The Machine (2 page)

“What do you mean, Doggie?” Anderson said. “We’re losing three to nothing.”

“Ah,” Perez said. “Don’t worry. I hit a home run.”

He pronounced “hit” like “heat”—
I heat a home run
—and Anderson, even in his state of panic, smiled. Doggie went to the bat rack, grabbed a bat. He watched Rose break up the double play and then heard him cursing and insulting and rousing players in the dugout. He stepped in to face Boston’s pitcher, Bill Lee.

“Throw me that slow one,” Perez muttered to himself. Earlier in the game, Lee had thrown his slow curve, a lollipop of a pitch that
peaked at about ten feet off the ground and then dropped gently into the strike zone. Batters wait for fastballs—it is in their nature—and slow pitches shock the nervous system. Doggie was mesmerized, and he could not unleash his swing. “Throw it again,” he muttered now.

Pete turned from his yelling to watch Tony Perez hit. Bill Lee began his windup, and then he unleashed it one more time, his slow curveball, and Perez saw it, his eyes widened, and he did something funny in his swing. He buckled, like a car trying to jump into second gear.

Up in the Fenway Park press box, the dean of Cincinnati sportswriters, Si Burick, watched the pitch come in. Burick had been writing for the
Dayton Daily News
for fifty years. He was the son of a rabbi, and he started writing about sports in the paper when he was sixteen—four years before the stock market crashed in 1929. Burick saw the pitch floating in, and he watched Perez double-clutch. Before Doggie even swung the bat, Burick uttered two words he thought nobody else could hear.

He whispered: “Home run.”

February 1 to April 6

Nobody knew for certain
where the name came from. Rose claimed to have invented it, of course. Well, that’s Pete for you. He had come up with this whole convoluted story, one about a 1934 Ford coupe he owned, an antique from those Depression days when you could get your Ford painted any color you wanted so long as it was black. Rose’s coupe was cherry red. Rose said he called his coupe the Little Red Machine. So naturally he called the team the Big Red Machine. Pete said that’s how the name came about, that’s how the Big Red Machine was born. No one believed the story. No one ever believed Pete.

Bob Howsam believed he inspired the name. Howsam ran the Cincinnati Reds, and he thought of himself as something of an innovator. Back in the 1950s, he owned a minor league baseball team, the Denver Bears, and he came up with so many gimmicks and promotions that some years the Bears drew more fans than teams in the major leagues. He would try anything. Once, he approached a chemist and asked if it was possible to concoct a spray that could make the ballpark smell like a bakery. He explained: everyone loves the smell of bakeries. The chemist explained: no, it is not possible.

When Howsam became general manager of the Cincinnati Reds
in 1967, he wanted his team to have an image based on an identity that separated them from the times—something altogether separate from the hippies, long-hairs, and bra-burners who danced to that sitar music in the Summer of Love. He wanted a baseball team that would not terrify the good and decent family folk of Cincinnati. He decreed that every Reds player would wear his hair short, his uniform would be wedding gown white, and his shoes tuxedo black. No one would wear a beard, of course. On the field, the pant legs of their uniforms would end just below the knee, and everyone would see the red of their socks. Off the field, they would wear ties and jackets. He wanted them to be, yes, a machine, a Big Red Machine, as powerful and inoffensive and coldly efficient as the big red Zamboni machine that polished the artificial turf field at Riverfront Stadium between innings. Howsam would believe until the end of his life that it was his Zamboni machine that inspired the name. It did not. The team was routinely called the Big Red Machine by 1970, when his Zamboni first swept the field.

A sportswriter in Los Angeles named Bob Hunter claimed to have coined the name back in August of ’69, just after the Reds scored nineteen runs in a game against Philadelphia. Hunter had quit law school to become a baseball writer, and he became somewhat known for his witty nicknames—his favorite being the time he called Bill Singer, a pitcher known for his endurance, “the Singer Throwing Machine.” Hunter always claimed that after the Reds scored all those runs in Philadelphia, they went to Los Angeles, and he felt like they deserved a nickname that fit their offensive majesty. He carefully considered the color of the uniform and their relentless run-scoring power and dubbed them the Big Red Machine. The trouble with his story is that the Reds did not go to Los Angeles for a month and a half after the Philadelphia stampede. And by then the name had been in papers all over the country.

The best bet is that Dave Bristol, the old Reds manager, came up with the name himself. Bristol was one of those men held in bond
age by the game; he never quite received as much as he gave. Bristol was a good baseball player, but not quite good enough to play even a single game in the major leagues. He was a faithful manager, but baseball owners rarely felt the same faithfulness to him. Bristol would be hired and fired repeatedly in his life. As he said, in his Georgia drawl, he never took it personal. He had to be around baseball. He needed the game. And this is what happens when you need them more than they need you. Bristol’s destiny was to spend a lifetime managing losing baseball teams for vain millionaires like tycoon Ted Turner, who once fired Bristol so he could manage the Atlanta Braves himself. Turner’s experiment in self-reverence lasted one day—plenty of time to make Turner into a national laughingstock—and then the beleaguered Turner mercifully fired himself and rehired Bristol. At the end of the year, Turner fired Bristol again.

