The Machine (24 page)

“Genius, boy,” Sparky said to himself. He had done it. He had his Reds way out front in first place. He had invented a whole new way to run a pitching staff, using relief pitchers in a whole new way. And now he had outflanked the great Walter Alston, and in his hometown of Los Angeles no less. Yes, Georgie Anderson had turned out all right. Sparky sat back in the ninth inning and almost laughed when George Foster hit a single to left field with Johnny Bench on second base. Bench rounded third, headed for home, about to score the winning run…and then something crazy happened. Lee Lacy, that second baseman playing left, fired a perfect throw to home plate and that unknown catcher Paul Powell slapped the tag on Bench.

“Out,” the umpire shouted.

Well, that was unfortunate. So the game went to the tenth inning. This time the Machine’s Darrel Chaney walked and moved to second base. Pete came up. He smacked a single to left field. Sparky smiled. Chaney rounded third, headed for home. And Lee Lacy fired a perfect throw to the plate. Paul Powell slapped the tag on Chaney.

“Out,” the umpire shouted.

And the Reds lost the game in the bottom of the tenth inning.

“That,” Sparky said to reporters after the game, “was the greatest game I ever managed.” And when reporters suggested it could not be the greatest—after all, the Reds had lost—Sparky simply smiled and said: “The greatest. It just goes to show you what it is to be a manager.”

Not that it mattered much. The Reds won the next day, and the next day, and again the next. Borbon and Geronimo made up; Pedro even called Cesar’s parents in the Dominican to apologize. Two days later, when Pedro’s third son was born, he and Cesar handed out cigars in
the clubhouse.

The ripping continued. On Sundays, Pete would get on Davey about crossing himself before he hit. “Davey, let me ask you something. What happens if you make the sign of the cross and then the pitcher makes the sign of the cross? Why would God take your side? Do you really think God gives a shit about a baseball game?” Davey muttered something quietly in Spanish, something that loosely translated to mean: “Oh, you’re going to hell, Pete Rose.” Not that it mattered to Pete. Every Sunday, when the chaplain, Wendell Deyo, led the Reds in prayer in the weight room, Pete would sit by his locker, work over his bats, and just shake his head.

“Hey, Doggie,” he said as he pointed at a player heading to chapel. “Look at this guy. I hope he’s thanking God for that piece of ass he got last night because he damn sure isn’t getting any hits.”

Doggie was the clearinghouse for all Reds gags. He started the gags, he ended them, he was the arbiter of good taste, the man who drew the lines, the team leader who, more than anyone else, decided what was funny and what was off-limits. There wasn’t much off-limits.

“Hey, Joe, you hitting so bad now that Pete say he top your average today,” Doggie said.

“I don’t care,” Joe said.

“Wait,” Pete shouted. “I didn’t say anything.”

“That’s not what you told me,” Doggie said. “I heard you.”

“Hey, Pete, where your calculator?” Davey asked. “You figure your average already?”

“I don’t need a calculator,” Pete said. “I’ll learn what I’m hitting in tomorrow’s paper when I look at the league leaders. You will have to wait until Sunday, when they publish all the averages…if they run them down as low as you are.”

Doggie caught Griffey sitting by his locker laughing. “Hey, Kenny,” Doggie said. “How many infield hits you got? Never before do we have a player who get hits on ground balls to second base.”

Jimmy Hoffa disappeared, and investigators seemed to be looking for him, though everyone got the feeling from the start that the investigators did not expect to find him. Hoffa had led the Teamsters. He had done some shady deals. He made enemies. Witnesses had seen him standing outside a fashionable restaurant in Detroit in the early afternoon; he was supposed to meet Anthony Giacalone, better known in the papers as “Tony Jack, the reputed kingpin of the Detroit Mafia.” Hoffa never made it to the lunch. The Hoffa family offered a $275,000 reward to anyone who could offer information to help find Hoffa, though in barbershops and diners across America no one expected that reward to get collected.

