The Machine (32 page)

“What are you so worried about?”

Sparky looked up. It was Doggie, and he had that smile on his face.

“What do you mean, Doggie?” Sparky said. “We’re losing 3–0.”

“Ah,” Doggie said. “Don’t worry. I hit a home run.”

And Sparky came alive. Doggie was right. This wasn’t any normal baseball team. This was the Machine. Sparky got up, and
he
started pacing the dugout too, just like Pete, and he was saying: “Look, fellas, we got some outs left. I don’t want anyone to panic…. Somebody get on base, and Bench, Morgan, or Perez will hit a home run.”

Doggie went up in the sixth inning with Johnny on first base after Pete had, typically, barreled into second base and forced Denny Doyle to make a bad throw on what looked like a sure double play. Doggie went up to the plate looking for Boston starter Bill Lee to throw him that slow curve just one more time. Lee had gotten a strike on Doggie with that curve back in the second. Doggie wanted just one more look at it.

Fisk did not call for that curve—he knew better. But Bill Lee threw it anyway. Fred Lynn was standing out in center field, and he saw that curveball floating, and he saw the look in Tony Perez’s eyes. He thought:
Oh, oh.
Perez started his swing, then pulled back and started it again.

Up in the Fenway Park press box, the dean of Cincinnati sportswriters, Si Burick, watched the pitch come in. Si had been writing for the
Dayton Daily News
for fifty years. He was the son of a rabbi, and he had started writing about sports in the paper when he was sixteen—four years before the stock market crashed. Si saw the pitch, and he watched Tony double-clutch, and before Tony even swung the bat, he whispered two words that he thought nobody else could hear.

“Home run.”

And it was a home run, a long home run that sailed over the Green Monster, into the black of night, and nobody ever saw it land.

After Doggie hit his home run, the Reds still trailed by a run, but the Machine arrogance had returned. It’s a sports cliché for a player to say, “We knew we were going to win.” But it is the sports cliché that every member of the Big Red Machine would repeat in the months and years after Game 7. The long season of triumph and failure, jokes and hurt feelings, arrogance and charity, it all had to end with glory. They were the Machine.

“It’s not something that most people can understand,” Pete Rose would say. “But we were too good to lose that World Series. The Red Sox were a good damned baseball team. But we could not lose that World Series. If the Red Sox had scored ten runs, we would have scored eleven. We could not lose.”

The final details lacked the drama of Doggie’s home run or Carlton Fisk’s home run or Joe Morgan’s clubhouse rant or Sparky Anderson’s bullpen genius. In the seventh inning, Ken Griffey walked, stole second base (yes, he was hitting seventh in the lineup again, where he could steal bases without upsetting Joe Morgan), and scored on Pete’s single. And Pete could sense a shift in the crowd then. To his ears, they no longer sounded hopeful.

Then, ninth inning, with the scored tied, Griffey walked again. He moved to second base on a bunt. Rookie left-handed pitcher Jim Burton walked Pete with two outs. And Joe Morgan came to the plate. Joe would always remember how cold it felt, that New England chill. He would always remember how aware he was of the situation, how he knew that this was the childhood dream, the one he had talked about with his father time and again: seventh game of the World Series, two outs, winning run on second base. Joe’s father would ask: are you good enough?

With the count two and two, Joe chased after a nasty slider. He connected with the ball, but he did not hit it well…vibrations shook through his hands. He heard a hollow sound. The ball blooped toward center field. Joe did not know if the ball would land; the Red Sox had Fred Lynn playing center.

But Fred Lynn was playing deeper than he normally would. He had no choice; the Fenway outfield was mud, and he simply could not take the chance of a ball getting hit over his head. Lynn raced forward. He would always believe, for the rest of his life, that if the outfield had been dry, he would have caught Morgan’s ball. But he did not catch it. The ball dropped for a soft single. Ken Griffey scored the run. The Reds led the game.

