The Machine (9 page)

“They didn’t beat us,” Rose told reporters after the season ended and the Reds had lost. “They can’t beat us. We beat ourselves.” Only it wasn’t true. The Dodgers did beat them. Marshall beat them. He won the Cy Young Award. He finished third in the Most Valuable Player voting, behind his teammate Steve Garvey (though every Reds player knew Marshall was more valuable). Then, during the off-season, Marshall announced that he had made some more discoveries and that in 1975 he would no longer pitch two out of three days—he would pitch three out of four instead. When asked about beating the Reds, he smiled and reportedly said: “They’re like facing a high school team.” He later claimed to be misquoted, though he did not disagree with the sentiment.

“We’ve got to get that son of a bitch,” Pete Rose shouted on opening day when Marshall came into the game. Only they could not get him. Marshall pitched five scoreless innings, and he looked over to the Reds dugout and smiled.

Now it was the second game, and Marshall came in again. The Reds loaded the bases against him, but could not score. In the eighth inning, the Reds again loaded the bases, and again they could not score. What was this Marshall voodoo? The Dodgers led 3–2 going into the ninth inning. Marshall was still pitching.

Then it happened. Ken Griffey led off the inning with a long triple to right-center field. Darrel Chaney, everybody’s favorite turd on the team (Chaney actually had “Turd” T-shirts made for his teammates, and everybody loved him; Chaney’s problem was that he could not hit), punched a single to center field and Griffey scored. The turds had tied the game! After a bunt moved Chaney to second, Sparky Anderson needed a pinch hitter again, and he called on his shortstop, Davey Concepcion, who was trying to overcome a lingering groin injury. It was an odd choice. Marshall had gotten Davey out nine
straight times—Davey could not even hit the ball out of the infield against the guy. Concepcion was entirely spooked.

As soon as Davey realized that he was going to face Marshall, he became agitated. He got up and started moving around, trying to get his blood going. It was forty degrees, his body felt chilled. He could not get loose. He finally ran downstairs to the team sauna. He stepped into what the papers called the “100-degree swelter” and he maniacally exercised until his body felt loose. Then he raced back upstairs, and when he stepped into the batter’s box to face Marshall, sweat poured off of him. Marshall threw his fastball inside, and it jammed Concepcion, but Davey was loose enough and strong enough to bloop it to center field for a single. Chaney scored. The Reds beat Mike Marshall.

“We finally beat that son of a bitch,” Pete shouted in the clubhouse after the game.

“Luck,” Marshall said with conviction.

In San Diego, Gary Nolan felt the nerves again. Damn, these butterflies were becoming a habit. He made it through spring training, he won his old pitching job back, he even began to feel a bit like his old self. That beautiful pitching arrogance—that little voice that told him that nobody could hit him—had begun to sing again. Only now he was pitching in his first real game in almost two years, facing his first real batter since 1973, and he could not hear that little voice. He reminded himself that he was still a young man—he would not turn twenty-seven for another month. His arm, though, felt biblical.

“I feel relaxed,” he had lied to the
Cincinnati Enquirer
baseball beat writer Bob Hertzel before the game. “It’s almost like I haven’t been away.” That’s how he wanted to feel. That’s what he wanted people to think. But it wasn’t true; he had been away, and he was a different pitcher now. He could not throw pitches by hitters. He had to trick
them, befuddle them, make them feel uneasy somehow. He thought about what the great old pitcher Warren Spahn said: “Hitting is timing. Pitching is upsetting timing.” Yes, that’s what Gary had to do now. He had developed this new changeup, one that seemed to hesitate before reaching the plate. That changeup was now Gary Nolan’s best pitch. He had to upset timing.

The first San Diego batter he faced was Enzo Hernandez, a quick little Venezuelan shortstop. Hernandez played a good shortstop, but he was probably the worst hitter in the National League. He hit .232 in 1974 with zero home runs—that was probably his best offensive season. Gary officially had faced Hernandez twenty-six times and allowed just two cheap singles. Hernandez could not hit the old Gary Nolan with a tennis racket and a book of hints.

But Gary was not his old self. There was a part of him, a small part, that wanted to dream that one day his fastball would just show up again, like a high school friend. He stared down Enzo Hernandez, and he threw his best fastball, and Hernandez jumped all over it, crushed it, a double. And Gary stood on the mound and shook his head. There were no dreams left, and there was no going back. This was going to be a whole new life.