The New York Mets fired their manager, Yogi Berra. “I did the best I could,” he said. “And I couldn’t have done no better.” The great old Yankees manager Casey Stengel turned eighty-five and explained why he would never want a woman umpire in baseball: “I couldn’t argue with one,” he said. “I’d put my arms around her and give her a little kiss.” Xerox announced that it was getting out of the computer business just as two longtime friends, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, were putting together a business plan they tentatively were calling “Micro-soft.” Cigarette advertisements filled
Time
magazine, including an odd photograph of a woman with a black eye. Above it was the tagline: “Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch!”

The country kept changing. For years, the Staten Island Ferry had charged a nickel for a ride from Staten Island to Manhattan, but tough times forced the New York City Council to raise the price to
a quarter. There was an uproar, and the Associated Press came up with a list of things that Americans could still buy for a nickel, and among those were two and a half tablespoons of peanuts from a vending machine in Alabama; a cup of coffee at the Last Chance Café in Reno; and a local phone call in Wapakoneta, Ohio, the birthplace of astronaut Neil Armstrong.

The one-year anniversary of Richard Nixon resigning over Watergate came and went, the only real news being made by Betty Ford, the first lady, who told Morley Safer of the television show
60 Minutes
that she would not be surprised if her eighteen-year-old daughter, Susan, said she was having an affair. Mrs. Ford also offered up the opinion that, in some cases, premarital sex might prevent divorce. Clergymen lined up for days after that to criticize the first lady, none more than Elder Gordon B. Hinkley of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, who said: “We deplore the deterioration of morality around the world.”

On a Tuesday, the Reds beat the Giants without Johnny, Joe, or Doggie in the lineup. Cesar Geronimo cracked three hits, and his old friend Pedro pitched scoreless relief. Sparky complained. “We had a couple of guys loafing out there,” he told reporters. The next day, the Machine banged out twenty hits and walked seven times in a 12–5 destruction of the Giants. They were a preposterous sixteen and a half games ahead of the Dodgers. And for the first time, people were beginning to compare the Reds with the greatest teams ever. “The Reds may go down in lore with the 1927 New York Yankees,” wrote Jim Murray of the
Los Angeles Times
.

“I think this ball club can compare with any team in history,” Johnny said.

“I think it’s better,” Sparky said, and then he added: “Because you got to remember, all those old-time records were made in small ballparks. There isn’t a Chinese home run in any ballpark in the National League.”

Nobody needed to ask what a Chinese home run was in 1975.

The Reds fell asleep and blew two big leads against Montreal on a Friday—their only other loss in this glorious stretch—and so they obliterated the Expos 9–1 on Saturday. Pete Rose bashed three more hits—nobody could ever remember seeing him hotter—and Clay Carroll pitched four scoreless innings in relief. They called Clay Carroll “the Hawk” for the way his nose curved like a beak. He was from a small place in Alabama called Clanton, and everyone on the club had a good Hawk story. The best one was about the Cadillac—Hawk had signed with the Milwaukee Braves back in ’61, and he immediately spent his bonus money on a new Cadillac. A friend immediately wrapped it around a tree. Ever since then, the Hawk had wanted to buy a new Cadillac. After he was traded to the Reds, he had his first big league success, and his first big paycheck. And he knew just what to do.

“I’m going to buy a new Cadillac,” he told Johnny.

“No way,” Johnny said. That was 1971; Johnny and Pete co-owned a Lincoln dealership in town. They also co-owned a bowling alley. It wasn’t until later that they decided they would be better off not being business partners.

“You want a Lincoln,” Johnny said. “It’s a much better car.”

“No can do,” Clay said. “Ever since I wrecked my first one, I’ve wanted a Caddy.”

“Yeah,” Johnny said, “but the Lincoln Continental is the only car on the market that comes equipped with its own vacuum cleaner. Think of all the time you’ll save.”

The Hawk thought about that: a vacuum cleaner would come in handy. It wasn’t until two days later that he drove his car back into the dealership lot and screamed at whoever would listen: “I’ve been looking for two days and I can’t find that goddamned vacuum cleaner.”

