The Machine

by Joe Posnanski

  In Oakland, manager Alvin Dark got himself fired. It was considered impolite to fire a manager during the World Series when everyone’s attention was supposed to be focused on the big games, but this was something of an emergency. Dark had gone in front of a congregation at a Pentecostal church and preached that his team’s owner, Charlie O. Finley, was going to hell unless he mended his ways. Well, you had to admit, it was a bold move. Finley fired him immediately. When asked for comment, Finley said he had asked his mother and she did not think he would go to hell.

  “And,” Finley added, “she knows more about those things than Alvin Dark.”

  Umpire Larry Barnett had his life threatened again, this time by telegram, and it was taken seriously enough that his family was being guarded around the clock. A few columnists made the point that sports in America were being taken too seriously.

  The Reds went to work out at Tufts University. They had been offered a chance to work out at Harvard, but Sparky said: “I understand they’ve grown pretty radical over there…and I’m a conservative.” The only trouble with Tufts was that nobody knew where it was, and the Reds got lost on the way out there. The team bus stopped for directions, and players in full uniform walked into the gas station—service station, it was called in 1975—and asked for help. “That had to blow the guy’s mind,” Pete would say. Mind blown or not, the owner’s directions did not get them to Tufts. The next time, the bus stopped at a bakery.

  When they got to Tufts, Sparky watched the workout, and he sounded happy. “The human mind is a very, very funny thing,” he told Red Smith. “If they were sitting around looking at the rain, pretty soon they’d be thinking about the sixth game coming up. Now they’re running around, having fun, and not worrying about anything.

  “This is a gimmick. And I like gimmicks. Life is a gimmick, for that matter, until the big guy upstairs sends the word.”

  Sparky Anderson was happy. It even surprised him. Maybe it was because he saw his team, the real Machine, emerge in the last game. Maybe it was because he finally felt that destiny had turned. But, no, it was something else, something personal. Sparky sat down with Dave Kindred, the young newspaper columnist from Louisville, and opened up. He told Kindred all about the fight he had been having with his son Lee.

  “There was no way I could win,” Sparky said. He told Dave that the fight had been over the length of Lee’s hair. He talked about how it had broken up his family, and how his wife had asked him if he would stand by his son if he committed murder. “Of course I would,” Sparky had said. And then he thought about it, and it all made sense to him.

  Sparky said: “When we had argued there in the garage [a year earlier], I told him, ‘Someday you’ll respect me as your father.’ And he said: ‘I already do respect you.’ I didn’t understand how he could say that and still have the long hair.

  “I was being the child, and Lee was being the man. I wasn’t man enough to father my own son.”

  Dave Kindred realized something: this was not Sparky Anderson talking. No, there was no show here. There was nothing behind his words. He was not looking to motivate, not looking to teach, not looking to entertain. This was George Anderson, who had scrapped for everything his whole life, who had made the major leagues though he could not hit, who had managed games with such fury that he drove himself out of the game, who had sold cars for Milt Blish when baseball seemed lost, who had come back to manage the best damned team that had ever been put together.

  “I always hid my feelings before,” Sparky said. “But now…we’re together. That’s all he wanted. Affection.”

  And what George Anderson did not say, could not say, not in the middle of the World Series, was this: that was all he wanted too.

  By the time the rain finally subsided and they played Game 6, anticipation was frenzied. Scalpers—if you could find any around Fenway Park—were asking for $60 and $70 dollars per ticket, about ten times street value. More people around the country huddled around their televisions than had ever watched a baseball game. It was delicious. Here were the Red Sox, destiny’s punch line, a team that had not won a World Series since 1918, when World War I was raging and a young pitcher and outfielder named Babe Ruth hit eleven of the team’s fifteen home runs. For almost sixty years after that, the Red Sox came to represent something heroic and doomed: brilliant possibilities and inevitable disappointment. The Red Sox won the pennant in ’46, after Ted Williams came home from war, but they lost to the St. Louis Cardinals in a heart-wrenching seventh game of the World Series. In ’48, the Red Sox tied Cleveland for the pennant and then lost to the Indians in a one-game playoff. In ’49, they lost the last two games of the year to the ever-present Yankees and lost the pennant with it. In ’67, carried by Yaz and a sense of providence, they won the pennant again. And they lost to the Cardinals one more time in a heart-wrenching seventh game of the World Series. Yale professor and Red Sox fan A. Bartlett Giamatti—who would, late in his life, have his own sad waltz with Pete Rose—summed up the cursed voyage of Red Sox fans with his eleven-word summation of baseball: “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.”

