Homer History: When Reggie Jackson cemented himself as Mr. October

In our Homer History series, writers re-tell the stories of memorable home runs from their perspective. In this installment, Yahoo Sports fantasy writer Scott Pianowski recalls Reggie Jackson’s incredible Game 6 of the 1977 World Series.

“Oh, what a blow! What a way to top it off! Forget about who the most valuable player is in the World Series! How this man has responded to pressure! Oh, what a beam on his face — how can you blame him? He’s answered the whole world! . . . What a colossal blow!”

— ABC’s Howell Cosell, describing Reggie Jackson’s third home run in Game 6 of the 1977 World Series

I’ve seen this home run about 1000 times (say 700 on tape, 300 in my head) and it just occurs to me now: Howard Cosell and Reggie Jackson probably peaked at the same time, on this majestic World Series-wrapping homer. Cosell is running amok, overshadowing his boothmates like an oversized dump truck.

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Otherwise, baseball in 1977 pretty much belonged to Reggie Jackson, though it took a whole for him to get there. Ebb and flow, timing and space, arrogance and insecurity, hot print and sound bytes. And then he seals it all with a 475-foot jack, a freshly-minted nickname, and the biggest city in the world eating out of his hand.

Keep those final images in your mind. It’s going to take a while before we get back to it.

Let’s establish a few things up front. I was born in New England, two years after the Impossible Dream, grew up in the 01824. I was sports crazy, baseball crazy and Red Sox crazy from an early age. Any time my parents told us they had a surprise in store, I quickly blurted out something baseball related (and pouted at most other results). Later in my adult life, I named a dog “Fenway.” There can’t be any mistaking where my rooting interests lie.

And yet, Reggie Jackson was my favorite player.

It wasn’t easy to be a fan of an out-of-town player in the 1970s. There were no nightly highlight shows (the 2-3 minutes on the late local news doesn’t count, especially for a kid), no Extra Innings package, no Internet gateway. Baseball cards, the All-Star Game, This Week in Baseball, the Game of the Week — that’s how you became acclimated with your heroes. The newspaper was another lifeline, especially the Sunday edition where every players stats were listed. (And no one was learning and memorizing stats for their yet-to-be-invented roto league; you wanted to know the numbers simply for the sake of knowing them.)

The 1976 MLB season was my first all-in season. I collected and traded baseball cards, studied the Boston Globe sports section daily. My first All-Pro Baseball Stars came the next spring, the 1977 preview edition. Mark Fidrych on the cover. Reggie Jackson was photographed in the middle of the book, clad in Baltimore garb. Jackson as an Oriole never made much sense, then or now. After his one season there, he became a part of the first big batch of free agents.

The Yankees won the AL pennant in 1976 and were eager to spend to further improve after their World Series wipeout, but Jackson wasn’t the primary name on their radar. New York took dead aim at infielder Bobby Grich, imaging him shifting back to shortstop and replacing Fred Stanley. A starting pitcher was also desired, starting with Cincinnati’s Don Gullett. Jackson was merely the sixth of nine players the Yankees drafted in November — up to 12 teams could acquire negotiating rights per the system at the time — and he wasn’t an obvious fit for the returning club. The 1976 Yankees already had five regular left-handed batters in the lineup, including Graig Nettles, the reigning home-run champion.

Signing Gullett turned out to be a snap, but Grich had his heart set on California and eventually settled west, along with Joe Rudi and Don Baylor. With plenty of money left to spend (and perhaps some face to save), owner George Steinbrenner turned his eyes and his checkbook towards Jackson. Rather quickly, they came together on a five-year deal, just under $3 million. Jackson was 30, with 281 home runs and three championship rings (all from Oakland) in his back pocket.

Contradictions make for the most fascinating characters, and the 1977 Yankees were loaded with them. Steinbrenner, the boisterous, meddling, high-spending owner. Martin, forever the underdog, the scrappy, shrewd and insecure manager. Jackson, a rich, proud, arrogant but sensitive man, well compensated but unsure how he fit into the scheme of the club. Thurman Munson, another complicated man — fresh off the 1976 AL MVP, proud but insecure, as Jackson was. Munson didn’t have Reggie’s gift of gab (or the wit of a Nettles, say), but he could rattle off a handy line now and then. Like the time he tagged Jackson with the Mr. October nickname, tongue-in-cheek. Before it was promotion, it was pejorative.

We’ll get there. These Reggie Jackson stories need time to develop.

