The Machine (6 page)

March 25, 1975

TAMPA

In the Cincinnati clubhouse, players were still talking about the fight. Pete, of course, kept talking about the white guy. Did you see him? The white guy showed all kinds of heart. Chuck Wepner. But nobody gave him a chance. They called Wepner “the Bayonne Bleeder,” which is not an especially intimidating name for a boxer. What chance would a boxer called the Bayonne Bleeder have against Muhammad Ali, the greatest, “the Black Superman,” the heavy
weight champeen of the world? This wasn’t a fight; it was a bloodletting. The only thing bookies took bets on was what round the Bayonne Bleeder would drown. Jim Murray of the
Los Angeles Times
wrote that to entertain a crowd that would pay to watch a fight like this, they should follow up by gassing butterflies and setting fire to baby carriages.

Then the fight began. And the white guy wouldn’t go down. He took every blow, walked through every punch, he made it all the way to the fifteenth round with Ali. Wepner even knocked the champ down. The white guy! Of course, Ali later said it was no knockdown, he had slipped. And yeah, Ali’s trunks flushed red with Wepner’s blood. And sure, the whole thing was a joke…the champ taunted and mocked and played around most of the fight. He kept the tomato can upright just to entertain the booing crowd. Still, you had to admit it, Wepner stood for fifteen rounds. The white guy!

“He got knocked
out!
” Joe Morgan shouted at Pete. They were always shouting at each other, Pete and Joe. “You are like an old married couple,” Tony Perez would say, and they were, like an old married couple you might see on television, like Archie and Edith on
All in the Family,
or Sonny and Cher before they called it splits.

“He got knocked out with nineteen seconds left,” Rose yelled back. “Did anybody think this guy could last until there were nineteen seconds left in the fight? Everybody thought he would get knocked out in the first round…. Hell, the white guy even knocked Ali down.”

“Would you two shut up?” Johnny Bench yelled across the clubhouse.

“It was a slip,” Morgan said.

“Yeah, like you slipped when you swung at that pitch in the dirt yesterday,” Perez shouted.

Pete and Joe. Those two could get everybody in the locker room going. Funny thing, that’s exactly what Sparky had hoped for when he put Joe’s locker next to Pete’s. That was in 1972, when the Reds traded for Joe. Nobody in Cincinnati liked the trade, not even Sparky.
The Reds traded Lee May, a team leader and powerful hitter, and Tommy Helms, a Cincinnati boy, for a pack of players, headlined by Joe Morgan.

And who was Joe Morgan? He was no headliner, that’s for sure. About the only thing most Cincinnati fans knew about Joe was that he hit .256 the year before. About the only thing that Sparky knew about Joe was that he was supposed to be selfish, moody, and a general pain in the ass. Anyway, that’s what the Houston manager said about him. Of course, the Houston manager was Harry Walker—“Harry the Hat” everyone called him—from Pascagoula, Mississippi. Harry the Hat won a batting title in 1947, which coincidentally was the same year that he and his brother Dixie and the St. Louis Cardinals tried to form a league-wide boycott to protest the arrival of Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play in the major leagues in the twentieth century. The boycott was crushed, and Harry the Hat was traded to Philadelphia that May. Walker would say that he mended his ways and opened his heart. But Joe noticed that when he was around, Harry the Hat would say something like, “It will be a black day before I…whoops, didn’t mean to say that, Joe, you know, figure of speech.”

No, Sparky did not like the trade much. But it wasn’t his job to like trades…it was his job to make do. “I just want you to know that whatever happened in Houston is over,” Sparky told Joe when they met. “You get a fresh start here.” And he had the clubhouse kids put Joe’s stuff in the locker right next to Pete’s. Sparky hoped that whatever the hell it was that drove Pete Rose to the baseball edge might rub off on Joe Morgan.

It worked. It worked better than Sparky could have ever dreamed. “Damn, I’m a genius,” Sparky would tell friends. Joe Morgan, almost overnight, became best friends with Pete. And Joe Morgan, almost overnight, became one of the best players in baseball. He hit more homers, stole more bases, scored more runs than he had ever done before. “That little man can do everything,” Sparky said, and he had
real wonder in his voice. The next year, 1973, Joe was even better. Year after that, 1974, Joe was even better than that.