In 1968, though, Bristol was young and blissfully unaware of his tortured baseball destiny. That year, Bristol’s Reds suddenly and rather unexpectedly started hitting baseballs very hard. Bristol seemed as shocked by this turn as anyone—the two previous seasons his Reds had hardly scored any runs at all. The Reds scored more runs in 1968 than any other team. They scored more runs still in 1969. And sometime during that year—maybe it really was after that nineteen-run sonic boom in Philadelphia—a giddy Bristol began calling his team the Big Red Machine.

Bristol never claimed to have come up with the nickname on his own. Maybe someone mentioned it to him. He could not remember. And he did not care. His Reds were marvelous. Pete Rose banged 218 hits that summer when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Two sluggers, Tony Perez and Lee May, cracked long home runs. A twenty-one-year-old catcher named Johnny Bench burst into stardom. The Reds scored runs at will, and after happy games, Bristol would wander into his clubhouse and see his players sitting on stools, still in uniform, drenched in sweat, raising beer cans to each other. They toasted: “How about the Machine? How about us? Nobody can
stop the Big Red Machine!” It was, Bristol would say, the best time of his life. Then it ended. The Reds scored many runs, but they finished third. Bristol was fired. Howsam decided Bristol had taken the Machine as far as he could.

Bob Howsam hired Sparky Anderson to manage the Reds in 1970. That shocked everybody. “Sparky Who?” was a headline in the next day’s paper. Sparky was like the other woman who shows up at the reading of the will and walks out with the house and the Rolls. He was thirty-five years old when he was hired—he was younger than any other manager in the game—but his hair was shock white. He kept a can of black hair dye with him, and he smeared that stuff through his hair constantly, but he could never quite paint over the white, and he could never quite convince people he was as young as his years.

He had one of the odder playing careers in baseball history. He played one full season in the big leagues. And that was all. That doesn’t happen much. Baseball seasons bleed into each other, players get called up and down, they get second chances. Not Sparky. He was George Anderson when he first began playing ball, Georgie to his friends. They began to call him Sparky because of his violent temper. He got thrown out of dozens of games. During one of his many umpire spats in the minor leagues, a local radio announcer shouted, “Look at the sparks fly! That’s one sparky fella!” Sparky became known throughout baseball for his uncontrollable rage, which was better than being known for his other flaw: he could not hit a lick. The Philadelphia Phillies liked his spirit and traded three players for him in late 1958, and they named him the starting second baseman for the 1959 season. On opening day, eighth inning, Sparky lined an RBI single off of an aging star, Don Newcombe. He played almost every day that summer when
Explorer 6
sent back photographs of Earth and Hawaii became a state. And at the end of the season, the Phillies’ management still liked Sparky’s spirit,
but they did not like his .218 batting average or his home run total. (He hit zero—“Never even hit one off the wall,” Sparky would say.) They sent him down, and Sparky would never play another game in the major leagues.

He did play in the minor leagues for a while longer, and he became a manager, but his temper still raged. One day, Sparky found that nobody in baseball wanted him around. He sold cars for a while, Ramblers, and he was pretty lousy at that too. He only made a living because his boss, Milt Blish, would throw some extra business his way. Yes, Milt Blish saved his life. He was quite a man. And whenever Sparky tried to thank him, Milt would wave him off and say: “Real friendship means you don’t ever have to say thank you.”

Yes, Milt told Sparky that he had to put away those unhelpful feelings. He put it bluntly: feelings are for chumps. When Sparky would try to sell cars, he would get angry when people tried to cheat him. He fell for sob stories. If a customer talked about how little money he had, Sparky would say: “Look, I really don’t think you can afford this car.” He kept doing that until he realized that he was going broke, and the wise Milt Blish said, “George, don’t you realize those people are just going to another car dealership to buy a car they can’t afford?”

So Sparky put away those feelings. When he got another chance to manage a minor league team, he was transformed. Sure, he still got angry with the umpires. Sure, he still raged against his players. But now he cut the rage with funny stories, scraps of wisdom he had run across…he became a character, a baseball manager right out of central casting. When he became the Reds manager, people said that Bob Howsam must have lost his mind. People wrote letters to the editor and called Sparky a small-time nobody. Everybody made fun of the way he talked, his mangling of grammar, his lack of education, the clothes he wore, the lingering gray in his hair. On a bus ride in that first year, Lee May, a massive first baseman from Alabama, grew tired of Anderson’s constant chirping. May said, “Aw, what do you
know? You’re just a minor league motherfucker.” And that’s what the Reds called him.

