The Machine

by Joe Posnanski

  Pete Rose was my inspiration for this book, but so were Bench and Morgan and Ken Griffey and Gary Nolan and Jack Billingham and all the rest of them. There’s an old saying in sports: talent wins. And it does. But there is something beautiful about a team coming together.

  I have to share one more story with you because it so perfectly describes this book for me. I was driving back home from Cincinnati one evening, and I was pulled over for speeding in Indiana. The highway patrolman walked to the window, asked for my driver’s license, and then noticed I had a stack of books in the car about the Reds.

  “You a Reds fan?” he asked.

  “Sort of,” I said. “I’m writing a book about the 1975 Cincinnati Reds.”

  And suddenly, without hesitation, he said: “Tony Perez, Joe Morgan, Dave Concepcion, Pete Rose, George Foster, Ken Griffey, Johnny Bench, and, uh, Cesar Geronimo.”

  And he let me go.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  One of my family’s favorite activities every year is yelling at the television when Academy Award acceptance speeches go on too long. This doesn’t necessarily speak well of us, but we never seem to tire of mocking people on the big stage looking petrified that, in what may be the grandest moment of their lives, they will forget to thank somebody.

  And so it’s fitting, I suppose, that here I am feeling entirely certain that I am going to forget someone who was critical to me writing this book. I apologize to those people in advance. I’ll send you something in the mail, I promise.

  I want to begin by thanking Pete Rose. Not only was he the stimulus for this book, but he was also extremely generous with his time and memories. Everyone has at least one opinion about Pete Rose, and I have several, but he has always been extremely kind to me, and this book is in large part a result of that kindness.

  I want to thank the many people who were willing to take the time to talk to me for this book. These include: Buddy Bell, Johnny Bench, Jack Billingham, Pedro Borbon, Marty Brennaman, Tom Callahan, Dave Concepcion, Pat Darcy, Paul Daugherty, Frank Deford, Dan Driessen, Rawly Eastwick, John Erardi, Jim Ferguson, George Foster, Cesar Geronimo, Ken Griffey, Ernie Harwell, Robert Howsam, Bill James, Ferguson Jenkins, Randy Jones, Pat Jordan, Reuven J. Katz, Dave Kindred, Jim Lonborg, Fred Lynn, Mike Marshall, Hal McCoy, Will McEnaney, Joe Morgan, Gary Nolan, Steve Palermo, Tony Perez, Bill Plummer, Greg Rhodes, Jeff Ruby, Bob Ryan, Mark Sackler, George Scherger, Diego Segui, Art Stewart, Brent Strom, Tim Sullivan, and Frank White. I also relied on earlier interviews I had with Sparky Anderson, Johnny Bench, George Brett, Steve Garvey, Hal McRae, Joe Morgan, Pete Rose, and Marge Schott.

  I must thank research assistant Minda Haas for her hard work in re-creating 1975 through magazine articles and for almost getting an interview with George Clooney—we’re hoping he’s still available to play in the movie. Josh Katzowitz spent countless hours in the library scanning microfilm, and I thank him for that, and my weak stomach also thanks him. Greg Gajus was helpful on many fronts.

  There is no way I can thank my friends enough for pushing and pulling me through. I want to thank Scott Raab for his inspiration, Michael Rosenberg for his late-night instant-message pep talks, Adrian Wojnarowski, Alex Belth, Seth Mnookin, Mechelle Voepel, Jim Banks, Bob Dutton, Richard Bush, Dinn Mann, Ian O’Connor, Brian Hay, Tommy Tomlinson, and Bill James for always seeming so convinced that the book would actually get done. I always have special thanks for my brother-in-arms Mike Vaccaro. And I need to throw an extra thank-you to Michael Rosenberg for also taking the time to mark up the manuscript with red ink.

  I thank my editor, David Highfill, and his assistant, Gabe Robinson, for working so hard on this project. This is my second book with David, and both have been great experiences. I have to thank my fabulous agent, Sloan Harris, even though I will admit that it is precisely when actors start thanking agents at the Oscars that my family gets particularly unruly. I thank Nate Gordon at Sports Illustrated for helping me track down photographs, and by “helping me” I really mean tracking down photographs by himself.

