The Machine

by Joe Posnanski

  Only Joe threw that knuckleball, which danced and dropped and rose and turned, and that wasn’t right. That was like bringing a boomerang to the O.K. Corral. “I’d rather try hitting a hummingbird than a knuckleball,” Pete the author had written in Charlie Hustle. He had faced Joe Niekro one time in six years. He struck out.

  “Just swing hard,” he reminded himself. This was Rose’s strategy against the knuckler—swing hard so that even if he made an out, at least he would not foul up his swing for the next two weeks. Niekro fluttered the knuckleball his way, and Rose lashed at it, and he smacked a double. The next batter, Ken Griffey, singled in Rose for the game-winning run.

  “I feel reborn,” Pete told reporters after the game.

  “Have you seen Jaws yet?” he was asked.

  “I am Jaws,” he said.

  June 24, 1975

  ATLANTA

  REDS VS. BRAVES

  Team record: 43–27

  First place by three games

  The genius sat on the bench and watched his starting pitcher, Pat Darcy, very closely. It was the eighth inning, and Darcy had pitched a beauty. The Reds led the Atlanta Braves 3–0—all the runs coming on Joe Morgan’s home run off a Phil Niekro knuckleball—and Darcy had baffled the Atlanta hitters all night long. It was a Sparky Anderson kind of pitching performance. The Braves had not even moved a runner to second base since the first inning. Sparky’s ulcer was calm. He felt at ease.

  Then Darcy made the critical mistake—he walked Rowland Office, the Braves’ leadoff batter in the eighth inning. Sparky saw that some of those pitches were high. Sparky had this theory about high pitches—high pitches, if allowed to continue, became long fly balls, and then became home runs. He walked slowly to the mound to go take Pat Darcy out of the game.

  “Good game, kid,” Sparky said, and Darcy wanted to say something back, something like, “You’re taking me out now? I’m pitching a shutout.” He wanted to say something like, “No, I have a lot left, I’m throwing good, I have to finish this thing.” He wanted to say a lot of things. But talking, he knew, was strictly prohibited. He handed Sparky the baseball and walked slowly to the clubhouse. Fred Norman came into the game.

  Starting pitchers in 1975 expected to finish their games. In 1975, they finished about one-fifth of the games they started (compared to three decades later, when starters finished only one in forty games they started). They expected the chance to get out of their own jams, to finish what they started. Some pitchers would shout their managers off the mound. Some would refuse to give up the baseball. But it wasn’t like that in Cincinnati.

  And more, Sparky Anderson had come up with the genius plan. With Don Gullett out, he was going to change pitchers whenever he felt it in his gut. Sparky knew that his pitchers hated him. He knew that they felt underappreciated. And he did not care, not even one bit, because Sparky felt like he understood pitchers. Yes, he did. He understood better than they did when they were losing their stuff. He understood that the quickest way to lose a game was to stick with a pitcher too long because of personal feelings.

  And the game was changing. He was changing it. That’s why he was smiling at that breakfast with Jeff Ruby, because it all became clear to him. He had this great bullpen of pitchers. He had Will McEnaney, that flaky lefty who didn’t seem to fear anything. He had Pedro Borbon, his crazy righty who would pitch every single day if he could. He had Clay Carroll, the Hawk, his veteran righty who had pitched in more games than any Cincinnati Reds pitcher ever and who knew how to get batters out. And finally, he had the new kid, Rawly Eastwick, who liked painting and reading and doing all sorts of intellectual things that Sparky didn’t understand or trust, but on the mound he was all ballplayer—Rawly had the kind of arrogance that made him believe that nobody could hit him.

  Sparky understood in that moment that it was his bullpen that would make the Reds champions. Sure, he cried the night Gullett got hurt—cried for Gullett himself. The kid probably would have won the Cy Young Award if he’d stayed healthy. But by morning, there were no more tears. Sparky saw the future. The bullpen was the future.

