“Well,” Chief began slowly, “Bob’s in Arizona.”
“Chief, I’m gonna tell you something,” Sparky said, and there was a bit of snap in his voice now. “It doesn’t matter where Bob is. You know we haven’t won yet, and we’re starting off slow this year. I look at it this way: it’s me or nothing right now. I’m gonna play him at third base.”
Chief gave Sparky that hard look again. Then he sort of shrugged and walked off. It was Sparky’s funeral.
Ralph Garr was Atlanta’s leadoff batter that night. He was fast, and he had slapped and run his way to a .353 batting average in 1974, the best batting average in the National League. Garr had a unique talent for hitting baseballs precisely where he wanted to hit them. He saw Pete Rose at third base, and he smiled.
Up in the radio booth, Reds announcer Marty Brennaman watched closely. Sparky had told Marty that Rose would play third base, but Marty did not believe him. Now he was out there. Marty watched as Garr cracked a ground ball to third. Rose took a step to his left, kind of lost his footing, grabbed the ball, stumbled slightly again, steadied himself, threw the ball across the diamond. “He got him,” Marty told his radio listeners. “How about that Pete Rose?”
The Reds won the game 6–1. Gary Nolan pitched nine innings and allowed only one run—his best pitching performance since he came back from the shoulder surgery. Pete had a key hit, and he did not make a single error. Sparky had this feeling that everything was about to change.
Early the next morning, at his second home in Arizona, Bob Howsam picked up his morning newspaper and saw what he thought was a misprint. The box score showed Pete Rose playing third base. He called up Chief Bender.
“I see Rose at third,” he said. “That’s a mistake, isn’t it?”
“No, Bob,” Chief said. “Sparky put him at third base.”
“Oh, my God,” Howsam said.
May 4, 1975
CINCINNATI
REDS VS. BRAVES
Team record: 13–12
Every few years, people would widely decide that baseball was about to die as the national pastime. This was one of those times in America. The nation was changing—for the better, for the worse, nobody knew—but people seemed to agree that baseball moved too slow for a modern America. “Baseball is in trouble,” said James J. Kilpatrick, the man on the right in the point-counterpoint segment of the television news show 60 Minutes. “It’s too old-fashioned and needs some rule changes to make the game more exciting.” It was pretty jarring to have Kilpatrick—the traditionalist who was only beginning to come around on desegregation—call a sport “too old-fashioned.”
But that was the popular opinion in 1975. Baseball was a sport of the past. And football—professional football specifically—was the sport of the time. Football had everything that baseball lacked—violence, danger, a ticking clock. Comedian George Carlin, who had gained some fame after being arrested for performing his “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” routine in Milwaukee, traveled around with a new routine about baseball and football.
“You know football wants to be the number-one sport,” he told audiences. “And I think it already is, because football represents what we are. Europe Jr. We play Europe’s game. What was Europe’s game? That’s right. ‘Let’s take their land away from them.’…Ground acquisition. And that’s what football is. Football is a ground acquisition game. You knock the crap out of eleven guys and take their land away from them.”
Then he itemized a few of the differences between baseball and football. Football, he said, is technological. Baseball is pastoral. Football is played in a stadium, baseball in a park. In football you wear a helmet, in baseball you wear a cap. In football you get a penalty, in baseball you make an error (“Whoops!” Carlin would shout). It was a great bit, but it was more than that. America was not the same country it had been twenty years earlier, before civil rights, before two Kennedys were assassinated, before Vietnam, before Kent State, before Watergate. Carlin wondered, lots of people wondered, if America had the patience for a pastoral game played in a park. He wondered if baseball was as outdated as candy kitchens and ice-cream socials.
The people who ran baseball worried too. “I think you will see teams disappearing in the near future,” the baseball commissioner and acting voice of doom, Bowie Kuhn, told reporters. Kuhn was always predicting the end of the world, but he had a point. The economy was troubled. The nation was changing. Baseball responded with Tootsie Rolls.
