Seeing Reds: The Pirates’ 1970s Rivals

Early in the 1974 season, with the Pirates struggling after finishing April at 6-12, Dock Ellis took the mound against the Cincinnati Reds.  In spring training, Ellis vowed that he would hit the first five Reds batters because the Pirates had lost their aggressiveness and self-respect ever since their painful loss to the Reds in the 1972 National League Championship Series.  He thought the Pirates had become “physically afraid” of the Reds, so he told catcher Manny Sanguillen not to bother giving signals.  He was going to ”mow the line up down” and send a message that the Pirates were back after a disastrous 1973 season.

While Ellis was warming up, he threw one of his pitches at Pete Rose, who was waiting in the on-deck circle.  When Rose stepped into the batter’s box, Ellis’ first pitch sailed just over Rose’s head.  The next pitch from Ellis hit Rose in the side.  As Rose ran down to first base, he yelled at Joe Morgan, the next Reds batter, not to worry because Ellis wasn’t going to hit “a brother.”  Ellis’ first pitch to Morgan hit him in the kidney. 

When Dan Driessen, another “brother” stepped to the plate, Ellis hit him in the back with the first pitch.  Recognizing that Ellis was color-blind, Tony Perez managed to avoid four pitches that had him ducking and jumping out of the way and drew a walk.  When the first two pitches to Johnny Bench nearly hit him in the head, Pirates manager Danny Murtaugh finally came out the dugout, walked to the mound, and in his best deadpan, asked Ellis if he was having trouble with his control.

Ellis’s head-hunting performance was the most bizarre moment in a rivalry between the Pirates and the Reds that began in 1970 and lasted throughout the decade.   From 1970 to 1979, the two teams met four times in the National League Championship Series.  The Reds won the first three encounters, including the 1972 playoff that ended in what many regard as the worst loss in Pirates history until Sid Bream’s slide in 1992.   It wasn’t until the 1979 NLCS that the Pirates finally gained a measure of revenge for their fans after those earlier series defeats.

It had been nearly a decade since the Pirates won the 1960 World Series, but many believed the 1970 Pirates were capable of bringing a World Championship back to Pittsburgh.  Along with veterans Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell, the Pirates had several rising stars in Richie Hebner, Al Oliver, Bob Robertson, and Manny Sanguillen.  They were also moving at mid-season from an aging Forbes Field to Three Rivers Stadium, a move that, with Three Rivers shorter dimensions, would help their hitters, especially Willie Stargell.   Their strong offense was supported by a young, talented pitching staff, led by Dock Ellis, Steve Blass, and Bob Moose, and strengthened during the off-season in a trade that brought closer Dave Giusti to the team.

After winning 19 of their last 29 games, the Pirates finished with a 89-73 record, five games better in the East Division than the second-place Cubs.  Their opponents, in the best-of-five 1970 NLCS, was a powerful Cincinnati Reds team that had run away with the West division and finished with a 102-62 record.  Pittsburgh had its young offensive guns, but the Reds also had a powerful offense led by 22-year-old Johnny Bench’s 45 home runs and 148 RBIs.

For all the talk about offense, the 1970 NLCS was dominated by pitching and featured no single memorable moment.  In the first game of the Reds’ three-game sweep, Dock Ellis shut out the Reds for nine innings, but Gary Nolan matched Ellis’s performance.  When Pete Rose drove in the first run of the game in the top of the tenth, the Reds went on to a 3-0 victory.

The Pirates offense continued to falter as the Reds went on to 3-1 and 3-2 victories and a sweep of the series.  In three games with the Reds, the Pirates offense scored only three runs and had no home runs.  The Pirates bullpen, effective all season, never had a chance to save a game.  In the three games, the Pirates had the lead in only one inning.

The disappointment of the NCLS loss to the Reds, however, lasted for only one season.  In 1971, the Pirates ran away with the East Division, finished with a 92-70 record, and defeated Willie Mays and the San Francisco Giants in the NLCS.  The best, however, for Pirate fans came when Roberto Clemente turned the 1971 World Series victory over the Baltimore Orioles into his personal showcase. 