In the ninth, Will McEnaney—that quirky lefty—got Juan Beniquez to fly to right field, and Bob Montgomery to ground out to shortstop. And finally, he faced the great Yaz. Of course, Yaz was one of McEnaney’s heroes—Yaz was everybody’s hero. McEnaney threw his best fastball, and Yaz hit a high and lazy fly ball to Cesar Geronimo in center field. “I knew right as soon as he hit it,” McEnaney would say years later, “that Geronimo would get it and we had won. There wasn’t a place Yaz could hit it out there that Geronimo would not chase it down.”

Geronimo did catch it. And then jumped up and down in joy. Marty Brennaman shouted, “This one belongs to the Reds.” Johnny Bench raced to the mound, and Will McEnaney jumped into his arms—a perfect shot for the cover of
Sports Illustrated.
Pete ran to Joe, and they hugged for a long time. The whole team huddled together in the Fenway chill. All of them except Sparky. He walked back into the clubhouse. He did not want to be on the field—that was for the players. He wanted his moment alone. There were tears in his eyes. The Reds were what he had always hoped. Winners.

February 2008

SUN CITY, ARIZONA

Joe Morgan said, “I promised myself
I wasn’t going to do this.” And then he started to cry. Joe stepped away from the lectern, stood silently for a few moments, and then began again. “I shouldn’t be crying,” he said. “This is not supposed to be a sad occasion.”

There were many different people in the retirement home. There were baseball people, and family members, and a few old friends. Bob Howsam had died. Joe was right, no one wanted this to be a sad day. Howsam lived to be eighty-nine years old. He had done everything he wanted in his life. He had owned a baseball team and a football team, he had built a stadium, he had raised a family. Buck O’Neil, the great Negro Leagues player, always said that funerals were for people who died too young. Everyone else deserved a celebration.

But Joe said he was not crying for Bob Howsam. He was crying because the man was gone. And his time was gone. And baseball—the kind of baseball Bob Howsam stood for—was gone too. Joe had stayed around baseball. He won two Most Valuable Player Awards with the Reds. He played for another decade or so. He became a famous baseball announcer. And he believed something got lost, something that we will never get back.

“I remember standing with Bob Howsam after we won the World Series in 1975,” Joe was saying. “And we were kings of the world.”

It is true, there was no drama for the Reds in 1975, no story line. Geronimo caught the final pop-up, and Will McEnaney jumped into Johnny Bench’s arms. Almost immediately after the season ended, Johnny and Vickie divorced. She would tell Tom Callahan that his exact words to her after that season were: “Now I’m through with two things I hate: baseball and you.”

Joe got the Most Valuable Player Award, and Pete was named
Sports Illustrated’
s Sportsman of the Year, and Sparky spent the off-season talking to clubs and groups. Doggie went home to Puerto Rico as a hero—nobody was talking about trading him.

In 1976, the Reds just won boldly and decisively. They toyed with the Dodgers for the first two months and then, in early June, moved into first place for good. They led the National League in every single offensive category in 1976—every single one. They scored the most runs, got the most hits, cracked the most doubles, triples, and home runs, stole the most bases. It was a rout. They swept the Philadelphia Phillies in the playoffs, clinching the final game with a three-run rally in the ninth. George homered. Johnny homered. And Ken Griffey, who always found a quiet way to be the hero, drove in the game-winning run.

The Reds then swept the Yankees four straight in the World Series. Nobody even seemed willing to argue the point anymore. The Big Red Machine, the team that Bob Howsam built, was as good a team as had ever been put together. And they might have been a little bit better.

Joe said he was standing with Howsam in the hotel after the Reds had put away the Yankees in the Series, and he saw tears building in the old man’s eyes. “Then he turned to me,” Joe said, “and he said, ‘Joe, this is it. There will never be another team like this. Ever again.’”

Joe began to cry again. Things did change after 1976. Players won the right to become free agents, so players did not stay in the
same place as much. Players started earning larger salaries, which made owners reluctant to hold on to stars. The Machine broke up. They traded away Doggie and Will McEnaney before the 1977 season. Howsam and Sparky finally gave Danny Driessen a chance to play first base. He hit well, but something was lost.

