“Bust ’em up, kid,” Sparky said to McEnaney as he walked back to the dugout.
God, Sparky loved Will McEnaney. True, McEnaney lived a bit of a wild life. He had been thrown off his high school baseball team back in Ohio for doing all kinds of stupid kid things. And all through the minor leagues, he was always busting curfew and sneaking women into his room and Lord knows what else. But when he got to the mound, he attacked, he threw strikes, he believed that nobody could get a hit off him. Sparky appreciated it.
A bunt moved the Giants’ runners to second and third. Sparky smiled—a bunt, eh? San Francisco’s manager, Wes Westrum, wanted to get into a little chess match with ol’ Sparky? Well, that was fine. Wes was a good player in his day; he’d played on a couple of All-Star teams back when he was with the Giants in the 1950s. But, Sparky knew, Wes was no match for his own strategic excellence. Sparky had McEnaney intentionally walk Gary Matthews, and Will McEnaney struck out Von Joshua. Take that, Wes. Two out.
One more time Sparky walked out to the mound. Will had done his job. He called for one more pitcher, a right-hander this time, Clay Carroll, to finish off the job. God, Sparky loved Clay Carroll. Everyone called him “the Hawk” because of that hook in his nose. Year after year, Sparky had Carroll come into games and get important outs—the previous five years Sparky had called for Carroll more than three hundred times. And this time, he was giving Carroll an easy assignment: all he had to do was retire a no-hit rookie named Horace Speed. Colorful name. Speed was actually slow, one of the wonderful quirks of baseball. Speed had just been called up to the big leagues, and he was about to get sent down, and there was no way that he was going to get a hit off Clay Carroll. And he didn’t.
Instead, Carroll’s fastball slipped out of his hands, and the ball hit Horace Speed.
“He just hit that son of a bitch,” Sparky said in wonder. And he stared at the field. And he said again, “He just hit that son of a bitch.” He watched Speed jog to first, which allowed Chris Speier to jog home with the tying run. Incredible. Sparky hated Clay Carroll. He hated Will McEnaney. He hated Pedro Borbon. He hated all his pitchers. In the ninth inning, with the score tied, with Clay Carroll still pitching, some guy named Chris Arnold got a single. Who in the hell was Chris Arnold? Two batters later, Chris Speier came up one last time, and he ripped a double to left field, scoring the winning run for the Giants. Sparky sat in the dugout, numb. The war was lost. The country was in shambles. He hated everybody in the whole damned world.
May 2, 1975
CINCINNATI
Team record: 12–11
Sparky had to do something about his weak third baseman. The club was spinning in the mud. There were a couple of reporters out there writing that if Sparky didn’t get this thing turned around quick, the Reds were going to fire him. The general manager, Bob Howsam, told Sparky not to worry, but isn’t that what they tell dying patients too? The writers had to be getting it from somewhere, right? Even sportswriters didn’t just make up stuff like that.
He had to do something about Vukovich. But what? He had this crazy idea—crazy, but it just might work. He just needed an opening. And now, like fate, he saw that opening. He saw Pete Rose before the game taking a few ground balls at first base. This was the moment.
“What are you doing there, Peter Edward?” Sparky said as he walked out on the field.
“Aw, just breaking in this new glove for Fawn,” he said. Fawn was Pete’s daughter.
“Yeah,” Sparky said. Then he looked longingly over toward third base. “I sure wish you were playing over there instead.”
“Where’s that?” Pete asked. “You mean third base?”
“I sure could use you there,” Sparky said. “Give me a chance to get Danny Driessen and George Foster in the lineup more.”
“Are you serious?” Pete asked, and he looked over at third base.
