The Machine (4 page)

February 28, 1975

TAMPA

Spring training

The players would each remember Sparky Anderson’s spring training speech a little bit differently in later years, but everyone recalled his main point. He announced that the Machine was made up of two different kinds of players. First, there were the superstars. To be more specific, Sparky said, there were four superstars—Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, and Tony Perez. Those four made their own rules. Those four had no curfew. Those four had special privileges. If Johnny wanted to go golfing every so often during spring training, he could go. If Pete wanted to blow off some steam at the dog track, well, Sparky might give him a few extra bucks. If Joe needed to come in late so he could finish school, that was all right by Sparky. If Tony needed a little rest, then Sparky would fluff the pillow. Those four were royalty.

“The rest of you,” Sparky said, “are turds.”

This was the law of the Machine. Sparky never hid it. He knew
some managers tried to treat everyone equally. Well, Sparky was not one of those men. He had learned another of the great rules of doing business from the car salesman Milt Blish: you scratch my back….

“If you want to be treated like one of them,” Sparky said to the turds as he pointed toward Bench and Rose, “you have to
play
like one of them. You have to
work
like one of them. I don’t treat everyone the same. I don’t believe in it. I’ll give you as much as you give me.”

Then Sparky looked out over the players who made up the Machine, the team that had to win, and he very clearly said the words that so many of them would remember for the rest of their lives. He said: “Boys, this team is like my television set. Nobody messes with it.”

“I’ll be honest with you,” the kid relief pitcher and turd Will McEnaney would say more than thirty years later. “None of us ever knew what the fuck Sparky was talking about.”

Sparky picked his least favorite turd on the first day of camp: a kid name John Vukovich. Sparky had seen bad hitters all his life. Hell, he had been a bad hitter all his life. But this new guy, Vukovich, well, he was a whole other level of bad. First time he saw Vukovich go through batting practice, he already had a nickname in mind: “Balsa.” That was because whenever Vukovich hit, the ball seemed to just dribble off the bat like milk off a baby’s chin, and the dead sound Sparky heard made him wonder if the kid’s bat was made out of balsa wood.

“Can’t you do anything with him?” he asked his hitting coach, Ted Kluszewski, whom everyone called Big Klu.

“What do you want me to do, shoot him?” Big Klu asked back.

Sparky considered the offer. A couple of months earlier, Bob Howsam had told Sparky that the team was going to trade Tony Perez to get a third baseman. Sparky had mixed emotions about it.
He loved Perez—everybody loved Doggie—and the guy was still one helluva tough hitter. But a trade made some sense. The Reds needed someone to play third base—it was the one overwhelming flaw of the team. Six different men had played third base the year before, and not one of them was worth a damn out there. Danny Driessen had been Sparky’s great hope; he was young and determined, and like Sparky told the reporters, he was one helluva hitter. Trouble was, Danny Driessen looked scared out of his mind when he played third base. They call third base “the hot corner”—baseballs rush at you like angry wasps—and Danny couldn’t handle that. One time he simply forgot to step on the base to force out a runner. Kid was terrorized out there. No, Danny couldn’t play third base. But he could play first base, a much safer defensive position, and Sparky found himself daydreaming about a trade and a new infield, with Danny at first base and a young star like New York’s Graig Nettles or Kansas City’s George Brett playing third.

In the end, though, Howsam did not trade Tony Perez. Instead, he went out and traded for Balsa, a part-time player from Milwaukee who was a magician with the glove. His hands, Sparky thought, were like boxers’, but he could not hit his own weight. Hell, he could not hit Sparky’s weight. Through four mostly bleak seasons, Balsa’s batting average was .157.

“With our lineup, you won’t need his hitting,” Howsam had told Sparky. “We’ll still score plenty of runs. Just put him at third base and let him make all the plays—every hit he gets will be a bonus.”

