The Machine (7 page)

That was Jeff Ruby, a mouthy Jewish kid who had gone to Cornell. Sparky called him “bubula”—Yiddish for “babe”—and when Jeff transferred out to Sharonville so he could be manager of his own Holiday Inn, well, Sparky transferred out there with him. It would not be a baseball season without Jeff. And he didn’t give a damn if his coaches had to drive a few extra minutes.

“Bubula,” Sparky whispered to Jeff over dinner that night. (That was another thing: Sparky often whispered when he talked to Jeff, like they were sharing a secret.) “People don’t know, bubula. They think they know this team, they think they know the Big Red Machine, but they don’t know anything. Bubula, we’re going to be good. We’re going to be really good.”

Jeff smiled. He’d heard versions of this speech before. Every year, the day before the opener, they would have dinner, and every year, the day before the opener, Sparky would predict that the Reds would win the World Series. So far it had not happened. So far, the Machine had finished every season in disappointment. But there was an edge to Sparky’s voice this time.

“Remember, bubula,” Sparky was saying, “in life you don’t treat people the same. You don’t treat Humpty Dumpty like you treat King Tut. Don’t fool yourself about people. Some people will let you down in life. And you can’t let them let you down. Do you understand? You have to get those people out of the way. You have to follow your stars.

“I’m telling you,” he continued, “the stars will win it for us this time.”

April 7 to April 19

Opening Day, April 7, 1975

CINCINNATI
REDS VS. DODGERS

Baseball has always been a game
of myth and fables. One of the most powerful of these is that a career military man named Abner Doubleday, the man who aimed the cannon that fired the first shot in defense of Fort Sumter the Civil War, invented the game. Doubleday, it was said, sketched out the game’s rules and played the first games on Elihu Phinney’s farm in a picturesque New York town called Cooperstown. It was a sweet fable, no less so for being entirely untrue. The real origins of baseball are murky and serpentine. Baseball probably derives from games like cricket and rounders and perhaps a game called oina played in Romania during the fourteenth century. Baseball surely gained its shape and rhythms in the small towns across the young American nation, where people played their own version of bat-and-ball games. Civil War soldiers played base ball—two words, back then—all over the nation.

There are no mysteries, though, about where baseball—the pro
fessional game, the one we know, the American pastime, peanuts and Cracker Jack—was invented. That game sprang to life in Cincinnati in 1869, and it sprang to life for the most American of reasons: a group of Cincinnati business leaders grew tired of watching the local baseball team get their heads kicked in game after game. They had to get better players. And so they decided to pay the players money. Of course, teams had been paying players for years, but always covertly; there seemed to be something unseemly, especially in the years after the war, about paying men to play a gentlemen’s sport. The Cincinnati businessmen decided there was something quite a bit more unseemly about losing. They paid a New York jeweler named Harry Wright $1,200 to play outfield, and they asked him to put together a baseball team that could stick it to the elitists from New York and other eastern cities.

Harry Wright traveled to New York and other eastern cities and hired a few of those elitists (including his brother George, widely viewed as the best player in the world). Years later, Harry Ellard, a Cincinnati journalist, published the list of players on that first professional team, their jobs, and their salaries.

It was $9,300 well spent. They called themselves the Cincinnati Red Stockings, named after the gaudy red stockings they wore. They
traveled the country to play the best teams (charging 50¢ per ticket), and they were unbeatable. They won all 57 games they played in 1869. The games were not close. The Red Stockings beat the Atlantic Baseball Club 76–5, and they beat the Pacific Baseball Club 66–5. Rough statistics were kept—George Wright hit .633 with 49 home runs. The Red Stockings’ most daunting player may have been their pitcher, Asa Brainard. In those days, pitchers were supposed to pitch the ball underhanded—this is where the term “pitcher” came from—and they were supposed to let batters hit the ball. Of course, from the start, pitchers always looked for an edge. Brainard figured a way to sneak in a little extra wrist snap, which put spin on the ball and made it significantly harder to hit. Many people believe the term “ace” for outstanding pitcher began with Asa Brainard’s first name.