Well, so what? Feelings? Nothing more than feelings? Who needed them? All Georgie Anderson wanted his whole life—all he ever wanted since he was a boy living in a two-room house in the heart of the neighborhood that became Watts—was to be around baseball. Then, against odds, against hope, he became manager of the Big Red Machine. Feelings? Forget it. He told friends, “There ain’t no way I can lose.” First year, he took those players of the Big Red Machine and he flattered them, whipped them, inspired them, insulted them, and guided them to the World Series. Yeah. First year. How did they like their minor league motherfucker now?

The Reds lost that World Series to Baltimore—the Orioles’ third baseman, Brooks Robinson, the human vacuum cleaner, made a series of superhuman defensive plays. “Guy busted us up single-handed,” Sparky muttered. Well, it was okay. “I’ve still got the best team in baseball,” he said. “I guarantee ya we’ll win it all in ’71.”

The team collapsed instead. The Reds stopped scoring runs. They lost more games than they won. Rumors swirled that Sparky would be fired. How about that? They were thinking about firing him one year after he took the Reds to the World Series. Well, so what? “We’ll win it in ’72, I guarantee it,” he told reporters. That spring, he worked his players to exhaustion—Sparky’s favorite, Johnny Bench, called that spring training camp “Stalag 13,” the concentration camp from the television show
Hogan’s Heroes.
Pete Rose called Sparky “the Exorcist.”

“Why’s that?” Sparky asked.

“’Cause you work the devil out of us,” Rose said, big goofy grin on his face.

Who cares? When the season began, Sparky mercilessly yanked his pitchers out of games the instant they showed weakness. They hated his guts for it…who cares? Sparky never liked pitchers anyway. He bullied and charmed his team back to the World Series, and
this time they played the roughneck Oakland Athletics, a team made up of players with long hair and mustaches, every kind of hippy-dippy ne’er-do-well. Sparky knew a team like that could not beat his disciplined, controlled, pristine Big Red Machine. Only, the A’s won the World Series in seven games. Sparky said the loss felt like dying.

And so it went. In 1973, Sparky guaranteed his team would win. The Machine got beat in the playoffs by an unimpressive New York Mets team and an angry New York crowd that constantly seemed on the brink of rioting. “New York ought to be the next atomic bomb testing site,” Anderson said after that loss, and then he apologized, and he felt dead inside. Then came 1974 and the worst season of all. The Reds won 98 games, more than every team but one. But that one team was the Los Angeles Dodgers, and they won 102 games and went to the playoffs instead. This was beyond heartbreak. Sparky Anderson lived in Los Angeles. He hated, just hated, the Dodgers.

“You know how you judge yourself?” Sparky would tell his players. “You judge yourself by what’s on the back of your baseball card.” The back of Sparky’s baseball card stated that in five years his Reds had won three division championships and two pennants, but they had never won it all. That seemed good. But Sparky did not see it quite that way. Sparky figured that for five years he had the best team in baseball, the very best, and they had never won it all. Whom could he blame? Johnny Bench? Hell, no, Johnny Bench was the greatest catcher Sparky ever saw. Pete Rose? Hell, no, nobody ever played the game with more guts and energy than Pete. Joe Morgan? Hell, no, that little man could beat you every which way you could be beaten. The team? Hell, no. The Machine was the best goddamned baseball team Sparky ever saw.

He blamed himself. “I’m not good enough,” he told friends. “It’s me. I’m costing this team. I’m the weak link.” Then he would snap out of it and shout, “But I’ll show them! Nobody in the world could manage this team better than ol’ Sparky.” Feelings. Who cares?

Things were unhappy at his home in Thousand Oaks. He wanted
baseball to begin so he could get away. Sparky had not spoken to his oldest son, Lee, for more than a year. They were having the same fight that fathers and sons were having all over America.

“You’re going to cut your hair,” he said as he watched Lee working on his motorbike in the garage. Lee’s hair was down to his shoulders. He looked, well, cliché or not, he looked like a girl. “Come with me right now, I’m taking you to the barber.”

Lee did not even look up. Quietly, he said, “No.”

No. Just like that. For a moment, Sparky thought about settling things like he had always settled things, with fists and rage and sparks. But he could not fight his own son. Instead, he cut him off. He stopped talking to Lee. Every now and again, he felt like breaking through the silence, only he would see Lee, and he would see that his hair had grown a little bit longer, and he would seethe again and turn his back. He was Sparky Anderson, baseball manager of the Machine, the cleanest-cut team, the team that represented the America he believed in. If a player grew his hair too long, Sparky had relief pitcher Pedro Borbon cut it. If the player refused to cut his hair, Bob Howsam traded him. This was how it had to be: Sparky would talk to reporters for hours about how this country was going to hell, what with the drugs and sex and atheism and, especially, the long hair. Think about this, he would say. If a man can’t be counted on to cut his hair, how can you count on him to pitch the eighth inning? How can you count on him to be a good neighbor or keep our communities safe or help heal our sick? How can you count on him to be a good son and do all the right things? Sparky could not even stand to look at his own son.