He really could do everything. Joe could beat teams more ways than anyone else around. Take 1974. Joe had a .427 on-base percentage, which led the league. On-base percentage is probably the most important single baseball statistic because it tells you how often a player gets on base (and conversely, perhaps more importantly, how rarely he makes an out). While Joe had never batted .300—which was what the fans and reporters mostly cared about—he had reached base more than 40 percent of the time each of his years with the Reds. He drew 120 walks in 1974, second in the league. He stole 58 bases, third in the league. He hit 22 home runs—one of those to beat the Dodgers late in the year when the Reds were still fighting for the championship. He won the Gold Glove for his superior defense at second base. And his attitude? “Smartest player I ever coached,” Sparky gushed endlessly to reporters about the greatness of Joe Morgan. Sparky overflowed with the faith of the converted.

How much of Joe’s transformation was inspired by his pal Pete Rose? Well, Pete did have a way of getting inside people. “You had to be around Pete every day to understand,” Joe would say. “We all loved baseball. Doggie, Johnny, me—we all loved the game. But I think any of us would tell you that Pete loved it a little bit more. It changed me to be around that.”

Something black and primal drove Pete Rose. Take the All-Star thing. In 1970, they played the All-Star Game in Cincinnati, and the game stretched into extra innings. In the twelfth, Pete led off second, and his teammate Jim Hickman cracked a single to center. Pete never hesitated—that was something he always told his teammates, never pause, never doubt, never hesitate, never slow down—and he rounded third and raced home. Sportswriters in the morning editions around the country were split in their descriptions between “snorting bull” and “rolling train.” Amos Otis, the American League center fielder, scooped up the ball and made a
strong throw home. The ball and Pete reached home plate about the same time. But Pete was bigger. He smashed into catcher Ray Fosse, busted the poor kid’s shoulder, sent the baseball flying, and defiantly scored the game-winning run. The crash would take on more meaning because Ray Fosse was only twenty-three and the most promising young catcher in the game; he was never quite the same after. More than thirty years later, he would still wake up with the echoing pain of that collision ringing in his shoulder. To add a little irony to it all, Pete had had Fosse to his house the night before for dinner, though Pete never saw any irony at all in it. Pete was the kind of guy who would invite you to dinner at night and run right through you the next day to win a ball game. It was all part of the deal.

People often asked Pete if he regretted smashing into Fosse—hell, it was just an All-Star Game. It didn’t count in the standings. Pete’s response was telling. He did not even understand the question. They were playing baseball. His was the winning run. Fosse was blocking the plate. Pete had no choice.

That was the thing Joe picked up from Pete Rose. Everybody wanted to win. Some players needed to win. But Pete really had no choice. He had to hit .300 or he felt like less than a man. He had to get two hundred hits every year or he felt time slipping away. He had to win because his old man, Harry Rose, told him so. Rookie pitcher Pat Darcy would always remember playing Ping-Pong with Pete in the basement of the Rose home. Pat won game after game. And after each game, Rose would shout, “Again!” and then, “Again!” game after game, hour after hour, until sweat soaked through his shirt, and Darcy realized that no matter how many times he beat Pete Rose, there would be another game and another for all eternity. And that’s when Pete Rose beat him. Yes, Sparky was smart to put Joe’s locker next to Pete’s.

“You do know that Ali let the bum hang around,” Morgan was saying. “You are smart enough to realize that, right?”

Rose smiled. “All I know,” he said, “is the white guy went fifteen rounds with the champ. We’re athletes too, Joe! We’re athletes too!”

Sparky Anderson sat behind the desk in his spring training office, and he opened his Bible. He read from the book of Matthew. “Drive out those demons,” Matthew said. Sparky had George Foster on his mind. George was a young outfielder, and he had talent. Baseballs jumped off his bat, but Sparky thought there was something soft about him, something that held him back. Baseball was a game to be played hard and rough. When Sparky was young, he worked as batboy for a local team for only one reason: so he could steal equipment for games in the neighborhood. That’s what baseball meant to Sparky. He wanted players who wanted to play ball so badly, they would steal the bats off the rack and balls right out of the burlap bag.

Did George love baseball that much? It was hard to tell. He hardly ever even talked. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t womanize, as far as Sparky could tell about those things. George didn’t do much of anything that ballplayers do. George read his Bible all the time
(all the time),
and it made Sparky nervous. He was, as the saying went, searching for himself. George even went to see a hypnotist. The guy put George under and then asked him all kinds of crazy questions, and you know what he found? He found that George had this latent fear of getting hit in the head with a pitch. Good information. Ninety-eight percent of all baseball players had a latent fear of getting hit in the head with a pitch. Sparky thought it was about damned time George found himself.