  There is no way I could have done this book without the support of my editors at the Kansas City Star, Holly Lawton and Mike Fannin, who are also two of my best friends. I also got great support from my editor at Sports Illustrated, Christian Stone, even though as a young boy he undoubtedly wanted the Red Sox to win that World Series.

  Finally, we come to family. My parents, Steven and Frances Posnanski, came to America in 1964 and hoped their oldest son would be a doctor, maybe a lawyer, at least an accountant. They got a sportswriter, and while they don’t get free medical advice or their taxes done, they do seem fairly proud to have books with their last name in their library. While I was writing this book, my youngest brother, Tony, lost more than two hundred pounds, so he achieved more during the time frame. My other brother, David, will no doubt remember baseball games we played in the backyard while growing up in Cleveland. Because I was the Cleveland Indians. He had to be the Cincinnati Reds.

  I dedicate this book to my two beautiful daughters, Elizabeth and Katie, who do not know or care about baseball or the Cincinnati Reds but were always there with hugs and helpful suggestions such as “Are you finished with your book yet?”

  And, last, most, I thank my beautiful wife, Margo, for putting up with the crazy life of a sportswriter, the hectic life of a blogger, and the feverish life of an author, all at the same time. In addition to her infinite patience, her editing talents, and her rare talent to panic when I’m on a tight deadline, she is much more artistic than I am. She was instrumental in getting the photographs for this book. She claimed it was a pain, but I’m quite certain that she enjoyed every minute of it.

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  A baseball writer in 2009 has so many advantages over writers of the past because of extraordinary baseball websites such as BaseballReference.com and Retrosheet.org. I spent countless hours on those two sites looking up box scores, statistics, and dates. It is not an exaggeration to say that this book, as presented, would have been impossible to do without the tireless work of Sean Forman, David Smith, and countless others who make those remarkable baseball websites possible.

  The information gathered here came in large part from extensive interviews with the members of the 1975 Reds and various other players and observers. A complete list of people interviewed is in the acknowledgments.

  The day-to-day information was mostly harvested from 1975 daily newspapers, particularly the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Cincinnati Post. Additional information was found in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, along with Associated Press and United Press International wire service reports printed in various papers across the country. I had the honor of working for the Cincinnati Post, which printed its final edition on December 31, 2007; Cincinnati and the country are poorer for losing the Post.

  Among magazines, Time and Newsweek helped me get a better feel for the time and place, as did The New Yorker, and Playboy’s interviews with Pete Rose and Sparky Anderson were both beneficial. Sports Illustrated was an invaluable reference, particularly Frank Deford’s wonderful story “Watch on the Ohio” (September 29, 1975).

  A more complete list of the books used is in the bibliography, but the most crucial to me include Bob Hertzel’s The Big Red Machine (Prentice Hall, 1976), Ritter Collett’s Men of the Machine (Landfall Press, 1977), Hub Walker’s Cincinnati and the Big Red Machine (Indiana University Press, 1988), and especially Big Red Dynasty (Road West, 1997) by Greg Rhodes and John Erardi. Greg and John were kind and unceasingly accommodating to me during the writing process.

  There is no shortage of books about Pete Rose, but the diary he wrote with Bob Hertzel called Charlie Hustle (Prentice Hall, 1975) was particularly useful in trying to find the young Pete Rose, before his world went mad. Johnny Bench’s autobiography (with William Brashler; Harper & Row, 1979) was unusually blunt and informative, and one of the real pleasures of my obsessive Reds readings was Joe Morgan: My Life in Baseball, which I found to be as i
nteresting and complicated as Morgan himself. One of my regrets was that, for one reason or another, I failed to connect with Sparky Anderson, but I have spoken with him on a number of occasions through the years and heard his voice come through clearly in The Main Spark (Doubleday, 1978) and Sparky! (Prentice Hall, 1990).

