The Machine (16 page)

It was getting to the point where baseball was no fun at all. He played with a busted-up shoulder in front of a bunch of ungrateful fans. Married life wasn’t going too well either. Vickie constantly complained that they never had any time together, that he was gone all the time. Well, what did she expect? He was Johnny Bench, baseball star, famous American. He wasn’t going to come home during the day and put on his Mister Rogers sweater and live some sort of regular guy life. She knew that. She had to know that. Everybody knew that.

But she didn’t know that. Some reporter had asked Rose if Bench’s marriage was affecting him—like the guy knew anything about it—and Rose said: “He’s hitting about .240.” The quote got into
Sports Illustrated
. Got everybody in the clubhouse laughing. But it wasn’t funny, Johnny
was
hitting about .240 (actually .256, which wasn’t much better), and his marriage was already on the rocks, and he heard every last one of those boos. He heard people mocking his $175,000 salary. He heard it all. It wasn’t funny.

“No, I don’t believe I’m overpaid,” Johnny snapped when asked about overpaid athletes. “I don’t think any ballplayer is overpaid…. Jimmy Connors plays two tennis matches and winds up with $850,000. Muhammad Ali fights one bout and winds up with five million bucks…. Me? I play 190 games, if you count exhibitions. And I’m overpaid?”

Then it was May 24, a warm Saturday afternoon in Cincinnati; the midwestern humidity was beginning to roll in. The Reds had won three games in a row, but they trailed by two runs in the sixth inning when Johnny Bench came up to face Philadelphia relief pitcher Gene Garber. Johnny banged a long home run to left field, and he ran coolly around the base, and he heard the tentative cheers, and he shrugged.

The Reds trailed by one run in the eighth inning when Johnny
Bench came up to face Garber again. He banged another long home run to left field, and he ran coolly around the bases again, and now the cheers were louder. Sure, they loved him when he hit home runs.

American journalists were expelled from Vietnam. Bobby Unser beat favorite A. J. Foyt to the finish line at the Indianapolis 500, though the larger story was Tom Sneva’s fiery crash—his car tumbled and exploded in flames. Somehow, he walked away. The Alaska pipeline work was halted for environmental reasons. The Golden State Warriors won the NBA championship, though few around the country noticed—NBA games drew such low television ratings that the games were often shown on tape delay. President Ford announced that the U.S. government would impose an oil tax that would raise gas prices by a penny or two a gallon. Gas was running about 55¢ a gallon.

In London, the daredevil Evel Knievel announced his retirement unexpectedly. Knievel had come to London to jump thirteen London buses on his motorcycle. Wembley Stadium was packed with people. Knievel had created his own legend. He was, according to myth and newspaper interviews, a former bank robber and a man who sold insurance policies to people in mental institutions. He had led elk-hunting expeditions into Yellowstone Park. Evel Knievel said he got his name in a Montana jail when he happened to be the next cell over from notorious criminal Awful Knofel.

Knievel invented this persona, not just as a daredevil who wore gaudy full-body suits and jumped various objects on a motorcycle, but as a man’s man, the toughest hombre in America. The story goes that for his first televised jump—the one that made him famous—he walked into Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, slapped a $100 chip on the blackjack table, busted out, downed a shot of Wild Turkey, grabbed two showgirls, and walked out into the sunlight. He climbed on his
motorcycle, made it growl, raced up the ramp, took off, and soared over the famous Caesars Palace fountains. Evel would say it was beautiful up there, a view no other man had ever seen, a feeling greater than sex, and it would have been better still if he had not lost power in his motorcycle just before takeoff. He crashed on top of a van, flipped over the handlebars, skidded about a quarter-mile, crushed his pelvis and femur, and descended into a coma. When he emerged from the coma, he was an international sensation.

He had tried many stunts, many of them spectacular failures, such as the time in 1974 when he crashed while trying to jump some sort of aircraft across Snake River Canyon in Idaho. But people still needed to see Evel Knievel. More than seventy thousand people showed up in London to see him attempt to jump thirteen single-deck buses. There was a point behind the number thirteen—Evel Knievel believed in tempting fate.