  “Why did you take out Darcy?” Morgan asked back in the dugout, mostly because he wanted to get Sparky going. And of course, he did.

  “You want to know why?” Sparky said, and he said it loud enough for everyone to hear. “I’ll tell you why. Because if you want to stay in the game, it’s like dance steps, boys. You need to play the song in your head like a waltz—one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three. You play it like that, and I’ll just sit right here in the dugout and enjoy it. But you start going one-two-three…four-five, well, we’ll see you later. We’ll get somebody else out there who wants to get somebody out.”

  Fred Norman got out of the eighth inning unscathed. He started off the ninth by allowing a walk and then a single. Sparky made his slow walk out to the mound again. He pulled Norman out and put Pedro Borbon in. Borbon got a double-play grounder and foul fly ball, and the game was over. Three pitchers—and two were ticked off—but the Reds won, and that was all that mattered.

  “Just follow my lead, boys,” Sparky said happily as he walked back into the clubhouse.

  Lee Trevino, the only professional golfer out there who consistently could beat Jack Nicklaus, was struck by lightning while sitting under a tree at the Western Open in Oak Brook, Illinois. Tennis players Jimmy Connors and Ilie Nastase yelled at a man in the crowd at Wimbledon, causing quite the stir in London. A woman named Nancy Fitzgerald won the Indianapolis city golf tournament, though she was eight months pregnant at the time.

  The newspapers tried to calm the shark fear by pointing out, helpfully, that only fifty people each year were killed by sharks in the whole world, while more than three hundred died in the United States alone from bee and wasp stings. There was no reported surge in bee and wasp panic, however. People all over the country still reported shark nightmares after seeing Jaws. “I’ll never go swimming again,” Martha Lecaroz of Saugus, Massachusetts, told the United Press International senior editor assigned to report the mass hysteria that Jaws was causing. On Cape Cod, the movie-line recording warned that adults should not see it before they went swimming.

  The papers reported that a nineteen-year-old woman named Cheryl Petit was expected to live a normal life after doctors replaced her defective heart valve with one made of pig tissue. President Ford signed a bill into law that would help middle-income people get financing to buy homes. Jewel thieves in Paris pretended to be delivery boys and stole more than $4 million worth of diamonds from the ex-wife of the Revlon cosmetics emperor.

  And Joe Morgan tried to adjust to his new life as the best player in baseball. He liked the attention, but he did not know how to deal with it. Funny thing, he had spent so much of his life bitterly fighting back at the perceptions. He signed with the Houston Colt .45s, he always said, because the scout, Bill Wight, approached him after a game in college and said, “You’re a really good player.” Other scouts had come to talk to him, but all of them called Joe a good little player. And it was that word, “little,” that bit of condescension, that inspired Joe Morgan. He would face down that patronizing word for the first ten years of his career. He hit with power, he stole bases, he intimidated pitchers in any number of ways. And still people saw that five-foot-seven ballplayer with the tiny glove that looked like it was a toy out of a Cracker Jack box. And it inspired him more.

  Now, though, they could not help but see his greatness—and what was left to prove? What was left to drive him? Morgan had uncharacteristically clipped something out of the morning paper—he was among the league leaders in batting average, home runs, runs, runs batted in, and stolen bases. All five categories. He wanted to send that clipping to his father.

  “I have never seen anyone, and I mean anyone, play better than Joe has played this year,” Sparky told reporters. Nobody argued. Joe was on another level.

  “All I want to do is get the most out of what I have,” Joe told the writers who, more and mo
re, gathered around him. Now the writers noticed how thoughtful he was, how well he spoke about the game, how much he loved to talk. He told them a story about a game he played his second year. He made an error in the tenth inning that cost Houston the game. He said that he actually started crying, right there in the dugout, and when he walked to bat in the bottom of the inning the fans booed him mercilessly. “Don’t let it get to you,” the Dodgers catcher Johnny Roseboro told him. “You’ll hear a lot of cheers before it’s over for you, kid.”

