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229 Chapter 48. 1976 and Beyond Anthony Giacalone The Big Red Machine reached its destiny when César Gerónimo closed his glove around Carl Yastrzemski ’s fly ball on October 22, 1975, at Fenway Park to end the World Series. In that moment of ecstasy and exhaustion the Cincinnati Reds became world champions, finally grasping the ring that had eluded their reach in the first half of the decade. On a cold October night in Yankee Stadium nearly one year later, after another brilliant campaign, they successfully defended the title. But then it was over. And while the Reds empire didn’t exactly fall in the second half of the 1970s, it did stumble. There are several reasons why the Reds failed to reach the summit again after 1976. First, the contenders for the crown were very powerful. Additionally, some the team’s old warriors were sent away or allowed to leave, while age and injury dulled the skills of some who remained. Finally , the Reds failed to modernize, allowing their opponents to strengthen their legions while the Cincinnatians grew weaker. So, despite six years of valiant battling, by 1982 the Reds dynasty lay in ruins, a victim of miscalculation and cruel fate. Having built the Reds into champions, the team’s longtime general manager, Bob Howsam, looked to improve his world champion squad. In an effort to give the team more vitality and versatility, after the 1975 season, Howsam dealt away former All-Star reliever Clay Carroll and starter Clay Kirby , along with bench players Darrel Chaney, Merv Rettenmund, and Terry Crowley, and replaced them with veterans and talented players from the Reds’ Minor League organization. Bob Bailey and Mike Lum, who had played a combined twenty-one full Major League seasons, were acquired to reinforce the bench, while Howsam turned to a pair of hardthrowing homegrown pitchers, Pat Zachry and Santo Alcala, to supplement the pitching staff. With these changes, Reds management believed that they had improved an already great club. “Our front line is the best eight men in either league,” Howsam declared , “and our bench is now as good as anybody has in baseball.”1 For now, the changing economics of the game did not affect the Reds. Within a year, the players’ newly won right to become free agents if they played a season without a signed contract would overturn baseball ’s hidebound economic structure, but Howsam and the Reds dealt with it well during the 1975–76 off-season. Despite an owners’ lockout during spring training, by Opening Day the Reds had signed all of their players except one, although they had to give some, like Joe Morgan and Pete Rose, significant raises to do so. Only the headstrong Don Gullett, the team’s best starting pitcher, was playing with an unsigned contract. Reds management, it seemed, was willing to adapt to the game’s new economic uncertainties. After all, as Morgan summarized, “The players realized it long ago. It’s a business.”2 Though they entered the 1976 season as the overwhelming choice to defend their division title and were 2-to-1 favorites to repeat as world champions, the Reds were just 12-10 on May 6 and still trailed the Los Angeles Dodgers by 2½ games on May 23. Only a few players struggled with injuries in 1976, notably Johnny Bench, whose “strange spasms of pain” compromised his production, but the rest of the team’s hitters compensated for their catcher’s relative decline. As for the pitchers, injuries pushed Gullett’s first start back to April 25, but, like the 230 anthony giacalone team’s hitters, their pitchers also picked up the slack. By the All-Star break, the Reds were 53-33 and in front of the second-place Dodgers by six games.3 And no one in the nl West really challenged the Reds during the second half of the season. The Dodgers managed to sneak to within seven games of Cincinnati in early September, but the Reds then won seven of eight games to widen the lead back to eleven games and finished the campaign ten games in front of the Dodgers. They were an excellent team. In fact, it is arguable that the 1976 Reds, despite a poorer overall record and a lesser margin of victory in their division, were the equal of Cincinnati’s more celebrated 1975 squad. Unlike the 1975 team, the 1976 group never slipped below .500, and while the 1975...

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