The Machine

by Joe Posnanski

  That was the fun side of Pedro Borbon. There was another side. He had a fierce temper. After the famed 1973 playoff brawl with the Mets—the one Pete Rose started with his violent slide into New York’s Bud Harrelson—Borbon realized he had mistakenly put on a Mets cap. He tore it to shreds with his teeth. One winter in the Dominican, a minor league manager named Tommy Lasorda tried to take him out of a game. Borbon wheeled and threw the ball over the center-field fence.

  The “Dracula” nickname came after a different fight. The Reds and the Pittsburgh Pirates brawled during a game in 1974. Most baseball fights end up with a couple of guys playing pat-a-cake and the rest of the players watching. This fight was unusual: hard punches were thrown, players got knocked down, and Pittsburgh’s Daryl Patterson, a thirty-year-old pitcher trying to revive his career, made the mistake of pushing Borbon aside. Borbon promptly sucker-punched him, pulled Patterson’s hair, and then bit him on the side. Patterson had to go get a tetanus shot.

  “Like a dog!” Borbon said with, perhaps, an inappropriate amount of glee. He enjoyed the attention. But he did not enjoy the Dracula nickname that came with it, and during the rain delay in Pittsburgh he ran outside and found Nellie King, the Pirates radio announcer.

  “You know my name?” he shouted at King.

  “Yes,” King said. “Pedro Borbon.”

  “Borbon. Yes. Borbon. Not Dracula.”

  “I never called you anything but Borbon,” King said calmly.

  Borbon was confused. He knew the Pittsburgh radio man had called him Dracula. Something was not adding up. And then he thought: Maybe it was the other Pittsburgh radio guy, Bob Prince, who called me Dracula.

  “You tell the other guy I no like it,” Borbon said.

  “I don’t carry messages,” King said. “Tell him yourself.”

  Borbon considered this. Then, with impeccable logic, he said, “Maybe I punch you in the nose.”

  King, a six-foot-six former pitcher, looked down at Borbon (who stood six-foot-two), just shook his head, and walked away. Borbon shrugged. He had made his point, whatever he had intended that point to be. Rain washed away the game.

  June 4, 1975

  PITTSBURGH

  REDS VS. PIRATES

  Team record: 30–21

  American sports had turned upside down overnight. On the front page of the morning papers, there was the news that President Ford had signed a new law called Title IX. The law required that all public schools and all colleges give equal athletic opportunities to women, except in the case of contact sports like football.

  Nobody seemed sure what this meant, but panic was in the air. “This may well signal the end of intercollegiate athletic programs as we have known them,” said Michael Scott, a lawyer for the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Football coaches screamed that American sports were doomed.

  And that wasn’t even the big news in the Cincinnati Reds clubhouse. No, bigger, much bigger, was a story coming out of New York: Pele, the great Brazilian soccer player, had signed to play for the New York Cosmos. His price: $4.7 million.

  There had never been a contract like it, certainly not in team sports. The Reds players were not quite sure what it meant, but they all had this idea that the world was changing. Johnny Bench found himself almost daily defending his $175,000 salary, even though he played hard for it, he played hurt for it, and he made the All-Star team every year. Now here was a soccer player—a great soccer player, yes, but still a soccer player—signing for almost $5 million. Americans didn’t even like soccer.

  Yes, Johnny and the rest sensed that something significant was happening. Things would change dramatically in baseball after the 1975 season. The baseball players’ union would use a couple of pitchers—Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally—to challenge baseball’s “reserve clause.” The clause basically came down to one sentence that stated if the player and team could not come to terms, then the “Club shall have the right by written notice to the Player to renew this contract for the period of one year on the same terms.” Union head Marvin Miller could not believe that this one sentence essentially bound players to their teams until they were traded, sold, or released. The sentence very clearly said “one year.” The owners claimed that the team’s right to renew the contract repeated in perpetuity, but Miller thought that wouldn’t hold up in a court. And sure enough, an arbitrator named Peter Seitz ruled that Messersmith and McNally were free agents.

  “I’m not a new Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves,” Seitz would say.

