And Gullett pitched five scoreless innings against the St. Louis Cardinals on his first day back.
“It was like he had never been away,” Sparky gushed to reporters. This game was like so many of the rest. After Gullett came out, Pedro Borbon pitched. After he hit a batter in the eighth, Will McEnaney came in and limited the damage. After McEnaney gave up a leadoff single in the ninth, Clay Carroll came in. After Carroll gave up a single to load the bases, Rawly Eastwick came in. He finished off the Cardinals, the Reds won 3–2, and they were on pace to win more games than any National League team in sixty years, and they were playing the best baseball that had ever been played.
Not that anything had really changed. When the game ended, reporters surrounded Pete Rose and one asked him if Dick Wagner—the man who had cut his pay before the season began—had seen Pete’s twenty-five hundredth hit. “I don’t think he’s ever seen me get a hit,” Pete said. “All he sees is me throwing baseballs into the stands at twenty-five bucks a clip.”
Clay Carroll inspired another Clay Carroll story. He borrowed a magazine from a reporter, glanced at it, and returned it. “Boy, that was quick,” the reporter said. “Weren’t no pictures,” the Hawk replied.
The guys ripped Johnny for going oh-for-five. Joe and Pete argued about which one of them would end up with a better batting average. And Sparky sat in the office, drank milk, and worried about things—worried that his players might let down, worried that someone would get hurt, worried that the Reds would lose to Pittsburgh in the playoffs, worried that maybe he lacked the killer instinct that separates champions from bums.
WE HAVEN’T WON ANYTHING
August 19 to October 7
The highway’s jammed with broken heroes.
—BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, “BORN TO RUN”
August 25, 1975
CHICAGO
REDS VS. CUBS
Team record: 84–44
First place by sixteen and a half games
Bruce Springsteen was not happy, not at all, not with the sound, not with the hype, and most of all not with the album. Born to Run, his new album, hit the stores on August 25, and it was a monster. He had spent fourteen hard months making it. He felt like a failure. Springsteen was twenty-five years old, and he wanted only one thing, but it was the biggest thing he could imagine: to make the greatest rock-and-roll record ever. He had spent fourteen hours a day in the studio, every day for more than a year, leaving at six o’clock most mornings, sometimes later, and still he could not get the sounds out of his head and onto the tape. His friend and coproducer, Jon Landau, kept telling him to get the record done, to set a release date, and Springsteen would growl: “Hey, man, the release date is just one day. The record is forever.” The pressure was intense. Years later, Springsteen would tell the author Dave Marsh that he bought an $89.95 record player and listened to the album for the first time. He hated it so much that he wanted to kill the release.
But Landau calmed him down and talked him into releasing the album. Landau had been a wandering rock critic—a year earlier, after seeing Springsteen perform at the Harvard Square Theater, he had written one of the most famous reviews in rock-and-roll history. He wrote: “I saw my rock’n’roll past flash before my eyes. And I saw something else: I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time.” Landau and Springsteen understood each other. They both wanted something hard to describe.
Maybe it was a little bit like that in America in 1975, with the war over and the economy dried up and Watergate smoldering, maybe it was a time to reach for something wild and bold or—as Springsteen sang in “Jungleland”—for poets to reach for their moment and try to make an honest stand. The album Born to Run began with a screen door slamming and ended with those poets winding up wounded and not even dead, and in the middle, as the author Greil Marcus would write, were “one thousand and one American nights, one long night of fear and love.” The album would get Springsteen on the cover of Time and Newsweek the same week. Thirty years later, it would be placed in the Library of Congress as a culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant recording, there forever with John Kennedy’s inauguration speech, the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, and the evangelist Billy Graham’s “problems of the American home” speech. It would become, to many, the greatest rock-and-roll album ever recorded.
But that day, Bruce Springsteen believed he had failed.
In Chicago, the Reds pounded the Cubs 11–4, Pete got three hits, Doggie drove in two more, and Clay Carroll threw perfect relief. When the game ended reporters gathered around Pete as usual, only he did not seem as happy as he normally seemed after a victory.