Sparky was fired in 1978—Johnny Bench himself told reporters that he thought Sparky had lost the team and he no longer had the fire he’d once had. Dick Wagner flew out to California to fire Sparky personally. Then Sparky saw something he never expected: he saw Dick Wagner cry. Sparky went to Detroit the next year, and he won another World Series there. He went on to the Hall of Fame.

Pete Rose left Cincinnati after the 1978 season too; he always believed the Reds did not want to pay him fairly after he got divorced from Karolyn. He would come back to Cincinnati in 1984 to play and manage. In 1985, he broke Ty Cobb’s all-time hit record. In 1989, he was suspended for life for gambling on baseball games.

Johnny stuck around in Cincinnati to the bitter end. He was only thirty-five when it became clear to him that he could no longer play well enough to go on. He hurt and ached all over. He and Carl Yastrzemski retired the same year, 1983. And they went into the Hall of Fame together five years later.

Joe himself left after the 1979 season. He signed with his old team in Houston, of all places. He was released a year later, signed again, traded, released, and signed one more time. He had a hard time letting go of baseball, though to the end he was able to do the little things that great players do. To the end, he was able to mess with pitchers’ minds.

“I look back now,” Joe said, “and I think Bob was exactly right. I don’t think there will ever be a team like us. We cared about each other. We still care about each other.”

He looked around the room. He was the only member of the Big Red Machine there.

November 2008

CINCINNATI

The eight men—the Great Eight, they call them in Cincinnati—sat around two tables in a sports art gallery. They were not sitting in any particular order. Pete Rose was on the end. Joe Morgan was on his right, Johnny Bench on Morgan’s right, and Tony Perez on Bench’s right. At the other table, George Foster sat next to Ken Griffey, who sat next to Cesar Geronimo, who sat next to Davey Concepcion. They were there to talk about the old days and eat some food. The ticket price was $2,500.

There were no pitchers there, which was typical. No one ever gave the pitchers of the Machine much credit. Sometimes the pitchers felt slighted. “You would think that we couldn’t pitch at all,” Gary Nolan would say.

“We had a damned good pitching staff,” Jack Billingham would say.

“It’s all a bunch of horseshit,” Will McEnaney would say.

Still, they all knew that this was how it was—that when people thought of the Machine, they thought of these eight men, the greatest baseball team ever put on the field.

“Okay,” Marty Brennaman said. He was the master of ceremonies. “Who was the one guy who wound everybody up, the one guy who started the most trouble?”

Seven Reds all looked and pointed at Tony Perez. He had a look of mock horror on his face. “Me?” he asked. “I don’t do nothing.”

They all laughed, and drank wine, and talked about the old days. They remembered how Sparky used to pull his pitchers. They remembered how much Davey wanted to be a star. They remembered how quiet George used to be. George, in his later years, had found his voice. He had started a petition to get himself on the television show
Dancing with the Stars.

“Can you even dance?” Johnny asked him.

“All black guys can dance,” George said.

They remembered certain games, certain stadiums, the good moments. Johnny remembered how they were color-blind—“I didn’t see black or Hispanic or any of that, I just saw teammates,” he said—and Davey Concepcion remembered how they all kidded him, and Ken Griffey mostly stayed quiet and in the background. Joe did most of the talking; he always did. He talked about how they were family—they bickered and they fought and they didn’t like each other and they loved each other.

“What is your best memory?” someone asked Joe, and Joe looked around the room at the Big Red Machine. For a moment, he seemed at a loss for words.

Then he said: “All of it.”

March 2008

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

Pete Rose sits in the Field of Dreams
, a sports store in the Caesars Palace Shops in Las Vegas. He sits behind a card table and a velvet rope and two young men who scream like circus barkers: “Come see Pete Rose! Come see the Hit King!” Pete Rose calls himself the Hit King, signs his baseballs that way too, because he cracked 4,256 hits in his long career. No one ever got more.

Pete is guarded by a young woman, Sarah, who, he rarely fails to point out, has a great ass. She does not seem to mind being reminded about her ass, or anyway, she has grown used to it. There are various job-related quirks when it comes to working with Pete Rose. Appreciating ass compliments seems to be one of them.