  “Baseball cannot function under the Messersmith decision,” baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn would gripe.

  “Things in baseball will never be the same,” Bob Howsam said.

  Baseball survived fine, but Howsam was right: things never were quite the same after 1975. Salaries skyrocketed. Players had the right to become free agents after six years, and they were able to drive up their value. The average salary in 1975 was about $44,000. Four years after Seitz’s decision, the average salary in baseball was about $120,000. By 1989, it would be about half a million a year. By 1992, it would be more than $1 million.

  And in many ways, it all could be traced back to the enormous contract that Pele signed with the New York Cosmos. The contract told baseball players they were shooting way too low.

  Pete wasn’t hitting worth a damn, and it was ticking him off. Sure, he was happy that the club was beginning to win—the Reds had moved into a first-place tie with the Dodgers. But, realistically, no, Pete wasn’t happy, he could not be happy when he was not hitting. His batting average, as he knew better than anyone, was .293. Back in Cincinnati, Pete sat at the kitchen table every morning and worked out his batting average. His wife, Karoyln, would watch him happily when he did that. Karolyn and Pete had married in 1964, and she knew better than anyone his faults and vices. She figured he cheated on her when he was on the road. But he loved those bright mornings, after he had cracked three or four hits the night before, and he would sit at the table like a schoolboy doing his last-minute homework. And when the numbers came out right—when he found himself well above the .300 mark—his smile had to look, more or less, like the one Pythagoras had on his face when he came up with his math theorem.

  But this wasn’t one of those bright mornings. Pete did the math in his hotel room in Pittsburgh. He had 61 hits in 208 at-bats—and that came out to a .293 batting average no matter how many times you ran those numbers through the long-division grinder.

  “Hey, Rose,” Morgan said to him, like he often said to Pete as he walked into the clubhouse. “What’s the batting average looking like these days?”

  “Fuck you,” Rose said. “That’s my goddamned batting average.”

  Morgan smiled. Rose did not. A .293 average. Jesus. Pete had already spent the whole winter living with last season’s .284 batting average, and that was hard enough. Pete Rose knew what he was. He was a .300 hitter. That was what he was born to be. That was what his father, Big Pete, had raised him to be. When Little Pete was eight years old, Big Pete went up to his Knothole League coach—they called Little League “Knothole League” in Cincinnati—and said: “I’ll make you a deal. You have to promise to let my son switch-hit. And I mean, you have to let him switch-hit every time, no matter what. If you do that, I promise Pete will give you everything he’s got, and he will never miss a game. Never. We’ll even leave him here when we go on vacation.”

  That’s how it was: Big Pete happily sold his son into baseball servitude in exchange for the right to switch-hit. And more, Little Pete happily went. He never missed a Knothole League game or any other game. He never stepped foot out of Cincinnati until he went to Geneva, New York, to play his first year of minor league ball. By the time he went to Geneva, Pete could switch-hit like a son of a gun.

  Pete hit .300 every single year from 1965 to 1973, nine straight years. People wondered why he cared so much about his statistics; well, they were more than numbers to him. Big Pete (as Harry Rose) worked with numbers every singl
e day at the bank, every day, boring and dry numbers. With that in mind, Harry Rose did not raise his oldest son to just be a major league baseball player. No, Harry Rose raised his son to hit .300.

  Pete Rose jogged out to the field for batting practice and worked the math out in his mind. The Reds were playing Pittsburgh. And he knew that if he got two hits in his first two at-bats, that would make him 63-for-210, which would come out precisely to a .300 batting average. If he managed to go three-for-four, he would leave the game with a .302 average. The only thing that mattered was to get that average back up where it belonged. He needed three hits.

  First time up, Jerry Reuss, a tough left-handed pitcher, threw Pete a hard-sinking fastball, the kind that caused most batters to swing over the top and bang ground balls into the dust. Rose was not like most batters. He cracked a hard line drive to right, a base hit for sure, only then Pittsburgh’s first baseman, Bob Robertson, caught the ball. He was oh-for-one.

