The Machine

by Joe Posnanski

  “Foster,” Sparky finally yelled. “Grab a bat.”

  It was done. George felt his insides shake. George figured that at his age he was not supposed to feel nerves. He had been in the big leagues, on and off, since he was twenty years old, and these jittery moments were for kids. Still, he felt as nervous as he had felt on his first school day in California when he walked into Roosevelt Elementary School and saw that he was the only African American in the class. His family had moved to Hawthorne from Alabama—in Alabama, George did not know any white people. Except, he said, policemen.

  Now those childhood nerves gripped him again. It is just one at-bat, he told himself. It is just one game. He tried to tell himself that. Only, his mind would not let go. This was not just one at-bat. This was not just one game. This was his career. This was his life. If he could come through here, crack a single up the middle, crush the baseball off the wall, drive home the winning run, give Sparky Anderson the win he so desperately wanted and needed, well, his life might change. He might get to play more. He might convince Sparky that he was not weak, that he could be a star in this game if given the chance.

  And if he failed? Well, he could not fail. Sparky was wrong about him. George was not weak. He was not soft. No, he did not drink or smoke or screw every groupie who loitered around the team hotel. But, George was sure, those were not things that made a man. A man was…well, all George Foster really knew was that he could not fail. He would drive Geronimo in. He would win the game. He would not fail.

  The Dodgers pitcher was Charlie Hough, a twenty-seven-year-old man from Honolulu whose career had ground to a halt in the minor leagues until he learned how to throw a knuckleball. There is something mystical about the knuckleball. Baseball is a game of speed. To a fan in the stands, everything moves fast: the pitches, the crack of the bat, the runners, the fielders, the umpires’ calls. The knuckleball moves slowly. It doesn’t fit the eye, doesn’t keep up with the pace of the game. The knuckleball pitcher hardly seems to be trying. But the knuckleballer isn’t going for speed. He is trying to throw the baseball so that it does not rotate—when thrown well, the ball dances and quivers to the whims of air resistance, bouncing like a balloon in the wind. When thrown well, a knuckleball is not only impossible to hit with a baseball bat, it’s darned near impossible to catch with a padded mitt. Bob Uecker, the old Braves catcher, used to say that the secret to catching a knuckleball was to wait until it stopped rolling and then pick it up.

  George Foster stepped into the batter’s box and watched a couple of knuckleballs float by. Nerves were supposed to go away once the action began, that’s what everyone said, but Foster only felt his hands shake. He saw a knuckleball coming, and he swung hard. He topped the ball. No! He saw the ball rolling slowly down the third-base line, fair territory. No! Foster started to run to first base, and he felt like he was stomping grapes, he was barely moving at all. He had been exercising in the dugout all game long to stay warm, to prepare for this moment, and now his legs felt cramped. It was like that dream, the one where you run and run but you stay in place, you gain no ground. Still, he ran.

  Foster could not see what was happening behind him. Geronimo raced for home; he would score only if Foster could make it safely to first. The Dodgers’ third baseman, Ron Cey, rushed forward—well, he sort of rushed; Cey’s wobbly running style had earned him the nickname “the Penguin”—and scooped up the ball and threw hard to first base. The baseball and George Foster reached first base at the same time. First-base umpire Paul Pryor had been a minor league baseball player for a few years, and he had been an umpire in the big leagues since 1961. He had made calls like these too many times to even think about them. It was all instinct.

  “Safe,” Pryor shouted.

  The Reds won the game. The largest crowd ever to see a baseball game in Cincinnati stood and stomped in the chill. Reds players rushed out to jump on Geronimo and Foster. A couple of the Dodgers players rushed Paul Pryor for a moment, then angrily slipped away. “I know in my heart we had the man,” the Dodgers’ first baseman, Steve Garvey, said, but nobody around cared much about Garvey’s sour grapes.

  “George beat the throw by that far,” Sparky Anderson said in the clubhouse, and he held out his shaky hands for everyone to see. “My hands, they always shake,” he said happily.

  Foster cheerfully talked to reporters. Pat Darcy, the Reds’ rookie pitcher who held the Dodgers scoreless in the thirteenth and fourteenth innings, looked over the bottle of champagne that Joe Morgan gave him as a gift. “From my own personal stock,” Morgan said. Pete Rose told reporter after reporter how this was a big win, huge, enormous.

  And Joe Morgan, the Reds’ star second baseman, leaned back contentedly on his stool and pulled out a cigar. “The Dodgers,” he said, “can’t possibly believe they are better than us.”

  April 9, 1975

  CINCINNATI

  REDS VS. DODGERS

  Team record: 1–0

  They were called Reds, yes, but they were the most conservative outfit in sports. Bob Howsam and Sparky Anderson created this seemingly endless list of rules. Everyone had to keep his hair short—the reliever Pedro Borbon had been charged with the role of team barber. Everyone had to wear black shoes, all black; clubhouse boys were responsible for blacking out any white logos with shoe polish. Everyone had to wear his pant legs at the knees so the red socks would be seen. No one could wear a beard. No one could be seen in public without a jacket and tie. No one could drink any alcohol on the team plane. And so on. And so on.

  The thing that separated the Reds, though, was not the rules themselves. It was the way the players took the rules. “What the hell would Bob Howsam or Sparky have said if I decided to wear my hair long?” Pete Rose would ask. “What would they have done if Johnny Bench decided to wear his pants low? What if Joe Morgan had wanted to wear a mustache? What do you think they would have done? They would not have done shit.”