This was it. This was the moment. Sparky knew he was taking a big chance. Back in 1966, a Reds manager named Don Heffner had moved Rose to third base. And it was a disaster. Rose was just twenty-five at the time, and he was a second baseman who had just hit .300 for the first time in his big league career. He had just made his first All-Star team. He was just beginning to make his mark in the game. Heffner utterly misread him. When Pete asked why he was being moved to third, Heffner told him to shut up. He was moving to third because that’s what the manager wanted. Mistake. Rose had never responded well to authority, except the authority of his father. Rose moved to third, but he hated it. He hit .200 the first three weeks of the season, and he was miserable, and he was not afraid to say it. Heffner finally moved Rose back to second base, but it was too late. Heffner got fired two months later. Pete Rose’s succinct scouting report of his old manager: “He was an asshole.”
Sparky hoped that this time would be different because he wasn’t telling Pete to move to third base. He was coming to Pete with his hat in hand. If Sparky knew Pete Rose, that would make all the difference. “So what do you say?” Sparky asked.
Pete did not hesitate. “Well, if you think it will help the club, sure. When you thinking?”
Sparky said: “Tomorrow.”
And Pete said three words: “Tomorrow? Damn. Okay.” Then he ran into the dugout for a moment and reemerged.
“What did you get there, Peter Edward?” Sparky yelled.
“A cup,” Pete yelled back as he ran toward third base. “I’ll help the club, but I’m not going to risk my family’s future for you.”
More than thirty years later, Pete Rose thought back with wonder to that moment. “Who else would just agree to play third base in the middle of the season?” he asked. “Just like that. Who else? You name me one star player who would do that. I was an All-Star in left field. I hadn’t played the infield in, what, five years?”
Eight years.
“Damn right. Eight years. Now you tell me, who would agree to just switch positions to help the club? Do you know any great player that would have done that? I’ll bet you could not name a single great player who would have done that.”
He smiled in that challenging way…go ahead, name one. He was probably right, though. Rose was the oddest kind of player. He was undeniably and admittedly selfish—he played for glory and fame and money and statistics. But he was bizarrely selfless and generous too. In his career, he moved around to six different positions (and was an All-Star at five of them). He invited rookies to stay at his home. He always picked up the check. Will McEnaney would always remember that on his first day in the big leagues, Pete Rose walked over to him and said, “You can’t wear those shoes.” Rose then pointed to the shoe boxes in his locker and told Will: “We probably wear the same-size shoes. Go ahead, help yourself. Take as many as you want.”
When Sparky approached Pete to play third base in 1975, it wasn’t by accident and it wasn’t spur of the moment. He’d been thinking about it for a couple of months, going back to spring training, ever since he saw John Vukovich swing a bat. Sparky knew all about what had happened with Don Heffner. He could not afford to alienate his team leader. But Sparky had this instinct about people. He figured that if he asked Pete Rose to play third, if he could appeal to Pete’s generous side without trespassing on his pride, then Pete would jump at the chance to play third base.
“Sparky could just get us to do stuff,” Pete would say all those years later. “I don’t know what it was. We just liked the guy, I guess. It wasn’t just me. Johnny did stuff for Sparky. Joe did stuff for Sparky. Tony did stuff for Sparky. I don’t know if there was another manager who could have brought all those egos together.
“I knew Sparky was using me when he asked me to play third. But that was the thing. He asked me. He didn’t tell me, because that wouldn’t have worked. He asked me, and he explained to me why he wanted to do it, and that’s all I ever asked. Sparky knew how to handle people. He knew more about psychology than Freud.”
Pete then said something that probably explained Sparky better than anything else.
Sparky wanted to keep the Pete Rose experiment secret for as long as he could. He did not want anyone to know, not even his general manager, Bob Howsam. He had a good reason for this: there was no way Howsam was going to let him play Pete at third base. Howsam had made his thoughts clear on that subject time and again: he believed that Pete did not have a good enough arm to play third base. Sparky did not disagree with that, but he believed the situation had gotten dire. The Reds were playing lousy. And he had to do something.
