We can thank a stray rat for that iconic Carlton Fisk home run footage
Fifty years ago this morning, shortly after New England midnight, Carlton Fisk hit one of the most dramatic home runs in baseball history – a high, arcing fly ball that kissed the left field foul pole in Boston’s fabled Fenway Park to gift The Olde Towne Team a monumental 7-6 win in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series.
Fisk, the Red Sox’ matinee idol catcher, led off the home half of the 12th inning with his fateful blow, beating the Cincinnati Reds and forcing a winner-take-all showdown against the Big Red Machine.
“There it goes,” exclaimed Dick Stockton, narrating the game on NBC. “A long drive! If it stays fair…home run!”
Fenway organist John Kiley played Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus when the baseball glanced off the yellow stanchion at 12:34 am. (1)
“And all of a sudden, the ball was suspended out there in the black of the morning like the Mystic River Bridge,” wrote legendary scribe Peter Gammons, conjuring perhaps the greatest lead to any baseball article. (2)
Hyperbole merged with reality in the Fens.
The most indelible elegy of all, however, was cinematic. The iconic footage of Fisk waving the ball fair, pleading with the baseball gods as he leapt down the first base line, is seared into the Boston sports conscience. Still, that such an evocative clip was born of sheer serendipity is relatively unknown. In fact, if not for a stray rat scurrying through the ancient ballpark bowels, it would not have been captured at all.
For Game 6, NBC placed veteran cameraman Lou Gerard inside Fenway’s storied left field wall, hoping to gather unique insights from a Green Monster peephole. “Lou, you have to follow the ball if he hits it,” renowned director Harry Coyle instructed via internal radio as Fisk strode to the plate. “Harry, I can’t,” Gerard replied. “I’ve got a rat on my leg that’s as big as a cat. It’s staring me in the face. And I’m blocked by a piece of metal on my right.” (3) (4)
Frozen and flustered, Gerard made the best of a bad situation and suggested keeping his camera trained on Fisk rather than jolting it skyward to track the ball’s mesmeric parabola. Coyle acquiesced, some say reluctantly, before Fisk’s fly shattered the misty night as adrenaline took over. With one eye on the rat, Gerard moved his camera slightly, trailing the Fisk down the baseline as he aped an air traffic controller. The fraught human yearning was palpable. (5)
Ironically, NBC did not play Gerard’s footage immediately. It was only when producer Roy Hammerman watched it back in the production truck that he discovered the epochal gold. Hammerman soon ran myriad replays of Fisk desperately waving the ball fair, and the rest is Fenway folklore. (3)
Broadcasting folklore, too, it is important to add, as many historians credit the Fisk vignette with birthing the reaction shot in live sports coverage – the celebrating athlete becoming just as compelling as their in-game exploits. Coyle kept a literal 14-page handbook on how to optimally broadcast a baseball game, and he tweaked the lionised tome following the Fisk homer to ensure camera operators lingered on a batter for five seconds after he made contact. (6) (7)
Similarly, the Fisk homer is often seen as heralding the dawn of modern baseball, made for televisual drama, or at least as a last hurrah for the staid old game, regularly lampooned for its stodgy stubbornness. The Green Monster was still practically blank, devoid of corporate slogans and ads, when Fisk’s ball caromed off its foul pole. That changed gradually in the ensuing decades, propelled by baseball’s player-centric commercialisation, itself traceable to Gerard’s inadvertent exposure of the game’s personable emotion. (8)
The Red Sox infamously lost Game 7 of the 1975 World Series, of course, blowing a late 3-0 lead to etch a bittersweet asterisk next to Fisk’s melodramatic opus. Cincinnati won the first of consecutive world championships while Boston slumped into a 57th straight winter of discontent, stirring further talk of a curse. The Red Sox did not win the World Series between 1918 and 2004, as everyone knows, but Fisk’s signature blast became totemic of the team’s alluring cultural legacy.
The stray rat genesis is perhaps apocryphal, and very likely exaggerated, but it is a fun footnote to one of the most replayed moments in sports history, regardless. Lou Gerard passed away in 2013, by which point Fisk was enshrined in the Hall of Fame. People never stopped asking Gerard about his most famous work, and he was quick to mention the rat whenever prompted. (9)
Coyle probably summed it up best, however. “Without the rat,” he once explained, “we wouldn’t have gotten the shot. I’ve always wanted to find that rat and thank him.” (10)
We all should, Harry.
Baseball heritage would be poorer without it.
Sources
1. Silverman, Al. It's Not Over 'Til It's Over: The Stories Behind the Most Magnificent, Heart-Stopping Sports Miracles of Our Time. 2019.
2. Gammons, Peter. Boston Globe. [Online] October 22, 1975.
3. The Sporting News. [Online] April 19, 2012. https://www.masslive.com/redsox/2012/04/carlton_fisks_iconic_1975_home.html.
4. Snyder, John. The World Series' Most Wanted. 2004.
5. Vincent, David. Home Run: The Definitive History of Baseball's Ultimate Weapon. 2007.
6. Walker, James and Bellamy, Robert. Center Field Shot: A History of Baseball on Television. 2008.
7. Amdur, Neil. The New York Times. [Online] October 4, 1983. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1983/10/04/issue.html.
8. Gammons, Peter. Beyond the Sixth Game. 1986.
9. Mushnick, Phil. New York Post. [Online] February 11, 2013. https://nypost.com/2013/02/11/late-cameraman-gerard-captured-fisks-iconic-gesture/.
10. Los Angeles Times. [Online] May 10, 1987. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-05-10-sp-6492-story.html.