In 1972, after winning their division for the third year in a row, the Pirates were in a position to repeat as World Series champions, something never done before in Pirates history.  Standing in the way, however was an even stronger Cincinnati Reds team than the one that swept the Pirates in the 1970 NLCS.  They had four future Hall-of-Famers in their starting lineup and a strong pitching staff, including a 21-year-old Don Gullett, who was scheduled to open the series in Pittsburgh against Steve Blass, winner of the seventh game of the 1971 World Series.

In the NLCS, Blass picked up where he left off in the World Series. He gave up only one run, on a Joe Morgan homer, in a 5-1 Pirates victory, sparked by Al Oliver’s triple and home run.  The Reds, however, tied the series when they scored four runs in the first inning off Bob Moose and held on for a 5-3 victory.

In Game Three, played in Cincinnati, the Pirates fell behind 2-0, but, with a home run from Manny Sanguillen, the Pirates fought back, tied the game, and scored a late inning run for a 3-2 victory and a 2-1 lead in games.  Once again, the Reds tied the series by scoring early off Dock Ellis on their way to a 7-1 victory.  The only Pirate run came on a homer by Roberto Clemente, the last in his fabled career.

The deciding game of the 1972 NLCS, played in Cincinnati. was a rematch of Steve Blass and Don Gullett and became one of the most dramatic and heartbreaking games in Pirates history. The game started off well for the Pirates when consecutive singles by Sanguillen, Hebner, and Cash in the top of the second gave them a 2-0 lead.  The Reds bounced back to score a run-on a Rose double, but in the top of the fourth, Sanguillen, Hebner, and Cash singled again to give the Pirates a 3-1 lead. A Cesar Geronimo home run in the bottom of the fifth cut the Pirates lead to 3-2, but that was the end of the scoring going into the bottom of the ninth.

To finish the game and send the Pirates back to the World Series, Bill Virdon, who had replaced an ailing Danny Murtaugh in 1972, brought in Dave Giusti, his most reliable relief pitcher during the season, but the strategy backfired when Johnny Bench hit a towering home run to right field to tie the score.  When a shaken Giusti gave up back-to- back singles, Virdon brought in Bob Moose, who got two batters out, but, with the winning run at third, unleashed a wild pitch that gave the Reds a stunning 4-3 victory.  It was the most devastating Pirates loss since 1938 when the Cubs Gabby Harnett hit his infamous “homer in the gloamin’” that knocked the Pirates out of a trip to the World Series.

A few months later, on New Year’s Eve, Steve Blass and his wife Karen hosted a party and invited the Giustis to spend the night.  About 3 a.m. the phone rang.  On the line was Pirates Publicity Director Bill Guilfoile with horrifying news.  He told Blass, “There was an unconfirmed report that there was a plane that went down in Puerto Rico and Clemente was on it.”

The tragic death of Roberto Clemente was the prelude to a disastrous 1973 season that featured a misguided decision to play Manny Sanguillen in right field and the firing of Bill Virdon in the futile hope that Danny Murtaugh could salvage the season.  

When the Pirates struggled early in 1974 season, the team, and especially Dock Ellis, focused on the Cincinnati Reds as the source of their problems.  Ellis had hoped his earlier beanball antics against the Reds would snap the Pirates out of their doldrums, but when the two teams met in Pittsburgh for a five-game series in mid-July, the Pirates lost the first four games, and, at 37-49, were on the verge of collapse. 

In the second game of a doubleheader played on July 14, Pirates pitcher Bruce Kison kept throwing at Reds batters.  When he came to bat in the 4th inning, Reds pitcher Jack Billingham retaliated by hitting Kison in the arm with a pitch.  Both teams charged out of the dugout, but nothing happened until Pirates Ed Kirkpatrick stepped on Sparky Anderson’s foot. That, according to a delighted Dock Ellis, was when “all hell broke loose.”