“Is this the best team you’ve ever seen?” they asked Pete.
“We haven’t won anything,” he said softly. “We’ve got to win it all.”
August 29, 1975
CINCINNATI
REDS VS. CARDINALS
Team record: 89–44
First place by eighteen and a half games
Bob Gibson, that proud man, walked slowly in from the bullpen, and he had that same scowl on his face, that famous Gibson scowl, the scowl that said, “I’m going to get you out, or I’m going to kill you.” He had the scowl, but he no longer had the fastball. Gibson was almost forty years old. His record was 3–9. He had pitched so poorly that St. Louis manager Red Schoendienst, who had been Gibson’s teammate years earlier, put him in the bullpen, where he pitched mop-up relief. For a man with Gibson’s pride, that demotion cut through him like a cold wind. Still he pitched on. Every player on the Machine understood—this would be the last time they would ever face him.
Gibson had defined baseball for more than a decade. He was big and strong and black and ferocious. He set off childlike fears in major league players—he made them feel like they were facing the fastest pitcher in Little League. It wasn’t just that Gibson was bigger than anyone else (though he was big) or that he threw harder than anyone else (though he threw hard) or that he was meaner than anyone else (though he was plenty mean—he would not hesitate to hit a player who he felt looked too comfortable at the plate).
“You wanted to earn his respect” was how Joe put it many years later. Gibson once told the author Roger Angell that he had played hundreds of games of tic-tac-toe with his daughter…and she never beat him. Gibson once announced to parents, “Why do I have to be an example for your kid? You be an example for your own kid.” Gibson was one of the rarest of players, a legend in his time, a man players measured their careers against. Every player who ever faced Bob Gibson remembered the moment.
The Reds led the game 6–1, it was the bottom of the fifth inning, and Gibson dug his spikes into the dirt. Cesar Geronimo stepped into the box, and he saw Gibson stare him down, and he felt unnerved, like the years had melted away. Gibson struck him out. “He throw hard,” Cesar said as he walked back into the dugout.
The next inning, Pete Rose stepped in. “Bob Gibson is the toughest pitcher I ever faced,” Pete would say after that day and many times after that. This wasn’t the same Bob Gibson. But he was still Bob Gibson. The two battled, and then there were two strikes, and then Gibby threw his fastball, his pitch. And Pete swung and missed for strike three. Gibson stomped off the mound, and Pete watched him go.
“I won’t miss him,” Pete would say. “But the game will.”
Five days later, Gibson pitched in his final game, against the Chicago Cubs. He had nothing. He walked a man, allowed a single, walked another, threw a wild pitch, intentionally walked a man. And finally, he grooved a fastball to Pete LaCock, a twenty-three-year-old first baseman who was the son of game show host Peter Marshall. LaCock blasted it, a grand slam. That was the last pitch Bob Gibson ever threw in the big leagues.
But with Gibson, there’s always one more story. Many years later, he was pitching in an old-timers game. And Pete LaCock was playing too. LaC
ock stepped up to face Gibson, who was well into his fifties. Gibson stared him down and promptly hit LaCock in the back with a pitch.
“Ow, Bob, what gives?” LaCock asked.
“I’ve been waiting for years to do that,” Gibson said.
September 3, 1975
CINCINNATI
REDS VS. DODGERS
Team record: 91–46
First place by eighteen and a half games
The Machine had dismantled the Dodgers in every way possible—physically, emotionally, spiritually, you name it—but they had one more message to send. It was the fourth inning, and there were two outs, and Pete Rose walked to the plate to face Andy Messersmith. Dave Concepcion was on first base.
Pete crushed a double over the center fielder’s head to score Davey. Then Geronimo walked. Then Joe Morgan hit a double to right field, scoring Pete. Then Doggie singled up the middle, scoring Geronimo and Joe. Then Johnny hit a single to center. Then George hit a choppy ground ball that was botched by the Dodgers’ third baseman, Ron Cey, and another run scored.
