The Machine (23 page)

Harry Rose was the toughest man in Cincinnati.

And when he died, Pete became the toughest man in Cincinnati. He cried for three days, and then he went about living—though he never got over Big Pete dying. One small paper—the
Abilene Reporter-News
—had a small story about Harry Rose dying, only the headline said: “Pete Rose Dies.” In many ways, that’s how it felt for Pete.

Baseball was always important, but it became more important after Harry Rose died. Days at the track became more precious. The bets grew bigger. The nights grew longer. Life on the road became more delirious. Pete wondered, many years later, what it would have been like—what
he
would have been like—if Big Pete had lived. All of his young life, Pete Rose had lived to please his father. Harry Rose wanted to raise a ballplayer; every birthday and Christmas, Harry would give Pete a baseball present—a bat, a ball, a glove, another bat, a catcher’s
mitt. “I don’t think I got a single toy my whole childhood,” Pete would say. Harry Rose wanted to raise a tough son of a gun, so Pete stepped in the boxing ring to impress his father. (And he got bloodied, beaten, but when the fight ended, he said, “I didn’t go down, Dad,” and Harry Rose smiled broadly.) Pete switch-hit because Harry wanted it, he ran hard to first on walks because Harry loved how Enos Slaughter did that, Pete hit first because Harry told him to.

“We gonna throw, Dad?” Pete Jr. asked again. Pete looked out over the field. In later years, Pete Jr. and his sister Fawn would talk about how distant they felt from their father. Fawn told the writer Pat Jordan, “My father is the world’s worst father.”

And when Jordan asked Pete Jr. what he’d learned from his father, an even more heartbreaking answer emerged.

“What’d I learn from my dad?” Pete Jr. asked the writer Pat Jordan. After some thought he said, “My dad told me to hit the ball where it’s pitched.”

Truth was, Pete Rose wasn’t ready to be a father. He still felt like a son.

July 25, 1975

CINCINNATI
REDS VS. DODGERS

Team record: 64–34
First place by twelve and a half games

The games for the Dodgers series had been sold out for months, and reporters pulled out every hackneyed line they could find in the sportswriter toolbox: the Dodgers had their backs against the wall; it was do-or-die time; there was no tomorrow; it was now or never. Really, it was a whole lot less than that. There was no race. The Reds, with a spectacular six-week show, had run away from the Dodgers.
Truth was, there were no interesting races anywhere in baseball. The three-time World Champion Oakland A’s were ten games up in the American League West. The Boston Red Sox were not expected to do well before the season began, but the emergence of two rookies—Fred Lynn and Jim Rice—had changed their fortunes, and they led the New York Yankees by seven games in the American League East. And the Pittsburgh Pirates—who had won the National League East four of the previous five years—had a comfortable enough five-game lead. There would not be much tension in the final two months.

So teams had to find different ways to draw fans. In Atlanta, they spread twenty-four thousand one-dollar bills on the field and had six fans try to grab as many as they could in ninety seconds. One of those fans, Peggy Stephens, entertained everyone by stuffing the bills in her blouse. In Minnesota, manager Frank Quilici hoped to spark his team and inspire some fan support by naming Rod Carew—the league’s leading hitter—as team captain. Unfortunately, the Twins were in last place at the time, twenty games behind Oakland. “Today seemed like the ideal moment,” Quilici said. He would be fired at the end of the season. In Texas, manager Billy Martin announced that he had been fired right in the middle of the season, and he used the moment to publicly announce that Rangers owner Brad Corbett “has owned his team for one year, and he thinks he’s a baseball genius. Corbett knows as much about baseball as I know about plastic pipe.”

And in Cincinnati, the Dodgers arrived for four games. Players on each team tried halfheartedly to make it sound like the games still had some meaning. If the Dodgers somehow swept all four games, they would be only eight and a half games back, and anyway, it was something to talk about.

