Bernie Carbo was out of major league baseball by the age of 33, but now stays connected with the game by running a fantasy camp each year in Mobile, Ala. (Stan Grossfeld/ Globe Staff)
MOBILE, Ala. — Bernie Carbo launched the greatest pinch-hit home run in Red Sox history. He admitted he was high on drugs during the 1975 World Series.
“I probably smoked two joints, drank about three or four beers, got to the ballpark, took some [amphetamines], took a pain pill, drank a cup of coffee, chewed some tobacco, had a cigarette, and got up to the plate and hit,” Carbo said.
The Sox were four outs from elimination against Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine in Game 6 when Carbo came off the bench to smash a three-run home run into the center-field bleachers, tying the score at 6-6. The blast set up Carlton Fisk’s arm-waving, 12th-inning walkoff home run for the ages.
“I threw away my career,” said Carbo, 62. “If I knew Jesus Christ was my savior at 17, I would have been one heck of a ballplayer, a near Hall of Famer. Instead, I wanted to die.”
Drugs, alcohol, and temptation were his downfall.
“I played every game high,” he said. “I was addicted to anything you could possibly be addicted to. I played the out field sometimes where it looked like the stars were falling from the sky.
“I played baseball 17 years of my life and I don’t think I ever missed a day of being high, other than when I went to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait [for a baseball clinic] in 1989. And the only reason I didn’t do any drugs there was that I was afraid that I would lose my life.”
Carbo, who conducts a fantasy camp each year at Hank Aaron Stadium in Mobile, Ala., that combines baseball and gospel, in 1993 founded the Diamond Club Ministry, a Christian evangelical organization. He played for six major league teams in his 12-year career, and he batted .264 with 96 home runs and 358 RBIs in 1,010 games. But he was out of baseball by age 33.
Carbo, who said he hasn’t touched alcohol or drugs in 15 years, travels throughout New England every summer preaching at youth camps, 12-step programs, prisons, and churches. He uses the nominal money from his fantasy camp to pay expenses.
“People remember me as an unsung hero,” he said. “Grandparents and parents tell their kids.”
But Carbo’s career opens a window to a time of widespread abuse of alcohol and drugs in baseball.
“When I came to the big leagues in 1970 with the Big Red Machine, the trainer told me, ‘You need to take these vitamins,’ ” Carbo said.
Carbo gobbled them down. He hit .310 for Cincinnati manager Sparky Anderson and was The Sporting News Rookie of the Year. He would never do better.
In the offseason, he asked his doctor for more “vitamins.”
“These aren’t vitamins,” the doctor said. “You’re taking speed.”
That was the beginning of the end, Carbo said.
“The Cincinnati organization trainer was giving me speed, so I never played a game without it,” he said. “Then he started giving me pain pills. Then when I couldn’t sleep, he was giving me sleeping pills. So I got to the point where I couldn’t play without any of them. “I was introduced to marijuana in 1969.
I was introduced to cocaine in 1973. So from 1973-80, I was taking Dexedrine, Benzedrine, Darvons, sleeping pills, smoking dope, drinking beer, doing cocaine, and chasing women, and I never played a day without it.”
There were a lot of lowlights. In 1975, Carbo awoke in a rain-soaked Chicago gutter at 5 a.m. with a car tire nearly touching his feet and another just inches from his head.
“I just started crying,” he said. “I knew I needed help.”
All Bernie Carbo ever wanted to be was a baseball player. He was born in Detroit, where his father played minor league ball and worked in the steel factories. The elder Carbo was an adulterer and a batterer who never told his son he loved him.
Carbo said an older cousin sexually abused him when he was 9 years old.
“My mom said, ‘We won’t ever talk about this,’ ” he said.
Joy and pain in Boston
The Sox acquired the lefthanded-hitting Carbo and Rick Wise in October 1973 from the Cardinals for Reggie Smith and Ken Tatum.
“When I first met [Red Sox owner] Mr. Yawkey, he was shining shoes in the clubhouse,” said Carbo, “and I went up to him and gave him $20 and told him to get me a cheeseburger and fries.”
Carbo was one of the most popular Red Sox players. Charismatic and colorful, he was part of the fun-loving “Buffalo Heads” with Bill Lee and Ferguson Jenkins.
He had a giant stuffed gorilla named Mighty Joe Young and traveled with him. The two were inseparable. The gorilla sat next to him in the middle seat on planes. Carl Yastrzemski wanted the gorilla placed on the bat rack in