  And here were the Cincinnati Reds, remarkable and coarse and emotional and family and Machine, a team that spoke for the heartland. Here were the Reds, baseball’s first professional team, the best team in baseball for five years running, but still uncrowned, still uncertain of where they belonged.

  In the bottom of the inning, Gary Nolan tried to sneak a fastball past Fred Lynn and failed: Lynn crushed a long, three-run homer to center field. And that was how it began, this four-hour-one-minute game that would leave everyone spent, would get players babbling, and would set off church bells. The Red Sox led 3–0.

  Luis Tiant started for the Red Sox, and for a while he was as elusive as ever. In the second inning, he struck out Doggie. In the third, he struck out Geronimo, and in the fourth he struck out Bench again. Johnny was in agony. His shoulder hurt, he had an awful cold, and he was ready to end his marriage and become an eligible bachelor again. Vickie was already telling people about their wedding night: she said that after the guests had been fed and the dancing had been done, Johnny had slipped away to play a new video game called “Pong” with his friends. When she later told this to Tom Callahan, a mistake was made by editors, and it was reported that Johnny Bench had played Ping-Pong with friends on his wedding night.

  Sparky was working frantically, Captain Hook on five cups of coffee. He pulled Nolan for a pinch hitter in the third. He pulled Freddie Norman after he had faced only five batters. He pulled Jack Billingham for a pinch hitter in the fifth. All of that inner peace Sparky was feeling the previous couple of days was gone now. The Reds had to get to Tiant. They had to figure out a way to beat that old man.

  Sparky’s pinch hitter in the fifth inning—the ever-present Ed Armbrister—walked. Pete singled to center. Then Ken Griffey, once more in position to do something heroic, hit a triple off Tiant to score two runs. With two outs in the inning, Johnny Bench—even in pain—rapped a single to left field, scoring Griffey and tying up the game.

  “That son of a bitch has been doing it with mirrors,” Pete shouted in the dugout as he looked out at Tiant. “He should be sawing ladies in half. Are we going to get to this guy already?”

  They were ready. Seventh inning, Ken Griffey singled, Joe Morgan singled. Tiant looked like he might wriggle free one more time after he got Johnny to hit a deep but playable fly ball and he got Doggie to do the same. But there was no more magic. George Foster crushed a double to center, and Ken and Joe scored. El Tiante had run out of time. He started the eighth inning, and Cesar Geronimo blasted a long home run to right field. And then Darrell Johnson came out to the mound and took out Boston’s hero. The applause for Luis Tiant was deafening, but it wasn’t just for Tiant. It was also for their season, another beautiful failure. The Reds led 6–3. Marty Brennaman began to make his way down to the Reds clubhouse; the baseball writers had already chosen reliever Rawly Eastwick as th
e World Series MVP. And sure enough, in the eighth inning, Eastwick entered the game to put away the Red Sox once and for all.

  Sparky loved Bernie Carbo. Back in 1968, in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina, he made Bernie his personal project. Carbo had loads of talent. He had been the Reds’ first pick in the 1965 draft—the Reds took Carbo before they took Johnny Bench that year—but he was goofy and he didn’t take the game seriously. Sparky had been selling cars; he knew how precious baseball talent was, and he decided that he would not let Bernie Carbo waste away his career. He would get Bernie at ten o’clock every morning to work out. He would send two coaches out to the field after every game to work him out again. Sparky intended to leave Bernie no time to party or be a fool.

  Whenever Bernie complained, Sparky would ask him: “What did you hit last year?”

  Carbo would say, “I hit .201.”

  And Sparky would say again, “That’s right. There ain’t no place in baseball for .201 hitters, take it from me. Now get your ass out there and work.”

