The Machine (14 page)

May 16, 1975

MONTREAL
REDS VS. EXPOS

Team record: 18–18

Bob Howsam refused to believe that things were this bad. He was a professional optimist; he had spent his whole life believing in the best-case scenario. Back in 1959, a group of very rich men—oil men, a hotel magnate, an industrialist—started a new football league called the American Football League. They asked Howsam to join in, even though he did not have—as he often said—two nickels to rub together. What the hell? He joined. He founded a football team he called the Denver Broncos. When people asked Howsam how exactly he intended to keep that team going without money, he said, “Things will work out.” Things worked out for the Broncos, but not for Howsam: he had to sell off the team after one year. He had tried every promotional trick he could imagine. He even had his football players wear socks where the lines stretched vertically rather than wrapping around. He thought these would make the players look taller. If so, the socks made them look like taller circus clowns.

That was Howsam. He believed that if you studied the situation carefully, if you worked hard, if you put together the best plan, if you stayed positive, things would work out. That’s what he thought back in ’72 when he traded for Joe Morgan. Nobody liked that trade when he made it. Look now. He got Morgan, of course. He got Jack Billingham, a mediocre pitcher for Houston who won nineteen games for the Reds in both 1973 and 1974. He got Cesar Geronimo,
a brilliant defensive center fielder who, according to Reds batting coach Ted Kluszewski, had a terrible swing. But Geronimo came to the Reds, and Klu worked with him, and Geronimo hit pretty well. Things just worked out.

Now Howsam felt sure that the Reds would come around. Sitting in his office back in Cincinnati, he would write out the Reds’ lineup, write out the opponent’s lineup, and then decide which team had the better group of players. He always tried to be a harsh judge of his own team. But he kept coming up with the same answer.

Today the Reds were playing the Montreal Expos, and so the Howsam scouting sheet looked something like this:

So that was eight for eight in favor of the Reds. Sometimes the Reds won seven of the eight positions, or six of eight. But every time Bob Howsam worked out the calculation, the Reds came out ahead. He tried to be impartial and logical about it—the Reds were the best team in baseball. He knew, absolutely knew, full confidence, that the Reds would come around and win.

“I’m an optimist,” he told the newspaper guys.

That day, the Reds’ lineup that had won all eight positions in Bob Howsam’s office lost to Montreal 4–2. Through thirty-seven games, the Reds had lost more than they had won. Also, Joe Morgan got slashed by spikes on a slide and had to go to the hospital. Also, Pete Rose made his first error at third base. Reporters were saying that the Machine was falling apart. Sparky Anderson was doing what he could to keep his ulcers from smoldering. Bob Howsam sat in his office and tried to stay positive. And Johnny Bench grabbed the Reds’ young radio announcer, Marty Brennaman, and together they went out into the Montreal night.

May 17, 1975

MONTREAL
REDS VS. EXPOS

Team record: 18–19

Johnny Bench looked like he had lost several fights. He had a fever of 104, or anyway that’s what he told Sparky as he walked into the dark and cramped manager’s office at Montreal’s Jarry Park Saturday morning. He said that there was no way he could play, and he limped back out toward the training room. Sparky nodded. Sure, why not? Bench was out. Morgan had gotten fourteen stitches in his shin the night before, and he was out too. The team had lost six games in a row. The Reds were only a half-game ahead of the Padres. Sure, why not?

Marty Brennaman walked into the office, and he had the biggest smile on his face. Marty was thirty-two years old, but he was still a kid in a lot of ways. It was only his second year in the big leagues. He had been chosen from more than two hundred applicants to be play-by-play announcer of the Big Red Machine, and he was thrilled by it
all. Sometimes Sparky got a kick out of that excitement. This wasn’t one of those times.

“What’s going on, Marty?” Sparky grumbled as he looked down over his lineup, with Johnny Bench’s name scratched off.

“Oh, I went out with Bench last night,” Marty said. “And we had the damnedest time.”

That woke up Sparky. He looked up from his lineup card, and he had this look on his face, and Marty Brennaman knew—instantly knew—that he had just screwed up. He had just broken the most basic rule of baseball: you never tell a baseball manager about the night before. Sparky had this crazy, almost demented, little smile on his face, and he said: “Is that right?”

