The Machine (33 page)

“Well, will she?” Pete asks.

No. Pete rests his case. The Hit King wins again.

Yes, on those busy days, Pete gives all those people a thrill, something to hold, a brush with greatness. And what he won’t tell you,
what he can’t bear to say, is that he needs those days too. Because it’s on those days, when he’s in demand, when there’s action going, when he can hear the slots bells ringing, when the people are shouting, “You’re the greatest, Pete”…maybe he feels invincible again. And maybe he feels like a Hall of Famer. The quiet days are harder. This is a quiet day.

“We live in a fucked-up world,” Pete says suddenly.
“USA Today
had that survey of the top ten sports disasters or whatever the hell they called it. And you know who won? Mine. Mine was ahead of O. J. Simpson. How the fuck is that possible? Ahead of Rae Carruth. Those guys fucking killed people. How is betting on your own team to win a bigger story than that? What the fuck are they talking about?”

I try to get him back to talking about the ’75 Reds. He seems happiest talking about the Machine. But first this mood has to pass. He rants for a while longer about how he was wrong but he wasn’t this wrong, he deserved punishment but it’s too much, how quickly people forget. Finally he is exhausted. A woman walks up and asks him who was the toughest pitcher he ever faced.

“Bob Gibson,” he says automatically, and he signs her baseball.

He pulls out his money clip and looks at it closely. “Joe gave me this,” he says. “I went and spoke for him out in Oakland a couple of months ago. He didn’t invite Bench. He didn’t invite Perez. He invited me. So I went. He gave me this money clip. It’s a nice one too. It’s nice. Gold.”

He runs his fingers over the money clip, which is clipped around several $100 bills. Joe was his closest friend on the Machine. They ripped each other and hugged each other and pushed each other. “Joe will tell you that I made him a better baseball player,” he says, and it’s true, Joe does say that. But Joe also ended up living the life after baseball that Pete felt sure would be his. Joe is in the Hall of Fame. Joe is
nationally famous as an announcer. Joe is one of the most respected men in the game. It’s different for Pete.

“I was talking to Joe just the other day,” he says. “We talk a lot. But we don’t talk about old times. We talk about stuff that’s going on today. No point in talking about old times all the time. We lived them. They were good. But we can’t live them again.”

I ask Pete Rose if there is a single memory, a single moment from that 1975 season, that he thinks about more than others. Pete says he remembers all of it. He remembers the slow start. He remembers when Sparky asked him to go to third base. He remembers the hot streak that seemed to last all summer. He remembers destroying the Pirates in three straight. He remembers Game 3 of the World Series, when Fisk and Armbrister collided. He remembers Game 6, when he was hopping from man to man and shouting, “Isn’t this the greatest game you ever played in? You’ll be telling your grandkids that you played in this game.” He remembers Game 7 and the way he paced in the dugout and shouted at his teammates, not to inspire them but to inspire himself. He remembers it all. He remembers exactly how many hits he got that year.

“You know what makes me feel good?” he says. “How many kids come up and ask for my autograph. They’re saying, ‘There’s Pete Rose, he’s the best hitter ever, he’s the best player ever.’ I always tell them, I’m not. That’s Babe Ruth. He’s the best player ever. Me? I’m one of the most consistent players ever. I think I consistently hit the ball harder than just about anybody. I hit the ball hard.”

He pulls out the money clip and looks at it.

“Joe Morgan gave this to me,” he says again, like he forgot saying it the first time. “It’s pretty special, you know? Joe still likes me. I really think Joe still likes me.”

The Big Red Machine towered over my childhood. That is at the heart of why I wrote this book. I grew up in Cleveland, and I was eight years old in 1975. Sometimes, it seems to me, we all just want baseball to forever feel like it does when we are eight years old. The good players seem great. The great players seem legendary. And the legendary players are like flashes of light.