  It was exactly what Carbo needed. He raised his average eighty points in Asheville, and he mashed twenty home runs. The next year, he hit .359 in Triple A. Sparky had worked his magic. They were reunited in Cincinnati in ’70. Sparky the rookie manager led the Reds to the World Series. Bernie the rookie outfielder hit .310 with twenty-one homers and was named the Sporting News Rookie of the Year.

  Then Bernie started goofing off again, or at least that’s how Sparky saw it. Sparky didn’t have the time or the energy to save Bernie Carbo’s career again. The Reds traded him to St. Louis. Sparky said: “I never loved a player more than I loved Bernie Carbo.”

  And so it was Bernie Carbo standing at the plate with two outs in the eighth inning. He was the tying run for Boston—Fred Lynn and Rico Petrocelli were on base. The air was cool but light—the rain had finally gone—and the crowd was pleased, and Sparky knew that this was the moment. He worked some quick calculations in his head. Carbo was a left-handed hitter. If Sparky brought in his own left-handed reliever, Will McEnaney, then Darrell Johnson would replace Carbo with a righty, Juan Beniquez. Sparky had to make a choice: should he have Rawly pitch to Bernie Carbo or have Will pitch to Juan Beniquez?

  A manager has to make these sorts of decisions all the time, and they are based on so many things, seen and unseen—statistics, emotion, gut feelings. Sparky looked out at the field, and he saw the Wall, that great hulking thing out in left field. And he decided. He would let Rawly face Bernie for the World Series. He did not want a right-handed hitter at the plate, someone who would pull-hit a pop-up over that damned wall.

  And it looked like he had made the right call. Rawly quickly got two strikes on Bernie. Sparky stood up suddenly and moved toward the top step. He had this idea: he would bring in Will McEnaney now, with two strikes, because with two strikes there was no way that Darrell Johnson would bring in Beniquez to hit. Yes. It was brilliant. He would bring in McEnaney to get the final strike. And Bernie could not hit left-handed pitching. Sparky took a step toward the mound. He was ready to make the move.

  Only then, something stopped Captain Hook. He thought many times about it for the rest of his life…he never did figure out what stopped him. He stayed in the dugout and let Rawly pitch to Bernie Carbo with the stadium shaking, with the nation watching, with the Reds four outs away from the championship. Rawly threw a fastball, and it was a beauty, Carbo had no chance, strike three, only somehow, some way, Carbo fouled it off with what Johnny would call “the weakest swing you ever saw.”

  Next pitch, Rawly threw a high, straight, and fat fastball. Bernie Carbo crushed it to deep center field. It was gone. The Red Sox scored three. The score was tied. Fenway Park never sounded louder, at least to that moment in time. There was another homer to come.

  “Pete!” Bernie yelled as he rounded third base. “Don’t you wish you were that strong?”

  What followed Bernie Carbo’s homer was Hollywood, that’s all. It was baseball with special effects. Remarkable play followed remarkable play. Heroes escaped the jaws of death. All of that. In the bottom of the ninth, the Red Sox loaded the bases with nobody out, and then Fred Lynn hit a fly ball down the left-field line. It was drifting foul, and George Foster considered dropping it on purpose because he was not sure if he could prevent Denny Doyle, the man on third, from tagging up and scoring. Foster caught it anyway, and Doyle took off because he thought third-base coach Don Zimmer was yelling “Go! Go! Go!” Zimmer was in fact yelling “No! No! No!” Foster’s throw wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough. Doyle was tagged out.

  In the top of the tenth inning, Davey singled and stole second base. But Dick Drago, looking angrier than ever, struck out Geronimo and overpowered pinch hitter Dan Driessen.

  In the bottom of the tenth, the Reds sent their rookie pitcher Pat Darcy to the mound…Sparky really had nobody else left. Darcy had pitched well for the Reds all year long, but Sparky was never sure about the kid. On this night, Darcy had his good stuff; he got the Red Sox in order.

  “I don’t believe it,” Bench said to Carbo.

  “John,” Carbo replied, “I don’t believe it either.”

  In the eleventh, Pete Rose led off, and he turned to Carlton Fisk and said: “Wow, this is some kind of game, isn’t it? We’ll be telling our grandkids about this game.” And Fisk, in spite of himself, nodded. Then Dick Drago hit Rose with a pitch.