The first Baseball Encyclopedia—all 2,338 pages—was published in 1969. It weighed more than six pounds, and it was exorbitantly priced at $25, but it was a marvel. It was the first book to have the statistics of every single player in the history of professional baseball. The Baseball Encyclopedia set free the minds of many baseball fans across America, and one of those was a college student named Mark Sackler. He decided, for fun, to take a mechanical calculator and total precisely how many runs had been scored in the history of the game. He found that more than one million runs had been scored, and he thought that was interesting. And he forgot about it.
A few years later, he got his first electronic calculator, and he decided to add up all the runs scored again. This time, though, he only added up the American and National Leagues—he did not worry about the runs scored in the Federal League and the Union Association and all the other defunct leagues. He found something interesting: the one millionth run would be scored in baseball in 1975. He was working in radio then, and he got together with a promoter, and they tried to sell the one-millionth-run idea as a big celebration for baseball. At first, they tried to get McDonald’s to sponsor the event, but McDonald’s owner Ray Kroc was ambivalent about baseball. He owned the perennially ghastly San Diego Padres, and he was not especially happy about it. He had paid $12 million for the team, and in his first game as an owner—the first game of the 1974 season—he raced up to the press box in the eighth inning, grabbed the public-address microphone, and shouted: “I have never seen such stupid ball-playing in all my life.” McDonald’s did not get behind the one-millionth-run promotion.
But the Tootsie Roll people did. They felt like it was time to expand the company. Tootsie Roll, like baseball, had been around since the turn of the century, and like baseball, the candy reflected another time. In 1896, a man named Leo Hirshfield opened a small candy shop in New York, and he created small chocolate-flavored rolls that he sold for a penny apiece. He named the candy after the nickname he had for his daughter Clara—he called her Tootsie.
The company grew over the years and moved to Chicago. “Things couldn’t be better at Tootsie Roll,” Richard R. Harshman, the vice president for marketing at Tootsie Roll Industries, told reporters. The time was right to strike with a big campaign. And what would be better than connecting with baseball? They hired Stan “the Man” Musial, one of baseball’s most beloved players, a man who had scored 1,949 of those almost one million runs. He unveiled a contest: fans would guess which player would score the millionth run. Tootsie Roll Industries would give out 496 prizes to customers who named the right player. The company also would give the player who scored the run one million pennies ($10,000 was around what the average family made in a year) and one million Tootsie Rolls. “I think it’s a great promotion, I really do,” Stan the Man said. “What could be more American than baseball and Tootsie Rolls?” Musial said his lines with feeling. Everyone involved expected the nation to get swept up in the excitement.
And strangely, there was excitement. The Seiko Company installed counters in each ballpark to let fans know precisely how many runs had been scored. A giant scoreboard was installed in front of the Time Building in New York so people could follow along. And as the big day approached, there was a countdown center set up in New York with phones connected to every major league ballpark. The public relations people in each city were responsible for shouting out who had scored a run the instant a player stepped on home plate. There must have been one hundred people roaming around the
countdown center. Musial was in there. The old Yankees announcer Mel Allen was running the teleconference. And Mark Sackler sat in the middle with a calculator and a score sheet. It was Sunday, and it was raining in New York, so nobody was standing outside watching the giant scoreboard. This was the day when someone would score the one millionth run.
Davey Concepcion woke up excited. He had this strange feeling: he thought he might score the run. And if he scored the run, he would be famous. And Davey Concepcion wanted nothing more than to be famous.
That was something he had been born with. His father had wanted him to be a doctor in Venezuela, but Davey could not even stand the sight of blood, and anyway, nobody cheered doctors. He had watched the great Venezuelan shortstop Luis Aparicio play on television, and he said to his family: “I can do that.” He quit school to work for a bank, though his actual job was to play shortstop for the bank baseball team. He was tall and skinny, and in those younger days he could not hit much. But he was a wonder playing shortstop. No ground ball seemed out of his reach. The Reds signed Davey in 1967. He made it to the big leagues in 1970. He made the All-Star team in 1973. “Davey,” Sparky said, “can be a big star in this game.”
