“Don’t listen to that asshole,” Pete shouted across the room.
“You said it, you know you said it,” Doggie said.
They had gone fifteen consecutive games without an error. That was a record, but a bizarre one. Baseball is a game of bizarre records—consecutive-game hitting streaks, most home runs hit in a month, most games in a row with a walk, and so on. Nobody on the Reds quite knew what this record meant. It was impressive, sure, going that long without making an error. But what did it mean? The players understood that there was something odd about the whole error concept. For a player to get an error, a man in the press box—called, pretentiously enough, the “official scorer”—had to determine that a player should have caught that ball or picked up that grounder or made a better throw. The official scorer, of course, would not appreciate that the ball was spinning so rapidly that you could hear it buzzing. He probably would not care that the sky was so empty and vast that the baseball simply disappeared into it. He could not appreciate that there was a fast runner racing to first base, which changed the whole dynamic of the play. No, the official scorer sat up high, judge and jury, and he alone would rule that a player did not do his job well enough, that he made an error, and this was the silly thing that the Reds had managed to avoid for fifteen straight games.
But silly or not, the players on the Machine simply hated making errors. Pete could barely tolerate a hitless night, but he could not tolerate making an error. He would go home and sit at the kitchen table and stare at the wall for hours. In Los Angeles once, he dropped a pop-up when someone threw a beer at him just before the ball landed. He was so upset about it that later, when a friend suggested that he should have caught the ball, Pete picked up a biscuit, threw it at the guy, and said, “Catch.” The friend reached up to catch it, and just before he could pull it in Rose threw a glass of water in his face. The friend dropped the biscuit.
“That’s why I didn’t catch it,” Rose shouted. They all felt more or less like that. An error left bad feelings.
So the Reds players were proud of their record, proud that they were playing flawless baseball for longer than any team had ever played. But they all knew that the streak would end. And none of them wanted to be the one to end it.
“Actually, I sure it will be you, Pete,” Doggie said. “You cannot play third.”
“You need a bulletproof vest over there,” Joe said.
“Hey, it won’t be me,” Pete said. “I’ve only made two errors over there. It will probably be Bozo.”
Concepcion looked up from across the room and shook his head. He simply could not imagine anything more mortifying than being the one to break the streak.
In the fifth inning that night, with the score tied, Houston’s Bob Watson hit a line drive single to left field. Danny Driessen was playing out there. It had to be Danny Driessen. He grabbed the ball and tried to throw home, only he didn’t quite grab the ball—it fell out of his hands and dropped to the ground. Two runs scored. Watson ended up at second base. And that was the error that broke the streak.
“You the man, Danny!” Doggie shouted after the game. The Reds won in extra innings—fourth time in five days. It was getting eerie. This time they scored three runs in the ninth inning to tie the game. They won in the fifteenth when Joe Morgan cracked a single that scored Pete Rose. But as far as the Reds were concerned, there was only one hero.
“Danny, you save us all,” Doggie said. “Now we don’t worry about errors no more. We have the record. We can relax and play ball.”
Sparky Anderson would say later that it was no brainstorm. He did not have a brilliant dream or a eureka moment while lying around at the pool. He had just tried so many different lineup combinations that it was inevitable that he would come across the right one. And so, on Independence Day 1975, he unveiled what would become the most famous lineup in baseball history:
Rose, 3B
Griffey, RF
Morgan, 2B
Bench, C
Perez, 1B
Foster, LF
Concepcion, SS
Geronimo, CF
Sparky did not think much about it then. Nobody did. Seemed like everyone was talking about the upcoming “Battle of the Sexes” horse match race between the filly Ruffian, who had won every one of her ten races going away, and the thoroughbred Foolish Pleasure, the Kentucky Derby winner. President Ford went to Camp David, the presidential retreat, and said that the nation’s third century should be an era of individual freedom. A bomb hidden inside an old refrigerator killed thirteen in Jerusalem. Johnny Bench’s old friend Bob Hope became only the third American—after Presidents Herbert Hoover and Harry Truman—to receive the Philadelphia Freedom Medal. The Reds beat the San Diego Padres 7–6, and every single player in the lineup got a hit. The lineup change went largely unnoticed.
