The Machine (25 page)

And that ticked off the Cincinnati players. Pete fired back. “Oakland’s time is over.”

And Oakland’s backup catcher Larry Haney fired back: “Our whole pitching staff could make the Reds.”

And Johnny fired back: “Haney should know, he has bounced from one team to another so much he should be an authority.”

And Oakland pitcher Ken Holtzman fired back: “The Reds haven’t even beaten Pittsburgh yet. The Pirates might beat them three straight.”

The Pittsburgh Pirates came to town—and like Holtzman suggested, the Pirates were good. They had their own nickname, “the Pittsburgh Lumber Company,” and they had run away with the National League East division. The Reds would play the Pirates in the playoffs. “We got something to prove to those guys,” the Lumber Company’s star player, Willie Stargell, said in the papers.

The Reds beat them four straight. In the first game, George Foster mashed a three-run homer in the fourth inning, then another one two innings later. He had become a star, even Sparky had to
admit it. Sparky did not just admit it: he already had begun to rewrite history. He had started to say that the reason he moved Pete Rose to third base was to get George Foster in the lineup. That wasn’t quite right; he did want to get Foster a few more at-bats, but he really had moved Pete to third to get John Vukovich out of the lineup and to get Danny Driessen in the lineup more. Nobody argued, though. It was just another bit of Sparky genius.

George had begun to develop his own style on the field. While almost every other hitter used the bats stained brown, so they looked like natural wood, George would wave a menacing black bat, and he would flip his bat in the air when he walked, and he would hit monstrous home runs, the sort that would make even Doggie shake his head in wonder. Then, after the game, he would have the reporters laughing hysterically.

“Why do you use that black bat?” someone asked George after one game.

“I thought someone should integrate the bat rack,” he said.

“Why do you step in and out of the batter’s box and make pitchers mad?” someone else asked.

“If a pitcher is mad enough, he’ll try to blow the ball past you,” he said. “That’s what I’m looking for.” And then he smiled big and with a comic’s timing said: “I like that fastball.”

“Where the hell did that personality come from?” Sparky wondered. If there was one thing Sparky had learned since becoming manager of the Reds it was that people would surprise you.

The Reds beat the Pirates 8–3 in the second game. Pete Rose got two hits in the first inning; that gave him 2,499 for his career—one shy of a magic number. Johnny hit a homer. Fred Norman pitched a complete game. The day after that, Doggie and Cesar hit homers, and the Reds beat the Pirates again. “We are playing free,” Doggie said.

On Sunday afternoon, Sparky sent out a makeshift lineup—no Johnny, no Doggie, no Davey Concepcion, no George Foster. The stage belonged to Pete Rose. Baseball is a game of numbers, and the most beautiful of those are the round numbers. Pitchers want three hundred victories. Batters want five hundred home runs. Pete Rose was one hit shy of two thousand five hundred, and it was driving him nuts. He had been one hit shy for two days.

Pete knew why. The Louisville Slugger Bat Company had sent him a special bat to use for his twenty-five hundredth hit. Pete Rose loved memorabilia. He had kept the baseballs for every numerically round hit of his career—his five hundredth hit, his one thousandth hit, his two thousandth hit, his first World Series hit, and so on. He enjoyed having a token from every big moment of his career. And he had this hunch that all these things would be worth a lot of money someday. So he was happy to use the specially made bat, except for one thing: the bat they sent was thirty-five ounces. And Pete
always
used a thirty-four-ounce bat. You wouldn’t think an ounce would make much difference, but for Pete, using that damned bat was like wearing a wristwatch one size too big or a shirt with a neck size a half-inch too small. He could not get around with that heavier bat. He lashed two hard ground balls, and in Pete’s estimation both of them should have rolled up the middle for a base hit. Instead, they went right to the shortstop. That bat was making him swing an instant too late.

“To hell with it,” Pete said in the seventh inning, and he borrowed someone else’s thirty-four-ounce bat. He walked over to Sparky and Big Klu and said, “You just watch, this time the ball will go right up the middle.”

Then he stepped into the batter’s box, dug in against Pittsburgh pitcher Bruce Kison, and cracked a line drive right up the middle for a base hit. While the fans cheered and the Reds scored the game-winning run, Pete Rose stood on first base, pointed to the Reds dugout, and shouted, “I
told you
it was the fucking bat.”

Don Gullett returned to pitch the final game of the glorious stretch. The Reds’ best pitcher had missed fifty-seven games. The Reds won forty-three of them. The Reds led the Dodgers by only three and a half games when Gullett broke his thumb on June 16, and everyone prepared for a heated and tight summer pennant race. When Gullett returned, the Reds led the Dodgers by seventeen and a half games. Sparky had been exactly right the morning after the injury, when he had breakfast with his friend Jeff Ruby at the Holiday Inn. Now everyone saw his genius.