“I don’t want to win this thing by twenty games,” Joe moaned to reporters, an interesting new complaint. Joe worried that the Reds would lose their edge if they won the division title too easily. In truth, he felt like the Reds already
had
lost their edge. They had been playing poorly since the All-Star Game (though the Dodgers were play
ing badly themselves). Morgan had been playing poorly. “Maybe I do too much for a little guy,” he said in a weak moment. And he went on: “I’m tired. I’m always battling, but I’m going to rest somewhere.” This was not something that a member of the Machine was supposed to say, certainly not to reporters. Joe knew, even as the reporter was writing down the words, that he had made a mistake, and his teammates would make him pay.

The Reds and Dodgers played a doubleheader that Friday night, and more than fifty-one thousand packed into Riverfront Stadium to see it. In the afternoon, heat poured upward from the Astroturf; it felt like they were playing over a New York sewer grate. At night, moths fluttered in the lights. The Dodgers won the first game after a backup outfielder named John Hale smacked a double in the eighth inning to score Garvey and then came around to score himself a couple of batters later. The Dodgers’ previously indestructible Mike Marshall was back after missing close to two months with that mysterious injury back in April. He felt good again. And he still knew how to unwind the Machine. He threw two shutout innings, which infuriated Pete all over again.

“We have got to
hit
that son of a bitch,” Pete shouted. Pete didn’t feel any of the hesitant feelings that Joe felt. He wanted to win the division by twenty games, thirty games, fifty games. He wanted the Dodgers to writhe in embarrassment. He did not want there to be any excuses left. He did not want them to say, when it all ended, “It would have been different if only we’d had Marshall all year.”

Second game, seventh inning, Reds trailed 3–2, and Pete stepped to the plate with two men on base. Marshall was pitching again. “Pete Rose was the weakest hitter in that lineup,” Marshall would say many years later; the war between the two raged on. “Well, he was. I could get him out pretty much anytime I liked. All he did was hit the ball on the ground and run. The only way Pete Rose could hit me was if I made a mistake.”

This time, Pete moved his hands up on the bat three or four
inches—Marshall had struck him out in the first game with a sneaky fastball, and Pete was not about to let one of those go by again. Marshall threw, only it wasn’t a fastball this time. It was instead a hanging screwball—meaning it was up and sitting there, tempting as low-hanging fruit. It was a Mike Marshall mistake. Pete turned on it, crushed it, a line drive homer to left field, a final blow.

“It was a big one,” Pete said after the game. “The Dodgers were done before. But they’re really done now.”

When Joe Morgan arrived at the ballpark early the next day, a Saturday, he still felt exhausted. He had not gotten a hit Friday. To be precise, he had not gotten a hit in his previous eighteen at-bats—hell, he had not even hit the ball hard. His batting average had plummeted twenty points, his magical season was drifting away, and he was angry and disappointed and, more than anything, tired.

He walked into the clubhouse and toward his locker. There he saw two pillows, a sleeping bag, a cup of coffee, a pair of slippers, and two aspirin tablets.

There it was: his teammates’ response to his “I’m going to rest somewhere” quote. Joe looked around quickly. Was it Bench? No, he wasn’t around. Rose? Doggie—it had to be Doggie. Only he wasn’t around either. With this team, it could have been any one of them. And so Morgan just shouted out loud, for everyone to hear, “You guys are crazy! Insane! I love it! Without this, I’d hang myself.”

And that afternoon Joe banged two hits, scored a run, drove in a run, and the Reds beat the Dodgers again.

July 30 to August 18

For three weeks in that hot summer of 1975,
while the Eagles’ song “One of These Nights” played constantly on the radio, while actor Bob Newhart and singer John Denver guest-hosted for Johnny Carson on
The Tonight Show,
while President Ford tried to reassure a nation scarred by Watergate and Vietnam and a tumbling economy, while everyone wondered if Jimmy Hoffa was alive, the Big Red Machine played baseball as well as it has ever been played.

The Reds had had brilliant times before, of course. And there would be many more famous moments to come. But this was their apex, their Fifth Symphony, their
Citizen Kane.
This was the time when all the tumblers clicked into place, when Pete stretched doubles into triples, when Joe stole bases with abandon, when Johnny hit and threw, when George Foster hit long home runs, when Doggie drove in runs, when those haunted starting pitchers—Gary Nolan, Freddie Norman, Jack Billingham, Pat Darcy—were unbeatable.