But this was historic: the Reds almost never lost when Sparky Anderson entered that lineup. The lineup had everything. Rose gave the lineup will, Griffey gave it speed, Morgan gave it a little bit of everything. Bench gave the lineup power, Perez gave it big hits, Foster gave it home runs, Concepcion gave it great plays at shortstop, Geronimo gave it defensive grace in center field.
There had never been a lineup quite like it. Yes, the famed 1927 New York Yankees had four Hall of Famers in the lineup—including Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig—and had averaged more than six runs per game. The “Boys of Summer” Dodgers of the 1950s had Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, and Roy Campanella and were a beautiful blend of power and speed. But the lineup Sparky Anderson put on the field on July 4, 1975, had something more. The Reds’ lineup had power and speed too. More, though, there were three African Americans in the lineup, three Latin Americans, two white Americans—and Johnny Bench had Native American blood. They were the Great American Ball Club.
“We had black players on our team?” Johnny Bench would ask many years later. “We had Latin American players on our team? I never noticed that. I promise you, none of us ever noticed that. We made fun of each other. We made fun of the way players talked. We made fun of the way players looked. But when it came down to it, we were Cincinnati Reds.”
He paused here for emphasis.
“We were,” he said, “the Big Red Machine.”
July 6, 1975
SAN DIEGO
REDS VS. PADRES
Team record: 53–29
First place by eight games
Everyone loved Ruffian. The papers called her the modern-day Black Beauty. She was almost entirely black, with just a touch of brown around her nose. And as a racehorse, she was invincible. The first time she raced she won by fifteen lengths. The next nine times she raced she won wire to wire. Lucien Lauren—the trainer of the great Secretariat, widely viewed as the greatest racehorse ever—wondered if Ruffian was better.
Everyone was looking for the next battle of the sexes. More than ninety million people around the world had watched the 1973 exhibition tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King at the Houston Astrodome. In 1975, states were debating the merits of the Equal Rights Amendment. The new Title IX rule was sparking arguments between men and women too. And, yes, the question was fascinating: could Ruffian beat the greatest thoroughbred, Foolish Pleasure, in a female-versus-male race at Belmont Park on that Sunday afternoon? The Chicago Tribune called it a battle of Anthony and Cleopatra.
“Any woman who wears a Foolish Pleasure button at a time like this ought to be ashamed of herself,” a fan, Pat Menafra, told the New York Times.
More than fifty thousand people were in the stands when the race began, and Ruffian worked her way to an early lead. It was expected. Ruffian had always shown brilliant early speed, and Foolish Pleasure’s talent was coming from behind. Still, it was electrifying to see Ruffian pulling away, first a quarter-length ahead, then a half-length, still pulling away. Then tension built. And then, suddenly, Ruffian wobbled. “I heard a crack,” said Braulio Breza, the jockey on Foolish Pleasure. Ruffian stumbled into Foolish Plea
sure, brushed him three times. Then he rushed by while jockey Jacinto Vasquez had Ruffian pull up. She had broken down. Vasquez would later say he never heard a racetrack so quiet.
The doctors rushed in to save her. She had shattered two sesamoid bones in her right leg. If Ruffian had been another horse, the doctors would have put her down right away. But she was Ruffian. Six veterinarians attempted to operate and put her in a cast. And everyone hoped.
While a nation waited to see what would happen to Ruffian, Joe Morgan booted Tito Fuentes’s ground ball in San Diego. He kicked the dirt. The Reds already led 3–0—Joe already had a run scored and an RBI—but he did hate errors. They all did.
In the second inning, Morgan botched another ground ball, this time hit by San Diego’s Johnny Grubb. The Reds led 6–1 by now, but still Joe felt miserable. Two errors in one game. He could not believe it. And as he looked around the infield, he noticed that all the other guys, well, they were laughing at him. Man, they were going to give it to him in the clubhouse.
