Game Six: Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America's Pastime

Bench signaled for the sinker, inside, and Darcy delivered. It didn't have his usual hard kick, cutting low and inside, and probably would have finished out of the zone, a pitch most hitters couldn't do much with, but Pudge Fisk, unusual for such a tall right-handed man, was a notorious inside/low-ball pull hitter, and that, finally, was Darcy's one and only mistake.
Fisk saw it, liked it, reached down, and crushed it.
In the broadcast truck, director Harry Coyle tried to hail his left field cameraman, Lou Gerard, stationed inside the Green Monster scoreboard, on his headset. Fisk's ball was headed straight down the left field line, a high towering shot, exactly the kind of flight path they'd planted a camera in there to pan up and capture. Gerard, at that moment, stood frozen in terror at his post, staring down at the biggest rat he'd ever seen in his life--the size of a frickin' housecat--that had just crawled across his foot. Half-paralyzed with fright, he couldn't swing his camera around; he held the close-up he'd established on Fisk.
Fred Lynn jumped up from the on-deck circle to align himself with the left field foul line, the first person in the park to realize this was going to turn out well; he jumped straight into the air. As the ball reached the apex of its flight, it began to hook to the left, toward the yellow foul pole and screen. With his great bat speed, and the way he jumped on inside pitches, Fisk hit dozens of foul "home runs" a year, and this might be another one; and in any other ballpark in baseball, absent the short left field wall, it undoubtedly would have been.
The crowd rose to its feet.
Carlton Fisk didn't run. He turned sideways and took three abbreviated hops down the first base line, wildly waving his arms at the ball like a kid in a Little League game, urging, willing, begging it to stay fair.
Pete Rose turned and sprinted down the left field line, following the flight of the ball toward the pole, willing it to turn foul, and never saw Fisk's dance toward first.
Tony Kubek stepped forward right into the Reds dugout, alongside Sparky and everyone else in the club, all of them craning their necks forward to keep the ball in sight.
Eyes fixed on the training room television, Luis Tiant [starting pitcher for the game] sat up in the whirlpool. Hearing the deep rumbling about to crescendo in Fenway all the way down in the depths of the old building, Bill Lee jumped off the training table nearby and started shouting.
In the owner's box, Tom Yawkey and Duffy Lewis stood up, their hands reaching out for each other.
In the broadcast booth, Dick Stockton, taking his turn back on play-by-play, his voice hoarse with emotion as he narrated: "There it goes, a long drive, if it stays fair..."
Thirty-five thousand people locked in a suspended passage of time--less than four seconds by the clock--and then, yes, the ball crashed off the screen near the very top of the left field foul pole.
"...home run!" finished Stockton, then wisely realized that the best thing now was to sit back and let the magic of the moment speak for itself.