Well, there were legendary players in Cincinnati. Rose. Bench. Morgan. Perez. At the time, the Cleveland Indians were a ragtag bunch playing in blood-red uniforms in a cavernous old stadium that always seemed to have more birds than fans. Those Indians were my team, and they would have been the subject of this book…if I thought anyone else wanted to read a book about the 1975 Cleveland Indians.

The Reds played a four-hour drive away, and they were perfection. They took the field with their hair cut short, with their shoes polished black, with their uniforms pristine white and worn just so. They could beat you, in the words of Joe Morgan, any way that you could be beaten. They were too brilliant to love, and too unassailable to hate. But being a good Clevelander, I tried to hate them anyway.

The last thing anyone wants is another book claiming another team was the greatest ever. The shelves are filled with the greatest—the greatest match, the greatest game, the greatest player, the greatest team, the greatest sports book, and so on. I do believe the 1975 Cincinnati Reds (and the ’76 Reds that followed) were the greatest team in baseball history. I don’t believe any other team—not the 1927 Yankees, not the “Boys of Summer” Dodgers, not the Casey Stengel Yankees, not the Oakland A’s of the early 1970s or Derek Jeter’s Yankees of the late 1990s—could match those Reds for power, speed, defense, star power, innovation, and personality. We can sword-fight with statistics and logic forever and never come up with a correct answer. I believe the Reds were the best.

But that is not what drew me to the book. No, it was the chance to write about baseball from my childhood. It was a chance to relay the brilliance of Joe Morgan the baseball player to those who missed his singular career and know him only as the baseball announcer. It was a chance to write about Johnny Bench’s brilliance, and George Foster’s power, and Ken Griffey’s breathtaking speed, and the grace of Cesar Geronimo. It was a chance to write about a year in America that, in memory, feels as faded and distant as the crackling color footage of the 1975 World Series.

It was a chance to catch up again with the ol’ genius Sparky Anderson.

And mostly, for me, it was a chance (I hope) to resurrect a little bit of the Pete Rose as I remembered him from 1975. The story of Pete Rose’s fall has been written and rewritten so many times that I sometimes think America has forgotten the one-of-a-kind player who refused to sit out a single game during the 1975 season even though the Reds won the division championship by twenty games. I sometimes think that we lost the player who was so driven that he would get to the ballpark first, leave the ballpark last, and then go to the car in his driveway so he could listen to West Coast games. Nobody
ever loved baseball more. Nobody ever gave baseball more. It doesn’t pardon Pete his sins, not at all, but it seems to me the man thrilled too many people and played too hard to be remembered only as the man who gambled on his team, was thrown into jail for tax evasion, and now spends his days signing autographs at a memorabilia shop at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

Pete Rose was my inspiration for this book, but so were Bench and Morgan and Ken Griffey and Gary Nolan and Jack Billingham and all the rest of them. There’s an old saying in sports: talent wins. And it does. But there is something beautiful about a team coming together.

I have to share one more story with you because it so perfectly describes this book for me. I was driving back home from Cincinnati one evening, and I was pulled over for speeding in Indiana. The highway patrolman walked to the window, asked for my driver’s license, and then noticed I had a stack of books in the car about the Reds.

“You a Reds fan?” he asked.

“Sort of,” I said. “I’m writing a book about the 1975 Cincinnati Reds.”

And suddenly, without hesitation, he said: “Tony Perez, Joe Morgan, Dave Concepcion, Pete Rose, George Foster, Ken Griffey, Johnny Bench, and, uh, Cesar Geronimo.”

And he let me go.

One of my family’s favorite activities every year is yelling at the television when Academy Award acceptance speeches go on too long. This doesn’t necessarily speak well of us, but we never seem to tire of mocking people on the big stage looking petrified that, in what may be the grandest moment of their lives, they will forget to thank somebody.

And so it’s fitting, I suppose, that here I am feeling entirely certain that I am going to forget someone who was critical to me writing this book. I apologize to those people in advance. I’ll send you something in the mail, I promise.

