturing and, almost 100 years ago, labor strife.
The granddaddy of all World Series rainouts took place in 1911 in Philadelphia, naturally. Weather delayed Game 4 for an entire week. And the rest of the series was not nearly as eventful as the gameless break.
Hostilities were already high as the Philadelphia Athletics and the New York Giants traveled back to Philadelphia’s Shibe Park with the A’s leading, two games to one. Christy Mathewson, the Giants’ otherwise gentlemanly ace, had accused A’s groundskeepers of wetting the infield in Game 2 to slow down New York’s famous running game. In what was perhaps a related incident, the Giants’ Fred Snodgrass spiked the popular A’s third baseman Frank Baker and left him a bloody mess.
When Game 4 was called twice by rain so hard that one person suggested covering the field with oil and setting it afire — Connie Mack, the A’s manager and owner, demurred because he did not want to hurt the grass — Snodgrass found himself trapped in a less-than-friendly city of Philadelphia. Furious Baker fans gathered outside the Giants’ hotel and threatened him whenever he emerged; Giants Manager John McGraw finally told Snodgrass to take the train back to New York until play resumed.
“The absence of Snodgrass from the Majestic Hotel, the Giants’ headquarters, set a wild rumor afloat this afternoon that an irate fan had attempted to shoot Snodgrass,” The New York Times reported. Another false rumor centered around whether Baker’s spike wounds had become infected and caused blood poisoning.
This was not even the last controversy of the week, during which Giants players grumbled about McGraw’s interrupting billiards and card games by making them work out to stay sharp. During the delay, the National Commission, the era’s version of Major League Baseball, ordered players on both clubs to pose for a motion-picture company that would distribute the film to theaters over the winter. Several Giants refused to participate without any cut of the profits.
“Baseball with them is a business, they say, and they don’t propose to furnish pictorial entertainment for the whole country just for the love of having their pictures taken,” The Times reported. The dispute was apparently resolved, and the A’s finally won the series in six games.
The next lengthy delay in a World Series came in 1962, after Game 5 between the San Francisco Giants and the Yankees was postponed in New York for a day. (One teenage Yankees fan complained that by attending four previous World Series games at the Stadium, he had run out of grandparent-funeral excuses for missing school.) Game 5 was played the next day, and the Yankees took a three-games-to-two lead, but a torrential set of storms greeted the two teams after they flew back to San Francisco.
Yankees Manager Ralph Houk was able to move Whitey Ford up to Game 6 because of the first day’s delay.
“Ford will pitch this upcoming sixth game come hell or high water,” Houk said, looking out on increasingly high water as the weather did not let up.
Trapped in their hotel rooms for another day because of strong rain and 40-mile-per-hour winds, players complained that they might as well have been on Alcatraz. When the game was postponed for a third day — in bright sunshine — because Candlestick Park was too waterlogged, both teams drove 80 miles east to Modesto to work out.
Ford actually lost Game 6, 5-2, setting up a climactic Game 7. That turned out to be one of baseball’s most exciting games, with the Yankees’ Ralph Terry beating the Giants, 1-0, and the game ending with Willie McCovey’s lineout to Bobby Richardson.
Coincidentally, another of baseball’s greatest games had soggy roots in the rain: Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, won by the Boston Red Sox in the bottom of the 12th on Carlton Fisk’s home run.
The Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds arrived in Boston to a nor’easter and waited as Saturday’s scheduled Game 6 was postponed two days in a row. On Sunday, when clearing seemed imminent but Fenway Park remained drenched, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn had to decide whether to try playing the next night — squarely against “All in the Family” on CBS and a new sensation called “Monday Night Football” on ABC — or postpone Game 6 all the way to Tuesday.
When Kuhn told the Times columnist Red Smith that he preferred night games “to better accommodate the fans,” Smith accused M.L.B. of kowtowing to the networks.
“Exposing cash customers to raw night cold is a novel way of accommodating them,” Smith said. “Accommodating TV sponsors at prime time is something else again.”
Meanwhile, with Fisk still just a good catcher and not yet a New England icon, the Reds decided to try to stay sharp by working out inside Dussault Cage at Cousens Gymnasium on the campus of Tufts University. While pitchers worked off a portable mound plopped down on the running track, Pete Rose and Joe Morgan bashed line drives into fishnets hung from the ceiling.
Why Tufts? Reds Manager Sparky Anderson was asked.
“I think Harvard would be a little over my head,” he replied.
The sky over everyone’s heads soon cleared, and the Series played on.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 30, 2008
An article on Wednesday about the influence of poor weather on the World Series through the years misstated the scheduled day for Game 6 between the
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