In the fourth inning, with the Reds leading 8–2—Morgan had two runs scored and two RBIs—Johnny Grubb came up again. He hit another ground ball to Morgan. And one more time, Morgan booted it. He had committed three errors in a single game.
“Congratulations,” Bench told him back in the dugout, and he threw his hat at Joe. “You pulled off the hat trick.”
The Reds won the game 13–2, but Joe did not want to go back to the clubhouse. He felt miserable, and anyway he knew the guys would be there waiting to tear him apart. When he got in there, he noticed that none of his teammates were standing around his locker. He looked over at Doggie and Pete, waited for them to say something, but none of them said a word.
Then Morgan got to his locker and saw there was a garbage can in front of it. He looked inside and saw his glove inside.
When Ruffian came out of the operation, she immediately tried to run. This was exactly what the doctor had feared. She destroyed the cast they had set for her.
“Don’t let her suffer anymore,” owner Stuart Janney told the doctors at 2:00 A.M., and it was then that Ruffian was, as the papers told a shocked nation, “humanely destroyed.”
July 7, 1975
CINCINNATI
REDS VS. PHILLIES
Team record: 54–29
First place by eight games
“Doggie,” Pete Rose told Tony Perez, “you know the three worst things that ever happened to you?”
“What that, Pete?” Doggie asked back.
“Me, Joe, and Johnny,” Pete said. Well, Pete was right. Nobody outside the clubhouse seemed to appreciate what made Tony Perez special. That’s just how it was with the Machine. Newspaper reporters were in a hurry after games. They needed a fast quote, something pithy, something edgy, something wise, something that would help them make deadline. There were rules. Hal McCoy, the young baseball writer from the Dayton Daily News, figured them out. If he wanted something thoughtful, he would go find Joe Morgan. Nobody could break down the game quite like Joe. “I should give you my typewriter,” he would tell Joe sometimes.
If Hal needed something pithy, he would go to Pete Rose. Nobody in baseball could beat Pete when it came to thinking up the perfect one-liner. But there were politics involved. If Hal needed to talk to Johnny Bench, he could not talk to Pete Rose first. Johnny did not like that. Johnny was a good quote—thoughtful and opinionated—but if he saw the reporter talking to Pete Rose first, he would turn his back.
“John, you got a minute?” Hal would say.
“Seems to me you got all you need,” Johnny would grumble, and walk off.
Hal loved talking to George Foster. He thought George had this great and subtle sense of humor that few people picked up on. He got a kick out of Davey Concepcion; you never knew what Davey was going to say. He thought Ken Griffey was quiet and Cesar Geronimo even quieter. He liked talking to pitchers sometimes. But really, Pete got it right. There were three guys in the Reds clubhouse who mattered to reporters: Pete, Joe, and Johnny.
And Doggie? Well, sure, Hal liked Doggie, everybody liked Doggie. But he was hard work. His English wasn’t great. He fell back on clichés. It wasn’t that Hal avoided Tony Perez, no, he talked to Doggie all the time. He just did not use many quotes.
“I didn’t care,” Doggie would say, and then again, “I really didn’t care. They didn’t put me in the paper much. So what? They put Joe and Johnny and Pete in the paper all the time. So what? I’ll tell you what: You know when they put me in the paper? They put me in when I got a big hit. And I got a few big hits.”
In the first inning against Philadelphia, on a humid Monday night in front of a half-filled Riverfront Stadium, Doggie came to the plate to face Steve Carlton. Nobody was harder to hit than Carlton. He had a blazing fastball that would rise, a curveball that would drop like a New York elevator, and the greatest slider anyone had ever seen. Carlton had learned that slider while pitching exhibition games in Japan back in ’68. It looked just like the fastball only, at the last instant, it broke hard to the right. “Hitting against Steve Carlton,” Willie Stargell had said, “is like eating soup with a fork.”
Perez was hitting .192 against Carlton for his career. He had struck out six times against him in the previous thirteen months. And Doggie was not hitting all that great against the other pitchers either; his batting average was only .247. He shrugged. “I’m a good hitter,” he said. “I’ll get hot. I just need something to get me going.”