I want to begin by thanking Pete Rose. Not only was he the stimulus for this book, but he was also extremely generous with his time and memories. Everyone has at least one opinion about Pete Rose, and I have several, but he has always been extremely kind to me, and this book is in large part a result of that kindness.

I want to thank the many people who were willing to take the time to talk to me for this book. These include: Buddy Bell, Johnny Bench, Jack Billingham, Pedro Borbon, Marty Brennaman, Tom Callahan, Dave Concepcion, Pat Darcy, Paul Daugherty, Frank Deford, Dan
Driessen, Rawly Eastwick, John Erardi, Jim Ferguson, George Foster, Cesar Geronimo, Ken Griffey, Ernie Harwell, Robert Howsam, Bill James, Ferguson Jenkins, Randy Jones, Pat Jordan, Reuven J. Katz, Dave Kindred, Jim Lonborg, Fred Lynn, Mike Marshall, Hal McCoy, Will McEnaney, Joe Morgan, Gary Nolan, Steve Palermo, Tony Perez, Bill Plummer, Greg Rhodes, Jeff Ruby, Bob Ryan, Mark Sackler, George Scherger, Diego Segui, Art Stewart, Brent Strom, Tim Sullivan, and Frank White. I also relied on earlier interviews I had with Sparky Anderson, Johnny Bench, George Brett, Steve Garvey, Hal McRae, Joe Morgan, Pete Rose, and Marge Schott.

I must thank research assistant Minda Haas for her hard work in re-creating 1975 through magazine articles and for almost getting an interview with George Clooney—we’re hoping he’s still available to play in the movie. Josh Katzowitz spent countless hours in the library scanning microfilm, and I thank him for that, and my weak stomach also thanks him. Greg Gajus was helpful on many fronts.

There is no way I can thank my friends enough for pushing and pulling me through. I want to thank Scott Raab for his inspiration, Michael Rosenberg for his late-night instant-message pep talks, Adrian Wojnarowski, Alex Belth, Seth Mnookin, Mechelle Voepel, Jim Banks, Bob Dutton, Richard Bush, Dinn Mann, Ian O’Connor, Brian Hay, Tommy Tomlinson, and Bill James for always seeming so convinced that the book would actually get done. I always have special thanks for my brother-in-arms Mike Vaccaro. And I need to throw an extra thank-you to Michael Rosenberg for also taking the time to mark up the manuscript with red ink.

I thank my editor, David Highfill, and his assistant, Gabe Robinson, for working so hard on this project. This is my second book with David, and both have been great experiences. I have to thank my fabulous agent, Sloan Harris, even though I will admit that it is precisely when actors start thanking agents at the Oscars that my family gets particularly unruly. I thank Nate Gordon at
Sports Illustrated
for helping me track down photographs, and by “helping
me” I really mean tracking down photographs by himself.

There is no way I could have done this book without the support of my editors at the
Kansas City Star,
Holly Lawton and Mike Fannin, who are also two of my best friends. I also got great support from my editor at
Sports Illustrated,
Christian Stone, even though as a young boy he undoubtedly wanted the Red Sox to win that World Series.

Finally, we come to family. My parents, Steven and Frances Posnanski, came to America in 1964 and hoped their oldest son would be a doctor, maybe a lawyer, at least an accountant. They got a sportswriter, and while they don’t get free medical advice or their taxes done, they do seem fairly proud to have books with their last name in their library. While I was writing this book, my youngest brother, Tony, lost more than two hundred pounds, so he achieved more during the time frame. My other brother, David, will no doubt remember baseball games we played in the backyard while growing up in Cleveland. Because I was the Cleveland Indians. He had to be the Cincinnati Reds.

I dedicate this book to my two beautiful daughters, Elizabeth and Katie, who do not know or care about baseball or the Cincinnati Reds but were always there with hugs and helpful suggestions such as “Are you finished with your book yet?”

