A Red Sox hero shares his emotional story of addiction, loss and renewal
By William Weinbaum | ESPN
In the hours before Cincinnati and Boston took the field for Game 7 of the 1975 World Series at Fenway Park, Bernie Carbo says he outdid himself, exceeding his regular routine of incessant drug and alcohol use.
“I was totally wasted when I went to the ballpark,” Carbo says. “I would say I was at my worst.”
The night before, Carbo had become an instant and enduring hero for Red Sox Nation — hitting a game-tying, three-run home run with two outs in the eighth inning to set the Fenway stage for Carlton Fisk’s 12th-inning leadoff shot that hit the foul pole and gave Boston a 7-6 victory over Cincinnati in Game 6. It was the greatest pinch-hit home run in Red Sox World Series history, yet Carbo says he couldn’t savor the signature moment of his 12-year major league career because getting high was what his life had become all about.
“I was taking mescaline. I was taking cocaine, crystal meth, smoking dope and taking pills and drinking,” Carbo says.
In the hours after the clubhouse celebration of Game 6, Carbo says, “I was very depressed.”
The next day, for Game 7, Carbo, then a 28-year-old outfielder, expected to be on the bench again until the late innings. After all, he was a left-handed-hitting part-timer and the Reds were scheduled to start the accomplished lefty pitcher Don Gullett. While shagging fly balls in the outfield before the game, Carbo received a jolt.
“I went to catch a fly ball and it hit my chest and went to the ground,” Carbo recalls. “I thought, ‘Maybe nobody saw this.’ Well, [Red Sox center fielder] Freddie Lynn came over and he said, ‘You know what? I saw the ball hit you in your chest.’ I went, ‘Oh, wow.'”
According to Carbo, the conversation with his fellow outfielder then shifted from Carbo’s dropped fly to Lynn dropping a bomb.
“‘The bad thing about it,’ [Lynn] says, ‘is you’re playing,'” Carbo recalls. “I said, ‘Don’t play games with me — Don Gullett’s pitching. It’s a left-hander, I haven’t played all year against a left-hander.'”
“I’ll be all right, I’ll be all right,” Carbo remembers thinking to himself as he dismissed the news from Lynn. “I get to the seventh inning, I’ll be ready to pinch hit.”
Lynn, who was a rookie at the time, says much of the Series was a blur to him and he doesn’t remember seeing a ball hit Carbo in the chest. He also says he was unaware of the “drug stuff with Bernie,” adding, “obviously, he hid it well from people around him.”
Trying to get ready
A day after shining in the clutch in Game 6, Carbo says he thought he had everything figured out precisely for the night of Game 7.
“I was thinking, ‘Game starts at 7, I’ll pinch hit around 9:30, 10, maybe if the game gets a few runs here and there, I’ll be fine — cup of coffee, I’ll be ready to go.'”
When another teammate, pitcher Reggie Cleveland, came over and told Carbo he was to start and bat leadoff, Carbo says he thought it was all a practical joke. But when a third player mentioned the starting assignment, Carbo decided he had to see for himself, so he went to check out manager Darrell Johnson’s lineup card posted in the dugout.
Early in the Series, Carbo had voiced a desire to start. But for Johnson to now turn to his Game 6 savior for his first start of the Series, with the season and championship on the line, was unfathomable, Carbo says. It was beyond even the wildest of thoughts that usually entered Carbo’s mind, until he reached the dugout.
Once there, in front of the lineup card with his name written in the leadoff spot, seeing was not only believing, it was panic-inducing. “I knew in that seventh game of the World Series, I’m in trouble right now,” Carbo says. “I couldn’t play right now. There’s no way I could go to the plate and hit and play, because I was too stoned.”
Carbo’s condition, he says, called for accelerated efforts to become game-ready.
“I went and took more Dexedrines [stimulants] and ran in the outfield, worked up a sweat and then I went in and took a cold shower and got ready,” says Carbo. “Next thing I know the game’s starting and I’m facing Don Gullett.”
In the field and on the bases
Carbo, who had pinch-hit homers in Game 3 and Game 6, had no opportunities in left field during a 1-2-3 top of the first inning.
The Hernandez Story
He was a celebrated hair salon operator in his native Michigan, five years after he last played in the major leagues and 10 years after his home run in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series. Bernie Carbo had even been featured in People magazine.
But on Sept. 6, 1985, Carbo says, he was in his salon when a news report shattered any secrecy about his use of illegal drugs and altered his family life forever. That day in Pittsburgh, former Cardinals teammate Keith Hernandez (pictured above) testified in a federal trial about drugs in baseball that Carbo had introduced him to cocaine.
“I was cutting my dad’s hair and my mother was in the next chair getting her hair done,” Carbo says. “I had the TV on and my dad just said, ‘Oh no!’ He just took the cape off and walked out of my salon and my mom started crying.”
Carbo says Hernandez’s revelation devastated his parents, cost him a lot of his business and subjected his children to cruelty at school. In an interview with Mark Schwarz of “Outside the Lines,” Carbo recalls pursuing drastic action.
“How did you feel about Keith Hernandez when you heard that?” Schwarz asked.
Carbo: “The truth? I knew some people and I had $2,000 and I asked them to break his arms.”
Schwarz: “You really did want to send someone over to break his arms?”
Carbo: “Yeah! I had $2,000 and when I went to the individual to have it done, he said, ‘We’ll do it in two or three years, if you want it done, but we’re not going to do it today, Bernie. If we went and broke his legs today or broke his arms, you don’t think they would understand that YOU are the one that had it done?'”
Through a spokesman, Hernandez, now a TV analyst for the New York Mets, declined to comment for this report.
Carbo says he never sought any further measures against Hernandez and has never seen him in the quarter-century since the testimony. And he says he eventually concluded, following the 1989 suicide of his mother and the death of his father the same year, that he, not Hernandez, was to blame for his personal suffering.
“If I was to be with Keith Hernandez today