  Next time up, Pete hit an easy ground ball to second base. He was oh-for-two. Third time up, he needed a hit, needed one badly, only this wasn’t looking like the day to get it. Reuss was throwing a no-hitter. And Rose hit another easy ground ball to second base. He was oh-for-three.

  Davey Concepcion finally smacked a single off Reuss’s shin in the seventh that broke up the no-hitter and, at the same time, knocked Reuss out of the game. Rose came up in the eighth with the Reds down 2–1, and he faced righty relief pitcher Dave Giusti. That meant Pete could go back to hitting left-handed, which was good. He felt more comfortable hitting lefty. It didn’t matter on this day. Pete topped the ball again and grounded out to second base. He was zero-for-four.

  The Reds lost the game. More to the point, Pete’s average dropped to .288. Back in the hotel room, he did the math. Now he needed four hits against the Cubs on Friday to get his average above .300. Pete was losing ground.

  Davey Concepcion kept getting the strangest calls from people back home in Venezuela. They only wanted to hear his voice. Seemed that a radio station in Caracas had reported that Davey had been assassinated. He had no idea how a rumor like that could have started, but the people who called him sounded so convinced that after a little while Davey began to feel uneasy, like maybe his life really was in danger. He was not sure, though, why anyone would want to assassinate him.

  “Maybe it’s because of the error you made a couple of days ago,” Johnny said helpfully.

  Weird things were happening to the Machine. The kid reliever Will McEnaney was pitching in an exhibition game against Detroit when suddenly this sharp pain pounded in his chest. He felt sure that he was having a heart attack. Not that it surprised him exactly. Will did like to live life. He smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. He enjoyed the nights. But the chest pain scared the hell out of him. He kept on pitching and hoped that the pain would just go away. It did not. It lasted the whole time he was in the game. It pounded while he was in the clubhouse. It cut through him on the plane ride. It was a damned long heart attack. When he woke up the next morning, the pain was gone—and in gratitude he promptly quit his two-pack-a-day cigarette habit. And he did not pick it up again for days.

  A few days before that, Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Jim Lonborg hit Tony Perez with a pitch and fractured Doggie’s thumb. Doggie could not swing the bat, the pain was excruciating, though the pain was probably not as intense as the agony he had to endure on the bench while listening to Pete and Joe rag him.

  “Hey, Doggie, how’s that boo-boo?” Joe said every day, five times a day.

  “I think Doggie’s just so happy with his .215 batting average, he just doesn’t want to risk it,” Pete said.

  “I’m a little guy, Doggie,” Joe said. “It’s hard for me to carry your sorry ass.”

  “Hey, Joe, what is the area code in Cincinnati?” Pete asked.

  “It’s 513,” Joe said.

  “Divide that in half, and you still are hitting better than Doggie.”

  Tony would then say something in Spanish that defied translation.

  “Hey, Doggie,” Davey said the day of his assassination rumor. “They’re saying back home that I’m dead.”

  “Join the club,” Doggie said. “We all dead.”

  And that day, Concepcion hit a two-run double and George Foster hit a home run. Don Gullett pitched a complete game and allowed one run. The Machine won again.

  June 8, 1975

  CINCINNATI

  REDS VS. CUBS

  Team record: 32–22

  First place by one and a half games

  Joe Morgan had that same feeling. He was about to change the game again. Lots of people around baseball despised Joe Morgan. They thought him arrogant. And hey, not everybody on the Reds loved Joe either. Ken Griffey and George Foster, for instance, thought him distant. He spent much of his time off the field alone in his room, listening to jazz, reading the adventure comic books that allowed him to escape. “George and I kept waiting for him to take us under his wing,” Ken Griffey would say years later. “But it never happened.”

  Still, they could not help but admire the way he played baseball. Joe had no weaknesses. If Pete had learned ferocity from his father, Joe had learned completeness from his dad. Leonard Morgan had played semipro baseball, and he told his son, again and again, that the secret to success was the ability to do everything well. They would go to minor league baseball games in Oakland, Leonard and Joe, and the father would express his disdain for those players who hit home runs but did not seem to care about their defense, or those who could run fast but did not seem to take pride in their hitting. “Be everything,” Leonard would say.

