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New York Times
02-07-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
The Reds beat the Red Sox in epic '75 Series, but NESN won the reunion with its thowback telecast
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. Advertisement 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.) Advertisement 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.' Advertisement 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)
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Montana Supreme Court strikes down trio of abortion bills as unconstitutional
In this photo illustration, packages of Mifepristone tablets are displayed at a family planning clinic on April 13, 2023 in Rockville, Maryland. A Massachusetts appeals court temporarily blocked a Texas-based federal judge's ruling that suspended the FDA's approval of the abortion drug Mifepristone, which is part of a two-drug regimen to induce an abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy in combination with the drug Misoprostol. (Photo illustration by) A trio of abortion-related bills, passed in 2021, were declared unconstitutional by a nearly unanimous Montana Supreme Court on Monday. Nearly, because Justice Jim Rice wrote both a concurring and dissenting opinion affirming again Montana's constitutionally protected right-to-privacy, which includes medical procedures and abortion. The laws were halted before they could even be practically enacted, so the hurdles to the procedure, including waiting periods, mandatory ultrasound, a pile of documentation and banning abortion after 20 weeks, even before the point of fetal viability, never rippled throughout the state. Justice Beth Baker wrote the opinion on behalf of the court, which not only reaffirmed the state Constitution's right-to-privacy as unique and separate from federal cases on abortion, but also took the state to task for failing to support its claim that the State of Montana had a compelling interest in abortion, while not proving that any of the legislative hurdles were scientifically supported. The lawsuit was brought by Planned Parenthood of Montana, and had a handful of other entities that wrote friends-of-the-court briefs, including a group of delegates to the 1972 Montana Constitutional Convention. The three laws that were challenged were House Bill 136, House Bill 140 and House Bill 171: HB 136 would have banned abortion at 20 weeks, even though expert opinion agreed that fetal viability is not possible until at least 22 weeks. HB 171 would have put paperwork and more requirements for healthcare providers who provide abortion via medication or telehealth, subjecting them to both civil and criminal penalties. HB 180 would have required healthcare professionals to provide both ultrasound and fetal heartbeat tones to those considering abortion, and requiring a patient to sign a form created by the state, demonstrating that the patient had been offered the choice, and yet declined. Because fetal viability — or the concept a child can survive outside the womb — is dictated by a host of factors, including medical science and approximate age of the fetus, the court rejected the state's attempts to prescribe a fixed number of weeks for viability. 'A fixed gestational age that does not allow a provider's case-specific determination fails to ensure that the government does not interfere with an individual's private medical decision,' the ruling said. 'Until a fetus is viable and able to survive outside the womb, the right of personal autonomy belongs to the person on whose body the fetus depends. 'We find no legal authority for the idea that the state's interest in preserving fetal life or the fetus' right to life takes precedence over all constitutional protections and dignities of the mother.' Attorneys for the state had argued that physical safety risks of abortion increase as the pregnancy progresses, and that abortions lead to worse mental health outcomes, an argument that the Supreme Court dismissed and debunked. 'The record shows that abortion is safe,' the decision said. 'As the district court noted, there were zero deaths cause by abortion in Montana between 2010 and 2020 and only 25 of 8,402 (0.3%) reported abortions in Montana from 2016 to 2021 resulted in complications. This court cannot find a bona fide health risk simply based on a detailed step-by-step description of what the state defines as 'barbaric' and 'gruesome' procedure when the overwhelming evidence shows that procedural abortions are safe.' The ruling also said if the state wanted to address health outcomes or mental health issues, banning abortion was not the least restrictive way to do it. The court also pointed out waiting-periods and requiring multiple in-person visits, as outlined by HB 171, actually increased the odds of harm or complications, instead of avoiding them. 'The record demonstrates that compliance with the 24-hour wait period, the multiple in-person visits, and the telehealth ban serve only to delay access to abortion care — thus increasing the odds that the patient will not be able to obtain an abortion or increasing the odds of the very complications this state asserts it wishes to protect against,' the opinion said. The ruling also said in addition to violating the state's constitutional provisions for privacy, it also impacted physician's free-speech rights by requiring them to provide forms and documents, for example, information about a disputed abortion reversal procedure, that have not been medically verified or supported. They said HB 171 compelled healthcare professionals to give advice contrary to their training and conscience. Physicians and experts also raised concerns about the state's assertion abortion led to other health care concerns, for example, an increase in breast cancer, which has never been scientifically established. 