For the next twenty minutes, scrums broke out all over the field, with Manny Sanguillen, an amateur boxer in his youth, leading the way.  Willie Stargell tried to be a peacemaker, but, if a Red player had a headlock on one of his teammates, he’d bend back one of his fingers.  The most outrageous act occurred when Reds pitcher Pedro Bourbon bit Pirates pitcher Daryl Patterson so severely that he had to get a tetanus shot.  For the rest of his career, Bourbon was known as “Count Dracula.”

The Bastille Day brawl brought the Pirates back to life.  They began a surge that led to an East Division title when they defeated the Cubs in the last game of the season.  The Pirates expected and even hoped they would play the Reds in the NLCS, but, even though the Reds won 98 games, the Dodgers won the West division with 102 wins.  The Dodgers easily won the first two games of the NLCS in Pittsburgh, and, after a Pirates win, clinched the National League pennant with a three-games-to-one victory.

The Pirates would get their wish in 1975 when they repeated as East Division champions, and face the Cincinnati Reds, the team that Pirate fans now loved to hate.  The problem for the Pirates was that they would be playing against a Reds team that dominated the West Division with 108 wins and, by season’s end were being called “the Big Red Machine.”

Any hope for an upset was dashed when the Reds easily won the first two games, played in Pittsburgh 8-3 and 6-1.  When the Reds won the third game, 3-2 in extra innings, despite the brilliant pitching of John Candeleria, who struck out 14 Reds, the Pirates and their fans had to deal with the bitterness of a third loss to the Reds in the NLCS and an overall 2-9 record in games.

While the Pirates failed to make the playoffs the next three years, they also had to cope with off-the field losses that couldn’t help but be painful reminders of their playoff defeats, especially in 1972.  On October 9, 1976, Bob Moose died in a car crash on his way to a party celebrating his 29th birthday.  Just a few weeks later, On November 30, Danny Murtaugh who had been in poor health for years, suffered a serious stroke and died on December 2, just two months after his 59th birthday.

By the 1979 season, the Pirates had made several important trades, including acquiring manager Chuck Tanner in a 1977 deal with the Oakland As. Once the season started they added Tim Foli and Bill Madlock and, sparked by Willie Stargell and his Stargell stars went on to win the East Division in the last game of the season.   Their opponent for the fourth time in five NLCS was the Cincinnati Reds. 

With the loss of Pete Rose, Tony Perez, and Don Gullet, the Reds were no longer the Big Red Machine, but, with Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, and the recently acquired Tom Seaver, they were still formidable.  Like the first time the teams met the 1970 NLCS, Game One went into extra innings, but this time the Pirates won in the eleventh inning 5-2 on a Stargell three-run homer.  Game Two also went into extra innings, but this time it was Dave Parker who provided the heroics with an RBI single in the tenth that gave the Pirates a 3-2 victory and a 2-0 lead in the series.

In Game Three, played in Pittsburgh, Tanner sent out Bert Byleven, who had been acquired in an off-season trade.  He held the Reds to a Bench home run in a clinching series winning 7-1 victory, sparked by another Stargell home run.  Stargell had proclaimed Sisters Sledge’s “We Are Family” to be the team’s anthem and when the song was played in the bottom of the seventh, Pirate wives moved up on a narrow shelf behind the home plate screen and started dancing.  Roger Angell, writing for The New Yorker, thought all that “waving and laughing and hugging and shaking their banners to the music….was terrific.”

The Pirates went on to win the 1979 World Series, the team’s last going into the 2024 season.  With Barry Bonds leading the way, they did make the playoffs in 1990, and, once again, played and lost to the Cincinnati Reds.  The loss, however, failed to revive the rivalry, which was overshadowed in 1991 and 1992 with bitter playoff losses to the Atlanta Braves.  There was a glimmer hope for the old rivalry when the Pirates met and defeated the Reds in a wild card playoff game in 2013.  But these days, even though the teams are in the same division, there’s little sign of a rivalry unless it’s for last place.  (Richard “Pete” Peterson is the author of “Growing Up With Clemente” and co-author, with his son, Stephen, of “The Slide: Leyland, Bonds and the Star-Crossed Pittsburgh Pirates.”)