For eighteen games, the Reds’ whole team hit .318. For eighteen games, the Reds’ starting pitchers did not lose even once. For eighteen games, the Reds won by big scores and small ones, they won easily and they won with late comebacks, they won with speed, with
power, with defense, with starting pitching, with great relief, with strategy, and with pride. They lost only twice, and even those games were epic. In one loss, the Reds relaxed and blew a five-run lead. Sparky Anderson would call the other loss one of the greatest games he ever managed.

The stretch was breathtaking, no less so because it was also—in real terms—almost meaningless. The championship race was over. The Reds began the stretch thirteen and a half games up on the Dodgers and everyone else. They had the best record in baseball. They could have coasted into the playoffs. But maybe that’s what separates good and great, beautiful and spectacular, contender and champion. In a baseball season, there are many muggy days, late in the season, when the race has been won or lost, and exhaustion has set in, and the bat feels heavy, and the strike zone moves, and the sound of the crowd pounds like a jackhammer on a New York sidewalk. And the great teams win on those days.

Joe Morgan and Pete Rose had an almost daily argument. Joe believed you play baseball to win, nothing else. That’s how he lived, that’s how he performed, that’s why he wanted to be good at everything. He did not steal bases with the team up a few runs. He did not enjoy playing as much when his team was comfortably ahead (or hopelessly behind). He rested a few games every year so he could stay fresh. He did not want to beat the Dodgers by twenty games. He thrived on victory and defeat.

Pete believed something else. He believed that you play baseball to
play
. Sure, he conceded, you play to win. Sure, he conceded, you play for money. Sure, he happily admitted, you play for fame and celebrity and the fancy cars and the second glance of the woman in tight jeans. He was no monk, not even a baseball monk, not by a long shot. But there was something more. He hungered for one more at-bat, one more ground ball to field, one more chance to bring the crowd to its feet. He played to make headlines, to make history, to let everyone on the ball field know that Pete Rose was the toughest ball
player they had ever run across. He was playing in a spring training game once, and Sparky wanted to take him out. “One more at-bat,” he told Sparky, and in that at-bat he ripped a ball into the gap, and he rounded first, rounded second, raced to third, and finished it off with a vintage, flying headfirst Pete Rose slide. He got up, dusted himself off, and waved to the dugout.

“Now you can take me out,” he shouted. He had given the kids a thrill.

Baseball fit his personality because it was the one game played off Wall Street that encouraged selfishness and rewarded greed and called the guy with the highest batting average “Champion.”

“Pete, I’m going to give you a rest one of these days,” Sparky said to him at one point in the middle of this glorious stretch.

“Well, who do we play Thursday?” Pete asked.

“Nobody,” Sparky said. “We have Thursday off.”

“Fine,” Pete said. “Then that will be my day of rest.”

For eighteen games in the middle of their remarkable season, the Reds played baseball Pete Rose’s way. They played for glory. And they were damned good.

Sparky Anderson began the glorious stretch in a foul mood. His genius had paid off better than even he expected—the Reds had run away from the Dodgers with their best pitcher, Don Gullett, injured and out—but it had worn Sparky down too. The Reds had gone forty-five consecutive games without having a starting pitcher throw a complete game. That was a record, and it kept Sparky up at night. For forty-five straight games, every single night, Sparky made the slow walk to the mound to take out his starter. His starting pitchers despised him. The fans booed him. The newspaper guys mocked him. Sure, it was all well and good to say that he didn’t care about that stuff, but he cared. He was not mild and unsure George Anderson pulling weeds in his backyard and letting the phone ring. No, he was
Sparky Anderson, showman, and he managed the best baseball team in the world, maybe even the best baseball team that ever was, and he wanted everyone to know it.

“Damn it, we’ve got to end this streak, it’s killing me,” he kept telling his pitching coach, Larry Shepard. “I don’t care what happens, tonight the starter’s going the distance.” But then it would be the eighth or ninth inning, and the Reds would be up a few runs, and the starter would show the slightest sign of weakening, and Sparky would take that slow walk to the mound. He could not help himself. He could not take any chances. He really was Captain Hook.

