The Machine (8 page)

“Good,” Sparky said. “We might as well find out right away which team is best.”

George Foster stared out at the field. It was the fourteenth inning, and he was still on the bench. “I’ve seen more baseball games than any player alive,” he had told reporters. “Why, I even know some of the players personally.” George squeezed a rubber ball again and again. He was twenty-six years old, and he had been beaten up by baseball. Lately he had come to believe he would never get his chance. Foster knew that admitting defeat was the first step on the road to perdition, but what else could he do? He had been with the Reds for four years, and nothing changed. They hardly noticed him. Sparky never even looked his way. Foster read his Bible every day in search of answers. “Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord.” Yes. The Lord was coming. But how patient could a brother be?

Sparky thought Foster was weak. Foster knew that. It was funny, really, if you thought about it. Sparky was five-foot-nine, maybe, white hair, wrinkled, tired under the eyes—the guy looked like somebody’s grandfather even though he was just forty-one years old. And Foster was a physical marvel, the very picture of strength. He stood six-foot-one, had a twenty-eight-inch waist, arms roughly as big around as Sparky’s legs. During batting practice, he crushed the longest home runs on the team. Nobody on the team was stronger than George Foster. But Sparky meant something else.

Sparky, at that moment, was looking up and down the bench but avoiding Foster’s eyes. Foster could not help but feel a bit amused. The April wind chilled the dugout. Charcoal burned on Sparky’s new hibachi grills, and players gathered around to warm their hands. Gray smoke blew out of the dugout; the place smelled like a barbecue pit. Sparky was stuck. It was the fourteenth inning, two outs, the score was tied, and the Reds outfielder Cesar Geronimo was on third base. Sparky wanted to win this game badly, wanted to send his message to the Dodgers. The Reds pitcher was due up, so Sparky had to choose a pinch hitter. He had only two choices. He could send up Doug Flynn, a rookie who had never played in a major league game before. Or he could send up Foster. George studied Sparky’s face; he could see how badly Sparky wanted to go with someone else.

“Foster,” Sparky finally yelled. “Grab a bat.”

It was done. George felt his insides shake. George figured that at his age he was not supposed to feel nerves. He had been in the big leagues, on and off, since he was twenty years old, and these jittery moments were for kids. Still, he felt as nervous as he had felt on his first school day in California when he walked into Roosevelt Elementary School and saw that he was the only African American in the class. His family had moved to Hawthorne from Alabama—in Alabama, George did not know any white people. Except, he said, policemen.

Now those childhood nerves gripped him again. It is just one
at-bat, he told himself. It is just one game. He tried to tell himself that. Only, his mind would not let go. This was not just one at-bat. This was not just one game. This was his career. This was his life. If he could come through here, crack a single up the middle, crush the baseball off the wall, drive home the winning run, give Sparky Anderson the win he so desperately wanted and needed, well, his life might change. He might get to play more. He might convince Sparky that he was not weak, that he could be a star in this game if given the chance.

And if he failed? Well, he could not fail. Sparky
was
wrong about him. George was not weak. He was not soft. No, he did not drink or smoke or screw every groupie who loitered around the team hotel. But, George was sure, those were not things that made a man. A man was…well, all George Foster really knew was that he could not fail. He would drive Geronimo in. He would win the game. He would not fail.

The Dodgers pitcher was Charlie Hough, a twenty-seven-year-old man from Honolulu whose career had ground to a halt in the minor leagues until he learned how to throw a knuckleball. There is something mystical about the knuckleball. Baseball is a game of speed. To a fan in the stands, everything moves fast: the pitches, the crack of the bat, the runners, the fielders, the umpires’ calls. The knuckleball moves slowly. It doesn’t fit the eye, doesn’t keep up with the pace of the game. The knuckleball pitcher hardly seems to be trying. But the knuckleballer isn’t going for speed. He is trying to throw the baseball so that it does not rotate—when thrown well, the ball dances and quivers to the whims of air resistance, bouncing like a balloon in the wind. When thrown well, a knuckleball is not only impossible to hit with a baseball bat, it’s darned near impossible to catch with a padded mitt. Bob Uecker, the old Braves catcher, used to say that the secret to catching a knuckleball was to wait until it stopped rolling and then pick it up.