“So this woman, she sits down right here, right next to me,” Pete is saying, and he points at the spot next to him as if it were a historical landmark. “And she has really big breasts, you know? I mean, really, she has big breasts. And she’s like leaning over the table, like, um, you know…”

Pete realizes that at this point in his presentation he needs a stand-in to give the story a visual. He calls over to Sarah and asks her to play the woman with the big breasts. She nods. You get the sense
that this is a recurring role for her. She sits next to Pete, leans far over the table.

“So,” Pete says, “she’s really showing off her breasts, you know, like I didn’t notice them. And then I say to her, ‘Where are you from?’”

At this point, he pauses and begins the little demonstration.

“So, where you from?” Pete asks Sarah, who plays the large-breasted woman.

“Titsburgh!” she says triumphantly.

“Titsburgh?” Pete asks. “Is that in Tennsylvania?”

And then Pete Rose laughs. He does not laugh casually, no, he laughs hard, hard enough that he can hardly breathe, hard enough that if he were drinking, liquid would spew out of his nose. He laughs like this is the single funniest thing he has ever heard, and he is hearing it now for the first time.

Pete Rose is sixty-seven years old and defiantly not retired. He sits here on a chair at the Field of Dreams four times a week, six hours a day, and he listens to people praise him and ask him the same questions and tell him that he got screwed by the people who run baseball. Pete was banned from the game in 1989 when an investigation determined that, while managing the Cincinnati Reds, he gambled on baseball games. Gambling is the cardinal sin of baseball; there is a sign in every clubhouse in the major leagues that warns against it. For almost twenty years, Pete adamantly denied that he bet on baseball. Then he wrote a book in which he admitted that, in fact, he did bet on baseball, he even bet on his own Cincinnati Reds. But, he aggressively pointed out, he always bet on his Reds to win. To him, this makes all the difference. He was a competitor.

Every day Rose sits on this chair, and he signs the baseballs and photographs and jerseys and posters and homemade paintings and baseball cards that people bring to him. “One woman, she brought
me a Babe Ruth card,” Pete is saying. “She couldn’t see too well. I said to her, ‘This is a Babe Ruth card.’ She said, ‘Isn’t that you?’”

“What did you do?”

“I signed it,” Pete says. He will sign anything. He has been known to sign the Dowd Report—the 225-page report prepared by special counsel John M. Dowd that led to Pete getting banned from baseball. He has been known to sign the police mug shot taken after he was arrested and then jailed for tax evasion. Pete sits in this spot six hours a day, four days a week, and he waits for Las Vegas tourists to come in. People ask him if he’s sad. He says, “Hell, no, I’m not sad. I get paid a lot of money.” He will not say how much.

“I get paid seven figures,” he says. He will not be more specific.

“It isn’t just barely seven figures either. I mean, I get paid a shit-load of money,” he says.

“I got no problem with Johnny Bench,” Pete is saying now. While he talks, Sarah walks over to the computer and starts working on something. “The only thing is, Johnny is moody. He’s goddamned moody. You never know what you’re going to get. Like with me, I’m the same all the time. But Johnny’s just moody.

“The thing with Johnny is he never could accept the fact that I’m from Cincinnati. That’s why Pete Rose Way is there, you know? I never got mad at him because in Binger, Oklahoma, there’s a Johnny Bench High School. Cincinnati’s my hometown, that’s all. He never could accept that.

“It’s not important to be the best player ever with the Reds, right? I mean, we were all great players. Johnny was one helluva player. Joe was a helluva player. Tony was a helluva player. I was a helluva player. Davey, George, we were all great players. But Johnny thinks it matters. I mean, I get along with him all right. He said that stuff about me after I got suspended, stuff about me not respecting the game and what have you. I mean, that was bullshit, because nobody respected
the game more than me. Johnny Bench didn’t respect the game more than I did. But we get along all right.”

Just as he says those last words, Sarah walks over. She has printed out a photograph: it is of Pete and Johnny from a few months before, and they have their arms around each other’s shoulders, both of them smiling deep.

“See,” Pete says, right on cue, “we get along. We just took that picture. I like Johnny all right. We’ve been through a lot together, you know? We get along.”

