The Machine

by Joe Posnanski

  Even Boston’s normally quiet and withdrawn third baseman, Rico Petrocelli, could not hold back: “It was interference, pure and simple. Millions of people saw it. But one man says it isn’t. And that’s it.”

  Looking back, the Red Sox complaining seems a bit excessive. If Larry Barnett had called interference, he simply would have called the batter out and told Geronimo to go back to first base. The Reds would have had a man on first base, one out, with Pete Rose, Ken Griffey, and Joe Morgan coming up. They might not have scored. But they might have scored. Even if they did not score, the game would have been tied going into the next inning. But the Red Sox players were so lost in rage that by the end of the night they seemed to believe they had been cheated out of their destiny, cheated out of a victory they had earned. The television broadcast stoked that rage. The Boston newspapers stoked that rage more. And beginning the next day, home plate umpire Larry Barnett began getting death threats.

  Back in the Cincinnati dugout, the most respected columnist in America—Red Smith of the New York Times—asked Sparky how he saw the play. Sparky paused, and then, with the comic’s timing, he said: “To be honest with you, I don’t see that well.”

  Ken Griffey sat in the Reds clubhouse, and he tried to show that smile, tried to let everyone around him know how happy he was that the Reds won. But he was angry. He was confused. He was trying to make sense of the last three days, and he wasn’t getting anywhere.

  On Sunday, he hit the double that scored Davey, the winning run. In the Cincinnati Enquirer on Monday morning, the headline read: “Bench Double Brings Winner.” Bench’s double? His double had led off the inning. It didn’t bring in any runs. And even if you grant that Bench had come around to score, he only scored the tying run. The headline was just wrong. Numerous people called the newspaper and angrily charged that it was driven by racism. They were trying to make a white man, Johnny Bench, the hero of a game that a black man, Ken Griffey, clearly won. Ken did not charge racism. He did not want to say anything about it. He kept to himself.

  And then, on this night, with the score tied, with the bases loaded, with a fastball pitcher on the mound—damn, Griffey loved fastballs—Sparky had pulled him for a pinch hitter. Why did he do that? Ken hit .305 for the season. He hit lefties well. Sparky had not pinch-hit for him since July. It made no damn sense at all.

  Ken came up with a theory: Sparky did not want him to be the hero. Sparky loved his big hitters—he loved Joe, he loved Pete, he loved Johnny—and maybe that was it. Maybe he called for a pinch hitter, not because he was worried that Ken would fail, but because he was worried that Ken would succeed. Maybe Sparky did not want him to get the Most Valuable Player Award for the World Series. The more Ken thought about it, the more sense it made to him. It all went back to what Sparky had said all the way back in spring training: “Those four are royalty,” he said of Johnny, Joe, Pete, and Doggie. “The rest of you are turds.”

  Ken continued to smile, but he seethed. He wanted to tell someone his theory. He waited for a reporter to come by and ask him how he felt about Sparky sending up a pinch hitter for him in the tenth inning with the bases loaded and glory there to be had. He wasn’t going to hide his feelings this time. No, he was going to put it out there for everyone to hear.

  No reporter came around.

  October 15, 1975

  CINCINNATI

  REDS VS. RED SOX

  World Series Game 4

  Reds lead the Series 2–1

  The Armbrister War raged into its second day. The Boston Globe found a law scholar and asked him to analyze the interference rule—he ruled that Armbrister did in fact interfere. An anonymous umpire, though, fought back for his brothers in blue: “[Fisk] just made a lousy throw to second base. And he’s trying to take it out on Barnett, but it shouldn’t happen that way.”

  Fisk said he tossed and turned until about five in the morning.

  “Did you finally get to sleep?” he was asked.

  “No,” Fisk said. “I finally woke up my wife.”

  Barnett, it was breathlessly reported, slept very well. He had no regrets about his call that night. He never would regret the call.

  “I did not hear a word from Mr. Fisk saying he had been run into by Armbrister when it happened,” Barnett said. “And I did not hear Armbrister say a word to me. But all of a sudden when the throw went into center field, then I hear a lot of talk about interference.”

  He shrugged.

  “If I had to do it again, I would do it all over again,” he said. “I know I am right.”

  Ken Griffey did not sleep well. He could not shake off the sting from the night before, and in truth he never would. But crazy things kept happening in that 1975 World Series, and on that Wednesday, Ken Griffey found himself in almost precisely the position he had been denied the night before. This time, Boston led by a run, 5–4, but everything else was the same. Cesar Geronimo led off the inning with a single. Ed Armbrister was sent into the game to sacrifice-bunt, and this time he managed to do so without setting off a riot. Geronimo moved to second base. Then Pete Rose walked. So Ken came up to face Luis Tiant with the game on the line.