April 14, 1975

LOS ANGELES
REDS VS. DODGERS

Team record: 4–2

Pete Rose hated playing baseball in Los Angeles. That was what he thought as he stood at the base of the left-field wall and watched Ron Cey’s home run float over his head. The fans taunted him. They threw stuff at him. They insulted him. They called his mother names. Pete usually loved this stuff. But there was something differ
ent about Los Angeles. He could not stand these people. They got into his head.

It drove him mad. Pete took great pride in his toughness; nobody got into his head, nobody, not ever. He learned that from his old man, Harry Rose—Big Pete, they called him—who spent his days working at Fifth Third Bank in Cincinnati and spent his weekends cracking heads with the kids on football fields. Big Pete was still playing semipro football when he was forty-two. Everyone told the story of the time Big Pete played a game with a broken leg. If you asked people on the West Side of Cincinnati to name the toughest man in town, two out of three would name you Big Pete Rose.

And Little Pete idolized his old man. During the 1973 playoffs, Pete Rose toppled New York Mets shortstop Bud Harrelson on a double play, and that set off a major fight, turned the whole city of New York against him. Pete shrugged: “My dad didn’t raise me to play like a little girl,” he told the New York reporters. The next day he hit a game-winning home run in the tenth inning, all while the Mets fans booed ominously.

“How’d you do it, Pete?” those reporters asked.

“I’m better when they boo,” Pete said. “I have been my whole life. Fans better get used to it. The more you hate me, the more I’ll beat you.”

That was his mantra, his core baseball philosophy: “The more you hate me, the more I’ll beat you.” When they booed him in Chicago, in Philadelphia, in Houston, in New York, he would have fun with the fans. He would toss a baseball to the fan who booed him loudest. He cracked jokes: “Hey, you don’t even
know
my mother.” It was fun. But in Los Angeles, the boos felt threatening. He would give baseballs to fans in Los Angeles, and they would throw those balls back at him when he wasn’t looking. He would try to talk to the fans, and they would shout him down, throw bottles at him, pour beer on him. Pete hit .076 at Dodger Stadium in 1974.

“What the hell did I ever do to these people?” he asked Steve
Garvey, the Dodgers’ first baseman and the most beloved baseball player in Los Angeles. Rose and Garvey played baseball in similar ways—they both hit .300, they both cracked two hundred hits, they both cared about their teams but also about their own statistics. Garvey worked out a complicated program in 1974 designed to get him his two hundred hits. The system involved bunting every so often, punching the ball to right field every so often, and staying in games until the very end even if the scores were lopsided. The system was so precise that Garvey finished with exactly two hundred hits; he got the two hundredth hit on his last at-bat of the season. Rose also had a detailed knowledge of his own statistics; he could tell you off the top of his head his batting average against left-handed pitchers and right-handed pitchers, during the day and at night, on grass fields and on artificial turf. He and Steve Garvey spoke the same language.

“These people hate me like I killed their mothers,” Pete said.

“You play for the wrong team,” Garvey told him.

“No, there’s something more,” Pete said. “It isn’t normal.”

Garvey shrugged. The Los Angeles fans loved him. They called him “Captain America.”
Sports Illustrated
that week featured him on the cover next to the headline “Proud to Be a Hero.” Garvey was a hero: he traveled around the city, spoke to every Optimist Club and in every VFW hall. He told the story of visiting a kid name Ricky in the hospital, a kid who doctors said had an 18 percent chance of living. When Ricky was told that Steve Garvey was there to see him, though, he squeezed Garvey’s hand. Not long after that, he walked again. “I knew then,” Garvey would tell the teary-eyed people in the crowd, “that Steve Garvey had a place.” Yes, he was one of those old-fashioned ballplayers who could heal sick kids.

So maybe that was it: maybe out in Los Angeles people saw the world through the Hollywood prism, maybe they could only see the world as good guys (Clint Eastwood, James Bond, Hawkeye Pierce, Steve Garvey) and bad guys (politicians, Dr. Goldfinger, Frank Burns, Pete Rose). Pete went hitless again, and he watched helplessly
as Marshall easily shut down the Reds in the ninth. The Dodgers won the game and moved into a tie for first place.

“You know,” Rose mumbled to Sparky Anderson, “maybe I should sit the next one out. I don’t feel like I’m helping the team.”