“Hey,” Sparky called out. “Chaplain. Can you come in here?”

Wendell Deyo walked into the office. Wendell became team chaplain in 1974—he was the first team chaplain the Cincinnati Reds ever had. It was his idea. Wendell had been an athlete in college—baseball, football, whatever he could play—and he found his faith when his best friend died in Vietnam. He found that in his own life,
faith and sports blended together; he wanted to help athletes bridge the physical and the spiritual. He lived near Cincinnati, so he reached out to the Reds. It was, as they say, a mixed blessing.

“Hey, what the hell is this?” Joe Morgan shouted out when Wendell held his first chapel service in the Cincinnati clubhouse. Pete joined in the shouting, and it did not do much for the atmosphere. Wendell moved the chapel into the weight room, since none of the players ever went in there anyway. That did not calm things down much. After a few weeks, Dick Wagner—the man Cincinnati columnist Tom Callahan called “Howsam’s Halderman”—called Wendell to his office. Wagner started yelling before Wendell could sit down.

“What the fuck are you doing to my team?” he said by way of introduction. And then: “Listen, I come from a business where I once walked into my boss’s office, and he was screwing his secretary on his desk. You know what I did? I quietly backed away and walked out and never said another word about it. That’s my background. And that’s the kind of company we run here. And I don’t need you messing up my players with your talk about God. Am I being clear?”

Well, Wendell had to admit: Wagner was being clear. The Reds wanted an environment where bosses could diddle secretaries on desks without being sermonized. Still, Wendell stuck around—he had his mission. And he found that some players were beginning to seek him out. The player who reached out to him most was George Foster. The kid longed for peace. He longed for reason. And he also longed for playing time; Sparky would not let him off the bench.

“I can’t help you get playing time,” Wendell said. “But I can help you be closer to God and help you deal with what he has given you.” George understood. They became friends. Sparky knew it.

“Chaplain,” Sparky said as Wendell sat down, “can I ask you something?”

“Of course, Sparky.”

“I’m reading this here Bible, and they’re talking about all these
demons. Matthew’s talking about demons. Are these like real demons, or are they like, you know, symbols for something?”

Wendell smiled. He had not expected a biblical question.

“Well, Sparky, I think they’re real. You know, there’s a war going on, good and evil, and the demons are evil, the evil that must be cast out.”

“Oh, sure,” Sparky said softly. “I see. You know, I try to read this Bible here, and I sometimes have questions. I’m hoping, if it’s okay, I can ask you some of those questions from time to time.”

“Of course, Sparky,” Wendell said, as he stood to leave. “Of course. Anytime.”

“Oh, Chaplain, one more thing,” Sparky said. Wendell turned. And Sparky said: “Don’t turn George Foster into a fucking religious freak. He’s fucking soft enough now.”

April 6, 1975

SHARONVILLE, OHIO

Sparky’s coaches hated the Sharonville Holiday Inn. Well, it just did not make any sense. Why in the hell were they living in a hotel in some bedroom community that was a pain-in-the-ass thirty-minute drive from Riverfront Stadium in downtown Cincinnati? There were perfectly good hotels right across the street from the ballpark. They were baseball men; it just didn’t make sense. Of course, the coaches did know why they were living out in Sharonville.

“Jeff’s there,” Sparky said. “And we go where Jeff goes.”

“But,” they said to him, “we’re talking an hour of driving back and forth on Interstate 75.”

“Jeff’s there,” Sparky said. “And we go where Jeff goes.”

Jeff was Jeff Ruby, the Holiday Inn manager. Sparky loved that kid. It didn’t take a psychologist to figure it out: Jeff was the son he had wanted Lee to be. Sparky would never forget having lunch at the old
Holiday Inn, one that was near the ballpark, and he saw one of the hotel employees leaning on his mop, not doing a thing, the sort of laziness that always set off Sparky. He thought America was sinking because of shiftlessness—“How long will thou sleep, O sluggard? When wilt thou arise out of thy sleep?”—and he was just about to say something to this sluggard when he heard that voice, dripping with New Jersey: “Hey, pally! If you can lean, you can clean! Get moving!”