For a moment, in that year when Ulysses Grant became president and Susan B. Anthony formed the National Women’s Suffrage Association, Cincinnati was the hub of baseball. The moment did not last. By the end of the year, there were more than a dozen professional baseball teams, and after that, two dozen, and soon Cincinnati found itself priced out of the high-stakes game it created. The Reds, as they became known, joined the National League in 1876, but they won just nine of their sixty-five games. And soon after, they were thrown out of the National League because beer was sold in the stadium on Sundays.

Baseball years were trying after that. The Reds did get back into the National League, and they won the World Series in 1919 against the famed Chicago Black Sox, the team that got paid by gamblers to throw the Series. The Reds won the championship again in 1940, the year before America went to war. It didn’t satisfy anyone. Toward the end of the “Red Scare” of the McCarthy years and thereafter, from 1956 to 1960, the Reds changed their name to the more patriotic “Redlegs,” but the Redlegs drew so poorly that there was talk about moving them to another city. The Reds were good in the 1960s—they won a pennant in 1960 and almost won another in 1964—and the
Machine won more games than any other team in the early 1970s, but those Reds were never the best. The only time they were first was on opening day—the first baseball game of every season was played in Cincinnati, a tip of the cap to the first professional baseball team.

“I don’t want to just start first,” Sparky Anderson said to reporters. “I want to finish first.”

Sparky Anderson stopped on the way to the ballpark to buy three hibachi grills. It was always cold on opening day in Cincinnati. As he drove, Sparky reminded himself again not to make any guarantees. He had to control himself.

It was never easy for him. The trouble was that Sparky was two men at heart. He was Georgie Anderson, son of a housepainter, a hardscrabble kid who would read the Bible now and then and lie out at the pool every day and daydream back to the happiest days of his life, his young days in South Dakota, in a little town called Bridgewater, where the jail was never locked and his father would spend Halloween sitting inside the family outhouse with a shotgun to be sure nobody stole it. Georgie Anderson had a heart of gold and a quiet nature. Georgie could not send a steak back if it was overcooked; he didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. Georgie would let the phone ring because he did not feel like talking. Georgie would drink milk to soothe the ulcer that burned inside. Georgie spent every day of the off-season walking through his yard in California, pulling any weeds that dared to appear. Georgie sometimes felt like he could be happy for the rest of his life pulling weeds.

Few people knew Georgie Anderson. They knew Sparky Anderson, manager of the Big Red Machine, purveyor of wit, guardian of baseball’s tradition, soother of ill feelings, botcher of the English language, defender of an America gone by. And as Sparky Anderson, he could not stop talking. He could not stop entertaining. He could not stop making bold predictions. Because if there was one thing that
Sparky knew completely, it was that he had the best damned baseball team that had ever been put forth on God’s green earth. He would get going on Johnny Bench or Pete Rose or Joe Morgan, especially Joe. He loved that little man, and well, he would sometimes start crying in the middle of a sentence, that’s how much he loved those guys. They could play baseball better than he ever dreamed, better than anyone else, and still they listened to Sparky, they played hard for Sparky, they kept their hair trimmed and their uniforms clean and their minds on the game, all for Sparky. He wanted to tell the whole world about them. He wanted to shout out their names. He needed to guarantee victory because that’s what they deserved. Victory.

Trouble was, year after year, he predicted the Reds would win the World Series, and then the Reds did not win the World Series and he felt terrible. He had made his stars look like losers, like chumps. Every year, he told himself to shut up, let the season play out, let everyone see for themselves the wonders of the Big Red Machine. But then some loudmouth sportswriter would talk about the Dodgers, and Sparky would say, “The Dodgers? Hell, the Dodgers ain’t even in our league.” And it would start all over again. Sparky could not help himself.