It started to pour rain, and everyone raced off the field. It rained hard for thirty minutes, then it stopped, then the Reds sent out the Zamboni machine—those Big Red Machines that general manager Bob Howsam always talked about—to dry the field. When everything was dry, a new Dodgers pitcher came in. Marv Rettenmund hit a double to score two runs. Davey walked. Gary Nolan singled in a run. Pete got hit by a pitch. Cesar reached when the catcher dropped the third strike. Joe walked with the bases loaded. It was, as the papers put it, a free-for-all.
And when it ended, the Reds had scored ten runs.
“I’m not sure what you say,” Captain America Steve Garvey said. “I guess it’s their year.”
It was their year. Everything was anticlimax for the Machine in September 1975. The Reds officially wrapped up the National League West championship on September 7 while sitting in the clubhouse. They had beaten San Francisco an hour and a half earlier, and then they just lingered around, wrestled with each other’s kids, talked with reporters, sipped beer. They were waiting to see if the Dodgers lost to Atlanta; if they did, then the Reds would be champions and it would be the earliest date a team had ever clinched. If Los Angeles won, then the Reds would have to wait to clinch tomorrow or the next day or the next. There were still three weeks left in the season. The ending was inevitable. The rest was timing.
There was champagne chilling, and the Reds players watched television. The Dodgers led 2–0 going into the bottom of the eighth inning, and then Atlanta’s comically named Biff Pocoroba walked. Then the more professionally named Rowland Office doubled. The Dodgers sent in their knuckleball pitcher Charlie Hough. Then Ralph Garr reached on an error. Everybody moved up a base on a wild pitch. Darrell Evans walked. Another pitcher, this one named Dave Sells, entered the game.
“What is Dave selling?” Johnny riddled.
“Dave Sells cars,” Joe said.
Dave Sells walked Dusty Baker. Then he walked Mike Lum. The Dodgers were marching to their own funeral. Atlanta led 3–2. And when the Dodgers went down meekly in the ninth inning, the Reds were champions. Clubhouse attendants rushed in with forty-eight bottles of champagne, which the players dutifully poured on each other. Broadcaster Marty Brennaman walked around in his underwear—“You guys ain’t going to get my clothes,” he shouted as he got doused.
“If I was a drinking man, I’d be set,” Pete shouted as he was drowned in champagne, then beer, then cold water. Dick Wagner, the man who had cursed out the team chaplain, walked around the clubhouse warning players to stop running around with bottles in their hands…somebody could get hurt. They dumped a bucket of water on his head.
“We want Pittsburgh!” Johnny shouted in an effort to start a clubhouse chant. “We want Pittsburgh!” A few joined in.
“This is more subdued than past years,” Dick Wagner told a reporter. And then Bob Howsam dumped more champagne on his head.
The feds finally gave up the search for Jimmy Hoffa and pronounced him dead. A woman named Lynette Alice Fromme (“Squeaky” for short), who was once a child performer who appeared on The Lawrence Welk Show and later a member of the Charles Manson family, pointed a gun at President Ford in Sacramento. She may or may not have pulled the trigger, but the gun did not go off. She was grabbed by the Secret Service and arrested.
Seventeen days later, in San Francisco, another woman, Sara Jane Moore, actually did shoot at the president, and she only missed because an ex-marine named Oliver Sipple happened to see the gun just as she was about to fire. He screamed, “Gun!” and grabbed her arm just as the gun went off. The bullet missed the president and bounced off the St. Francis Hotel. “I’m not a hero,” Sipple said to the media. “I’m a live coward.”
The Sipple story did not end…it took several days for President Ford to personally thank him. Why? According to Randy Shilts’s book The Mayor of Castro Street, Harvey Milk—the openly gay politician just coming into his own in San Francisco—suspected that it was because Sipple was gay. Milk called the San Francisco newspaper and outed him. “It’s too good an opportunity,” Milk told the author Frank Robinson. “For once we can show that gays do heroic things. That guy saved the president’s life.”