“The thing you have to understand about Reggie is he wants everyone to love him.” — Catfish Hunter, longtime Jackson teammate with the As and Yankees

The clubhouse Jackson entered in the spring of 1977 was a frosty one. Some of the Yanks were surely jealous of Jackson’s contract. Others were turned off by his personality. For most of the spring, Jackson wondered if he had signed with the wrong team; he openly asked the question in a May issue of Sports Illustrated, innocuously but clearly. Many of his teammates maintained a standoffish approach to Jackson. It wasn’t necessary a team in chaos, but it wasn’t a clubhouse of harmony, either.

[Related: Larry King recalls the shot heard ’round the world]

And then all hell broke loose in late May and into June.

A spring training interview between Jackson and free-lancer Robert Ward turned into a bombastic article, “Reggie Jackson in No-Man’s Land.” The article appeared in the June issue of Sport, released in late May.

Jackson maintained (and still maintains) Ward misquoted him. No one seems to agree with Jackson. When the misquoting angle was presented to Munson, he immediately shot back “For four [freaking] pages?”

Here’s the key passage in the article.

“You know,” Jackson says, “this team… it all flows from me. I’ve got to keep it all going. I’m the straw that stirs the drink. It all comes back to me. Maybe I should say me and Munson… but really he doesn’t enter into it. He’s being so damned insecure about the whole thing. I’ve overheard him talking about me.”

Later in the article, Jackson continued.

“The way the Yankees were humiliated by the Reds? You think that doesn’t bother Billy Martin? He’s no fool. He’s smart. Very smart. And he’s a winner. Munson’s tough, too. He is a winner, but there is just nobody who can do for a club what I can do… There is nobody who can put meat in the seats [fans in the stands] the way I can. That’s just the way it is… Munson thinks he can be the straw that stirs the drink, but he can only stir it bad.”

Jackson homered the night the Sport issue came out, then made a beeline to the corner of the dugout, eschewing team handshakes. Sensitive to perceived slights and how he felt the team was being frozen out, his result was to get defensive. Later, he’d blame the incidence on a minor injury. A cold war of sorts broke out between Munson and Jackson for a few weeks — Jackson tried to reach out to Munson, slap his hand after big plays, and Munson would routinely ignore the gesture. You can’t make all this stuff up.

Three weeks later in Boston, tensions hit a new high. Jackson appeared to loaf after a Jim Rice check-swing to right field in the bottom of the sixth, turning a harmless single into a hustling double. Irate, Billy Martin replaced Jackson in the middle of the inning, concurrent with a pitching change. Martin then physically challenged Jackson in the dugout, be it for show or for real. Martin had danced around his Jackson ambivalence for months, but finally he was sick of hiding it. A few coaches had to come between Martin and Jackson.

Somehow, the Yankees smoothed this all over. Somehow, incredibly, Martin didn’t get fired, nor did Jackson encounter any discipline. Jackson and Martin and management all agreed to coexist, on some level, for the balance of the season.

When Jackson came to New York, he imagined himself as the No. 4 hitter, the cleanup man. That’s where the big power hitter usually slots, he figured. Big swing, big bat, big contract, drive in the big runs. He even had a fresh new Cadillac number, 44.

Surely no coincidence, Martin slotted Jackson just about everywhere but fourth. Jackson hit fifth on Opening Day, third for most of April, sixth occasionally, even second once. In New York’s first 109 games, Jackson batted cleanup just 10 times. Occasionally he’d DH, and occasionally he’d leave for late-inning defense replacement.

[Elsewhere: An Indians minor-league club is giving out a Willie Mays Hayes bobblehead]

Martin insisted that Jackson wasn’t a great fit for the cleanup spot given how much the Yankees ran. The skipper didn’t want a big strikeout source in the No. 4 position. That’s one way to spin things, but Martin was also making it clear he would accept Jackson but on his terms. Martin felt threatened by the relationship between Steinbrenner and Jackson, and this was one way at striking back, marking territory, holding control.

Some of Jackson’s teammates could see the forest for the trees. Lou Piniella and Munson privately politicked for Jackson to hit fourth. Nettles was on board, too. Martin finally relented on Aug. 10 and the Yankees, not coincidentally, went on a tear from there. Jackson posted a .288/.397/.576 slash with 13 homers and 49 RBIs over his final 51 games, with the Yanks winning 38 of them. New York had its second straight AL East title.

The Yankees pulled a great escape in the ALCS, rallying past the Royals in five games, but Jackson had little to do with the win, mired in a 2-for-16 slump. Martin didn’t even start Jackson in the deciding Game 5, stubbornly sitting him against K.C. lefty Paul Splittorff. Jackson did contribute a pinch-single in the eighth, helping to jump-start the New York comeback.

