This weekend in baseball history: The 1972 NLCS.
The 1972 playoffs began on Saturday, October 7. They featured three super-teams — the Oakland As, the Cincinnati Reds, and the Pittsburgh Pirates — plus Billy Martin’s aged but feisty Detroit Tigers.
Both championship series would go the maximum five games. The World Series would go the maximum seven.
The NLCS and the ALCS were both dramatic. This post will be about the NLCS — the less eventful of the two.
The Pirates and the Reds had the best records in baseball during the slightly shortened 1972 regular season. Their records were nearly identical (96-59 and 95-69, respectively). Pittsburgh had a better run differential, but only by a small margin.
The Pirates were the defending champions of baseball. The Reds had won the National League pennant in 1970.
The two regular starting lineups were full of stars. By combining the two sets of players, one could create a credible all-star team. It would include six future Hall of Famers: Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, and Tony Perez of the Reds; Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell of the Pirates. (The Pirates had another future Hall of Famer — Bill Mazeroski, who would go 1-2 as a pinch hitter in this NLCS.)
The pitching staffs contained no stars of Hall of Fame quality. However, Pittsburgh’s team ERA was the lowest in the NL. Cincinnati’s was the third lowest. This was a clash of the titans.
Game One, played at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, did not send the pulses racing, though. Cincinnati jumped out to a 1-0 lead in the top of the first inning on a Joe Morgan home run. But the Pirates answered with three in the bottom of that inning off of Reds starter Don Gullett. Al Oliver, Willie Stargell, and Richie Hebner had the RBI hits. A passed ball by Johnny Bench did not contribute to the scoring, but was notable for its rarity. He had only two of them during the regular season.
Pirates starter Steve Blass stifled the Reds after the first inning. The Bucs cruised to a 5-1 victory.
Cincinnati came out roaring in Game 2. The Reds scored four runs in the top of the first off of Bob Moose, who failed to retire a batter. Bobby Tolan and Tony Perez both doubled in a pair of runs.
The Pirates began chipping away at the lead in the fourth inning. They scored a run in each of the three middle innings. However, Tom (the Blade) Hall gave the Reds four-plus innings of two-hit, one-run ball to close out a 5-3 victory. (Why “the Blade”? Because he stood 6-0 but weighed only 150.)
With no day off, the series moved to Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati for Game Three. For six innings, this was a pitchers’ duel between starters Nelson Briles and Gary Nolan. After six, Cincinnati had the upper hand, 2-1.
Sparky Anderson elected to pull Nolan in the top of the seventh. By 1972 standards, Nolan was far from an iron man. But Sparky probably would have been better served by giving Nolan at least another inning.
Nolan’s replacement, Pedro Borbon, hit Hebner, the first batter he faced. Manny Sanguillen followed with a single, and Gene Alley bunted the two runners over a base.
Sparky then pulled Borbon and brought in his top reliever, Clay Carroll, National League’s “fireman of the year” in 1972. Unimpressed, Rennie Stennett singled Hebner home. Carroll escaped further damage, and the game was tied at 2-2.
The Pirates weren’t done with Carroll. In the eighth, a one-out walk to Stargell, a double by Oliver, and a RBI groundout by Sanguillen put the Bucs up, 3-2.
The Pirates survived a one-out double by Rose in the eighth and a one-out single by Perez in the ninth to close out the game. Bruce Kison, a hero of the 1971 World Series got the win. Dave Giusti, another standout in that Series, picked up the save.
Game 6 was must-win for Cincinnati. Win, they did, and quite handily.
Sparky Anderson gave the ball to 22 year-old Ross Grimsley. The young left-hander rewarded him with a gem.
Grimsley held the Pirates to one run on just three hits. He didn’t walk anyone.
Meanwhile, the Reds scored three off of Dock Ellis in the first five innings, though none of the runs was earned. They added four more in the next two innings against middle relievers to win 7-0.
In addition to his brilliant pitching, Grimsley chipped in two hits and an RBI.