  I also did not get the chance to speak with the architect of the Machine, Bob Howsam, before he passed away in February 2008, just as the project was beginning. But his unpublished book My Life in Sports, written with Bob Jones, was indispensable. I want to thank the Howsam family for their kindness and Greg Gajus for finding me a copy of the book.

  Cincinnati was blessed in 1975 with some of the best newspaper sportswriting in the country. The columns of the Cincinnati Enquirer’s Tom Callahan were priceless, as were his Reds memories in The Bases Were Loaded (and So Was I; Crown, 2004). And I’m proud to call Baseball Hall of Fame sportswriter Hal McCoy of the Dayton Daily News a friend of mine. His season wrap-up, The Relentless Reds (PressCo, 1976), was filled with wonderful stories and details.

  The Baseball Hall of Fame, the Cincinnati Public Library, and the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame were all exceedingly attentive, and they went out of their way to help.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Alfred Hitchcock by Alfred Hitchcock and Sidney Gottlieb, University Press of Mississippi, 2003.

  Baseball My Way by Joe Morgan, Atheneum, 1976.

  Baseball’s Great Dynasties: The Reds by Peter C. Bjarkman, Gallery Books, 1991.

  The Bases Were Loaded (and So Was I) by Tom Callahan, Crown, 2004.

  The Best Sports Writing of Pat Jordan by Pat Jordan and Alex Belth, Persea, 2008.

  Beyond the Sixth Game: What’s Happened to Baseball Since the Greatest Game in World Series History by Peter Gammons, Houghton Mifflin, 1985.

  Big Red Dynasty: How Bob Howsam and Sparky Anderson Built the Big Red Machine by Greg Rhodes and John Erardi, Road West, 1998.

  The Big Red Machine by Bob Hertzel, Prentice Hall, 1976.

  Black and Blue: Sandy Koufax, the Robinson Boys, and the World Series That Stunned America by Tom Adelman, Back Bay Books, 2006.

  Blockbuster by Tom Shone, Scribner, 1975.

  Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story by Dave Marsh, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1996.

  Byline: Si Burick, a Half-Century in the Press Box by Si Burick, Dayton Daily News, 1982.

  Catch Every Ball: How to Handle Life’s Pitches by Johnny Bench, Orange Frazier Press, 2008.

  Catch You Later: The Autobiography of Johnny Bench by Johnny Bench and William Brashler, HarperCollins, 1979.

  Charlie Hustle by Pete Rose and Bob Hertzel, Prentice Hall, 1975.

  Cincinnati and the Big Red Machine by Robert Harris Walker, Indiana University Press, 1998.

  Cincinnati: From River City to Highway Metropolis by David Stradling, Arcadia, 2003.

  The Cincinnati Reds by Lee Allen, Kent State University Press, 2006.

  The Cincinnati Reds: A Pictorial History of Professional Baseball’s Oldest Team by Ritter Collett, Jordan-Powers Corp., 1976.

  Cincinnati Seasons: My 34 Years with the Reds by Earl Lawson, Diamond Communications, 1987.

  Collision at Home Plate: The Lives of Pete Rose and Bart Giamatti by James Reston, Bison Books, 1997.

  Dear Pete: The Life of Pete Rose by Helen Fabbri and Larry D. Names, Laranmark, 1986.

  Echoes of Cincinnati Reds Baseball: The Greatest Stories Ever Told by Mark Stallard and Jim O’Toole, Triumph Books, 2007.

  The 50 Greatest Red Sox Games by Cecilia Tan and Bill Nowlin, John Wiley & Sons, 2006.

  4 Hispanic Heroes of the U.S.A. by Warren H. Wheelock and J. O. Maynes Jr., EMC Corp., 1976.

  The George Foster Story by Malka Drucker with George Foster, Holiday House, 1980.

  Hustle: The Myth, Life, and Lies of Pete Rose by Michael Sokolove, Simon & Schuster, 1990.

  Joe Morgan: A Life in Baseball by Joe Morgan and David Falkner, W. W. Norton, 1993.

  Johnny Bench Catching and Power Hitting by Johnny Bench, Viking Press, 1975.

  The Last Real Season by Mike Shropshire, Grand Central, 2008.