This time Carlton threw his slider, and Doggie swung hard. He connected. He knew as soon as the ball hit his bat that it was something special. The ball soared down the left-field line, and Perez watched it. He knew it was a home run. But he wanted to see where it would hit.
The ball landed in the second row of the upper deck—the red seats. The red seats were famous in Cincinnati. Only one Reds player had hit a baseball to the red seats at Riverfront Stadium. That was Tony Perez. Now he had done it again, and as he jogged around the bases, people all around the stadium sat in awed silence. Up in the press box, reporters estimated how far the ball had traveled. The best guess was five hundred feet.
After the game, the reporters did gather around Perez. They asked him what kind of bat he used, and he said it was a Babe Ruth model.
“The Babe never hit one that far,” Doggie said. Then he smiled. He had thought up a quote.
“Well,” he said, “not right-handed, anyway.”
July 11, 1975
CINCINNATI
REDS VS. METS
Team record: 57–29
First place by nine and a half games
They were booing Sparky. Could you believe it? The Reds had won six games in a row. They had won thirty-eight of the last forty-seven. They had humiliated the Los Angeles Dodgers, left them nine and a half games behind, coughing dirt and eating smoke. “The players ain’t worrying about LA no more,” Sparky told reporters. “LA to them don’t exist.”
The Machine, Sparky was telling people in his double negative way, was playing baseball like it ain’t never been played before. And still the fans booed Sparky every time he stuck his head out of the dugout. He wanted to laugh about it, but he was not sure it was funny. Here it was a Friday afternoon, first game of a doubleheader, big crowd, and he walked out to the mound in the seventh inning to go get his starter, Fred Norman. Well, hell, Freddie walked the opposing pitcher. In Sparky’s world, when you walked the opposing pitcher, you were begging to get pulled out of the game. Anyway, it looked like Freddie was going into his mad scientist bit, and Sparky had to get him out of there before he hurt himself. Freddie was a tough little pitcher; he stood no taller than five-foot-seven, weighed no more than 150 pounds, Freddie and Joe were the two guys Sparky could see at eye level. Sparky liked Freddie. But the guy was always tinkering, trying new things, adjusting his grip, experimenting with new pitches, and that stuff drove Sparky mad. When Sparky saw that, he would mutter, “Oh, boy, Freddie’s experimenting again.” Then he would walk out to the
mound real slow and go get him.
Anyway, as soon as he stepped on the field to go get Freddie, the crowd booed him mercilessly. It sounded like the boos were flapping around him, like low-flying bats. In a way, Sparky understood. It had been exactly a month since he let one of his starters finish a game. He was closing in on some kind of record—most consecutive days without a pitcher throwing a complete game. And the people didn’t like it. He sort of understood.
But on the other hand, he didn’t understand at all. Baseball was changing. How could they not see it? Sure, it was fine in the old days to let a starting pitcher keep going even when he got tired, when his arm hurt, when his fastball was shot, when his curveball was hanging. But no, Sparky was not going to put up with that. He was not going to just sit in the dugout and watch a tired pitcher blow the game. No. He had a kid warming up in the bullpen, Rawly Eastwick, and Eastwick threw hard, and he threw with confidence. He challenged the hitters’ manhood. Every pitch, he seemed to be saying: “Here’s my fastball, boys. Go on and hit it.” When you had a pitcher like that in the bullpen, there was no damned reason to stick with a tired starter.
“Good job, Freddie,” Sparky said over the boos when he got to the mound.
“I’m not tired,” Norman said. He was the one pitcher who was allowed to talk back to Sparky; hell, he wasn’t but eight years younger than Sparky. Freddie had played for nineteen different teams in his professional career; he had bounced around from the minors to the majors back to the minors, and he endured because of this screwball he picked up in San Diego and because he never stopped coming up with new ways to get batters out. For that, Sparky let him talk…a little.
“Yeah, I know, Freddie, you got us here, let’s get you this win,” Sparky said, and he reached out his hand. Freddie handed him the ball. The boos swirled around him.
The Machine Page 17
