April 20 to May 17
So please play for me a sad melody.
So sad it makes everyone cry.
—B. J. THOMAS, “ANOTHER SOMEBODY DONE SOMEBODY WRONG SONG”
April 22, 1975
CINCINNATI
REDS VS. GIANTS
Team record: 7–8
Johnny Bench could not remember a time before he wanted to be a hero. Like most ballplayers, he got that from his father. Ted Bench was one helluva ballplayer in the army. Ted was squat—a filled-out five-foot-nine—but he had this arm you would not believe. Ted was a catcher, and every time he uncorked a throw to second, he would hear the sighs of the crowd. Some people saw that arm in action and told Ted that he ought to pitch, but Ted Bench did not think anyone should tell a man what to do with his life. Ted quit high school as a senior because his baseball coach put him on the bench for a few days. Later, Ted would tell his sons, the coach tried to put him in a game.
“Get in there, Bench,” the evil coach said in the parable.
“Naw,” Ted replied. “I don’t wanna go in. If you don’t start me, I can’t go in.” And with that, the story went, Ted Bench quit the team, quit school, joined the army, and wowed the hard men of the Greatest Generation with his rocket arm.
The lesson in the story was for the boys to figure out. For a while after he got out of the army, Ted still had some vague dream of playing big league ball, but he was twenty-six, and he already had two sons, and he had bone chips floating around in his elbow. He came back to Oklahoma with his wife, Katie, looked for steady work, and finally found some driving a truck for a propane company in a little town of six hundred called Binger. On the side, Ted played sandlot baseball on diamond-hard fields covered with rocks and sand. He planned to raise a big league ballplayer, planned it even before he got married. His oldest son, Ted Jr., had the heart of a ballplayer, but he lacked the talent. His second son, William, might have had some talent, but there was something missing. Johnny had everything. Even when Johnny was a toddler, he could throw. Yes, sir, he was the one. Ted went to work on him right away. Ted would hit high pop-ups to his son in Oklahoma cornfields. Ted would have Johnny practice his throw to second base again and again and again until every throw landed on the corner of the bag. Johnny would always remember Saturdays, going with his father to Helms Grocery, buying a gallon of Neapolitan, and racing home to catch the Game of the Week on their black-and-white TV.
“There he is, John,” Ted would say, and he would point to the screen at Mickey Mantle, the great Yankees outfielder who had grown up in Oklahoma.
“I’m going to be a professional baseball player too,” Johnny would say.
“Yes, you are,” Ted said.
Johnny first alerted the world to his baseball destiny when he was in the second grade and the teacher asked the ubiquitous question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Johnny never could figure out why every other boy in the class offered what seemed to him mundane ambitions—policeman, fireman, teacher, farmer. There was something about growing up in a small town, something comforting and confining all at once, something that Johnny Bench would spend his life celebrating but, even more, running away from. Johnny announced that he intended to play baseball for a living. And every school year—in school essays, in class speeches—Johnny would remind every teacher and every student in his class that his goals had not changed.
Ted started a youth baseball team—the Binger Bobcats—and he made Johnny his catcher. He made Johnny a catcher for practical reasons: that was the easiest route to the big leagues. There were never enough good catchers in this world. Johnny loved it. He was good at it. He would block balls thrown in the dirt and catch pop-ups behind home plate, and when he made those practiced throws to second base, eyes would bulge. “That boy of yours is gonna play in the big leagues,” people would say to Ted.
“Yes, he is,” Ted said.
None of it was easy, of course. The Benches were just getting by—Ted only had enough money to keep the Binger Bobcats going for a couple of years. When he ran out of sponsorship money, he drove Johnny twenty miles to Fort Cobb to play. When Ted could not drive him to Fort Cobb, Johnny and his brothers and friends played baseball games using Milnot milk cans as balls and broken bats sliced in half. And when brothers and friends were not around, Katie would watch in wonder as Johnny stood out in the driveway and, for hours at a time, threw chunks of gravel up in the air, and hit them with a chipped baseball bat.
Ted and Johnny talked so much about him playing in the big leagues that soon it became almost plain, mundane, like planning a family vacation. Johnny never doubted that he would play in the majors. When he was in school—Johnny would always remember this—he got a C in penmanship. It devastated him. For one thing, Johnny Bench did not get Cs in anything—he had to be a success in everything or else he felt like a failure. But more, much more, he could not afford C-level penmanship. Johnny intended to sign a lot of autographs in his life.
