Quote of the Day (Tom Verducci, on the Yanks’ Epic ’78 Comeback Against the Red Sox)

“[Sports columnists Dick] Young and [Phil] Pepe, George [Steinbrenner] and Billy [Martin], the boozy nights, the shared buses and planes, the clubhouse friendship, the sway newspapers held with a team ... all are dead and gone now. But the Yankees’ season of 1978 endures. Four decades later the clatter of the clubhouse, the clinking of ice in a tumbler, the piercing shrill of 72-point back-page headlines and the funereal silence of Fenway in the gold and gray of an October late afternoon still echo because the Bronx Bombers came from 14 back to win it all. Memory preserves what otherwise is gone. And when we go there, how sweet the silent backward tracings.” —Tom Verducci, “14 Back,” Sports Illustrated, Sept. 24–Oct. 1, 2018

I can still remember that Monday 40 years ago today, the way I hung--first listening on the radio, then on WPIX-TV--on the news coming out of Fenway Park, hoping that my New York Yankees could somehow grab one more miracle out of that pale afternoon light, and how it arrived courtesy of a shortstop putting one over the left field Green Monster.

In any other year, the postseason games that followed—beating back a three-homer game by George Brett to hold off the Kansas City Royals, then coming back from a 0-games-to-2 deficit to beat the Los Angeles Dodgers for their second straight World Series—would have been ones for the ages. But victory over the hated Boston Red Sox in that pennant race--beyond the regular-season 162 games--was so astonishing that those later contests seemed anti-climactic. 

All the images from the shootout at Fenway are preserved, as if in amber, in my memory, and after reading so much about it over the years I doubted there was anything more to this tale that I didn’t already know. 

But the passage of four decades has liberated the tongues not just of the players at the center of the drama, but also of the stadium personnel who gasped at the whole thing and the beat writers whose printed stories—and whose disappearing stories (courtesy of a newspaper strike)—played such a role in the wildly improbable fracas that transfixed an entire city that year. 

So read Verducci’s tale, folks, and step back into the time machine with George, Billy, Reggie, Thurman—and, in his shining hour, Bucky (pictured here, of course!).