  That did not make him feel too much better. He walked into the clubhouse after the game, still despondent, his head hanging, and a coach named Jimmy Adair told him: “If you go out and give the best you got, you don’t ever have to come in the clubhouse with your head down.”

  And while the reporters scribbled down the story, Joe said: “That’s why I don’t worry when Johnny Bench or Pete Rose get more publicity than I do. I know I’ve done my job.”

  It was the perfect story. He was able to get his point across—that Bench and Rose got more publicity than he did—without sounding bitter. He was able to explain what mattered to him (“Give the best you’ve got”) without sounding insincere. He was able to tell people how much the game mattered to him (“I was in tears”). Joe had a great sense of words.

  And they had to listen to him now, had to appreciate him. A warm Friday night against San Diego, he came up in the eighth inning with the Reds trailing 2–1 against a San Diego pitcher named Dave Freisleben. He hit a home run to tie the score. He came up again in the eleventh inning with the score tied and two outs. This time he faced a pitcher named Danny Frisella, and he banged a single. He stole second. He scored the game-winning run when Danny Driessen hit a line drive that barely skimmed over the right-field wall for a home run.

  “What were you thinking?” they asked him after the game.

  “You don’t think,” Joe Morgan said. “You just play.”

  June 30, 1975

  CINCINNATI

  REDS VS. ASTROS

  Team record: 48–28

  First place by seven games

  Ken Griffey never forgot the red jacket he got. That was his signing bonus: a red jacket and five sanitary socks. It was not a Reds jacket. There was no logo on it, no lettering, no sign at all that it came from a major league team. The Reds handed out better-looking jackets to kids on “Jacket Day” at the ballpark. This was just a cheap red jacket, the kind you could buy at a thrift shop for 99 . That’s what the Cincinnati Reds thought of him.

  Still, he smiled. Ken Griffey always smiled when he played ball. So what if the Reds took him in the twenty-ninth round? So what if they did not even waste a telephone call to tell him that he was drafted? So what if they just sent him a cold letter telling him to report to Bradenton, Florida?

  “Hey, Mom, I got drafted,” Ken shouted out when he got that letter.

  “Oh, my God, no,” his mother shouted back. It was 1969. The Vietnam War was raging.

  He went to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 1970, where he stayed in a hotel so cheap and dirty that he had his infant son Ken Jr. sleep in the open top drawer of the dresser—high above the rats. He came close to quitting the game then, and he would have quit except that he found an apartment that was moderately cleaner. Anyway, he was not the quitting type. He had grown up in Donora, Pennsylvania, twenty miles south of Pittsburgh, and (as he would hear again and again his entire baseball career) the hometown of the great Stan Musial. A dark gray smog hovered over his hometown and his childhood—the same smog that killed Musial’s father two years before Ken was born.

  Ken played baseball on the barren field at Highland Park, where they used bricks for bases, a scrap of cardboard for home plate, powdered milk for the baselines. The Reds only drafted him because of an old scout named Elmer Gray, who had been watching kids play baseball around Pittsburgh for more than two decades. Elmer happened to bring a stopwatch to Ken’s high school game. It wasn’t unusual. Elmer always brought his stopwatch to games—he felt like that was his most important scouting tool. He loved players who could run. He loved to tell the story about how, in 1960, he tried to sign a raw but fast young outfielder named Joe Namath. He had it all worked out, but when he brought the contract papers over to the house, Namath was gone. The University of Alabama football program had taken him into hiding. Joe Namath went on to football glory. “We never saw him again except on TV,” Elmer told Sports Illustrated. “And then it was another guy. It was Broadway Joe.”

  Ken Griffey was the fastest thing Elmer had seen in a baseball uniform since the young Broadway Joe. Griffey could not hit a lick—he had this crazy-looking swing. He could not throw all that well either. But holy cow, he could run to first base about as fast as anyone you ever saw. Nobody else knew about Griffey. Nobody else cared about him. “Draft him low,” Elmer Gray recommended. “He might become somebody.”