There were two advantages to playing Pete at third base. One, he could get Balsa off the field. But the second thing, the most important thing, was that he could put Danny Driessen out in Pete’s old position, left field, and Danny Boy could really hit. What a story. What a discovery. Danny Driessen did not even play baseball in high school down in Hilton Head, South Carolina. He was just a talented kid goofing around with baseball on weekends down south. Then he worked up the nerve to send Howsam a letter asking for a chance to play professional ball.
Howsam signed him—all it cost was a plane ticket and a Cincinnati Reds yearbook. Danny was eighteen years old then, rawer than a fresh bruise, and when he went to the minor leagues in Tampa, he didn’t hit worth a damn. He was homesick. He felt alone. It happens to young baseball players. Some never get over it. But Danny’s second year, back in Tampa, he hit .327. It turned out he was a hitting prodigy—he only needed to be fooled by a pitch once and the next time he would crush it. He moved up to Double A, and he hit .322. They moved him up to Triple A Indianapolis, and he hit .409 in his first forty-seven games—he hit the ball so hard that the Reds simply could not keep him in the minors anymore. They brought him up to the big leagues, and in one hundred games he hit .301 there too. Even the players on the Machine were awestruck.
“Let me just say this: Driessen can hit,” Bench told the Sports Illustrated reporter who had come to do a story on Driessen, a story with the headline “Reds Rookie Is a Tough Cookie.”
Rose was even more astonished, and he offered the greatest compliment he could ever offer another man.
“He hits about like me,” Rose said.
Oh, Danny Boy could hit, but boy, Danny could not field. Sparky tried him at third base in 1973 and 1974, but he was so bad there that even Sparky couldn’t put up with his defense. The Reds lost one game because Danny simply forgot to step on the base for the third out. The Reds lost when baseballs comically skidded between his legs. Danny looked like a natural first baseman; that was the biggest reason why the Reds had tried to trade Tony Perez. But Doggie was back at first base again (“You no take my job,” Doggie had told Danny with that smile on his face). There was no place to play Danny, and it drove Sparky mad. “Who would you rather have hit with the bases loaded, Danny or Vukovich?” he asked reporters repeatedly. That was the genius of this move. Pete Rose would go to third base. Danny Driessen would go to left field. The Reds would take off.
And the move was indeed genius…though Sparky had the wrong reason. It would not be Danny Driessen who turned around the Reds’ season. There was someone else—a right-handed hitter who didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t fool around, a powerful-looking man who read the Bible every day and quietly stewed on the bench. George Foster prayed daily for a chance. And he was about to get that chance.
May 3, 1975
CINCINNATI
REDS VS. BRAVES
Team record: 12–12
“You were born at the wrong time, Pete,” Tom Callahan would tell Pete Rose. Callahan understood that feeling of being from a generation not quite your own. Callahan wrote the sports column for the Cincinnati Enquirer, and he was still young, just twenty-seven. He felt older. He felt like he should have written columns long before, when sports titans walked the earth, when Babe Ruth hit colossal home runs for sick children, when Luis Firpo knocked Jack Dempsey through the ropes of the boxing ring, when Red Grange scored five touchdowns and passed for a sixth against Michigan. Maybe that’s why Callahan felt himself drawn to Pete. Rose played like he belonged to another time—he ran to first base on walks, he brazenly slid into second base to break up double plays, he showed up every day with this feverish enthusiasm that came right out of the 1920s.
“You know who loves you, Pete?” Joe Morgan would say all the time. “Women who are in their eighties. Those are your fans. Because you play like the ballplayers they used to watch when they were young.”
Of course, lots of guys played baseball like the old-time players. But Pete, he lived like old-time players, he seemed to live in that mythical simpler time, when ballplayers ate steaks every night (Rose had his medium rare with a baked potato and iced tea) and signed autographs for kids (Bench grew tired of signing autographs; Rose never did) and sneaked girls up into their rooms (Pete was never especially coy about it) and loved the game unconditionally. Whenever Callahan wanted to find Rose after a game, he would go to Pete’s house and find him sitting in his car and listening to a West Coast game on the radio. Whenever Callahan wanted to find Pete on an off-day, he would just go to the track—Pete always loved going to bet on the horses and the dogs at the track. Pete loved the action, sure, but beyond that he seemed to love the smoke and haze and whiskey and shady characters and old gamblers and lost money. Pete didn’t smoke or drink himself—fast cars, fast women, and fast horses were enough vice for him—but he still liked being around the smoke and gin.
