The Reds beat the Red Sox in epic '75 Series, but NESN won the reunion with its thowback telecast

New York Times

2 days ago

BOSTON — When the Cincinnati Reds pulled into Fenway Park on Monday for a three-game interleague series against the Boston Red Sox, it provided the perfect platform for the Sox to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the teams' epic seven-game World Series. Even if Boston lost that series, as any Sox fan from those days can sadly attest.
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But thanks to 2004, and 2007, and 2013, and 2018, many of those same fans can remember the 1975 Red Sox without getting too caught up in soul-searching and resurrected blame assessment. Sure, the likes of Jim Rice, Game 6 home run hero Carlton Fisk and the captain himself, Carl Yastrzemski, might not be so gracious on this topic. They are among the greatest players in Red Sox history, Hall of Famers all, and let's add that Dwight Evans and the late Luis Tiant should be in the Hall of Fame. And for them, any reunion of the 1975 Red Sox has always been accompanied by a sobering reminder that they never played on a World Series winner.
Still, the Super Sox of '75 — as they were dubbed by the commemorative record album put out later that year by Fleetwood Records — was one hell of a team. That's the message NESN sought to deliver with its telecast of Tuesday night's Red Sox-Reds game, and its effort was spectacularly successful.
Yes, NESN deserves all the criticism it gets for cutting to commercials at the exact moment an inning-ending out was recorded. And yes, the 2025 Red Sox have struggled to a degree that too often resembles the ninth-place 1965 Red Sox, not the pennant-winning 1975 Red Sox. But NESN did so much more than show the usual grainy highlights and roll out a conga line of '75 veterans. It also created a sort of throwback 1975 telecast, right down to the ancient graphics and decking out the on-air talent in period garb.
Even the baseball gods came through. Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, considered by some to be the greatest game ever played, waited on hold for three days because of torrential rains that were soaking the Boston area. It wasn't until Tuesday, Oct. 21, 1975, that Game 6 finally got underway. So what happened on this hot, muggy Tuesday night in 2025? It started to rain at Fenway Park, and it kept raining. After a rain delay in the top of the fourth inning that lasted more than an hour, the game was suspended. It'll be resumed Wednesday afternoon at 2:30, with the Red Sox leading 2-1. (Wednesday's regularly scheduled game will begin at 7:10 p.m.)
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NESN did plenty of planning for this game. Let's start with pregame host Tom Caron and play-by-play man Dave O'Brien, who were dressed in thick yellow sports jackets, the kind that Dick Stockton wore when he was the television voice of the 1975 Red Sox. (It was a look made famous by the late Howard Cosell during the golden days of 'Monday Night Football.') Lou Merloni was the color analyst on duty Tuesday night, thereby stepping into the role played by former Sox fan favorite Ken 'Hawk' Harrelson in the mid-1970s. Merloni wore a powder blue sports jacket reminiscent of a 1970s game show host.
Sideline reporter Jahmai Webster wore sunglasses and some kind of multi-patterned, brick-colored shirt. Rice, who does the pre- and postgame shows on NESN and was content with showing up in one of his expensive, tailor-made suits (in a way, it's always 1975 in Rice Land), compared Webster with Linc, a character played by Clarence Williams III in the 1970s cop show 'The Mod Squad.'
The plan was for the third and fourth innings to be entirely retro. Alas, we only got to the third inning, and then it rained like it was October 1975 all over again. But we still saw plenty of period graphics, and we also saw an old-timey split screen with a thick yellow line running through the middle, something that was cutting edge in the '70s.
When the rain started and the play on the field stopped, the connection to 1975 was heightened, not dampened. For one thing, it conjured memories of that three-day delay. (During one of those off days, the Reds took a bus to Tufts University's Cousens Gym, located in Medford, Mass., about 5 miles from Fenway Park, to take batting practice. The story goes that the bus got lost and Reds manager Sparky Anderson, in full uniform, stepped off in the middle of Medford Square to ask for directions.)
With Tuesday's game on hold and NESN filling airtime on the fly, there were plenty of booth shots of O'Brien and Merloni, who, owing to the crushing humidity, had abandoned the bulky jackets. What was left were two guys in white, short-sleeved shirts and ties; take that look and add in the headsets, and they looked like the technicians from Mission Control in 'Apollo 13.'
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Some good stories were told. Merloni pointed out that during his playing career, he had four members of the 1975 Red Sox as hitting coaches: Rico Petrocelli when he was in Single A, Yastrzemski as a spring training instructor, and Evans and Rice when he was in the big leagues. 'Imagine having Rico as my first coach,' Merloni said. 'My mom was so happy.'
Rick Wise, who won 19 games for the '75 Red Sox, paid a visit to the booth and talked about the three-day rain delay during the World Series. 'All my friends from Pennsylvania had to go back to work on Monday,' Wise said. 'They couldn't watch the game.'
There were some fun clips of current Red Sox players watching video from the 1975 season. Right-hander Lucas Giolito, after seeing video of the late Pete Rose in his stylish, perfectly groomed Prince Valiant haircut, said: 'Look at that hair, dude. My God, it's like a helmet.'
For those who followed the Red Sox in the 1970s, this was all so wonderfully nostalgic. But what made it work is that it didn't get in the way of the game being played by the 2025 editions of the Red Sox and Reds. Present-day baseball was right there on the screen — O'Brien calling the action, Merloni breaking it down — and if that's all you were looking for, you could ignore the rest.
But it's the rest that made it special. The Reds won the 1975 World Series. NESN won the reunion. And now that its people have conquered the past, it can get to work on finding a way to let future games breathe a little after the last out of each inning.
(Top photo of Abraham Toro courtesy of NESN)