So here’s what he did: Johnny went down to Ford McKinney’s Texaco station there in Binger, and he practiced signing autographs. Over and over again, Johnny would sign his name—rounding out the top of the J, making sure the H and two Ns were precisely the same height and width, adding an extra swirl in his B. He signed his name again and again, and then, when he had the letters just right, he started handing out his autographs to people around town. “Keep this,” he said. “I’m going to be famous.” He liked doing that so much that he did it again the next week. And then again. After a while, Ford McKinney had a shoe box full of Johnny Bench signatures. Years later, he would say he still had them around somewhere.
That was the Johnny Bench everyone in Binger knew: the cocky kid who signed autographs at the gas station and believed without a doubt that he would play major league baseball, and then he would be a major league star, and then he would marry the prettiest girl in the world. It had to happen that way. It was preordained. The Reds drafted Johnny in the second round in 1965 and offered him a measly six grand and some school tuition, a pretty insulting offer. But Reds scout Tony Robello knew just how to make the deal happen. He said: “John, if you make it, you will have more money than you could ever want.” That was something Johnny Bench understood. He signed the contract. He knew that he would make it.
He played the next year for the Class A Peninsula Grays in Newport News, Virginia, and from the start he was something to see. He hit long home runs—ten of them over the HIT A HOMER HERE, WIN A FREE SUIT sign—and he showed off his gun of an arm, and he told people, “Forget Babe Ruth. Remember Johnny Bench.” At the end of the year, in one of the quirkier moments in minor league baseball history, Peninsula actually retired Johnny Bench’s uniform number. Minor league teams did not retire uniform numbers for one-year players, but then, none of them had ever seen anything quite like him. Anyway, Johnny took it all in stride. Retire his jersey? Why not? He smiled and waved to the crowd and then took his ten free suits and went up to Triple A Buffalo. He played less than a year there and hit twenty-three more home runs. Then the Reds called him up to the big leagues. Johnny’s first day, he announced to the catchers on the team that he had not come to be anyone’s backup; he had come to be the new starter, he had come to be baseball’s biggest star, and they might as well know that right up front. They hated him immediately.
Hated him…but what could they say? Johnny may have been an arrogant little jerk off the field, but on the field he was Mozart. He wasn’t just playing baseball better than any of them; he was revolutionizing baseball. Catchers through the years had caught pitches with both hands, using the right hand to secure the baseball in the glove. The Chicago Cubs’ Randy Hundley, who made it to the big leagues a couple of years before Johnny, was the first major league catcher to catch one-handed. But Johnny Bench made one-handed catching an art form. He had huge hands—he could hold seven baseballs in one of them—and he would scoop pitches out of the dirt like he was a shortstop picking up a ground ball. He could get t
he ball from his glove to his throwing hand so fast, it seemed like a card trick. He moved like a dancer around the plate on bunts. And when he had a bat in his hand, he hit long home runs to left field.
There was something else about him too—maybe “conviction” is the right word. He knew better. There’s a story Johnny would tell often involving a pitcher named Gerry Arrigo. Johnny was a rookie, and Arrigo was pitching one day against the Dodgers. Arrigo was not throwing his fastball with any authority at all that day—as ballplayers say, he was throwing meatballs. Johnny kept signaling Arrigo to throw his curveball instead, only Arrigo kept shaking off those signals. Johnny walked out to the mound, told Arrigo that his fastball did not have any heat, and Arrigo told him to pipe down and get behind the plate. Johnny shrugged, went behind the plate, and called for another curveball. Arrigo shook him off. Johnny called for the curveball again. Arrigo shook him off again. Then Johnny called for the fastball, Arrigo threw it, and Johnny reached out with his right hand and caught the ball barehanded.
“You should have seen his face,” Johnny said.
In a way, that was the look on all their faces when they saw Johnny Bench play ball. He won the Rookie of the Year Award. Then he started in the All-Star Game. In his third year, 1970, he had the greatest year a catcher ever had. He hit 45 home runs—that was a record for catchers. He had 148 RBIs—that was another record for catchers and would remain a record into the next century. That year only 62 brave souls tried to steal a base against him, and he threw out almost half of them. He carried the Reds to the World Series, and he was a phenomenon: the subject of a feature story in Life magazine, on the cover of Sports Illustrated, the fastest-rising star in the game.
