Instrumental? There’s an understatement. Typical Yaz. Saying Dick Williams was instrumental in the ’67 season is like saying Paul McCartney was an important part of the Beatles.
Yaz forever goes down as the most important figure of the most important season in Boston baseball history. But Dick Williams was right there riding shotgun with No. 8. Without Dick Williams, maybe none of it would have happened.
“He had everybody doing everything,’’ recalled Yaz. “There was no downtime. He had been a utility player [Williams played with five teams from 1951-64] and I think that was one of the things that made him such a great manager.
“He had the extra men go above and beyond what they would normally do. He had them out there for two hours instead of 20 minutes a day. And those guys came through. Jose Tartabull? With his arm, he couldn’t break a pane of glass from 10 feet away. And then he makes the big throw in Chicago to win a game for us. I thought that was the key to Dick’s success, what he did with the extra guys. When Tony Conigliaro went down, we had people ready to step in.’’
Tartabull stepped in. So did Jerry Adair and Dalton Jones and Norm Siebern. A guy named Gary Waslewski started the sixth game of the World Series. The ’67 Red Sox got contributions from everyone.
Dick Williams managed 21 big league seasons and won 1,571 games. He won pennants with three franchises and won two World Series. He won 90 games seven times. He made it to the Hall of Fame in 2008.
But ultimately, all we care about is his role in ’67. It changed everything around here - like when “The Wizard of Oz’’ goes from black and white to color. The 2004 season broke the Curse and gave us a biblical baseball tale for the ages, but ’67 will never be surpassed for those who lived it. It was the greatest pennant race of them all, and the Sox finished first one year after finishing ninth, and two years after losing 100 games.