George Foster stepped into the batter’s box and watched a couple
of knuckleballs float by. Nerves were supposed to go away once the action began, that’s what everyone said, but Foster only felt his hands shake. He saw a knuckleball coming, and he swung hard. He topped the ball. No! He saw the ball rolling slowly down the third-base line, fair territory. No! Foster started to run to first base, and he felt like he was stomping grapes, he was barely moving at all. He had been exercising in the dugout all game long to stay warm, to prepare for this moment, and now his legs felt cramped. It was like that dream, the one where you run and run but you stay in place, you gain no ground. Still, he ran.

Foster could not see what was happening behind him. Geronimo raced for home; he would score only if Foster could make it safely to first. The Dodgers’ third baseman, Ron Cey, rushed forward—well, he sort of rushed; Cey’s wobbly running style had earned him the nickname “the Penguin”—and scooped up the ball and threw hard to first base. The baseball and George Foster reached first base at the same time. First-base umpire Paul Pryor had been a minor league baseball player for a few years, and he had been an umpire in the big leagues since 1961. He had made calls like these too many times to even think about them. It was all instinct.

“Safe,” Pryor shouted.

The Reds won the game. The largest crowd ever to see a baseball game in Cincinnati stood and stomped in the chill. Reds players rushed out to jump on Geronimo and Foster. A couple of the Dodgers players rushed Paul Pryor for a moment, then angrily slipped away. “I know in my heart we had the man,” the Dodgers’ first baseman, Steve Garvey, said, but nobody around cared much about Garvey’s sour grapes.

“George beat the throw by that far,” Sparky Anderson said in the clubhouse, and he held out his shaky hands for everyone to see. “My hands, they always shake,” he said happily.

Foster cheerfully talked to reporters. Pat Darcy, the Reds’ rookie pitcher who held the Dodgers scoreless in the thirteenth and
fourteenth innings, looked over the bottle of champagne that Joe Morgan gave him as a gift. “From my own personal stock,” Morgan said. Pete Rose told reporter after reporter how this was a big win, huge, enormous.

And Joe Morgan, the Reds’ star second baseman, leaned back contentedly on his stool and pulled out a cigar. “The Dodgers,” he said, “can’t possibly believe they are better than us.”

April 9, 1975

CINCINNATI
REDS VS. DODGERS

Team record: 1–0

They were called Reds, yes, but they were the most conservative outfit in sports. Bob Howsam and Sparky Anderson created this seemingly endless list of rules. Everyone had to keep his hair short—the reliever Pedro Borbon had been charged with the role of team barber. Everyone had to wear black shoes, all black; clubhouse boys were responsible for blacking out any white logos with shoe polish. Everyone had to wear his pant legs at the knees so the red socks would be seen. No one could wear a beard. No one could be seen in public without a jacket and tie. No one could drink any alcohol on the team plane. And so on. And so on.

The thing that separated the Reds, though, was not the rules themselves. It was the way the players took the rules. “What the hell would Bob Howsam or Sparky have said if I decided to wear my hair long?” Pete Rose would ask. “What would they have done if Johnny Bench decided to wear his pants low? What if Joe Morgan had wanted to wear a mustache? What do you think they would have done? They would not have done shit.”

Perhaps. But the men of the Machine did not break the rules.
They did not bend the rules. No, it was the opposite: they embraced the rules, and in a strange way, they even loved the rules. The Reds players saw themselves as defenders of another time, a better time, a time when the great St. Louis Cardinals player Stan Musial would smoke under stairwells so that no kid would see him. The Reds players like Johnny and Joe and even Pete saw themselves as baseball players from that time before America lost wars, before the college kids burned draft cards, before
Sports Illustrated
ran a cover photograph of Chicago White Sox first baseman Dick Allen with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth.

“We need more heroes, especially for our young people,” Johnny Bench told the
St. Petersburg Times
sports editor Hubert Mizell. “Even if we have to keep ’em a little naive, it’s worth it…. I was seventeen years old before I knew that any major league ballplayer smoked or drank. It didn’t hurt [me] either.”

Yes, those Reds players had a pretty good idea what a ballplayer was supposed to be like: he was supposed to drink milk and say “gosh” and hit home runs for sick children in hospitals. And while none of the Reds players did those things, well, they came close enough. Anyway, they kept their hair short. They acted the way a ballplayer was supposed to act.