Baseball stardom was not enough. Johnny sang in nightclubs. He went to Vietnam with Bob Hope. He met with presidents. He hosted his own television show. He became friends with stars, like the singer Bobby Goldsboro, who hit it big in 1968, during Bench’s rookie year, with a song called “Honey.” He dated models and a Playboy centerfold, and once took Miss World USA Lynda Carter to a golf tournament. It wasn’t a real date, but word got out. Lynda became pretty upset, come to think of it. She thought Johnny had leaked it. He scoffed. Johnny did not have to leak anything. He was the most famous baseball player in the world. In 1972, when he had a growth removed from his lung, he had received thousands of letters in the hospital. When he married Vickie, he received almost as many letters from brokenhearted women.
He was twenty-seven years old, and he had everything. And then, on this day in Cincinnati, everything changed. Fifth inning, scoreless game, San Francisco’s Chris Speier singled to left field with a runner named Gary Matthews on second base. Johnny stood at home plate and waited for Pete Rose to get the ball and throw it home. Rose got to the ball, and he threw home—Rose did not have a strong arm. The ball slowly made its way to the plate, and so did Matthews, who was six-foot-three, weighed about two hundred pounds, and was called “Sarge.” Johnny could see that the baseball and Sarge were going to get to the plate at almost precisely the same time; he was in a tough spot. He wanted to catch the ball, get out of the way, and tag Matthews as he rushed by—nobody pulled that bullfighter maneuver better than Bench. But he did not have time. Instead, he stood in front of the plate, and he leaned forward to catch the ball, and he tried to protect himself. Sarge crashed into Johnny and sent him flying backward.
That’s when Johnny Bench felt a whole new kind of pain. It was sharp and biting and deep inside his left shoulder. He groaned. Then he got up—nobody, not even the people who hated Johnny Bench, ever questioned his toughness. He stayed in the game. He waited for the pain to go away. Only it did not go away. And what Johnny Bench did not know that day in Cincinnati was that the pain would subside, and it would recede, but it would never go away. He would play the rest of the 1975 baseball season in agony.
Bottom of the ninth inning, same game, and Joe Morgan danced off second base. The team was in the tank, but Joe was playing great. He felt great. He had spent the off-season punching a speed-bag every single day. “What are you, training to fight Muhammad Ali?” his pal Pete Rose sneered.
“Maybe I’ll knock you out,” Morgan said.
He felt fast. He felt light. Float like a butterfly. Sting like a bee. Baseballs cracked off his bat; the sound was louder than before. It seemed like every ground ball he hit scooted past a diving infielder. He saw the pitches so much more clearly; he had heard hitters talk about being in this zone where even the hardest fastballs seemed to be floating to the plate, as if underwater. Now he understood. He had walked fifteen times in sixteen games. He had reached base every single game this season. He was on his way to something historic, a season for the ages. Only the rest of the guys were playing lousy.
“Come on,” he shouted after he hit his double and took his lead off second base. Tony Perez came to the plate. This was exactly the kind of situation Doggie loved: man on second base, see the ball, hit the ball. Only Doggie struck out—he wasn’t hitting worth a damn. Up stepped Geronimo, and Geronimo wasn’t hitting either, and Morgan just knew he was going to die at second base.
Then something happened, something even Joe Morgan with his brilliant sense of language had a hard time explaining. The game slowed down. He had this feeling of destiny. He knew what was going to happen before it happened. Joe watched San Francisco pitcher Charlie Williams throw the ball in the dirt, and the ball bounced off rookie catcher Marc Hill. It was a wild pitch, and Joe took off for third base. Only then, suddenly, he slowed, no, more, he almost stopped about twenty feet from third base. He watched Hill grab the ball, and he watched him look toward third, and then he watched him throw the ball. It was exactly as he saw it. Hill’s throw was wild, and it skipped past third base and into left field. Morgan raced around third and scored the winning run.
“I could have made third easily,” Joe told the reporters afterward. “But I deliberately held back…I was hoping Hill would do just what he did.”
