October 14, 1975: Armbrister’s controversial bunt leads to Reds’ walk-off win in Game 3

Game Three of the 1975 World Series featured six home runs and plenty of late-inning heroics, but the outcome turned on a bunt by a reserve outfielder with a .185 batting average. With five future Hall of Famers on the field (Johnny Bench, Carlton Fisk, Joe Morgan, Tony Pérez, Carl Yastrzemski) plus the all-time hit king (Pete Rose), Game Three is most remembered because of Cincinnati’s Ed Armbrister, a player with the fewest plate appearances of any position player on the Reds’ roster for the entire season.

The World Series moved to Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium after the first two games in Boston were split: Luis Tiant’s shutout in Game One, the Reds’ ninth-inning rally in Game Two. The Red Sox took the early lead in Game Three when Fisk homered to open the second inning against right-hander Gary Nolan, who had won 15 games in 1975 after missing nearly all of the 1973 and 1974 seasons because of a calcium spur in his right shoulder.1

Boston’s starter was a familiar face for the Reds. Four years earlier, in 1971, Rick Wise had pitched a no-hitter and hit two home runs at Riverfront Stadium as a member of the Philadelphia Phillies. With the St. Louis Cardinals in 1973, Wise bid for another no-hitter in Cincinnati but settled for a one-hitter after Morgan singled with one out in the ninth.

Taking the mound seven days after beating the Oakland A’s to clinch Boston’s American League Championship Series sweep, the 30-year-old Wise kept the Reds hitless until the fourth. He issued a two-out walk to Pérez, who surprised everybody by stealing second base – Pérez had stolen just one base all year. Bench then launched a home run to left to put the Reds in front, 2-1.

Wise allowed home runs to the first two batters of the fifth inning – modest power threats Dave Concepción (five regular-season homers in 1975, then one in the Reds’ National League Championship Series sweep of the Pittsburgh Pirates) and Cesar Gerónimo (seven homers in ’75). After Nolan struck out, Rose knocked Wise out of the game with a triple. Rookie Jim Burton came in and walked Ken Griffey before Morgan scored Rose on a sacrifice fly. Held to just three total runs in two games at Fenway Park, the Reds now had a commanding 5-1 lead.

Reds manager Sparky Anderson removed Nolan with a reported stiff neck after Nolan allowed just one run on three hits and a walk in four innings.2 Nolan turned out to be Cincinnati’s most effective pitcher of the evening. Rookie Pat Darcy took the mound for the Reds in the fifth

Darcy had appeared in 27 games as a swingman in 1975, but he had not pitched in 17 days. He worked around Rick Burleson’s single for a scoreless fifth. In the sixth, however, Darcy walked two batters and then wild-pitched them up a base before Fred Lynn’s sacrifice fly cut the lead to three runs.

After Darcy allowed a leadoff single to Dwight Evans in the seventh, Anderson turned to veteran righty Clay Carroll. The move seemed to work when Morgan turned Burleson’s grounder into a double play. But former Red Bernie Carbo – Carroll’s Cincinnati teammate for four seasons – followed with a pinch-hit, opposite-field home run and the score was 5-3.

Will McEnaney got the last out in the seventh and retired the Red Sox in order in the eighth. He fanned Lynn to open the ninth, but Rico Petrocelli singled to center to bring up the potential tying run. Anderson came out of the dugout yet again, summoning rookie Rawly Eastwick to face Evans. Eastwick, the winning pitcher with two scoreless innings of relief in Game Two, had tied the Cardinals’ Al Hrabosky for the NL saves lead at 22.

Known more at the time for his tremendous outfield arm than for his bat, Evans showed he not only had power, but a flair for the dramatic, less than a month from his 24th birthday. He launched a game-tying home run to left field that stunned the Cincinnati crowd.3

The Red Sox, down for most of the game, not only had momentum but precedent on their side. Boston had never before scored at least five runs and lost a World Series game.4 After Boston’s furious comeback to tie the game, Jim Willoughby set down the Reds in order in the bottom of the ninth. Denny Doyle led off the 10th with a single for the Red Sox, but nothing came of it when Gerónimo hauled in Yastrzemski’s long fly ball and Fisk bounced into an inning-ending double play.

Gerónimo led off the bottom of the 10th with a single off Willoughby, putting the winning run on first with nobody out. And then up stepped Ed Armbrister.

As he came off the bench to bat for Eastwick, the 27-year-old outfielder from the Bahamas had just two successful sacrifices to his credit in a three-year major-league career. He had batted just 72 times during the regular season. Of his 59 games played, 42 were as a pinch-hitter or pinch-runner.