Before spring training started, Sparky could admit that Howsam made some sense. Even after spring training started, he could admit it when he was away from the ballpark, at the hotel, by the pool, lounging in the sun. Howsam’s words rang true on lawn chairs. Sparky would put Vukovich at third base and let him save all those runs with his brilliant defense. And sure, the Machine would still score plenty of runs. Sparky had Tony Perez back, he had his guys Bench and Morgan and Rose, he had a few turds who showed promise—yes, in
the lazy humidity of midafternoon, Sparky had himself convinced. But early the next morning, he would come back to the ballpark in Tampa, and he would feel that moist Florida chill on his arms, and he would watch Balsa hit slow, useless ground balls during batting practice, he would watch Balsa hit candy bloops to the shortstop. Then the rage would bubble all over again—there was no way on God’s green earth that he could have that turd playing every day for the Big Red Machine. Not this year.

“Fix him, damn it,” he screamed at Big Klu.

“You mean that literally?” Big Klu asked.

“I don’t know what I mean,” Sparky said, and he kicked the dirt.

“The Nautilus machine” became the punch line for Tony Perez’s favorite spring training joke. Baseball players—most of them anyway—did not lift weights in 1975. The compelling wisdom of the time was that baseball players who lifted weights would lose their flexibility, though the compelling wisdom of the day may have been written by baseball players who did not want to lift weights. Let the football players do that stuff.

Still, the Reds had one of the very first Nautilus pullover machines. It was a gift from Arthur Jones, the inventor. Jones had this idea that he could create a machine that would help everyday people build up their muscles without going to a dark gym and lifting enormous barbells for hours. Who had the time to be Charles Atlas? Jones hoped to spread the word of his miraculous machine by giving one to the Cincinnati Reds. He wanted to say that his machine pumped up the Big Red Machine.

Of course, none of the players used the thing except to hang jockstraps on it. Nobody even knew
how
to use it. That was why Tony Perez invented the “Nautilus machine list.” It was a simple gag: He would walk around the clubhouse and suddenly notice a player. And
he would say, “What are you doing here? You are supposed to be working on the Nautilus.”

The player would laugh. But Tony would look at him seriously.

“You gonna be in big trouble with Sparky,” he would say. He pronounced “big” like “beeg.” “He put you on the list. Didn’t you see the list?”

Some players fell for it. Most didn’t. But it tickled Doggie either way.

“Hey, fatty,” Doggie said to Joe Morgan. “How much you eat this off-season? It’s a good thing your name on list to work out on Nautilus today. We can’t have a fat second baseman. I cannot go and field all your ground balls.”

Morgan smiled. He always thought that this was what made the Machine different. This was their power. Nobody had feelings. Nobody showed weakness. Nobody took offense. When you played for the Machine, you never worried about the other team heckling you—the cruelest taunts always came from your own dugout. They called Morgan shrimp, midget, piss-ant, and much crueler and cruder stuff. But it was okay. Joe knew how to fight.

“Doggie, what are you even doing here?” Joe asked. “Weren’t we supposed to trade you? I guess we couldn’t find even an American League club that would take your sorry ass.”

Yes, Joe had a way of stabbing for the heart. Tony Perez had spent an agonizing winter in Puerto Rico worrying about being traded. Howsam called Perez into his office on the last day of the season, and he asked for permission to trade Perez. That’s how it worked in 1975. Only a few years earlier, players were traded freely, like baseball cards, and it didn’t really matter what they thought about it. They had no right to stop any trades, no control of their own destinies. But times were changing. The Major League Baseball Players Association had hired a tough old labor economist named Marvin Miller, who had negotiated for the steelworkers’ union. And Miller scared the hell
out of the baseball owners. They rushed to offer concessions in the desperate and ultimately doomed hope that they could hold off the inevitable pain of player free agency. Perez had been with the Reds for more than ten years, and because of that he had the right to veto a trade if he wanted.

“I just want you to sign this waiver,” Howsam said, and he slid a paper in front of Doggie.

Perez would not sign the waiver. He could not sign it. He was an original member of the Machine—a founding member, to tell the truth. He signed with the Reds in 1960, just as the United States broke off relations with his native Cuba. He had given up his life for baseball; Tony had seen his mother and father once in a dozen years. The Reds were his family. He could not imagine himself playing for any other team.