The only real problem was that Davey felt quite certain he already was a big star in the game, and he was never shy about saying so. “I’m just like you and Bench and Pete,” he told Joe Morgan, who shook his head.
“No, you’re not,” Joe said, without a touch of humor. “We’re stars. You’re not.”
And that exchange would be repeated again and again in the Reds clubhouse. Davey was so earnest and so nakedly hungry in his pursuit of stardom that he left himself wide open for jabs. One day he walked proudly into the clubhouse wearing a flashy suit, one that he felt spoke to his status as a player. “You look like Bozo the Clown,” Pete said, and everybody called Davey “Bozo” for a while.
One day, Philadelphia shortstop Larry Bowa walked over and said, “Hi, Elmer.”
“Why do you call me Elmer?” Concepcion asked.
“I figured that was your first name,” Bowa said, “since every day I pick up the paper and the first thing I see in the box scores is ‘E—Concepcion.’”
Everybody called Davey “Elmer” for a while after that.
But the kid would not be deterred. He believed himself destined for greatness. His first child was born one week before the millionth-run day, and that just added to Davey’s self-faith. Something really good was going to happen for him. And he felt sure that it would be the one millionth run.
Davey was out in the field playing shortstop when he saw the Seiko scoreboard turn to that beautiful sequence of numbers—999,999—and he tried to do some calculations in his head. He was due to bat third in the bottom of the fifth inning. He really might have a chance to score that run. Atlanta’s Dusty Baker flew out to center field. Concepcion raced into the dugout and shouted, “Come on! Let’s go! Come on. I have to get up there.”
The first batter up for the Reds was pitcher Don Gullett, and he dutifully grounded out to third. The Seiko still showed 999,999. Pete stepped in; Concepcion watched him closely. It would be just like Pete Rose to hit a home run and score the big run. The guy had a knack for doing things like that. But Pete grounded out to second. Concepcion ran to the batter’s box. He faced Phil Niekro, the Braves’ famous knuckleball pitcher. Concepcion had never hit a home run off of Niekro. This was the time. The pitch fluttered in, and he swung hard, a bit wildly. He felt the impact, ball hitting bat, and he heard the crack of the bat, and he knew. He got it.
The ball sailed to left field, and Concepcion started running hard. The crowd—a packed house, more than fifty thousand—went wild. The ball soared over the fence, but Concepcion was taking no chances. He sprinted around the bases, as fast as he could go, and he touched home plate, and he shouted, “For my baby! For my baby!” The Seiko scoreboard turned to 1,000,000. The dugout was madness, Reds players shouting and hugging and waving Concepcion to get in there so they could mob him. He was Dave Concepcion, Tootsie Roll hero, millionth-run man, and it was beautiful.
Back in New York, at the millionth-run countdown center, there was a problem. The Cincinnati Reds had fallen off the conference call. Nobody was sure what had happened, but no matter what they tried, they could not get the Reds back on line. The only thing they could do was have someone designated to call the Reds directly and just repeat what he was being told.
Everyone was paying attention to the situation in Los Angeles. The Houston Astros had Bob Watson on second base. Houston’s catcher, Milt May, was at the plate, and if he singled, Watson could be the one millionth run. May, though, homered. So Watson began to trot home when he heard people from his dugout scream, “Run!” He ran home and touched home plate.
“Bob Watson just scored!” the man in Los Angeles shouted.
Everyone stood up and cheered, but just as they stood up the man on the phone to Cincinnati shouted, “Dave Concepcion just scored!”
Everyone sat back down. Wait a minute. Watson seemed to score first, but nobody was entirely sure. The man on the phone to Cincinnati had to repeat the news, so there had been a delay. They replayed the tape to see what had happened. There was no question there had been a slight gap—four seconds or so—between the instant the man in Los Angeles said that Watson scored the run and the moment when the time guy in New York relayed the news that Concepcion had scored. A ruling had to be made.
They ruled that Bob Watson had scored the one millionth run in baseball history.