Marty swallowed hard. He did not know that Johnny had begged out of the game with the flu. He did not know that Sparky had just come up with an idea, the idea that was going to change the whole damned season. Marty did not know anything. He sat there and looked blankly back at Sparky, and then all of a sudden he heard a commotion in the clubhouse. He watched Sparky race out into the madness.

Joe Morgan had walked into the clubhouse. And he was yelling. Joe had spent much of the night in the hospital, getting those fourteen stitches in his shin. He had done some thinking.

“Screw you, Perez!” he shouted.

“Screw you, Rose!” he shouted.

“Screw you, Bench!” he shouted.

Then he looked at Sparky Anderson, the manager, the man who had wanted them to treat each other with respect. He pointed his finger at Sparky.

“And screw you too!” he shouted.

Sparky looked hard at Morgan. And then, that smile reappeared, the smile that he had flashed back in the office with Marty Brennaman. And then he started laughing. Then they all started laughing.

“When you gonna play again?” Doggie yelled at Joe. “That little scratch on your leg gonna keep you out of the lineup for a month?”

“Screw you, Doggie!” Morgan shouted once more. “I’m playing today.”

And that’s when Sparky saw his chance. His moment. He had done all of these little things that he felt sure would make the team better. He had moved Rose to third base. He had finally moved George Foster into the starting lineup; George was hitting even better than Danny Driessen. Sparky had moved players up and down the lineup. He had begged and threatened and challenged, and the team just kept coasting along. The team needed a spark, something that would bring them all together.

This was the time. He stormed into the trainer’s room where Bench was trying to sleep.

“Bench!” Sparky screamed. “I don’t care if your fever is two hundred and one. You’re gonna catch, and if we play thirty-five innings, you’re gonna catch every damn one of them. Do you hear me?”

And he stormed back into the clubhouse and shouted: “That goes for all you! I’m sick and damn tired of hearing that the Big Red Machine is dead. That’s what they’re saying out there. That we’re dead. Well, let me tell you something, we ain’t dead. We’re gonna win this thing. We’re gonna win because this is the best damn team in baseball.”

They were all looking at him now.

“You see that little man?” he said as he pointed at Joe Morgan. “That little man’s gonna play tonight. He had fifty stitches put in his leg, and he’s playing today. He’s playing, and so there ain’t nobody in this room that has an excuse. We got too many guys here who don’t want to be part of the action. We got too many guys here waiting around for somebody else to do the job.”

Now he was going good. He had forgotten how liberating this was, the chance to just unload all his feelings, to get it all out.

“If Cinderella’s slippers fit, put them on!” he yelled. “If they don’t,
get the hell out of the way. Because we are gonna win. I’m telling you that right now. We are gonna win, and we will go right over the top of you guys that don’t want to play.”

In the tenth inning, with the score tied, Ken Griffey stepped to the plate to face a Montreal pitcher named John Montague. Sparky had moved up Griffey to the second spot in the lineup, and he told Griffey: “Hit the ball on the ground and run your ass off.” Griffey could do that; nobody in the game was faster. Of course, Griffey thought he could do a lot of other things too, if the club would give him a chance. He could hit with some power. He could steal some bases. But the orders were clear: “Hit the ball on the ground and run your ass off.”

Griffey saw a fastball coming, and he swung hard, and he saw that he had hit it up in the air. But he had hit it good; the ball sounded deep and resounding cracking off the bat. He ran hard to first, he thought it might hit the wall, but it soared over. Home run. Griffey was the hero. He jogged around the bases, and he felt good. Two batters later, Johnny Bench stepped to the plate, and he felt a little bit better—he was no longer shivering, anyway—and he saw a Montague slider, and he swung hard too. “It’s about time I hit something,” he told reporters afterward, while Griffey looked on and imperceptibly shook his head. Bench had hit a home run too. And the reporters surrounded him.

“Everything’s changed,” Sparky said. Sparky felt it now. The season had changed. The Machine had been started.

“What did Sparky say in the team meeting?” a reporter asked.

“I can’t tell you that,” Pete said with a big smile. “All I can tell you is that it was a dandy.”