And, last, most, I thank my beautiful wife, Margo, for putting up with the crazy life of a sportswriter, the hectic life of a blogger, and the feverish life of an author, all at the same time. In addition to her infinite patience, her editing talents, and her rare talent to panic when I’m on a tight deadline, she is much more artistic than I am. She was instrumental in getting the photographs for this book. She claimed it was a pain, but I’m quite certain that she enjoyed every minute of it.

A baseball writer in 2009 has so many advantages over writers of the past because of extraordinary baseball websites such as BaseballReference.com and Retrosheet.org. I spent countless hours on those two sites looking up box scores, statistics, and dates. It is not an exaggeration to say that this book, as presented, would have been impossible to do without the tireless work of Sean Forman, David Smith, and countless others who make those remarkable baseball websites possible.

The information gathered here came in large part from extensive interviews with the members of the 1975 Reds and various other players and observers. A complete list of people interviewed is in the acknowledgments.

The day-to-day information was mostly harvested from 1975 daily newspapers, particularly the
Cincinnati Enquirer
and the
Cincinnati Post
. Additional information was found in the
Los Angeles Times
and the
New York Times,
along with Associated Press and United Press International wire service reports printed in various papers across the country. I had the honor of working for the
Cincinnati Post,
which
printed its final edition on December 31, 2007; Cincinnati and the country are poorer for losing the
Post
.

Among magazines,
Time
and
Newsweek
helped me get a better feel for the time and place, as did
The New Yorker,
and
Playboy’
s interviews with Pete Rose and Sparky Anderson were both beneficial.
Sports Illustrated
was an invaluable reference, particularly Frank Deford’s wonderful story “Watch on the Ohio” (September 29, 1975).

A more complete list of the books used is in the bibliography, but the most crucial to me include Bob Hertzel’s
The Big Red Machine
(Prentice Hall, 1976), Ritter Collett’s
Men of the Machine
(Landfall Press, 1977), Hub Walker’s
Cincinnati and the Big Red Machine
(Indiana University Press, 1988), and especially
Big Red Dynasty
(Road West, 1997) by Greg Rhodes and John Erardi. Greg and John were kind and unceasingly accommodating to me during the writing process.

There is no shortage of books about Pete Rose, but the diary he wrote with Bob Hertzel called
Charlie Hustle
(Prentice Hall, 1975) was particularly useful in trying to find the young Pete Rose, before his world went mad. Johnny Bench’s autobiography (with William Brashler; Harper & Row, 1979) was unusually blunt and informative, and one of the real pleasures of my obsessive Reds readings was
Joe Morgan: My Life in Baseball
, which I found to be as interesting and complicated as Morgan himself. One of my regrets was that, for one reason or another, I failed to connect with Sparky Anderson, but I have spoken with him on a number of occasions through the years and heard his voice come through clearly in
The Main Spark
(Doubleday, 1978) and
Sparky!
(Prentice Hall, 1990).

I also did not get the chance to speak with the architect of the Machine, Bob Howsam, before he passed away in February 2008, just as the project was beginning. But his unpublished book
My Life in Sports
, written with Bob Jones, was indispensable. I want to thank the Howsam family for their kindness and Greg Gajus for finding me a copy of the book.

Cincinnati was blessed in 1975 with some of the best newspa
per sportswriting in the country. The columns of the
Cincinnati Enquirer’
s Tom Callahan were priceless, as were his Reds memories in
The Bases Were Loaded (and So Was I
; Crown, 2004). And I’m proud to call Baseball Hall of Fame sportswriter Hal McCoy of the
Dayton Daily News
a friend of mine. His season wrap-up,
The Relentless Reds
(PressCo, 1976), was filled with wonderful stories and details.

The Baseball Hall of Fame, the Cincinnati Public Library, and the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame were all exceedingly attentive, and they went out of their way to help.