He pushed his 750cc Harley Davidson to about 100 miles per hour, raced up the ramp, soared about 140 feet (a new world record, his people would later claim), and clipped the thirteenth and final bus. His motorcycle tumbled over and over, and when it stopped, Knievel was stretched out on the ground, motionless, apparently unconscious. For five minutes, maybe ten, Evel Knievel did not twitch. A couple of medics brought out a stretcher and started to carry him away. But then, Evel Knievel shakily stood to wild cheers. Frank Gifford, the great former football player and ABC announcer, pleaded with Knievel to get on the stretcher. He would not. “I walked in, I walk out,” he shouted. Two assistants walked him over to the platform where a microphone was waiting.

“Ladies and gentlemen of this wonderful country,” Evel Knievel said. “I have got to tell you that you are the last people to see me jump. I shall never jump again, and that is the truth. I am through.”

Five months later, Evel Knievel jumped fourteen buses at King’s Island in Cincinnati.

May 26, 1975

CINCINNATI
REDS VS. EXPOS

Team record: 25–20

For the first time all season—but not for the last, nowhere close to the last—Sparky Anderson knew that the Machine would win. The Reds trailed Montreal 4–0 in the second game of the doubleheader, but the score didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. His team had just won its fifth game in a row to start off the doubleheader, and the guys had that look, the one Sparky had been waiting for all season. They would not lose. They could not lose.

He sat back and watched. It was the fifth inning. He wondered how his Reds would win this time. Would they hit a couple of home runs? Would they steal a few bases? Darrel Chaney led off the inning with a single. Then Pete Rose walked. And Ken Griffey walked to load the bases. That brought up Joe Morgan, the little man, and Sparky could see the panic on the face of Montreal’s pitcher, Steve Renko. He walked Joe Morgan too.

Sparky smiled. Few people appreciated walks as an offensive weapon in 1975. Owners—as Rose had found in his negotiations—did not pay for walks. Fans did not cheer walks. They did not even list walks in the statistics on the back of Topps baseball cards. In that time when being a man meant jumping buses, few had any use for a batter walking to first base.

But Sparky Anderson loved walks. He loved getting the runners on base, but even more, he loved the way that walks psychologically broke down pitchers’ spirits. The Reds led the league in walks in 1972 and 1974. They were leading the league in walks again. Sparky looked toward the mound—he saw in Renko’s body language the effect the walks were having on him. Sparky thought of the old baseball line: Renko looked like a kid standing in the rain. Sparky turned to Ted
Kluszewski, the Reds’ hitting coach, and said: “Here comes a grand slam.” And Johnny hit a grand slam.

“It’s like I told the fans at our luncheon the other day,” Sparky said to reporters after the game. “Before it’s all over with, a lot of people are going to be jumping back on the bandwagon in Cincinnati. You mark my words, okay? You mark my words.”

While Rose and Morgan and Perez and the rest of the hitters would sit in the clubhouse and insult each other, many of the Reds pitchers would gather in a different part of the clubhouse and discuss their favorite topic: theories about why Sparky Anderson hated them. There was no doubt that he did. Someone on the team—probably Jack Billingham, a tall right-hander from Florida who had led the team in victories each of the previous two seasons—had started calling Sparky “Captain Hook,” because of the coldhearted way he would hook a pitcher in the middle of a game and bring in whatever reliever came to mind. Then he would hook that reliever and bring in another. Sparky used more relief pitchers than any manager before him. Pitchers were as disposable as razor blades.

As time went on, they came up with increasingly more complicated reasons for Sparky’s hatred of pitchers, but nobody could improve on Billingham’s theory: Sparky hated pitchers because he could not hit them. It was a theory Billingham would hold on to; even thirty years after the Machine broke up, Billingham would sit in the crowd at various events and listen to Sparky Anderson talk about his amazing baseball team. About halfway through Sparky’s spiel—having noticed again that Sparky had not mentioned a single pitcher—Billingham would shout out (with a bit of delight in his voice): “Hey, Sparky, it sure is amazing how you won all those games without a single pitcher on the team.”

It was true, Sparky had little use for pitchers in general (and Billingham in particular—Sparky thought Billingham was too casual
in his pitching approach). But Sparky loved a young left-handed pitcher named Don Gullett. He was an athletic prodigy from a small Kentucky town called Lynn, along the Ohio River somewhere between Ashland and the Shawnee State Forest. Baseball scouts had a heck of a time finding it. But Gullett was so good, they did find it. Gullett was one of those kids touched by God; he could do everything. He could throw a baseball hard. He could make jump shots from all over the basketball court. He could run through defenders on the football field. Gullet was also intensely private, but if you caught him on the right day, you might get him to talk about the day he scored eleven touchdowns and kicked six extra points while playing for McKell High School. It seems his coach had gotten mad at the coach at Wurtland High—the Wurtland coach had made some remark in the paper after the last game that his team had shut down Gullett—and so, as Gullett said, “he sort of turned me loose.”