May 18 to June 16

John Vukovich knew it was coming,
knew it in that suppressed way that men know they will die. But he still was not ready for it. Sparky Anderson called him into the office, sat him down, and said, “I’m sending you down to Indianapolis.” That was the minor leagues. Vukovich looked hard at his manager’s face: was he enjoying this?

“That’s not fair,” Vukovich said quietly.

“You ain’t hitting,” Sparky said.

“I was hitting .294 when you took me out of the lineup,” Vukovich said.

“You ain’t hitting .294 now,” Sparky said.

That was true—Vuke had managed only three measly singles in the previous month. He had played his usual exquisite defense, and anyway, how was he supposed to hit when his own manager had no faith at all in him? “You never gave me a shot,” he told Sparky.

“I know you feel that way,” Sparky said. “But it just ain’t so.”

Vukovich left the office, walked out to the clubhouse, and packed his things. “I didn’t deserve it,” he told the few reporters who wanted a reaction. Then they all went up to the tall new relief pitcher who walked into the clubhouse. The kid was twenty-four years old, but he
looked to be about half that age. He had the unlikely baseball name of Rawlins Jackson Eastwick III.

“I’ve got a job to do,” Rawly said. “I’m here to help this team win.”

George Foster found that he enjoyed being interviewed. He did not expect that. He had always thought of himself as the strong silent type—a man who did not drink, did not smoke, and let his black bat do the talking. It was like those words from Ecclesiastes: “A time to rend, a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.” But George had been smacking the Ecclesiastes out of the baseball for most of the season. He had just homered in his last game.

“If I were traded,” Foster was saying to columnist Tom Callahan, “I’d grow a mustache right away. Just to see how it’d look.”

He watched Callahan feverishly write down the quote—well, why not have some fun with it? Callahan was writing about the Reds’ no-facial-hair policy again. Reporters never seemed to tire of writing about the Reds’ rules and regulations. The Reds had traded away pitcher Ross Grimsley after he started growing his hair long, leading Grimsley to say, “Sparky’s two-faced.” Bobby Tolan had been a star for the Reds in the early 1970s, but he also started to rebel, and the Reds banished him to San Diego. The Oakland A’s, who had won the three previous World Series, were a wild-looking bunch, men with full mustaches and crazy nicknames, and they represented the times. The Reds, as they saw themselves, represented a better time.

“I’d probably let my hair grow,” Pete Rose admitted. “They want us to look good, but you’ll get a lot of arguments whether we look good.”

Sure, Pete thought the rules were goofy. He especially could not understand the rule against having a beard or mustache. One time, when he felt like busting chops, he asked Sparky: “Hey, do you think Jesus Christ could hit a curveball?” Sparky looked at him, and
Pete repeated: “No, I’m asking you seriously: do you think that Jesus Christ could hit a curveball?” When Sparky finally admitted that, yes, he did believe Jesus could hit a curveball, Rose shook his head and shouted: “Not for the Cincinnati Reds he couldn’t—not with that beard.”

But even though he thought the rules were goofy, he kept his hair short. They all did.

“We respect Sparky,” Johnny said as an explanation that was no explanation. “The reason I wanted out of the army reserves was because I didn’t like all that ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir.’ But I take it from Sparky.”

Johnny paused. “I don’t have to take it. But I do.”

They all took it, and not one of them could explain
why
they took it. They were tough guys, all of them, but when it came to these rules—rules about how they looked, how they dressed, how they acted—they were as dutiful and accepting as children in grammar school.

Johnny Bench was in agony. It had been more than a month since Gary Matthews had smashed into him at home plate, and Johnny’s left shoulder still throbbed like it had in the moments after the collision. He took painkillers every day. He slept on his right side. Still, it hurt like hell when he tried to lift his left arm high. He thought about resting for a few days. But he couldn’t rest. He was Johnny Bench.

They booed him now in Cincinnati, every time he hit a weak grounder to the shortstop, every time he struck out, every time he failed to be their Superman. Sure, the booing hurt. The fans had no memory, none at all. Johnny led the league in runs batted in just last year. He had won the Gold Glove as the best defensive catcher every single year since he arrived. People who knew, baseball people, they were already calling him the greatest catcher in the history of baseball, the greatest, and he was just twenty-seven years old. Still
they booed.