  Griffey made it through Sioux Falls, and the next year he led the Florida State League in hitting. The year after that he led the Eastern League in hitting. The year after that, he led the American Association in hitting. The Reds finally called him up, and he hit .384 in twenty-five games. He was so fast that any ground ball he hit softly to the left side of the infield was a single. So that became his art form. While other hitters hated getting jammed—hated having the ball hit the bat too close to their hands—Griffey would get jammed on purpose. The ball would just drip off the bat, like drops of water out of a leaky faucet, and by the time the third baseman or shortstop or pitcher could get to the ball, Griffey would already have run past first base. He moved so fast—as they all said—he blurred.

  And all the while he smiled. People thought it was because he loved the game so much, and that was exactly what he wanted them to think. He did love the game. More, though, he did not want any of them to know what he was thinking. That was his business. He had a lot of thoughts. He could see the way Johnny Bench would look through him, like he was not even there. He was aware that Joe Morgan ignored him, maybe was even a touch jealous of him (because Joe, as good a base runner as he was, could not run with Ken Griffey). He heard them mock him, his batting style, his quiet personality. They thought it was funny. He did not often find it funny. But that was okay. He would not let them in. He would not let them see. He would not let anything affect him. He smiled all the time.

  “You just shut up and do your job,” Johnny told him one day, “and we’ll make you a star.” Ken nodded and smiled.

  “Just remember your place,” Joe told him. Ken nodded and smiled.

  He smiled when Sparky Anderson moved him all over the lineup. He batted Ken seventh or eighth or second or sixth, wherever he felt like it. In baseball, a man’s place in the lineup was a sign of respect. Pete always batted first, Joe always batted second or third, Johnny always batted cleanup, Doggie always batted fifth. Their place in the lineup was their place in baseball. It was their business card. Pete wasn’t “Pete Rose, Baseball Player.” He was “Pete Rose, Leadoff Hitter.” Ken, meanwhile, was a man without a spot in the line, a man without a country. Sparky moved him up and down the lineup like he was an afterthought.

  And then, one day, Sparky told Ken he would hit second, a huge promotion. But even that came with a caveat.

  “Kenny,” Sparky said, “I’m moving you up to the number-two spot in the lineup. That’s because I think you’re a great hitter. But there’s one thing you need to know: from now on, I don’t want you stealing any bases. You got Joe Morgan hitting after you, and he’s the best damn player in the game of baseball, and he doesn’t like when people steal bases when he’s batting. It distracts him. So you don’t steal.”

  Griffey smiled even then, even when Sparky took away his greatest gift, his speed. He could have stolen eighty bases if they would have just let him, he felt sure of that. They took that away so that Joe, who was already a big star, who was already making more than $100,000 a year, could feel more comfortable. That was how it went with the Big Red Machine. The stars ruled. And
the turds just did what was asked of them. Ken’s job was to get jammed and run hard to first base, and that’s what he did. He was a team player. And he smiled.

  Then, with the Reds trailing Houston 6–2 in the bottom of the eighth inning, he came up with the bases loaded, and he bashed a triple to deep left field, a triple that scored three runs. The Reds tied up the game, and then in the twelfth inning, with the score still tied, he crushed another ball to left, this time a double. Two batters later, Johnny Bench hit a long home run, and the Reds won in extra innings for the third time in four nights. The Reds were seven games ahead of the Dodgers. They were pulling away.

  The reporters crowded around Johnny Bench. He was the designated hero.

  “Yeah, I was tired,” Bench told the writers. “I wish we could make a trade where I could be a designated hitter for a week.” Everyone laughed. Ken Griffey looked on and smiled.

  July 1, 1975

  CINCINNATI

  REDS VS. ASTROS

  Team record: 49–28

  First place by seven games

  The Machine had not made a single error in more than two weeks, and Doggie was not going to let anyone forget it. “Hey, I was talking to Pete, and he said you are going to make that first error,” Doggie said to Joe Morgan.