The Reds did love Clay Carroll. From 1968 to 1974, he pitched in more games than any Reds pitcher ever, but things began to change in ’75. The Hawk pitched about as well as ever, but Sparky didn’t seem to trust him in the big moments. Nothing was ever said, but
everybody knew that Sparky’s favorite pitchers were now the kids: Will McEnaney and Rawly Eastwick. The only person who did not seem to notice was the Hawk himself, and every time he was called into a game, he ran in from the bullpen full speed, running so hard, as George Plimpton would write in
Sports Illustrated
, that teammates worried he would build up too much momentum and “run right past the mound, over the manager and the catcher standing there, and fetch up in a tumble in the dugout beyond.”

Johnny got three hits the next night as the Reds pounded Montreal again, 11–3. Johnny’s batting average moved back above .300. He still felt miserable. His shoulder throbbed no matter what he did. He tried hot pads, ice packs, cortisone shots, and none of it gave him relief. Also, he knew that his marriage was falling apart, though more to the point, it had never come together. He did not know what Vickie wanted from him. He was a ballplayer. He was a celebrity. He was a star. He could not stop being those things. And he was still a sex symbol; he could not help that either. Every day, it seemed, he got more tearstained letters from women who could not believe he had gotten hitched. There was this one young woman who adored him; she used to come out to the ballpark with her family and cheer like mad. He gave her a broken bat once, and she sent him notes after that. Then she sent him presents. Then she started sending him photographs, some of them of her in rather revealing poses. When he announced on local television that he was getting engaged, he came home to find that broken bat on his front porch. There was a rather frightening note attached too. He got a lot of notes like that, a lot of cards from brokenhearted women. He could not understand why Vickie did not appreciate that he had been the most eligible bachelor in town, maybe in the Midwest, maybe in the whole damn country, and she got him.

Johnny had always loved baseball. He loved not only playing ball
but also what baseball could do for him. He loved to make gentle wisecracks about his hometown of Binger—“It’s about two and a half miles past a town called ‘Resume Speed,’” he would say—but the truth was that, as far back as he could remember, he had wanted out. His father, like Pete’s father, had raised him to be a ballplayer. And he was going to be the best damned baseball player who ever lived. Johnny’s friend Glen Campbell had a song on the radio, and the lyrics suited Johnny:

That was Johnny, a rhinestone catcher, and the offers poured in—host your own TV show, appear onstage, do a commercial, pose in a picture with Miss World USA Lynda Carter, tell a few stories on
The Tonight Show
—and he would not say no. He did not like all the trappings of fame—he loved them. He did not like getting booed—and he did not care. He did not like dealing daily with the reporters’ inane questions—and it drove him mad when they did not come to talk to him first. The kid who had practiced signing his autograph at Ford McKinney’s Texaco station had grown up into a man who avoided signing any autographs, even for teammates. But even so, he loved
fame,
the concept, the idea, the way people would look at him. Vickie did not understand that. She did not understand him.

The Machine obliterated the Cubs 9–3 and 12–8 over the next two days. In the second game, the Cubs actually scored four runs in the first inning, but as San Diego pitcher Brent Strom would say: “You could score four runs in the first inning and feel like you were behind. You were constantly playing in fear against those guys.” The Reds scored five runs in the third inning—Ed Armbrister singled, Pete singled, Ken Griffey singled, Tony Perez singled, George Foster
singled, Danny Driessen tripled, Darrel Chaney singled. They really were a Machine, an unstoppable Machine, an assembly line of hits, a force of will.

“We’re the best team in baseball, there is no doubt,” Johnny told reporters. When one asked about the Oakland A’s—who, after all, had won three consecutive World Series—Bench scoffed. “You got to have respect for the Athletics because they’re World Champs,” he said. “But if you ask me, Reggie Jackson and Joe Rudi are the only guys there who could even make our team.”

Well, of course, that ticked off the Oakland players. The A’s star relief pitcher Rollie Fingers fired back: “Johnny Bench couldn’t even carry the catcher’s gear over here with the A’s. I’d hate to have to pitch to him…he can’t think behind the plate.”