Armbrister squared to bunt and his attempt bounced off home plate. Fisk sprang out of his crouch, threw off his mask, and grabbed the ball with his bare hand. That is when Armbrister stopped and crept slightly backward, just enough to make contact with Fisk. The catcher eschewed tagging the batter inches from him and went for the force play. The play at second would have been close, but the throw was over the glove of shortstop Burleson and continued into center field. Gerónimo kept running and barely beat Lynn’s throw to third base as Armbrister sprinted to second.

The winning run was 90 feet away, and home plate was where several Red Sox were streaming to demand to know why interference had not been called.

Home-plate umpire Larry Barnett, an American League arbiter, let the play stand. Red Sox manager Darrell Johnson fumed at Barnett before appealing to first-base umpire Dick Stello, a National Leaguer, but Stello diplomatically demurred to the ump with the play in front of him. Instant replay was decades from becoming part of the umpiring process, but the men in the booth had full access to the technology. NBC announcers Tony Kubek and Marty Brennaman – who was Cincinnati’s play-by-play man during the season – felt that the call should have been interference, as did all of New England and millions more across the country hanging on every pitch.

“I just stood there for a moment, watching it,” Armbrister told reporters who mobbed the obscure outfielder after the game. “Then [Fisk] came up from behind me and bumped me as he took the ball. I just stood there because he hit me in the back and I couldn’t move.”5

Fisk was so angry at the umpire and the turn of events that he moved away from Barnett, standing by himself for several moments on the Astroturf beyond the home-plate cutout. It was his second throwing error of the game; he had made a poor throw on George Foster’s steal of second base in the second, the same inning in which Fisk had homered.6 The game, almost three hours old, was still alive, though Boston’s hopes hung in the balance.

Johnson brought in Roger Moret, who walked Rose to set up a force play at any base with no one out. Anderson opted to pinch-hit Merv Rettenmund for the lefty-swinging Griffey against the southpaw. Moret caught Rettenmund looking and suddenly the Red Sox were a double play away from getting out of the mother of all jams.

The next batter, however, was Morgan, who would be named MVP of the National League for 1975 – and later for 1976. Morgan lined a single over the drawn-in outfield and the Reds had won in their final at-bat for the second straight game.7

Cincinnati led the Series and all bunts were off, you might say.8

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Troy Olszewski and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Photo credit: Ed Armbrister, Trading Card Database.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted:

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CIN/CIN197510140.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1975/B10140CIN1975.htm 

Enders, Eric. 100 Years of the World Series, 1903-2004 (New York: Sterling Publishing, 2005).

Frost, Mark. Game Six: Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America’s Pastime (New York: Hyperion, 2009).

Neft, David S., and Richard M. Cohen. The World Series: Complete Play-by-Play of Every Game, 1903-1989 Compiled by the Authors of The Sports Encyclopedia: Baseball (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990).

Notes

1 “Fisk’s Solo HR,” MLB.com, 0:44, accessed October 2025, https://www.mlb.com/video/fisk-s-solo-home-run-c1212597183?partnerId=web_video-playback-page_video-share.

2 Paul Meyer, “Ump: ‘Simply a Collision,’” Dayton (Ohio) Journal Herald, October 15, 1975: 15.

3 “1975 WS Gm3: Evans’ Homer in Ninth Ties Game,” YouTube video (MLB.com), 0:47, accessed October 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPEm0TIe_bE.

4 Bill Nowlin and Jim Prime, The Boston Red Sox World Series Encyclopedia (Burlington, Massachusetts: Rounder Books, 2008), 291.

5 Kevin Paul Dupont, “Obstruction Call Conjures Images of 1975 World Series,” Boston Globe, October 28, 2013, https://www.bostonglobe.com/sports/2013/10/27/middlebrooks-obstruction-conjured-memories-another-crucial-world-series-call/Iz2y6ASabchNuT9V1RR3GJ/story.html.

6 “1975 WS Gm3: Fisk Gets Tangled Up with Armbrister,” YouTube video (MLB.com), 2:57, accessed October 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRw2_KvHcPk.

7 “Morgan’s Walk-Off Hit,” MLB.com, 0:37, accessed October 2025, https://www.mlb.com/video/morgan-s-walk-off-hit-c31190473?partnerId=web_video-playback-page_video-share.

8 The Reds had one more final-at-bat win in the World Series, scoring the tiebreaking run in the ninth inning of Game Seven to clinch the Series.