Sarah walks away smiling. “Am I right?” Pete asks as he watches her. “Doesn’t she have a great ass?”

“I had a way of making guys better,” Pete says. “Maybe that’s because of the way I was brought up in the game. They all treated me like shit when I was a rookie. All of them. Except the black players. Frank Robinson. Vada Pinson. Those were the only guys who treated me like I was a man. The rest of them would get on me. They would rip me for running to first base on walks. Hell, I started running to first on walks when I was nine, and I’ll do it when I’m ninety. That’s how my dad believed the game should be played. But they treated me like a dog. And I said I would never let that happen to a young player again.”

I tell Pete that, almost to a man, every player on the 1975 Reds had some story about Pete helping them, inviting them to his house for dinner, picking up their check at a restaurant, helping them find a place to live. Pete does not smile. He only nods.

“Yeah, that was the disappointing thing that happened when I had my problem,” Pete says. “It wasn’t just players. It was reporters too. I helped them. And when I had my deal, they all turned on me. That was disappointing. No one has any recall of anything good. That’s the problem with fucking society. Once they judge you guilty, you’re guilty for life.”

His mood turns dark now. When Pete gets this way, he cannot
hear, and he cannot see. He talks, but he is not talking to anyone specifically. He is only talking.

“I’m the biggest winner in the history of sports,” he says. “Think about that. It’s safe to say baseball players play more games than any other sport. And I’m the all-time leader in games won. That has got to mean something, doesn’t it? That has got to mean something.

“That’s why it’s so strange what I did. When I was wrong. I respected the game. I respected the game more than anybody. I lived for the game. It was all I thought about, it was all I dreamed about, it was everything to me. And maybe that was my problem. Maybe the reason I did what I did is I am what I am. When I was finished as a ballplayer, I needed more. You know, I played every game in 1975. Every single game. Sparky must have come up to me fifty times that year and asked me to sit down. We won that year by, what, twenty games, right? He wanted me to sit down. He didn’t understand…I couldn’t sit down. I needed every fucking game. I needed every fucking at-bat. That’s who I was, and when I didn’t have that anymore…well, I was wrong. I had a standard bet, two thousand dollars every day on the Reds to win. No one knew about it. And I was wrong. I was wrong. And I paid dearly for it.

“But you know what? I don’t think I had anything to do with the integrity of the game. That’s horseshit. Because I never directly had any impact on the outcome of the game. The guys today, with the steroids, they’re cheating. They’re cheating the game. They’re cheating Babe Ruth, they’re cheating Ty Cobb, they’re cheating fucking Tris Speaker, Cy Young. I didn’t do that. And the sad thing, the really sad thing, is Jose Canseco came out and said how many times he took steroids, he cheated, but if somebody wanted to give him a job in baseball tomorrow, he could take it. And I can’t. I’m banned. And who put more into the game of baseball than me? I’ll tell you who. Nobody. That’s who. Nobody. I’ve been suspended for nineteen years. Nineteen fucking years. You kill somebody, you’re not suspended that long….”

While he talks, one of the store employees walks over and chirps: “Hey, Pete, we need an apology ball. We just sold the last one.”

An apology ball. What the hell is an apology ball? Pete Rose grabs the ball, and he grabs a pen, and he carefully writes on the baseball: “I’m sorry I bet on baseball. Pete Rose.” If someone buys the apology ball, Pete will personalize it. A personal apology ball. Now, though, he slams it down on the table.

“I’m in jail,” he says softly.

Pete shakes his head. “I’d like to sit here and tell you that we had the greatest team in baseball history,” he says. “I wish I could tell you that. I mean, I didn’t see the ’27 Yankees. I didn’t see those Brooklyn Dodgers teams.

“But I’m gonna tell you right now that I seriously believe we had the most entertaining team in the history of baseball, and that’s not even close. We had everything. We had Johnny and Doggie and George hitting home runs. We had Joe and Davey and Ken stealing bases. We had me playing my butt off every single night. We had Cesar playing center field, and I never saw anyone play it better. We had everything. We had white stars, we had black stars, we had Spanish stars. We had speed, we had Gold Glovers, we had power, we had daring base running, and we had a flamboyant manager. We had everything you need. And we had a good bullpen.