'Forcing medical providers to give medical advice that they disagree with — like the safety and efficacy of abortion reversal — is a form of compelled-speech triggering protections,' the ruling said. '(Planned Parenthood) asserts that patients may mistakenly understand the consent form to indicate DPHHS's and their provider's approval of abortion reversal.' The ruling calls such compelled speech egregious because it 'favors one viewpoint over another — namely, the viewpoint that abortion reversal is safe and possible over the judgements and viewpoints of providers that it is unsafe, ineffective and undermines informed consent.' The court noted the state does not mandate documentation or consent that requires medical providers to discuss the risk of carrying a pregnancy to term. Finally, the court also called into question the real purpose of HB 140, which mandates ultrasounds and fetal heart tones before an abortion, something that providers said either happens during the course of pregnancy, but may not be medically necessary. 'The court stated it was 'left with the strong impression that the law aims to advance the ulterior motive of discouraging abortion,' which is unacceptable under the law,' the ruling said. Montana's highest court found that in the case of HB 140, it was exactly substituting the judgment of the state, and the lawmakers who supported it, with the views of the doctor. 'The court's decision further protects what Montanans need and deserve: Legal access to compassionate, timely abortion care, free from government interference. At the same moment as this win for Montanans, anti-abortion politicians continue to threaten to decimate access to care by 'defunding' Planned Parenthood via the reconciliation bill before Congress, in an effort to shut down health centers who provide abortion and other reproductive care. Montanans agree that abortion should remain legal and accessible, and Planned Parenthood of Montana will always do whatever we can to ensure that patients in Montana have access to abortion care,' said Martha Fuller, president and CEO of Montana Planned Parenthood, after the ruling in a statement. The case was active for several years of litigation, and had district court Judge Amy Eddy sitting in place of former Chief Justice Mike McGrath, who retired at the end of 2024, as well as Judge Shane Vannatta, who was sitting in for Dirk Sandefur, who also retired. McGrath has since been replaced by Chief Justice Cory Swanson, and Sandefur was succeeded by Justice Katherine Bidegaray.
CBS News
04-04-2025
- Sport
- CBS News
Red Sox celebrate 1975 team, honor Luis Tiant before home opener at Fenway Park
Before the Red Sox played their first game at Fenway Park in the 2025 season, the organization had to honor -- and remember --some legends of Boston baseball. The Red Sox celebrated the 50th anniversary of the 1975 team, which made a shocking run to the World Series, with a pregame ceremony that had fans erupting in the stands. There were 20 members of the 1975 squad honored on the field, which included Jim Rice, Fred Lynn, Dwight Evans, Carlton Fisk, and of course, Carl Yastrzemski. The 85-year-old Yaz received a huge ovation from Boston fans, and threw out the ceremonial first pitch to current Red Sox manager Alex Cora before the game. Here's the full list of players from the 1975 team that were on hand for Friday's ceremony: Jim Rice, Fred Lynn, Dwight Evans, Cecil Cooper, Rick Burleson, Rico Petrocelli, Rick Miller, Jim Wiloughby, Dick Pole, Bill "Spaceman" Lee, Buddy Hunter, Kim Andrew, Butch Hobson, Steve Dillard, Tim Blackwell, Rick Miller, Bob Montgomery, Bernie Carbo, Carlton Fisk, and Carl Yastrzemski. They took the field with Aerosmith's Sweet Emotion playing over the park's speakers, and received a massive ovation from Fenway Park's sellout crowd. The 1975 Red Sox have a special place in the franchise's history after making an incredible run to the World Series. The team was in last place in April, but with an outfield of Yaz and rookies Jim Rice and Fred Lynn (who won Rookie of the Year and MVP honors) and a rotation made up of Luis Tiant, Bill Lee, and Rick Wise, Boston rocketed up the standings throughout the summer. The team finished the regular season with a 95-65 record to make it to the American League Championship Series, where they faced the Oakland Athletics. The Red Sox weren't given much of a chance against the back-to-back-to-back World Series champs, but ended up sweeping the A's in three games. It was Boston's first pennant since 1967. The Red Sox met the 108-win Cincinnati Reds in the Fall Classic, and were once again written off against the Big Red Machine. But Tiant tossed a complete game shutout in Game 1, which set up one of the greatest World Series showdowns of all time. Cincinnati won the next two games, but Tiant went the distance again in a 5-4 Boston win in Game 4. The Reds won Game 5 and took a 3-2 series lead into Game 6 in Boston, but that set up one of the biggest swings in Red Sox history. In Game 6, with the game tied 6-6 in the bottom of the 12th, Fisk