Nobody could believe Big Pete’s kid was saying that.

The next day was tax day, and Sparky finally had it out with his son Lee. He could not stand it anymore. They had not spoken for more than a year, not since that day in the garage when he told Lee to cut his hair and Lee quietly said, “No.”

“Someday you will respect me as your father,” Sparky shouted.

“I already do respect you,” Lee shouted back.

Well, Sparky could not make any sense out of that. If the boy respected him, he would cut his hair. Right was right. Sparky Anderson would sooner trade away a talented pitcher like Ross Grimsley than allow him to grow his hair long. He would quit managing baseball before he would manage a bunch of long-haired hippies who did not respect the game and the best damned country in the world. A couple of years earlier, Oakland A’s owner Charlie O. Finley called Sparky and offered him the manager’s job for the two-time World Series champs. Sparky said no, of course. He was too loyal to leave Cincinnati. But even more than that, he could not manage all those wild players in Oakland with their long hair and their mustaches. To Sparky, to many men of his generation, long hair was two steps away from atheism and three steps from anarchy.

He had to break the silence with Lee. The tension was eating him up inside. The team was playing lousy, the media was crowning the Dodgers, his third baseman could not hit, and the toughest goddamned baseball player he ever saw, Pete Rose, was asking to sit out the games in Los Angeles. The season had only just begun, and already it was going down the toilet. Sparky went home to Thousand Oaks to see his family, to confront Lee. He looked at his oldest son,
saw the way his hair fell to his shoulders. And the fight began fresh. It was a fight about hair, but, as Sparky would realize years later, it was also a fight about something deeper.

“You’re going to be a bum,” Sparky yelled at Lee, and the fight went on from there—Sparky would later call it a knockdown, drag-out fight, the worst of his life. When it ended, Lee had retreated to his room, and Sparky had to go to the ballpark, and nothing at all was settled.

“George,” his wife, Carol, said as he walked to the car, “if your son committed a murder, would you stand by him?”

“Of course I would,” Sparky said. “I’d be there every day.”

And she said: “Then why don’t you stand beside him in this? Give him your love.”

Sparky thought about that. Maybe she was right.

Then he went to the ballpark and watched the Dodgers’ pitcher Don Sutton throw a no-hitter against his guys for six full innings. Don Sutton! That cheater. Sparky was sure Sutton was cutting the baseball so that he could make it dive down harder. Sparky had even started his own collection of Don Sutton–engraved baseballs—you could see that he cut the ball in the same spot every time. He planned to show those baseballs to an umpire someday. But today he just watched as Sutton got out after out. Morgan popped up behind the plate. Bench hit a foul pop-up behind the plate—damn, Bench hadn’t hit worth a damn since he got married. Perez hit a foul pop-up down the first-base line. Sparky’s guys could not even hit the ball into fair territory.

In the seventh inning, Rose hit a harmless fly ball to center. Morgan struck out. Sutton punched the air in joy after striking out Morgan. The thirty thousand or so in the crowd went crazy. Everyone could sense it: Sutton was going to no-hit the Machine. Sparky could not believe the day he was having.

Then Sutton made his one mistake. He was so happy he got Joe Morgan out that he grooved a fastball right down the middle of the
plate to Johnny Bench. Bench still knew what to do with belt-high fastballs, and he crushed it over the left-field wall. That blew the shutout and the no-hitter. But that was the only hit for the Reds. The Dodgers still won the game. The Reds had lost four of five games.

“I wonder if we can beat anybody right now,” Sparky told reporters.

Sparky knew who to blame for the bad start. Who else? John Vukovich. His third baseman. Balsa. Sure, Bench wasn’t hitting. Perez wasn’t hitting. Hell, nobody on the whole team but Morgan was hitting. But that didn’t matter: Sparky knew all those guys would come around. But that third baseman was killing him. John Vukovich would never come around.

“Look at the third baseman they have over there,” he told his bench coach and right-hand man, George “Shug” Scherger, as he pointed over to the Dodgers’ third baseman, Ron Cey, the one everyone called “the Penguin.” Now that was a third baseman. He hit with some power. He drove in some runs. He made the diving defensive plays. He did all the things a third baseman was supposed to do, and on top of that he was tough and strong, and damn it all, how was Sparky supposed to beat the Los Angeles Dodgers with a third baseman who was so weak he kept getting the bat knocked out of his hands?