“You can always argue. You can argue the ’27 Yankees or ’61 Yankees or the Brooklyn Dodgers. Let me tell you this: any team that’s got four Hall of Famers and a couple of others on the verge has gotta be one of the best teams in baseball history.”

The Machine actually had three players in the Baseball Hall of Fame—Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench, and Tony Perez. There is a fourth Red if you count the manager, Sparky Anderson. But Pete does not mean Sparky. He means himself. Pete is not in the Hall of Fame and likely never will be in the Hall of Fame. When he was banned from
the game, he was taken off the Hall of Fame ballot. Every year, a handful of writers put Pete down as a write-in candidate, but those votes are not counted. If he ever managed to get on the ballot (an unlikely scenario), he would not get nearly enough votes. It takes 75 percent of the votes to get in the Hall of Fame. Pete Rose does not have 75 percent support. None of that matters. Pete views himself as a Hall of Famer.

“You know who shocks the hell out of me?” Pete asks suddenly. “George Foster. You know, when he was playing, that guy wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful. We used to call him ‘Gabby’ because he never said anything. Now the guy won’t shut up. He’s really changed.

“Johnny hasn’t changed. He’s the same moody guy he was…. Davey, he’s still the same. Ol’ Bozo. We used to give him hell…. Doggie’s the same. I first met Tony when we were together in Geneva, New York, back in 1960. I was two days out of high school, and he was two months out of Cuba. There’s a closeness there with Tony. I spoke to him a week ago for a half-hour. And you know what? I have no fucking idea what he said.

“Geronimo? He was another quiet one. Chief didn’t say a word…. Griffey would talk a little bit, I always liked Ken. He was a damn good player. He could really run. I’ll tell you a story, Griffey did something one time. He was battling for the batting title with Bill Madlock, I guess it was 1976. And he had a couple-point lead the last day. He asked Bench what he should do, and Bench told him to sit out the last game. Now, why take Bench’s fucking word? Bench never went through anything like that. What did he know about batting titles? I’d won them. I’d have told him to play the last day, get two hits, and put the fucking title away. But he asked Bench, and Bench told him to sit, and Madlock caught him on the last day. That’s what you get asking Bench about winning a batting title.

“But, hey, I liked everybody. I liked our coaches. I loved Big Klu, Ted Kluszewski. I loved that man. He had those big arms. You know,
he would walk over to you, and he would hold out his arm, and he’d say, ‘You know what that is? That’s a Polish-joke stopper.’ He was one helluva man. Sparky was too. I learned a lot from Sparky. I liked everybody. I liked our pitchers. I used to take McEnaney out to eat sometimes. He was fucking crazy. It was a good group. We really enjoyed playing together. We wouldn’t have been as good if we didn’t like each other, you know?” He shrugs. “You know what?” he says. “I don’t even know who the fuck our extra men were.”

“You know what I get a kick out of?” Pete Rose was asking. “I get a kick out of people saying they are going to break my record. Guess what. Nobody’s breaking that record. The first three thousand hits are easy. Baseball’s an easy game to play when you’re 100 percent. But try getting those hits when you’re old, when your bat’s slow, when your back hurts. Hell, it was easy in ’75. I was young. We were all young.”

A steady trickle of people have been wandering up for autographs, but all in all it has been a slow day in Vegas for the Hit King. Some days, the crowds line up to get a peek at Rose, to say a few words to him, to pay Pete to scribble his name. And why not? As Pete says, he’s the best deal in Vegas. For the price of your ticket, you get to meet the Hit King, talk to him, get a picture with him, ask him who was the toughest pitcher he ever faced and what was he thinking at first base after he got the hit that broke Ty Cobb’s record and…well, what the hell, they all ask the same questions. But the point is, he answers the questions. He puts his arm around strangers. And he asks: Does Bette Midler come out and take a photo with everybody? You can pay a hundred bucks to hear Celine Dion sing, but will she come out and shake your hand?