“I’m not going to guarantee anything this time,” he had told the press. Of course, a couple of days later he had said, “If the Dodgers are going to beat us, they’re going to have to win a hundred games.” And then for the column in the
Cincinnati Post
he wrote (through his ghostwriter Earl Lawson), “We’ve got a good ball club, a real good one, and I think if we stay injury free we’ll still be playing in October.” It was another guarantee.

Now it was opening day, and his Reds were playing those Dodgers, and Sparky knew that they would give him a microphone and have him address the sellout crowd. It was a bad place to put Sparky Anderson, and he knew it.

President Gerald Ford could not make it to Cincinnati for opening day, just like he could not make it to Cincinnati for Johnny Bench’s wedding. Vietnam was collapsing. The king of Saudi Arabia had been shot. The world would not stop. Ford liked baseball all right, though he had gotten some grief for supposedly saying that he watched a lot of baseball on the radio. Ford felt certain he did not say that. He tried to make up for it when he was given a season pass from Major League Baseball and had his key speechwriter, Robert Orben, write a few “ad-libs” for the occasion.

“I played football in college, but I also had a great interest in baseball,” Orben wrote for Ford. “There’s something about a sport where you don’t have to wear a helmet that appeals to me.” Ford, noting that baseball players do wear helmets, crossed out the line. He did not want to be mocked again.

“There are a lot of similarities between baseball and politics,” Orben wrote and President Ford said. “One of the worst things you can hear in baseball is: ‘You’re out.’ Same thing in politics.”

With Ford back in Washington, the designated politician of the day was Robert Taft, the Ohio senator and grandson of former president and baseball pioneer William Howard Taft. In his younger days, William Howard Taft had played baseball in Cincinnati—it was said that he could hit with power—but his real contribution to the game was that he became the first president to throw out the first pitch at a game. That was 1910. A legend was built that day: The story went that Taft—the heaviest American president—grew uncomfortable in his small seat and stood up after the top half of the seventh inning. When he stood, everyone in the stadium stood, and that was the first seventh-inning stretch. That story, like most great baseball stories, is probably not true.

Robert Taft rolled into the ballpark in a horse-drawn carriage. He looked good, everyone thought, considering that a biting wind blew through the stadium and Taft had suffered a heart attack only
two months earlier. The senator wore a giant button that read, G
O
R
EDS
, B
EAT THE
B
UMS
. He threw out the first pitch to Johnny Bench. Everyone cheered. Jim Lovell, the astronaut who brought
Apollo 13
home after an explosion, stood to be recognized. Everyone cheered again. The largest crowd ever to see a baseball game in Cincinnati—52,526 people—crammed into their seats at Riverfront Stadium. Sparky was handed a microphone.

“I can honestly say this is the finest baseball team we have ever brought north,” he said. “We’re going to make you proud.”

Across the way, in the other dugout, the Dodgers relief pitcher Mike Marshall shook his head. “Well,” he muttered, “it’s good to see that Sparky’s as full of shit as ever.”

Here was the lineup that Sparky Anderson sent out to face the Los Angeles Dodgers that opening day, along with the ages and approximate salaries of those players.

It was a good lineup, a great lineup even, though it had holes. Concepcion was not a powerful enough hitter to be batting fifth.
Griffey was too good a hitter and too fast a base runner to be batting seventh. And Vukovich…Sparky did not want him in the lineup at all.

The Reds were playing in what everyone expected to be the toughest division in baseball, the National League West. Most sportswriters thought the Dodgers would win the division and, after that, the World Series. The Reds were picked second, but many people expected the Atlanta Braves to contend too; the Braves had great pitching led by the knuckleballer Phil Niekro and a young pitcher named Buzz Capra. The Houston Astros had been a pretty good team in 1974, though tragedy struck in January when star pitcher Don Wilson was found dead in his Ford Thunderbird, which had been running inside the garage. The San Francisco Giants, after years of success, were on the downturn, and the San Diego Padres were expected to be routinely awful. Most people were convinced that it would come down to Los Angeles and Cincinnati, and the teams were playing each other seven times in the first eleven days.