  “This is the greatest game I ever played in,” Pete told Yaz at first base. And Yaz, in spite of himself, nodded too.

  There would be two more moments in this breathless game that would stay fresh in people’s memories for decades. The first of those came in the eleventh inning. Ken Griffey was on first base. Joe Morgan smashed a long fly ball to deep right field. It looked like a double for sure, maybe even a home run, and Ken began running hard around the bases—he was going to score. Joe ran hard to first—he had ideas of stretching this into a triple—only then he saw something that really disturbed him. He saw Boston’s right fielder Dwight Evans running back on the ball and running hard.

  And Joe thought: Where does he think he’s going?

  Evans thought he might catch the ball. He knew it was risky to even try—if he dived for the ball and did not catch it, then Griffey would score from first base and Morgan would probably have a triple—but in the moment, in that game, with improbable things happening every minute, he ran back, and he jumped up, and he simply threw his arm up in a desperate hope that the ball would hit his glove. The ball did hit his glove. Sparky Anderson would say it was the greatest catch he ever saw.

  Then Evans whirled and threw the ball to first base. The throw was not on target, but it did not matter—Griffey had no chance to get back. He had gone full speed after the ball was hit—he was almost at third base when Evans caught it. Double play. There was simply no comprehending the noise in Fenway Park.

  And then in the twelfth inning, at 12:34 A.M. Boston time (and 12:33 A.M. New York time, according to the New York Times), Carlton Fisk led off to face Pat Darcy. Years later, people would assume that Darcy was nervous. A movie would come out—Good Will Hunting—and a main character played by Robin Williams talks about the emotion of the night. The movie would use footage that made Darcy look nervous. Darcy hated the movie.

  “I was not nervous,” Darcy would say. He had already pitched two scoreless innings under intense pressure. He was not nervous…he was tired. Darcy had put so much into those first two innings that his fastball had lost a bit of its speed. As he warmed up, he could tell that he did not have his best stuff. And he was not the only one: Johnny Bench could tell too. “I knew we would not get out of that inning,” he would say.

  Fisk stepped in, and he crushed a high fly ball down the left-field line. At first, it seemed like the ball might hook foul. “I knew it was not going foul,” Pete Rose would say. “He hit it too hard.”

  Fisk was not so sure. He watched it all the way. And when it did stay fair, when the Red Sox had won, he leape
d for joy, then ran around the bases as Red Sox players raced out of the dugout onto the field like children on the last day of school. Fans ran on the field, and Fisk had to elbow his way through them. He leaped and landed on home plate with both feet and was mobbed by his teammates. In the Cincinnati dugout, Sparky Anderson stared out into space, thinking only of that moment he had to finish off Bernie Carbo. In Charlestown, New Hampshire, Carlton Fisk’s hometown, David Conant ran out and rang the church bells. “My wife used to change his diapers!” Conant told the newspapers. In the press box, Boston columnist Ray Fitzgerald wrote: “Call it off. Call the seventh game off. Let the World Series stand this way, three games for the Cincinnati Reds, and three for the Boston Red Sox.”

  It was, simply, the most famous home run in baseball history. There have been so many others—Bobby Thomson’s shot heard round the world that won the Giants the pennant, Babe Ruth’s called shot against the Chicago Cubs in the 1932 World Series, Henry Aaron’s 715th home run that moved him past Babe Ruth, Ted Williams’s home run in his final at-bat, Bill Mazeroski’s home run that stunned the Yankees in ’60. There have been so many. But this one ended the greatest game. It was hit over the most famous wall. And it provided the most famous television shot in baseball history. Lou Gerard was NBC’s cameraman inside the left-field scoreboard, and just before Fisk came to the plate, he noticed that there was a rat near him and it was getting closer, and he was not feeling too good about things. When Fisk hit the ball, he was so frazzled that he could not pick up the ball, and so he trained his camera on Fisk. What he got was Fisk dancing up the first-base line and waving at the ball—“Stay fair! Stay fair!” And the ball did stay fair. And Fisk leaped up in the air. And this was what made the Fisk home run even more powerful than Thomson’s home run or Mazeroski’s. For perhaps the first time on television, the game seemed to jump through the TV screen. The emotion was alive.