The first game of the glorious stretch, the Reds led San Francisco 6–1 in the ninth inning, and the starting pitcher, Pat Darcy, was still on the mound. It was miserably hot in Cincinnati, fans were fainting in the stands, and Darcy was pitching on fumes. Pat grew up in Arizona, and he loved pitching in the heat, but he knew that his energy was drained. His fastball had nothing on it. Darcy gave up a single to Gary Matthews. He gave up another single to Willie Montanez. Darcy told himself:
Don’t look at the dugout. Don’t look at Sparky. If you look at him, he will take you out of this game.

And it was a good thing he did not look, because he had it just right: Captain Hook was beginning to get worried. Sparky did not want this streak to keep going, but damn it, he was not going to lose a baseball game just to prove a point. He got Rawly Eastwick to start warming up in the bullpen. Damn it.

Darcy settled in, found a burst of energy. He struck out Chris Speier. He got Derrel Thomas to fly out to center field. Two out. Sparky felt good again. The kid was going to do it; he was going to end this damn streak once and for all. Then Steve Ontiveros rapped a single to left, and Sparky stood up again. “They’re killing me, Shep,” he said to his pitching coach, Larry Shepard. “They’s absolutely killing me.”

A guy named Jake Brown stepped up to pinch-hit for the Giants. He had been in the big leagues for about two months, and he would
be in the big leagues for only two more months. “If this guy gets on,” Sparky announced to everyone, “I’m hooking him.”

Pat did not hear Sparky yell that…but he knew anyway. He had a five-run lead, and he was one out away from a complete-game victory, and he had pitched beautifully…but it did not matter. If he did not get the out, he was gone. Pat threw one of his sinking fastballs, and Jake Brown pounded it into the ground toward first base. Doggie scooped it up, touched the bag, the game was over, the streak was over, and Sparky felt free.

“You know people were fainting in the stands,” a reporter told Darcy.

“Really?” Pat asked back. “Over a complete game?”

Next day, Sparky was in his office when he heard some yelling back in the clubhouse. He didn’t think anything about it because the guys on the Machine were always yelling about something. Johnny Bench knocked on the door and poked his head into the office. He said that Merv Rettenmund, the Reds’ backup outfielder, had to go to the hospital. What followed was pulled out of an Abbott and Costello routine.

“What happened?” Sparky asked.

“Terry Crowley stepped on his foot,” Bench said.

“Oh,” Sparky said. “Wait, why in the hell did he step on Merv’s foot?”

“He was breaking up the fight,” Bench said.

“Oh,” Sparky said. “Wait, what fight?”

“The fight between Cesar and Pedro,” Bench said.

“Oh,” Sparky said. “Wait. What?”

Cesar Geronimo and Pedro Borbon were best friends and roommates. Their personalities meshed perfectly. Pedro was loud and loony, and he had that savage temper. And Cesar was precisely the opposite. He was as quiet as the furniture, and he always seemed
at peace. Cesar, like Borbon, grew up in the Dominican Republic. When he was twelve, his parents sent him away to the Santo Tomas de Aquino Seminary to study for the priesthood. Cesar believed that he was destined to be a priest, he thought that was his calling, but at night he would listen to New York Yankees games on the transistor radio that he had slipped under his pillow.

He did not play baseball at the seminary—there was no baseball to be played. Instead, he played softball, and it was while playing softball that he developed what hitting coach Big Klu would call “a swing absolutely as bad as anything I’d ever seen in a big-league uniform.” With a swing like that—“like he’s trying to crush a cockroach,” Pete would say—Cesar should have had no chance to sign with a professional baseball team. But he had one thing: he was born with a magnificent left arm. That was the arm that the famed Yankees scout Pepe Sada saw when Cesar showed up at a tryout camp. Sada signed Cesar based on that arm, signed him to be a pitcher or an outfielder, didn’t matter, he would let them worry about that back on the mainland.

Cesar became an outfielder. He hit .194 his first year in the minor leagues. But he saw his signing as a gift from God, a sign too, and he had a fierce determination to make it to the big leagues. He taught himself how to play center field, and he played it with a beautiful grace—he looked like Joe DiMaggio out there.