And Gullett pitched five scoreless innings against the St. Louis Cardinals on his first day back.

“It was like he had never been away,” Sparky gushed to reporters. This game was like so many of the rest. After Gullett came out, Pedro Borbon pitched. After he hit a batter in the eighth, Will McEnaney came in and limited the damage. After McEnaney gave up a leadoff single in the ninth, Clay Carroll came in. After Carroll gave up a single to load the bases, Rawly Eastwick came in. He finished off the Cardinals, the Reds won 3–2, and they were on pace to win more games than any National League team in sixty years, and they were playing the best baseball that had ever been played.

Not that anything had really changed. When the game ended, reporters surrounded Pete Rose and one asked him if Dick Wagner—the man who had cut his pay before the season began—had seen Pete’s twenty-five hundredth hit. “I don’t think he’s ever seen me get a hit,” Pete said. “All he sees is me throwing baseballs into the stands at twenty-five bucks a clip.”

Clay Carroll inspired another Clay Carroll story. He borrowed a magazine from a reporter, glanced at it, and returned it. “Boy, that was quick,” the reporter said. “Weren’t no pictures,” the Hawk replied.

The guys ripped Johnny for going oh-for-five. Joe and Pete
argued about which one of them would end up with a better batting average. And Sparky sat in the office, drank milk, and worried about things—worried that his players might let down, worried that someone would get hurt, worried that the Reds would lose to Pittsburgh in the playoffs, worried that maybe he lacked the killer instinct that separates champions from bums.

August 19 to October 7

August 25, 1975

CHICAGO
REDS VS. CUBS

Team record: 84–44
First place by sixteen and a half games

Bruce Springsteen was not happy,
not at all, not with the sound, not with the hype, and most of all not with the album.
Born to Run
, his new album, hit the stores on August 25, and it was a monster. He had spent fourteen hard months making it. He felt like a failure. Springsteen was twenty-five years old, and he wanted only one thing, but it was the biggest thing he could imagine: to make the greatest rock-and-roll record ever. He had spent fourteen hours a day in the studio, every day for more than a year, leaving at six o’clock most mornings, sometimes later, and still he could not get the sounds out of his head and onto the tape. His friend and coproducer, Jon Landau, kept telling him to get the record done, to set a release date, and Springsteen would growl: “Hey, man, the release date is just one day. The record is forever.” The pressure was intense. Years later, Springsteen would tell the author Dave Marsh that
he bought an $89.95 record player and listened to the album for the first time. He hated it so much that he wanted to kill the release.

But Landau calmed him down and talked him into releasing the album. Landau had been a wandering rock critic—a year earlier, after seeing Springsteen perform at the Harvard Square Theater, he had written one of the most famous reviews in rock-and-roll history. He wrote: “I saw my rock’n’roll past flash before my eyes. And I saw something else: I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time.” Landau and Springsteen understood each other. They both wanted something hard to describe.

Maybe it was a little bit like that in America in 1975, with the war over and the economy dried up and Watergate smoldering, maybe it was a time to reach for something wild and bold or—as Springsteen sang in “Jungleland”—for poets to reach for their moment and try to make an honest stand. The album
Born to Run
began with a screen door slamming and ended with those poets winding up wounded and not even dead, and in the middle, as the author Greil Marcus would write, were “one thousand and one American nights, one long night of fear and love.” The album would get Springsteen on the cover of
Time
and
Newsweek
the same week. Thirty years later, it would be placed in the Library of Congress as a culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant recording, there forever with John Kennedy’s inauguration speech, the Beatles’
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
album, and the evangelist Billy Graham’s “problems of the American home” speech. It would become, to many, the greatest rock-and-roll album ever recorded.

But that day, Bruce Springsteen believed he had failed.

In Chicago, the Reds pounded the Cubs 11–4, Pete got three hits, Doggie drove in two more, and Clay Carroll threw perfect relief. When the game ended reporters gathered around Pete as usual, only
he did not seem as happy as he normally seemed after a victory.

“Is this the best team you’ve ever seen?” they asked Pete.

“We haven’t won anything,” he said softly. “We’ve got to win it all.”

August 29, 1975

CINCINNATI
REDS VS. CARDINALS

Team record: 89–44
First place by eighteen and a half games

Bob Gibson, that proud man, walked slowly in from the bullpen, and he had that same scowl on his face, that famous Gibson scowl, the scowl that said, “I’m going to get you out, or I’m going to kill you.” He had the scowl, but he no longer had the fastball. Gibson was almost forty years old. His record was 3–9. He had pitched so poorly that St. Louis manager Red Schoendienst, who had been Gibson’s teammate years earlier, put him in the bullpen, where he pitched mop-up relief. For a man with Gibson’s pride, that demotion cut through him like a cold wind. Still he pitched on. Every player on the Machine understood—this would be the last time they would ever face him.