Cliff Alexander, the legendary old scout who had helped discover the Hall of Fame left-handed pitcher Sandy Koufax, was working for the Reds then. He made his way out to Lynn, and he saw Gullett throw a seven-inning perfect game. Gullett struck out twenty of the twenty-one batters he faced. His scouting report: “Better at eighteen than Koufax.” The Reds drafted Gullett, signed him, and Sparky fell in love the first time he saw Gullett pitch.

“Mark my words, this guy stays healthy, he’s going to the Hall of Fame,” Sparky told reporters. That was back in 1971, when Gullett was just twenty years old. Sparky did tend to get carried away, but there was no missing Gullett’s pitching talents. He was left-handed, and he threw hard, and he had pinpoint control. He won sixteen games in 1971. No twenty-year-old lefty in fifty years had won sixteen games in a season. The last lefty pitcher to win so many at such a young age was a wild young kid out of a Baltimore orphanage named Babe Ruth.

“Well, I’m not Babe Ruth,” Gullett said. He didn’t say much. That was another reason Sparky loved him: pitchers were meant to be seen and not heard. Gullett didn’t make excuses. He didn’t play defense lawyer when he had a bad outing. He just took the baseball, and he threw hard fastballs, and he won baseball games.

“He’s like Koufax,” Sparky told columnist Tom Callahan before the season.

“Sparky,” Callahan would grumble, “he’s not like Koufax. The guy has never even won twenty games in a season.”

“He will win twenty this year,” Sparky said as he waved off Callahan’s doubts. “He’s like Koufax.” Sparky was starry-eyed, like a junior high school girl daydreaming about the Bay City Rollers. Callahan was not as impressed. He thought Gullett was talented but limited. He preferred other Reds pitchers. He preferred Gary Nolan’s precision, or Jack Billingham’s ability to pitch well in big games.

But on the last day of May, Gullett faced the St. Louis Cardinals, and he was on, and even Callahan had to admit that when Gullett was on, he was a force of nature. Joe Morgan hit a two-run homer in the first inning off a thirty-nine-year-old and fading Bob Gibson, and Gullett took over from there. He pitched nine shutout innings. The Cardinals never even managed to get a runner to third base against him. “That kid’s hot,” Gibson said after the game, and Sparky could hardly contain his glee.

“I wouldn’t trade our guy Gullett for any pitcher in baseball,” Sparky said. “He’s the best there is. The very best there is.”

The Machine had won nine of ten, they had moved to within a half-game of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and pitcher Pedro Borbon looked like he wanted to kill somebody. It was a natural look for Borbon, though he looked especially wild-eyed as the rain fell in Pittsburgh. Pedro had heard that someone on the Pittsburgh radio team was call
ing him “Dracula” on the air, and he did not like it one bit. “I go get him,” he said to a couple of the guys in the clubhouse. They nodded and laughed and watched Borbon walk out of the clubhouse and out into the rain.

“Where’d Pedro say he was going?”

“To kill somebody.”

“Okay. What are we playing, seven card?”

If the Machine had been a television sitcom, then Borbon would have been the crazy uncle. Everyone had a favorite Borbon story. There was the time Pedro went around the clubhouse and talked about Bernardo, his grandfather in the Dominican Republic. Pedro insisted that he was 136 years old. There were the times he would sit in front of his locker before games and play strange drumlike rhythms on his right biceps—he could play numerous songs. And there were times—his teammates’ favorite times—when Borbon would come up with ways to show off the strength of his amazing arm. In 1969, when Pedro was a rookie with the California Angels, for kicks, he stood at home plate and threw the ball over the center-field wall at Fenway Park in Boston. In 1972, he stood at second base and tried to throw the ball off the Astrodome roof in Houston. (“And I almost did it,” he would say.) He panicked pitching coaches and managers, but Pedro knew his right arm was indestructible. He hardly even had to warm up before coming into a game. “This arm,” he said as he flexed his arm muscle and made the drum sound, “is always ready. I pitch every day if they let me.”