Two days later, San Francisco columnist Herb Caen quoted Milk saying he was “proud—maybe this will break the stereotype.” Soon other newspapers picked up the story that Sipple was gay—“Homosexual Hero” was the headline in the Chicago Sun-Times—and the news made it back to Detroit, where his mother read it. She was a strict Baptist and refused to leave the house for days after reading the news. When Sipple called her, she hung up on him.
Everyone was talking about the big boxing match coming up—the third Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier fight, which would be fought in Manila in the Philippines. “Come on, gorilla!” Ali shouted as he pulled out a toy gorilla and punched it. “We’re in Manila!” Frazier seethed in furious silence. The sportscaster Howard Cosell started a new television variety show that he called Saturday Night Live. On All in the Family—the most popular show on television—Archie Bunker saved a woman’s life by administering CPR. He found out later that “she” was really a man.
The Reds kept winning. They won their one hundredth game of the season in Atlanta in front of three thousand people, the smallest crowd of the year. They beat the Astros two out of three in the Houston Astrodome. They came home and beat Atlanta again. Records fell every day. They won the most games in team history. They built the biggest division lead in National League history. On the last day of the year, a Sunday, more than forty-four thousand people packed into Riverfront Stadium. The Reds were losing by two runs in the eighth inning, and the lineup was filled with backups and Pete Rose. The Machine came back. The Machine always came back that year. Pete’s single in the eighth inning gave the Reds a brief lead. Cesar’s single in the ninth won the game.
The final numbers staggered the mind. The Reds had won 108 games—more than any National League team since the 1906 Chicago Cubs. They beat the Dodgers by 20 games, and no team had ever won by more. They scored 105 more runs than any other team in the league. They won 90 of their last 125 games, an absurd 72 percent…no National League team had played that well for that long in fifty years.
“There is nothing in my wildest dreams that didn’t come true this season,” Sparky told the reporters, a brilliant double negative to end the brilliant season. Everything had worked beautifully. Gary Nolan came all the way back from his injury—he won 15 games. George Foster emerged as a star—he hit 23 home runs. Joe Morgan played better than anyone Sparky had ever seen before. Pete Rose hit .317 and banged out 210 hits. Johnny Bench, even though he still felt awful, finished second in the league in runs batted in and stole 11 bases in 11 attempts.
“Watch out!” Johnny yelled at Joe. “I’m going to become the base stealer around here, and you’re going to have to hit the home runs.”
Those kids in the bullpen, Rawly Eastwick and Will McEnaney, combin
ed for 37 saves—giving the Reds pitchers more saves by far than any team in baseball.
It all seemed beautiful. And yet, Sparky could feel that ulcer burning again. Now the playoffs would begin, and all the things they had done during the season would mean nothing. Sparky thought a lot about the 1954 Cleveland Indians; there was a team that had played brilliantly. They won 111 games during the season. They beat the mighty New York Yankees. They were in position to make history. Then they faced the New York Giants in the World Series, Willie Mays made a famous catch in the first game, and the Indians never recovered. The Giants swept the World Series. And the Indians were mostly forgotten.
It could happen. Sparky knew it. The Reds would play Pittsburgh in a best three-out-of-five-game playoff, and he felt certain that the Reds were better than the Pirates, but that didn’t always matter. His team had been better than the New York Mets in 1973, but that was the series when Pete jumped Bud Harrelson, and those New York fans threw garbage on the field, and the Mets won the series in five games. There was no way in hell that Mets team even belonged on the same field as his Machine. That’s how it goes in baseball, though. To Sparky, brilliance was pronounced over months, not days; greatness was found in the chill of April, the humidity of August, the long shadows of September. That’s how Sparky saw it. But that wasn’t how America saw it. If the Reds lost to Pittsburgh, they would be forgotten. Or worse. They would be remembered only for what they could not do, remembered as a team that melted when it got too close to the sun.
“Sparky,” a television reporter began, after the final game of the season. Sparky had never seen him before, but it was that time of year—that time when new reporters who did not know a baseball from a bass drum popped up like mushrooms. “Sparky,” the guy said, “are you worried that if the Reds lose to the Pirates in the playoffs you will be fired?”
The Machine Page 21