They brought a little something out in each other. Cesar was the one guy in the clubhouse who seemed to know how to calm down Pedro. And Pedro was the one guy in the clubhouse who could get Cesar to talk. Only, on this day, Pedro started to make fun of Cesar, and for once Cesar came back with a few rips of his own. Pedro didn’t like it. He yelled, causing the Reds players around to step in the middle. Pedro sat down at the stool by his locker. The moment passed. Only then, quite suddenly, Pedro bolted to his feet and went after Cesar. A bunch of people stepped in to stop the fight. The only injury was to Merv, one of those players who stepped in.

“Damn it,
that’s it
!” Sparky yelled after he closed the clubhouse to reporters. “There will be no more ripping around here. Do you hear me?”

If they heard, they did not listen. That night, the Reds were facing a rookie pitcher named John Montefusco—everyone was calling him “the Count of Montefusco,” or just “the Count” for short. The Count had won ten games, and he was among the league leaders in strikeouts. But what made him special, what made him the talk of baseball in 1975, was that he bragged and gloated and never shut up. All week, leading into the game, Montefusco guaranteed that he would not just beat the Reds, he would shut them out. And he would not just shut them out. He would strike out Johnny Bench four times in the game. When asked by reporters if it was wise to rattle the cage of the Big Red Machine, the Count smiled and said that the Machine had never seen anything like him.

“Hey, Count,” Johnny yelled at him before the game. “You strike me out four times, and I’m buying you a steak dinner.”

“I can taste it already,” the Count yelled back.

“Hey, Count,” Pete Rose yelled. “Did you hear that Morgan’s not playing tonight?”

“Morgan’s not playing?” the Count yelled back. “Well, then it won’t just be a shutout tonight. It will be a no-hitter.”

The Reds loved it. Montefusco was their kind of player. He was a beautiful inspiration for a late summer ball game. “You know the difference between us and everyone else?” Joe Morgan would say. “Everyone else talks when they’re winning. We talk whether we’re winning or losing.”

First batter, Pete Rose, struck out. Montefusco smiled big. Then Ken Griffey doubled and stole third. (Joe Morgan wasn’t in the lineup, so Griffey was free to run.) Ken scored when Johnny Bench’s ground ball was mishandled by first baseman Willie Montanez.

“Lucky!”
the Count screamed.

“You didn’t strike me out, meat,” Johnny screamed back.

Next inning, George Foster doubled, Darrel Chaney doubled, and Reds pitcher Clay Kirby doubled too. Ken walked. Danny Driessen singled and then stole second. Johnny Bench walked up to the plate, and he saw that the Count’s face was ashen. On a full count, Johnny smashed a long home run to left field. Before the ball even landed, San Francisco manager Wes Westrum had reached the mound and taken the ball away from Montefusco. The Cincinnati crowd jeered and waved handkerchiefs and laughed as Montefusco walked toward the dugout. Before he disappeared, though, the Count of Montefusco tipped his cap.

“Are you out of the prediction business?” the Count was asked.

“Hell, no,” he said. “Wait till I get ’em back in San Francisco.”

There was a saying in baseball that went like so: every time Walter Alston sneezed, the rest of the National League caught a cold. Alston was the grand old man of the game—he had been managing the team since 1954, since the Dodgers were in Brooklyn, and he had won four World Series, and he had won another three pennants, and yes, it was true that pretty much every other manager in the game copied Walter’s style.

So, yes, Sparky wanted to outsmart the grand old man, at least this once. And here it was, eighth inning, Reds leading 3–2, and Alston was trying everything he could to tie the score. Alston sent in a pinch hitter. Then he sent in another pinch hitter. Then, he sent in
another
pinch hitter. Sparky looked at the scorecard and smiled. Even when the Dodgers tied the score, he did not stop smiling. Walter Alston had buried himself. He had made so many moves in his desperate effort to tie the score that he had no choice but to put a second baseman, Lee Lacy, in left field. He had to put a left fielder, Tom Paciorek, in center field. He had to put his utility infielder, Rick Auerbach, at shortstop.
He had to put Paul Powell, a twenty-seven-year-old with seven big league hits, at catcher. Sparky had barely heard of Paul Powell. It was a freak show out there.