Doggie also could not imagine why the Reds wanted to trade him. They called him “Big Dog” (and variations of that canine theme—“Doggie,” “Pup”) because, as the Reds’ old manager Dave Bristol said countless times: “If the game lasts long enough, the Big Dog will win it.” Doggie had driven in ninety or more runs for eight straight seasons; nobody else in either league had done that. The brilliant
Los Angeles Times
columnist Jim Murray did not even know how close he was to the mark when he wrote: “Perez runs more to Gary Cooper than Carmen Miranda.” Murray was writing a gag, making the point that Perez was not hot-blooded like people might expect a Cuban player to be. But Gary Cooper was about right. Perez was the marshal, the calming force of the Machine, the star who did not act like a star, the surest bet to drive in that runner from second base at high noon.

Reporters in general, though, did not get Doggie. They liked him fine, and they respected him. But they had trouble summing him up. Reporters on deadline needed droll quotes and pithy lines or cutting (and brief) analysis. Pete Rose would sit in the clubhouse and think
up clever lines for the reporters. Joe Morgan, even then, sounded like he belonged on television.

“How’d you do it, Doggie?” the reporters would ask after he smacked another game-winning hit.

“See the ball, hit the ball,” Perez would say every time—every time—and after a while everyone around him, including those reporters, would say the words with him. Then they would go to Pete or Johnny or Joe to get the quote they needed for the paper.

In the clubhouse, Tony Perez may have been Gary Cooper, but outside it he remained in the shadows—so much so that even his general manager, Bob Howsam, and his manager, Sparky Anderson, did not fully appreciate how much Doggie meant to the team.

“If we do trade you, we will try to trade you to a contender,” Howsam said. “But I cannot make you any promises.”

Perez did not speak. There was nothing to say. He did not sign the waiver. He went home to Puerto Rico, and he ran every day on the beach, and he let the realities consume him. If the Reds wanted to trade him, there still was not much he could do about it. Yes, technically, he could refuse the trade. He could embarrass the Reds. But where would that leave him? It would leave him stuck on a team that did not want him. He could not live like that. He waited every day for the news that he had been traded, and he prayed every day that the news would not come.

A miracle happened. Every time the Reds tried to trade Perez, something fouled up. The Reds were close to trading Doggie to Kansas City for George Brett, only the Royals chickened out. The Reds were close to trading Doggie to Boston for a rookie third baseman, Butch Hobson, and a tall beanpole of a pitcher named Roger Moret, but that fell through. There was even some talk about Doggie going to three-time World Champion Oakland for third baseman Sal Bando, but Oakland’s owner, Charlie Finley, was dependably undependable and that deal died in committee.

That left only one trade on the table, and it looked all but certain: Perez would go to the New York Yankees for their All-Star third baseman, Graig Nettles. The trade made too much sense not to happen. The Yankees needed a quiet leader, someone who could help lift the team from a ten-year World Series drought, their longest since World War I. And Nettles would give Sparky Anderson that third baseman who could play breathtaking defense and hit long home runs. Back home in Puerto Rico, Doggie imagined himself in Yankee pinstripes.

But that trade disintegrated too. The Reds wanted a pitcher thrown in. The Yankees wanted someone they could plug in at third base. Talks stalled. Then talks broke off. Negotiations began again. Then broke off again. Middle East talks. Then one day, Howsam became frustrated with it all and announced that there would be no trade. A miracle. “Who knows?” Howsam told reporters. “This spring I may look at our ball club and say I’m the luckiest son of a gun for
not
making a deal.”

The rest of the winter, Tony Perez wondered how it would feel to come back to the club. Everyone knew the Reds almost traded him. Would everyone look at him differently? Would they lose a little respect for him? Would they worry about him? Would they treat him like a sick patient?

“Hey, Doggy,” Morgan said. “They can still trade your ass anytime, you know. I can just picture you after one year in that American League as a designated hitter. You’d balloon up to 280 pounds.”

“Fatty,” Perez said, flexing his arm, “it all muscle. And your biggest muscle is your mouth. You better get to that Nautilus, they waiting for you. You on the list.”

Perez grinned. It was just the same.

March 13, 1975

TAMPA
REDS VS. TWINS

Gary Nolan did not understand what was rumbling around in his stomach. He had never felt the butterflies before. They fluttered and flapped in his stomach, gnawed at his esophagus, kicked at his small intestine. This was spring training. The game did not even count. He thought,
So that’s how nerves feel.
Gary Nolan was back pitching for the Cincinnati Reds. He was not quite twenty-seven years old.