  Perhaps. But the men of the Machine did not break the rules. They did not bend the rules. No, it was the opposite: they embraced the rules, and in a strange way, they even loved the rules. The Reds players saw themselves as defenders of another time, a better time, a time when the great St. Louis Cardinals player Stan Musial would smoke under stairwells so that no kid would see him. The Reds players like Johnny and Joe and even Pete saw themselves as baseball players from that time before America lost wars, before the college kids burned draft cards, before Sports Illustrated ran a cover photograph of Chicago White Sox first baseman Dick Allen with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth.

  “We need more heroes, especially for our young people,” Johnny Bench told the St. Petersburg Times sports editor Hubert Mizell. “Even if we have to keep ’em a little naive, it’s worth it…. I was seventeen years old before I knew that any major league ballplayer smoked or drank. It didn’t hurt [me] either.”

  Yes, those Reds players had a pretty good idea what a ballplayer was supposed to be like: he was supposed to drink milk and say “gosh” and hit home runs for sick children in hospitals. And while none of the Reds players did those things, well, they came close enough. Anyway, they kept their hair short. They acted the way a ballplayer was supposed to act.

  Mike Marshall, on the other hand, did not. Marshall was the Dodgers’ relief pitcher, and he was the one guy who scared the living hell out of the Reds. He was just so…odd. There was nothing at all physically intimidating about the man. Marshall was thirty-two years old, balding, no taller than five-foot-ten. His muttonchop sideburns curved toward the corner of his mouth, and he wore a bushy mustache, and he seemed to be trying to look like Alexander II of Russia. Marshall did not throw hard at all; it was his tepid fastball that inspired Jim Bouton, in his classic book Ball Four, to invent “Doubleday’s First Law”: “If you throw a fastball with insufficient speed, someone will smack it out of the park with a stick.”

  So why did Marshall terrify the Reds? For one thing, he was a doctor; anyway, that’s what people called him. He
wasn’t the sort of doctor the Reds players could appreciate; he did not set casts or pull tonsils. He had earned his doctorate in kinesiology. When games ended, he shunned groupies of all ages and shapes and spent his free time with researchers. During the off-season, he taught classes at Michigan State. The topic of his dissertation was “Classifying Adolescent Males for Motor Proficiency Norms.” It made Marshall angry when reporters got that wrong.

  Dr. Mike Marshall was less a baseball player and more like, say, Bobby Fischer, the American chess genius who that same week abdicated his place as world chess champion rather than face off against the Soviet Union’s Anatoly Karpov. Fischer seemed to be standing on some sort of principle, though nobody quite knew what principle or where he stood on it.

  Marshall, too, seemed to stand on baffling principles. For instance, he refused to sign autographs, even for kids. Especially for kids. “As an athlete I am no one to be idolized,” he told Sports Illustrated. “I will not perpetuate that hoax.”

  The Reds thought: What kind of Communist would not sign an autograph for a kid? It was un-American. The Reds players believed wholeheartedly that baseball players not only deserved to be idolized by kids, but should be idolized by kids. That’s how it was when America was strong. Kids looked up to the pitcher Walter Johnson, and then they went off to fight World War I. Kids looked up to Babe Ruth, and then they endured the Depression. Kids looked up to Lou Gehrig and Bob Feller and Joe DiMaggio, and then they went to fight again in World War II.

  “With Watergate, and with politicians under attack and all kinds of investigations, it’s important that the young people have somebody to look up to,” Bench told New York Daily News columnist Dick Young, and he was speaking for the whole Reds team. “Maybe it sounds corny to a few people, but that’s what made this country.”

  Still, none of that quite gets to the heart of why Marshall so paralyzed the Reds. They could deal with his quirkiness, his scholarship, his subversive attitude toward autographs, even his bizarre notion of baseball being insignificant in the grand scheme of things. But there was one other thing about Marshall that spooked them.

  That son of a gun could pitch every…single…day.

  “He can’t keep it up,” Pete Rose said again and again during the 1974 season. The Dodgers were a good baseball team that year, but the Reds felt sure they were better. Even as the Dodgers pulled ahead in the race, the Reds felt sure that they would win in the end. General manager Bob Howsam would sit in his office and compare his Reds players to Dodgers players, man to man, and it was like they said on the Snickers commercial of the time: no matter how you sliced it, it came up peanuts. The Reds had better players. The difference was Marshall. He seemed inescapable. The Dodgers beat the Reds in back-to-back games in April—Marshall pitched in both games. In three nasty games in Los Angeles (the fans threw garbage and batteries at Rose), the Dodgers swept the Reds—Marshall pitched in all three games. The Dodgers beat the Reds three out of four back in Cincinnati in early July, and Marshall pitched in the three victories.

  It was crazy. It was unprecedented. Marshall pitched in 66 of 97 games before the All-Star break. He pitched two out of every three days. And his arm never seemed to tire. His body never seemed to break down. There was something wrong about it, something unnatural—a pitcher was supposed to throw his pitches, then grab a beer, dump his elbow in a bucket of ice, and deal with pain until his next time out. Marshall did not seem to feel pain. He seemed invulnerable. He announced that he had discovered secrets about pitching. He claimed that he had conducted experiments that proved a pitcher using the correct form could throw every day. But he did not need to show his experiments; he was a living example. In late June, early July, Marshall pitched in 13 straight games, a record. In September, Marshall pitched in 18 games as the Dodgers held off the Reds. Marshall pitched in 106 games in 1974, which beat the old record by an amazing 14 games. And Marshall held the old record too.

  “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 different about Los Angeles. He could not stand these people. They got into his head.