This set up a decisive Game 5. It would provide the drama missing from several of the previous games.
This was a rematch of the Game 1 starters — Blass and Gullett. But it was decided after both had departed.
Gullett departed early. The Pirates reached him for two runs in the second, a Hebner double being the key blow. In the fourth, after Sanguillen and Hebner led off with singles, Sparky removed his regular season ace.
Borbon came on and promptly gave up a single to Cash. It scored Sanguillen. Hebner held at second base.
Then, pivotally, Borbon stopped the bleeding. Alley flied out and Blass hit into a double play.
The Pirates led 3-1, but would not score again. Borbon, Hall, and Carroll limited them to only one more hit the rest of the way.
But Blass was nearly as effective. The Reds did score a run in the bottom of the fifth on a home run by a most unlikely source, Cesar Geronimo. The gifted center fielder hit only four homers in 255 regular-season at-bats.
After that, though, Blass held the Reds in check into the eighth inning, when Pirates manager Bill Virdon pulled him with one out and Joe Hague, a pinch hitter for Hall, on second (the result of a walk and a sacrifice bunt).
On came left-hander Ramon Hernandez for the purpose of pitching to a pair of dangerous left-handed hitters. Morgan and Bobby Tolan. The move worked. Morgan grounded out and Tolan struck out.
So the Pirates still led 3-2 going into the ninth. After, they went down 1-2-3 in the top of the inning, Virdon called on his ace reliever, Dave Giusti, to close out the game.
Giusti had been brilliant all year, pitching to an ERA of 1.92. The previous October had pitched immaculately in the World Series, giving the Bucs five-plus innings of scoreless relief and picking up a save. In this NLCS, he had finished two games (a win and a loss) without giving up a run.
But this was not his day. Johnny Bench was up first. Giusti got ahead of him 1-2, but then left his next pitch a little bit up and a little bit away. Bench drove it to the opposite field — over Clemente’s head and over the fence for a game-tying home run.
Next up was Perez. He singled. Anderson replaced him with a pinch runner, George Foster.
That brought Dennis Menke to the plate. Sparky called on him to bunt Foster to second — a sound move and one that any manager in that era would have made.
But Menke fouled off his two attempts at a sacrifice. He then redeemed himself by singling Foster to second.
Virdon still wanted to stick with Giusti, but when his ace fell behind Geronimo 2-0, Virdon had little choice but to remove the veteran. Virdon replaced him with Bob Moose, the Game Two starter who had been chased without retiring a batter.
Moose was more effective this time. He retired the first two batters he faced. Geronimo flied out to right and Darrell Cheney struck out.
But crucially, Foster advanced to third base on Geronimo’s fly ball.
So with two out, the Reds had runners on first and third. Sparky sent Hal McRae up to pinch hit for Carroll.
Let’s take a moment to reflect on how deep this Cincinnati club was. McRae, a little used outfielder, would go on to hit .290 with a better than .800 OPS in more than 2,000 major league games. Foster, the pinch runner and also little used, would belt 52 home runs in 1977 on his way to being named National League MVP. He played in five all-star games.
Okay, back to the game.
With the count 1-1, Moose unleashed a wild pitch. Foster scored, and that was it.
This contest aside, has the deciding game of a baseball playoff ever ended with a walk-off wild pitch? Not that I know of. And for some reason, this ending felt unsettling, at least to me — dramatic and anti-climactic at the same time.
Game Five, by the way, was the final game in the career of Roberto Clemente. A few months later, he would die in an airplane crash as he tried to deliver relief to victims of an earthquake in Nicaragua, where he had played for his Puerto Rican winter ball team in the international world series of 1963.
In his final game, he went 1-3. In his final at-bat, he drew an intentional walk.
Fortunately, Clemente had collected his 3,000th hit in his last regular-season plate appearance, so death did not deprive him of entry into this exclusive club .
As for the Reds, they would now have the opportunity to avenge their World Series loss of 1970. As I recall, most observers thought that, with the Pirates out of the way, they would do just that.