Gibson had defined baseball for more than a decade. He was big and strong and black and ferocious. He set off childlike fears in major league players—he made them feel like they were facing the fastest pitcher in Little League. It wasn’t just that Gibson was bigger than anyone else (though he was big) or that he threw harder than anyone else (though he threw hard) or that he was meaner than anyone else (though he was plenty mean—he would not hesitate to hit a player who he felt looked too comfortable at the plate).

“You wanted to earn his respect” was how Joe put it many years
later. Gibson once told the author Roger Angell that he had played hundreds of games of tic-tac-toe with his daughter…and she never beat him. Gibson once announced to parents, “Why do I have to be an example for your kid? You be an example for your own kid.” Gibson was one of the rarest of players, a legend in his time, a man players measured their careers against. Every player who ever faced Bob Gibson remembered the moment.

The Reds led the game 6–1, it was the bottom of the fifth inning, and Gibson dug his spikes into the dirt. Cesar Geronimo stepped into the box, and he saw Gibson stare him down, and he felt unnerved, like the years had melted away. Gibson struck him out. “He throw hard,” Cesar said as he walked back into the dugout.

The next inning, Pete Rose stepped in. “Bob Gibson is the toughest pitcher I ever faced,” Pete would say after that day and many times after that. This wasn’t the same Bob Gibson. But he was still Bob Gibson. The two battled, and then there were two strikes, and then Gibby threw his fastball, his pitch. And Pete swung and missed for strike three. Gibson stomped off the mound, and Pete watched him go.

“I won’t miss him,” Pete would say. “But the game will.”

Five days later, Gibson pitched in his final game, against the Chicago Cubs. He had nothing. He walked a man, allowed a single, walked another, threw a wild pitch, intentionally walked a man. And finally, he grooved a fastball to Pete LaCock, a twenty-three-year-old first baseman who was the son of game show host Peter Marshall. LaCock blasted it, a grand slam. That was the last pitch Bob Gibson ever threw in the big leagues.

But with Gibson, there’s always one more story. Many years later, he was pitching in an old-timers game. And Pete LaCock was playing too. LaCock stepped up to face Gibson, who was well into his fifties. Gibson stared him down and promptly hit LaCock in the back with a pitch.

“Ow, Bob, what gives?” LaCock asked.

“I’ve been waiting for years to do that,” Gibson said.

September 3, 1975

CINCINNATI
REDS VS. DODGERS

Team record: 91–46
First place by eighteen and a half games

The Machine had dismantled the Dodgers in every way possible—physically, emotionally, spiritually, you name it—but they had one more message to send. It was the fourth inning, and there were two outs, and Pete Rose walked to the plate to face Andy Messersmith. Dave Concepcion was on first base.

Pete crushed a double over the center fielder’s head to score Davey. Then Geronimo walked. Then Joe Morgan hit a double to right field, scoring Pete. Then Doggie singled up the middle, scoring Geronimo and Joe. Then Johnny hit a single to center. Then George hit a choppy ground ball that was botched by the Dodgers’ third baseman, Ron Cey, and another run scored.

It started to pour rain, and everyone raced off the field. It rained hard for thirty minutes, then it stopped, then the Reds sent out the Zamboni machine—those Big Red Machines that general manager Bob Howsam always talked about—to dry the field. When everything was dry, a new Dodgers pitcher came in. Marv Rettenmund hit a double to score two runs. Davey walked. Gary Nolan singled in a run. Pete got hit by a pitch. Cesar reached when the catcher dropped the third strike. Joe walked with the bases loaded. It was, as the papers put it, a free-for-all.

And when it ended, the Reds had scored ten runs.

“I’m not sure what you say,” Captain America Steve Garvey said. “I guess it’s their year.”

It was their year. Everything was anticlimax for the Machine in September 1975. The Reds officially wrapped up the National League West championship on September 7 while sitting in the clubhouse. They had beaten San Francisco an hour and a half earlier, and then they just lingered around, wrestled with each other’s kids, talked with reporters, sipped beer. They were waiting to see if the Dodgers lost to Atlanta; if they did, then the Reds would be champions and it would be the earliest date a team had ever clinched. If Los Angeles won, then the Reds would have to wait to clinch tomorrow or the next day or the next. There were still three weeks left in the season. The ending was inevitable. The rest was timing.

There was champagne chilling, and the Reds players watched television. The Dodgers led 2–0 going into the bottom of the eighth inning, and then Atlanta’s comically named Biff Pocoroba walked. Then the more professionally named Rowland Office doubled. The Dodgers sent in their knuckleball pitcher Charlie Hough. Then Ralph Garr reached on an error. Everybody moved up a base on a wild pitch. Darrell Evans walked. Another pitcher, this one named Dave Sells, entered the game.