It was absurd. Morgan was saying that he had purposely tricked Hill into making a bad throw to third base so he could score the run. The Giants players, when they heard that, went mad—they ripped Joe, they said he was an arrogant son of a bitch, and he had gotten lucky, and there was no possible way that he had really slowed down just to beguile Hill. Joe loved it. He had gotten into his opponents’ heads. He had controlled the game.
“If Joe Morgan keeps up his current pace,” Sparky said, “he’ll be dead in another month.”
Saigon fell as the Reds began their game in San Francisco. South Vietnam surrendered. Everyone knew it was coming. The few days leading up to it, the United States had evacuated the last Americans out of Saigon. “This closes a chapter in the American experience,” President Gerald Ford told America. And with that, the Vietnam War was over.
Nobody seemed to know quite how to feel about losing a war. A big yellow headline, “Hanoi’s Triumph,” blared on the cover of Time magazine, and underneath was a photograph of smiling young North Vietnamese soldiers outside Danang carrying AK-47s. The cover of U.S. News & World Report was even gloomier, if possible. It featured a collage of sketches featuring everyday and entirely unhappy Americans doing things like shopping for groceries, working construction, and wearing cowboy hats. The headline was “Mood of America.” And the conclusion, trumpeted in red ink, was a quote from a cafeteria manager in New Orleans with the unlikely name of A. L. Plaswirth III: “Things have got to get better.”
It had been only eight months since Richard Nixon had resigned the presidency in Watergate shame. Unemployment was skyrocketing. The price of everything was going up too fast. And then there was news that using ordinary spray cans was destroying the earth’s ozone layer. The number-one song in the land was B. J. Thomas’s “Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song.”
“We aren’t playing for shit,” Sparky Anderson told Scherger. This was the beauty of being a major league baseball manager: nothing else in the world mattered during the season. Sparky lik
ed reading the papers—later in his life, during the season, Sparky would like watching the same reports again and again on the twenty-four-hour news channels—but during this season he felt like the news didn’t have anything to do with him. Even baseball news that did not involve the Machine—it was in the papers that the San Francisco Giants, the Reds’ opponent that day, might go broke—did not concern Sparky. People never could understand how insular a manager felt during a baseball season. The soap opera Days of Our Lives went from a half-hour to an hour. Rich Little hosted The Tonight Show. The Wiz, a rhythm-and-blues version of The Wizard of Oz, won seven Tony Awards. American and Soviet astronauts trained near Moscow for their spacecraft linkup in July. It was just noise to Sparky. Static. The only thing that mattered was the game, and his emotions swung wildly from the first inning to the last.
“Hey, there he goes!” Sparky shouted in the fifth inning when Tony Perez cracked a double down the left-field line. Joe Morgan scored. Johnny Bench scored. It was good to see Tony hitting—maybe this would get the Big Dog going. The Reds had tied the Giants 2–2 in front of a Tuesday evening crowd of, well, let’s see—Sparky poked his head out of the dugout and looked around—in front of five thousand fans or so. Maybe less. Probably less.
“That a baby, Georgie Boy,” Sparky shouted in the seventh when George Foster launched a triple in the right-center-field gap. That scored Morgan again. The Reds led the Giants 3–2, and Sparky felt pretty good. Foster was hitting the ball pretty good. Sparky had to admit it. He needed to find a way to get Foster into the lineup more. Things were looking up.
Then it was the eighth inning, the Reds leading by that one run. Sparky put Vukovich in at third base for his defensive skills. He put his brilliant defensive center fielder Geronimo into the game. He put in the perfect relief pitcher for the moment, Pedro Borbon. God, Sparky loved Borbon. The guy was half crazy, everybody on the club was just a little bit scared of him, but Borbon always wanted to pitch. If Sparky needed a pitcher at two o’clock on Christmas morning, he could pick up the phone and call Borbon. He was just the right guy to hold this one-run lead. Then, with one out, San Francisco’s Chris Speier singled off Borbon. Damn it. Speier was followed by some guy named Ed Goodson, and he singled too. Damn it. Sparky stomped out to the mound to yank Borbon, who was obviously not the right guy at all. He pointed to the bullpen and then pointed to his left arm, meaning he wanted Will McEnaney to come in and pitch. Sparky hated Pedro Borbon.
The Machine Page 9