Mike Marshall, on the other hand, did not. Marshall was the Dodgers’ relief pitcher, and he was the one guy who scared the living hell out of the Reds. He was just so…odd. There was nothing at all physically intimidating about the man. Marshall was thirty-two years old, balding, no taller than five-foot-ten. His muttonchop sideburns curved toward the corner of his mouth, and he wore a bushy mustache, and he seemed to be trying to look like Alexander II of Russia. Marshall did not throw hard at all; it was his tepid fastball that inspired Jim Bouton, in his classic book
Ball Four,
to invent “Doubleday’s First Law”: “If you throw a fastball with insufficient speed, someone will smack it out of the park with a stick.”

So why did Marshall terrify the Reds? For one thing, he was a doc
tor; anyway, that’s what people called him. He wasn’t the sort of doctor the Reds players could appreciate; he did not set casts or pull tonsils. He had earned his doctorate in kinesiology. When games ended, he shunned groupies of all ages and shapes and spent his free time with researchers. During the off-season, he taught classes at Michigan State. The topic of his dissertation was “Classifying Adolescent Males for Motor Proficiency Norms.” It made Marshall angry when reporters got that wrong.

Dr. Mike Marshall was less a baseball player and more like, say, Bobby Fischer, the American chess genius who that same week abdicated his place as world chess champion rather than face off against the Soviet Union’s Anatoly Karpov. Fischer seemed to be standing on some sort of principle, though nobody quite knew what principle or where he stood on it.

Marshall, too, seemed to stand on baffling principles. For instance, he refused to sign autographs, even for kids. Especially for kids. “As an athlete I am no one to be idolized,” he told
Sports Illustrated.
“I will not perpetuate that hoax.”

The Reds thought: What kind of Communist would not sign an autograph for a kid? It was un-American. The Reds players believed wholeheartedly that baseball players not only deserved to be idolized by kids, but
should
be idolized by kids. That’s how it was when America was strong. Kids looked up to the pitcher Walter Johnson, and then they went off to fight World War I. Kids looked up to Babe Ruth, and then they endured the Depression. Kids looked up to Lou Gehrig and Bob Feller and Joe DiMaggio, and then they went to fight again in World War II.

“With Watergate, and with politicians under attack and all kinds of investigations, it’s important that the young people have somebody to look up to,” Bench told
New York Daily News
columnist Dick Young, and he was speaking for the whole Reds team. “Maybe it sounds corny to a few people, but that’s what made this country.”

Still, none of that quite gets to the heart of why Marshall so para
lyzed the Reds. They could deal with his quirkiness, his scholarship, his subversive attitude toward autographs, even his bizarre notion of baseball being insignificant in the grand scheme of things. But there was one other thing about Marshall that spooked them.

That son of a gun could pitch every…single…day.

“He can’t keep it up,” Pete Rose said again and again during the 1974 season. The Dodgers were a good baseball team that year, but the Reds felt sure they were better. Even as the Dodgers pulled ahead in the race, the Reds felt sure that they would win in the end. General manager Bob Howsam would sit in his office and compare his Reds players to Dodgers players, man to man, and it was like they said on the Snickers commercial of the time: no matter how you sliced it, it came up peanuts. The Reds had better players. The difference was Marshall. He seemed inescapable. The Dodgers beat the Reds in back-to-back games in April—Marshall pitched in both games. In three nasty games in Los Angeles (the fans threw garbage and batteries at Rose), the Dodgers swept the Reds—Marshall pitched in all three games. The Dodgers beat the Reds three out of four back in Cincinnati in early July, and Marshall pitched in the three victories.

It was crazy. It was unprecedented. Marshall pitched in 66 of 97 games before the All-Star break. He pitched two out of every three days. And his arm never seemed to tire. His body never seemed to break down. There was something wrong about it, something unnatural—a pitcher was supposed to throw his pitches, then grab a beer, dump his elbow in a bucket of ice, and deal with pain until his next time out. Marshall did not seem to feel pain. He seemed invulnerable. He announced that he had discovered secrets about pitching. He claimed that he had conducted experiments that proved a pitcher using the correct form could throw every day. But he did not need to show his experiments; he was a living example. In late June, early July, Marshall pitched in 13 straight games, a record. In September, Marshall pitched in 18 games as the Dodgers held off the Reds. Marshall pitched in 106
games in 1974, which beat the old record by an amazing 14 games. And Marshall held the old record too.