drove one deep down the left field line. The catcher willed the ball fair as he hopped down the line, and it hit off the foul pole for a walk-off homer to tie the series at three games apiece. In a pregame interview with WBZ-TV's Dan Roche, Evans agreed the 1975 was the greatest World Series ever played. "I think it was. I was 23 and standing at third base. They made a pitching change and a guy named Pete Rose walked over to me. He said, 'Dewey,' and I asked him how he knew my name. He's looking around and goes, 'This might be the greatest gave I've ever played in.' Being 23 I was caught up with being on the field, and I started to look around and realized how great the game was," recalled Evans. "That was the sixth game. He also said it to Fisk at home plate." Evans said it was a joy to reconnect with his former teammates over the last several days, and he was elated to be back at Fenway Park for another celebration. "I love this ballpark. Someone asked me what I love about this ballpark, and I said the fans. They make it special," said Evans. "Once you learn they're emotional, you fall in love with them. It's a great ballpark with so many nooks and crannies to it. The grass is beautiful. How great is this?" Evans has some high hopes for the 2025 Red Sox as well, and sees a lot of the 1975 team in the current squad. "This [Red Sox] team has that element to them. Being with them all spring training, they have got some talent. If that talent comes alive, anything can happen," he said. "I'm not going to say they're going to win, because I just don't say that. But we didn't know if we were going to win in '75. Then we came into the playoffs against the Oakland A's, who had won three World Series in a row, and we swept them. We didn't belong in the same ballpark with Cincinnati and we gave it a heck of a try to win that thing." The pregame ceremony also included a video tribute to former Red Sox players who has passed away over the last year, including the legendary Tiant. An "El Tiante" sign was also put up in the outfield. Tiant passed away October 8, 2024 at the age of 83. He spent eight of his 19 MLB seasons in Boston and logged 122 of his 229 career wins with the Red Sox. "Luis was very special. He would always greet me with a kiss on the cheek and say I love you, and he meant it," Evans said pregame. "I take from him a lot of things that I instill in my own life and how I treat people. I learned some things from Luis and he is sorely missed. He was a true, true treasure of the game of baseball." "Luis is a guy we miss," Cora said before Friday's game. "Spring training was kind of empty in that aspect, right? He was always talking to the guys, teaching the guys. How he used to be and what it means to be a Red Sox. We miss him."
CBS News
29-01-2025
- Sport
- CBS News
Red Sox legend Jim Rice part of ownership group reviving Brockton Rox
BROCKTON -- The Brockton Rox are back, and Red Sox legend Jim Rice is part of the team's return to professional baseball in 2025. Rice is part of the new ownership group that is reviving the Rox, which were known as the Brockton Knockouts in 2024. The 2025 season is being touted as a "revival season" for the Rox, who play at Campanelli Stadium in Brockton. The Rox will play in the Frontier League, which is an MLB Partner League. That partnership has boosted the league's player development and made it an appealing destination for up-and-coming ballplayers. That's where Rice comes in, hoping to his experience and vast knowledge from his Hall of Fame career with the Red Sox to help MLB hopefuls get their chance. But he said Wednesday that it will be up to the players to take advantage of their opportunity in Brockton. "I know I can help a young player trying to get to the big leagues. If you listen, you may get there faster. If you go the other route, it's going to take you a little longer," Rice said Wednesday in Brockton. "I was fortunate enough to be around guys named Carl Yastrzemski, Ted Williams, Johnny Pesky. You learn from those guys, and that's what it's all about." "Having legendary Red Sox player, eight-time American League All-Star, and Baseball Hall of Famer Jim Rice join our community is not only incredibly exciting, but also a perfect fit for our 'City of Champions,'" Brockton Mayor Robert Sullivan said of Rice being part of the ownership group. Mayor Sullivan also declared that Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2025, will officially be known as Jim Rice Day in Brockton. Rice joked that he'd celebrate by going home and doing whatever is on the to-do list his wife has waiting for him. As for Rox baseball, Rice believes the team will once again be a worthy option for fans who can't -- or don't want to -- dish out the big bucks to go see the Red Sox. He hopes the Rox will help bring baseball to the younger generation, who can go to games and envision themselves playing for the Rox or the Red Sox some day. The revival season begins for the Rox on Friday, May 16th against the New York Boulders at Campanelli Stadium. Who are the Brockton Rox? Rox baseball started in 2002 as part of the Northern League, which then became the Can-Am League in 2005. The team was sold after the 2011 season and then transitioned to amateur status, joining the Futures Collegiate Baseball League -- a wood bat league with seven other teams from New England. Now, under the new management that includes Rice, the Rox are heading back to independent pro ball in the Frontier League.