He loved old stories. Waite Hoyt was a hard-drinking old Yankees pitcher who knew the Babe and Ty Cobb and all the rest of those old baseball greats. He had also been a radio announcer for the Reds back in the early 1970s, and Pete would talk to him for hours. Pete would ask him to repeat the same stories again and again. Later, Callahan would hear Pete tell those stories, word for word, facial expression for facial expression. It was eerie. A few year later, when Pete Rose was chasing Ty Cobb’s record for most hits, the New York Times sportswriter Dave Anderson asked Rose how much he really knew about Ty Cobb. Rose, being Rose, indelicately answered, “I know everything about Ty Cobb except the size of his cock.”
Of course, the New York Times—“the Old Gray Lady”—could not report it quite that way. So the quote was delicately repackaged like so: “I know everything about Ty Cobb except the size of his hat.” Rose was furious. He knew damn well that Cobb’s hat size was 7 5/8. This was Kentucky Derby day, and Pete Rose did not wake up thinking about playing third base. No, he woke up thinking about Foolish Pleasure, the superhorse that was running that day at Churchill Downs. Rose prided himself on being able to pick the Kentucky Derby winner. As it turned out, he was absolutely right: Foolish Pleasure would win the Derby, passing Avatar and Diabolo, who would bump into each other down the stretch. Pete would win some money on that. Then, like a guy snapping out of a dream, he remembered that he was playing third base that day for the first time in almost ten years.
He picked up the phone and called George Scherger.
“Sugar Bear,” he said, “what are you doing today?”
“Thought I’d go fishing,” Scherger said.
“Naw. Why don’t you come out to the ballpark and hit me some ground balls at third base?”
“Damn it, Pete,” Scherger said. “What time?”
“Early. How about one P.M.?”
“Damn it, Pete,” Scherger said, and he hung up the phone. He’d be there, of course.
Sparky considered calling Bob Howsam to tell him that he would play Pete Rose at third base. He decided against it. For one thing, he was the manager of the team. He had to be allowed to run the team the way he knew how. As the old line goes, it’s always easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.
Second, though, he was desperate. Sparky tried to hide this from everyone, but the Holiday Inn manager, Jeff Ruby, could see it in his friend’s face. Sparky had convinced himself that if he did not do something, something drastic, this team would lose, and he would get canned. “They’ll fire me in a heartbeat
, bubula,” Sparky said over breakfast. Ruby thought Sparky was being a bit melodramatic, and he said, “They’d never fire you, Sparky.” But worry creased Sparky’s face. The Reds had lost as many as they had won, they trailed the Dodgers by four games (and were even behind the Atlanta Braves—the stinking Braves!). Sparky knew he had the best team going. But he also knew that the best teams sometimes faltered, and then managers got thrown out on the street.
Sparky watched Pete take some ground balls before the game. He looked okay. He wasn’t smooth, he wasn’t agile, and, of course, Howsam was right about his weak arm. But Sparky had to believe that Pete would work hard enough; he would not embarrass himself over there.
“What’s news, Sparky?” That was Chief Bender, the Reds’ director of the minor leagues. Chief was a good baseball man—he’d been in the game for twenty-five years. There had been a good pitcher known as “Chief Bender” in the early part of the century, and Chief was often confused for him. He didn’t seem to mind. He never tired of baseball. He went to a game every day—major league game, minor league game, it didn’t matter. He had to be around it.
“I’m playing Rose at third today,” Sparky said.
Chief’s face reddened. He looked hard at Sparky, as if he was trying to determine if he had just heard an inscrutable joke. Sparky was not joking.
The Machine Page 10