So things weren’t hunky-dory as Jackson and the Yanks moved to the 1977 World Series against the Dodgers. Munson also played along; when tangentially asked about Jackson during an interview, he sarcastically shot back “Why don’t you ask Mr. October?” With Jackson hitting .125 at the time, Munson surely wasn’t complimenting his teammate.

And when Jackson openly criticized some of Martin’s pitching choices in Game 2, it created another tempest in a teapot. Martin had already said Jackson would start the entire series, but now he was considering a change for Game 3, with lefty Tommy John on the mound for LA. Ultimately Martin pulled back — perhaps because a contrite Jackson read an apologetic note, written by team management — and the Yankees were rewarded. Jackson was locked in for the rest of the series.

The run started in Game 3, with Jackson reaching base twice and scoring two runs in a 5-3 victory over John. He added a homer a day later, sparking Ron Guidry’s 4-2 victory at Chavez Ravine. The Dodgers shot back with a 10-4 win the following day, behind Don Sutton, though Munson and Jackson homered back-to-back in the eighth inning. With that, the teams headed back to Yankee Stadium.

Batters are supposed to clobber the ball in batting practice. The idea is to lay a nothing pitch into the zone, let them sock it around. That said, everyone who watched Jackson take batting practice prior to Game 6 had a “wow” moment etched into their memory. Jackson deposited between 20-30 balls in the right field seats, depending on whose account you trust, and received a standing ovation from the crowd.

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“Save some of that for the game,” Willie Randolph, forever the supportive teammate, laughed to Reggie. Don’t worry, Jackson said, there’s plenty left over.

Jackson didn’t get anything to hit in his first plate appearance, walking on four straight Burt Hooton pitches. Chris Chambliss followed with a home run, squaring the score at 2-2. After that, it turned into the Reggie Show.

Hooton tried to sneak an inside fastball by Jackson in the fourth but caught too much of the plate. Reggie turned on it and hit a searing line drive to the right-field seats. The Yankees had a lead they would never relinquish.

Reliever Elias Sosa was on for the fifth and tried that inside corner again. Jackson hopped on the offering, unleashing a frozen rope that snuck into the first row of the right field bleachers. Two swings, two iron shots, two trots around the bases. And now the Yankees had a commanding 7-3 lead.

Jackson probably had the MVP Award sewn up before his final at-bat, though pitcher Mike Torrez (on his way to a second victory) might have had a say in that. But any uncertainty went out the window when Jackson came to plate in the eighth. Charlie Hough was mopping up for LA, a welcome sight for Jackson. He always felt comfortable against knuckleball pitchers.

Let the image play in your mind, or roll the tape again. It’s go-time.

I’m glad the center field seats were empty at this time — Jackson’s titanic third homer needed to fully land so we could appreciate it more. Look at it bouncing around, nowhere remotely close to the field of play. Look at Jackson’s exuberant gait as he rambles around the bases, hopping on air. Listen to Cosell commandeer the microphone ABC colleagues (Keith Jackson, Tom Seaver) — ironic, when you consider how similar Howard and Reggie were in approach and delivery.

Three swings, three home runs for Jackson. If you back it up to the fifth game, it’s four swings, four home runs. Mr. October, indeed. Start making those candy bars.

Jackson firmly accentuated the Mr. October brand the following fall, with four home runs and a .417/.511/.806 slash over 10 games, en route to another World Series ring. He also homered in the regular-season playoff game at Boston, a bomb to center field that stood as the winning run. Shortly after that titanic shot — another blast to dead-center field, by the way — a disconsolate nine-year-old Red Sox fan gave up on the game, went to his backyard to play Wiffle Ball.

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That was me. I knew when I was beat. And if you went up against Reggie Jackson in the autumns of the 1970s, he didn’t lose very often.

COMING SATURDAY: The unlikely Tony Fernandez blast that sent the Cleveland Indians to the World Series in 1997.

PREVIOUSLY IN HOMER HISTORY
– The night a hobbled Kirk Gibson broke my heart (by Mike Oz)
– Cal Ripken Jr. wowed us yet again on Iron Man night (by Lauren Shehadi)
– When Albert Pujols silenced Minute Maid Park (by Jeff Passan)
– Bill Mazeroski’s great walk-off World Series winner (by Kevin Iole)
– The Big Papi grand slam that still haunts Detroit (by Al Toby)
– That time Joe Blanton hit a home run in the World Series (by Sam Cooper)
– When Jim Leyritz halted hopes of a Braves dynasty (by Jay Busbee)
– Bryce Harper and the home run almost no one saw (by Chris Cwik)
– Shane Robinson and the home run on one predicted (by Tim Brown)
– The shot heard ’round the world (by Larry King)

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