  The Long Ball: The Summer of ’75—Spaceman, Catfish, Charlie Hustle, and the Greatest World Series Ever Played by Tom Adelman, Back Bay Books, 2003.

  The Main Spark by Sparky Anderson and Si Burick, Doubleday, 1978.

  The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk by Randy Shilts, St. Martin’s/Griffin, 2008.

  Men of the Machine: An Inside Look at Baseball’s Team of the ’70s by Ritter Collett, Landfall Press, 1977.

  My Bat Boy Days: Lessons I Learned from the Boys of Summer by Steve Garvey, Ken Gurnick, and Candace Garvey, Scribner, 2008.

  My Life in Sports by Robert Lee Howsam and Bob Jones, unpublished, 1999.

  My Prison Without Bars by Pete Rose and Rick Hill, Rodale, 2004.

  The New Bill James Historical Abstract by Bill James, Free Press, 2003.

  The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers: An Historical Compendium of Pitching, Pitchers, and Pitches by Bill James and Rob Neyer, Fireside, 2004.

  Pete Rose (Mr. .300) by Keith Brandt, Putnam Sports Shelf, 1977.

  Pete Rose: My Life in Baseball by Pete Rose, Doubleday, 1979.

  Pete Rose: My Story by Roger Kahn and Pete Rose, Macmillan, 1989.

  The Pete Rose Story by Pete Rose, World, 1970.

  Redleg Journal by Greg Rhodes and John Snyder, Road West, 2000.

  The Relentless Reds by Hal McCoy, PressCo, 1976.

  The Royal Reds: Baseball’s New Dynasty by Hal McCoy, PressCo, 1977.

  ‘75: The Red Sox Team That Saved Baseball, edited by Bill Nowlin and Cecilia Tan, Rounder Books, 2005.

  Sparky! by Sparky Anderson and Dan Ewald, Prentice Hall, 1990.

  Sports Hero: Pete Rose by Marshall Burchard, Putnam’s, 1976.

  Summer of ’49 by David Halberstam, Harper Perennial, 2006.

  SEARCHABLE TERMS

  Note: Entries in this index, carried over verbatim from the print edition of this title, are unlikely to correspond to the pagination of any given e-book reader. However, entries in this index, and other terms, may be easily located by using the search feature of your e-book reader.

  Aaron, Hank, 255

  Adair, Jimmy, 150

  Alexander, Cliff, 122

  Ali, Muhammad, 40–41, 44–45, 117, 204

  Allen, Dick, 61

  Allen, Mel, 101

  Allen, Paul, 187

  Allison, Douglas, 50

  All-Star Game (1970), 43–44

  Alston, Walter, 171, 184–85

  American Football League, 108

  Anderson, Carol, 70, 167

  Anderson, Dave, 94

  Anderson, Lee, 17, 47, 69–70, 73, 247–48

  Anderson, Sparky:

  as “Captain Hook,” 121, 180

  and Carbo, 250–52, 254

  career of, 13–14

  and the chaplain, 45–47

  and fans, 164–65, 167, 179

  fired by Reds, 262

  and games in April, 64, 70–76, 84, 85–88

  and games in August, 178–85, 188–90, 193–96

  and games in July, 157–58, 164–67

  and games in June, 135–40, 146–48

  and games in May, 88–91, 105–8, 110–13, 120–23

  in Hall of Fame, 262, 270

  and his father, 240–41

  and his son, 17, 69–70, 73, 247–48

  instinct of, 8, 90, 147, 251–52

  and lineup, 55, 157–58, 194, 208

  and lucky spot, 135–39

  as manager, 13–18, 53, 85, 185, 216, 256–57, 272, 276

  and National League championship (1975), 204–6, 217–18

  on opening day, 52–53, 55–56, 59

  and pitchers, 15, 37–38, 73–74, 86–88, 106, 120, 121–23, 135, 146–48, 164–67, 179–80, 185, 189–90, 195, 249, 252, 258, 263

  and playoffs (1973), 7

  and playoffs (1975), 205–6, 208–9, 215, 216–17