The run made Bob Watson semifamous—or anyway, the answer to a trivia question. He unhappily donated his shoes to the Baseball Hall of Fame (“I had just broken them in,” he would say). He said his fan mail doubled (“from four to eight”). Watson donated the million pennies and million Tootsie Rolls to charity. Sports Illustrated wrote a story about him. Years later, Watson would become the first black general manager in baseball, and later the first black general manager of the New York Yankees.
“I was glad to hear he’s a clean-living athlete,” said Richard Harshman, vice president in charge of marketing and sales. “We have to keep the image—good for kids, good for Tootsie Rolls. I know he’s not blond and blue-eyed, but he’s my idea of an All-American.”
Meanwhile, back in Cincinnati, Davey Concepcion heard the boos. He looked up at the scoreboard and saw that Bob Watson scored the run—and that he had scored run number one million and one in baseball history. It broke his heart. “Tell them to send me a Tootsie Roll anyway,” he said. “I come so close.”
Many years later, the Baseball Encyclopedia would make numerous adjustments and changes to its statistics. It turned out that neither Bob Watson nor Davey Concepcion scored the one millionth run. It was some anonymous player who never got any acclaim or Tootsie Rolls.
May 14, 1975
PHILADELPHIA
REDS VS. PHILLIES
Team record: 18–15
Sparky’s ulcer was burning again. He drank glass after glass of warm milk at night to soothe it, but nothing would calm the pain. The Reds still weren’t playing worth a damn.
“No one cares who finishes second,” he told Bob Hertzel, the baseball writer from the Cincinnati Enquirer. “This team can finish second on its ability alone. That’s the easiest thing in the world. This team has to finish first. It has to want it so bad that nothing will stop it.”
Maybe that’s what sent Sparky over the edge: this team didn’t want it as much as he did. What else could it be? He had the best second baseman in the game, Joe Morgan. Now he had Pete Rose at third base. Johnny Bench was the best catcher in the world. (Though Johnny was still griping about his shoulder hurting. Sparky didn’t get that. The X-rays had come out negative.) Doggie wasn’t hitting worth a damn, but he would come around. Davey was one helluva shortstop. He had super young outfielders. There was no way his team should lose.
And yet, the Reds kept getting beat. The night before in Philadelphia, cold night, rainy, some kid named Tom
Underwood shut them out. Tom Freaking Underwood shut out the Cincinnati Reds. Funny, they had faced Underwood in 1974, first game of the kid’s career, and the Reds pummeled him, smacked him around for six runs in one-third of an inning. After that game, Sparky told reporters: “That may be a blessing for the kid…it will show him it isn’t too easy here in the big leagues.” Sparky was still tasting those words. It sure looked easy for the kid last night, didn’t it? Every time Underwood threw low, the Reds swung high. When Underwood threw a fat pitch, right over the plate, the Reds didn’t swing at all. Sparky couldn’t figure it at all.
This night, they had faced Steve Carlton, damn fine pitcher, threw a great slider. In the first inning, Joe Morgan got picked off first base. In the second, Doggie doubled to lead off the inning, and the Reds could not drive him home. In the third, Pete Rose hit into a double play. In the fourth, Morgan doubled to lead off the inning, and the Reds could not drive him home then either.
Sparky felt that old rage coming on. He wanted to hit somebody. His stars were ripping away at each other, like always. Hey, Pete, you ever planning on getting another hit? Hey, Joe, you awake now? Hey, John, you got something against RBIs? They were laughing, like it was funny. Meanwhile, his young players, they looked scared out of their minds. His team was busting apart. Yes, Sparky wanted to hit somebody.
In the fifth inning, Reds rookie starter Pat Darcy got into some trouble. Sparky jogged out to the mound, which made Darcy feel better. Sparky had a routine. If he jogged to the mound, that meant he only wanted to talk. But if Sparky walked to the mound, that meant he had made up his mind, he was going to yank the pitcher, bring in a reliever, no doubt about it. Pitchers often told jokes about Sparky, and the punch line was usually: “Start jogging, you son of a bitch.”
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