  The Reds trailed Chicago 1–0, seventh inning, first game of a doubleheader, and the Cubs’ pitcher, Rick Reuschel, had allowed just one hit, a little ground ball up the middle to Cesar Geronimo. Reuschel was overpowering the Machine. Morgan worked Reuschel for a walk.

  Then the game began. Morgan danced off the bag, shifting his weight from his left leg to his right, then his right leg back to his left, and he inched a little bit closer to second base, and he had that smile, the Joe Morgan smile, the one that said: Oh, yeah, I’m about to steal second base, and there’s nothing you can do about it. That smile was yet another reason people didn’t like Joe.

  But he was right. There was nothing that anyone could do to keep him from stealing. On the bases, Joe Morgan was an artist at work. Reuschel threw over to first base to chase Morgan back to first base. Morgan looked back at Reuschel, and his smile grew larger, now it said, You poor man, you think throwing over to first base will stop me? You cannot stop me. I have spent hours studying you, hours looking over your every physical quirk, how your left leg twitches, how your shoulder slumps, how your back leans. I have studied you, and I know when you will pitch. You cannot fool me. I’m already at second base. It’s futile for you to throw over here. Reuschel threw over to the bag again, and Morgan dived back in.

  “This guy knows he can’t pick me off, right?” Joe said to Cubs first baseman Andre Thornton, and he dusted himself off. But Reuschel did not seem to know that at all. In fact, Morgan noticed that something in Reuschel’s face had changed. He was no longer so sure. He wore this look of weary apprehension, as if he was waiting for something to happen, a balloon to pop, a gunshot to go off. He started to throw over to first base again, only this time the umpire raised his arm.

  “Balk!” the umpire said as he pointed at Reuschel.

  Morgan jogged easily to second base. He had done what he wanted to do. He had broken something in Reuschel. Pitchers, Joe believed, were fragile creatures. When they felt good, powerful, invincible—when they got in the flow, as the saying went—they pitched easy and you couldn’t do much against them. But when you got underneath that somehow, when you made pitchers nervous even for a second, you had them. Reuschel looked back at Joe, and then he threw a fat fastball to Johnny Bench. And Johnny turned on it, crushed it, hit it just to the right of the left-field foul pole. That was a home run. The Reds won again
. They won the second game of the doubleheader too. And when the day ended, the Reds were all alone in first place.

  Gary Nolan won that first game. He pitched all nine innings, allowed only one run, and found that he had adjusted to his new life and his new arm. No, he could not throw his fastball by hitters anymore. But he could outsmart them. He was 6–3 with a 2.55 ERA. He was pitching as well as he ever had before.

  In a strange way, it was even more rewarding now because, for the first time really, he was using his mind to outsmart hitters. He found that they would get themselves out if he gave them half a chance. Throw them a low pitch and they would beat it into the ground. Throw them a high one around the eyes and they would swing right underneath it. Throw them sliders when they wanted fastballs and fastballs when they wanted sliders, pitch inside when they looked outside and pitch outside when they looked hungry and eager and angry. It wasn’t easy, no, but it was fundamental. The only way they could beat him, Gary figured, was if he made a mistake.

  Years later, after his playing days were done, Gary became a pit-boss at Vegas casinos and later worked at a casino in his hometown of Oroville. He found that it wasn’t much different from pitching. He would stand in those casinos, and he could not even hear the clanging of the slot machines. They faded into deep background, the way crowd noise did when he pitched. He would look at his clients for only a few seconds and size them up. He found that he could instantly tell something about them. Something in the eyes. He could tell if they were desperate, tell if they were hiding something, and it was second nature to him. Though he rarely thought about it, he knew that it came from pitching, from sizing up hitters, from guessing what they wanted and then throwing something else at them.

  “You know what’s funny?” Gary would say as he thought about what came of his life. “I never have gambled. I’ve been around it all this time, and I’ve never even been tempted to gamble myself. I guess it’s because I don’t see the point of it. I know how it always turns out.”