“What is Dave selling?” Johnny riddled.

“Dave Sells cars,” Joe said.

Dave Sells walked Dusty Baker. Then he walked Mike Lum. The Dodgers were marching to their own funeral. Atlanta led 3–2. And when the Dodgers went down meekly in the ninth inning, the Reds were champions. Clubhouse attendants rushed in with forty-eight bottles of champagne, which the players dutifully poured on each other. Broadcaster Marty Brennaman walked around in his underwear—“You guys ain’t going to get
my
clothes,” he shouted as he got doused.

“If I was a drinking man, I’d be set,” Pete shouted as he was drowned in champagne, then beer, then cold water. Dick Wagner, the man who had cursed out the team chaplain, walked around the clubhouse warning players to stop running around with bottles in their hands…somebody could get hurt. They dumped a bucket of water on his head.

“We want Pittsburgh!” Johnny shouted in an effort to start a clubhouse chant. “We want Pittsburgh!” A few joined in.

“This is more subdued than past years,” Dick Wagner told a reporter. And then Bob Howsam dumped more champagne on his head.

The feds finally gave up the search for Jimmy Hoffa and pronounced him dead. A woman named Lynette Alice Fromme (“Squeaky” for short), who was once a child performer who appeared on
The Lawrence Welk Show
and later a member of the Charles Manson family, pointed a gun at President Ford in Sacramento. She may or may not have pulled the trigger, but the gun did not go off. She was grabbed by the Secret Service and arrested.

Seventeen days later, in San Francisco, another woman, Sara Jane Moore, actually did shoot at the president, and she only missed because an ex-marine named Oliver Sipple happened to see the gun just as she was about to fire. He screamed, “Gun!” and grabbed her arm just as the gun went off. The bullet missed the president and bounced off the St. Francis Hotel. “I’m not a hero,” Sipple said to the media. “I’m a live coward.”

The Sipple story did not end…it took several days for President Ford to personally thank him. Why? According to Randy Shilts’s book
The Mayor of Castro Street,
Harvey Milk—the openly gay politician just coming into his own in San Francisco—suspected that it was because Sipple was gay. Milk called the San Francisco newspaper and outed him. “It’s too good an opportunity,” Milk told the author
Frank Robinson. “For once we can show that gays do heroic things. That guy saved the president’s life.”

Two days later, San Francisco columnist Herb Caen quoted Milk saying he was “proud—maybe this will break the stereotype.” Soon other newspapers picked up the story that Sipple was gay—“Homosexual Hero” was the headline in the
Chicago Sun-Times
—and the news made it back to Detroit, where his mother read it. She was a strict Baptist and refused to leave the house for days after reading the news. When Sipple called her, she hung up on him.

Everyone was talking about the big boxing match coming up—the third Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier fight, which would be fought in Manila in the Philippines. “Come on, gorilla!” Ali shouted as he pulled out a toy gorilla and punched it. “We’re in Manila!” Frazier seethed in furious silence. The sportscaster Howard Cosell started a new television variety show that he called
Saturday Night Live.
On
All in the Family
—the most popular show on television—Archie Bunker saved a woman’s life by administering CPR. He found out later that “she” was really a man.

The Reds kept winning. They won their one hundredth game of the season in Atlanta in front of three thousand people, the smallest crowd of the year. They beat the Astros two out of three in the Houston Astrodome. They came home and beat Atlanta again. Records fell every day. They won the most games in team history. They built the biggest division lead in National League history. On the last day of the year, a Sunday, more than forty-four thousand people packed into Riverfront Stadium. The Reds were losing by two runs in the eighth inning, and the lineup was filled with backups and Pete Rose. The Machine came back. The Machine always came back that year. Pete’s single in the eighth inning gave the Reds a brief lead. Cesar’s single in the ninth won the game.

The final numbers staggered the mind. The Reds had won 108 games—more than any National League team since the 1906 Chicago Cubs. They beat the Dodgers by 20 games, and no team had ever won
by more. They scored 105 more runs than any other team in the league. They won 90 of their last 125 games, an absurd 72 percent…no National League team had played that well for that long in fifty years.

“There is nothing in my wildest dreams that didn’t come true this season,” Sparky told the reporters, a brilliant double negative to end the brilliant season. Everything had worked beautifully. Gary Nolan came all the way back from his injury—he won 15 games. George Foster emerged as a star—he hit 23 home runs. Joe Morgan played better than anyone Sparky had ever seen before. Pete Rose hit .317 and banged out 210 hits. Johnny Bench, even though he still felt awful, finished second in the league in runs batted in and stole 11 bases in 11 attempts.