  El Tiante had not been as sharp this game as he was in the first—he gave up two runs in the first inning, one of those on a double to Griffey, and the Reds had him staggered. But they could not put him away. And for the rest of the night, Tiant bewitched, bothered, bewildered them. “I don’t know what the guy gets by with,” Pete said, and he shook his head. Mystical.

  But even Tiant’s mysticism was fading in the ninth inning. He had thrown more than 150 pitches in the game. There was no snap left on his fastballs, no bend on his curve, he had nothing left but guts. Darrell Johnson left him out there to finish the job. Ken dug in—he could see the ball perfectly. He felt certain that he would be the hero. He and Tiant danced—a strike, a couple of pitches low and outside, a foul ball—and then there was a full count. Tiant threw a fat fastball. And Griffey crushed it to center field. “That,” he would later say, “was the hardest I had ever hit a baseball.”

  Fred Lynn raced back on the ball. Nobody since Willie Mays went back on a baseball quite like Fred Lynn. He was fearless and aggressive—the University of Southern California had recruited him as a football player. He saw the ball jump off the bat, and his first reaction was, “I’m going to catch that.” That was always his first reaction. Geronimo headed toward third—he intended to score the tying run. But Lynn stretched out his right hand and caught the ball. And then—this was fitting for baseball’s new role model—Lynn reached out his left arm to make sure the ball stayed in the glove. It was like coaches always said: catch the ball with two hands.

  “Was I nervous?” Lynn would tell reporters afterward. “When I got to the ball, my arm had trouble going up.”

  Joe Morgan came up next, and Tiant threw a fat fastball to him too, but just as he threw it, Geronimo took off for third base. He was going to steal third base. Everyone on the Reds knew that Morgan hated when one of his teammates tried to steal a base while he was batting. He popped up to Yaz at first, and the Red Sox won the game. There was an instant just after Morgan popped up the ball—and it would forever be caught on video—when Joe turned his head to glare with anger at his teammate Cesar Geronimo.

  “Luis,” a reporter said, “you had to throw 163 pitches out there tonight.”

  “I don’t care if I throw 3,000,” Luis said as he puffed away on a fat cigar. “I throw enough to get those guys, right?”

  In the Reds clubhouse, Sparky Anderson was happily chatting away with reporters. This was the beauty of Sparky: you never knew how he would react. He would be angry or thoughtful or sad after victories. And sometimes he was happy after losses. “I don’t take anything hard,” he said. “It doesn’t bother me in any shape or form. To me, baseball is fun. If you look at it as a life-or-death thing, then you’re going to have a long struggle.”

  Cincinnati Enquirer columnist Tom Callahan just stared at Sparky and shook his
head. Sparky was not taking losses hard? Right. Tell that to his ulcer. It was funny—after all this time, after writing so many columns about the Reds, Callahan still thought of Sparky as a mystery. Sparky was sensitive and also oblivious, he was loyal and also fickle, he was spiritual and obscene, he was, as the headline on Callahan’s column said, voluble and vulnerable.

  Callahan never lost his interest in Sparky Anderson. Years later, after he had left Cincinnati and was working for Time magazine, Callahan found himself sitting in Sparky’s office, and they were talking about Sparky’s father. That was a hard subject for Sparky. Major league baseball, at heart, is a game of fathers and sons. And while Sparky admired his father, he never felt close to his father.

  “He was saying that his father had never been a gentle man,” Callahan would remember. “He said, ‘My father never played catch with me. That was my grandfather who played catch. My father was a hard man, and we were never close. He was a good man. But he was not gentle.’

  “So a few minutes later, the phone rings. And Sparky answers it…it’s his mother. And she’s calling to tell Sparky that his father has died. And now he’s talking to his mother, and he’s saying, ‘Mama, I’m so sorry. He was such a gentle man. Papa was a gentle man.’”

  Callahan said it took him a long time to figure out what it meant. But in time he decided that the moment was as close as he would get to understanding Sparky Anderson. He had told Callahan the truth about his father. “But,” Callahan would say, “he told his mother the greater truth.”

  October 16, 1975

  CINCINNATI

  REDS VS. RED SOX

  World Series Game 5

  Series tied 2–2

  Tony Perez stayed at home. He did not want to see anybody. And he did not want to be seen. And anyway, he did not have much choice: his wife, Pituka, had locked him in the bedroom and told him to watch television and sleep. Doggie did not have one hit, not a single hit, in the whole World Series. He was oh-for-fourteen. He was not quite sure what to do. The day before, he had gone out to break the spell, and everyone around town slapped him on the back and shouted, “You’ll get them tonight for sure, Tony!” Only he did not get them. He went hitless again. So now he stayed home.

  All of his teammates knew that nothing ever got to Doggie, that he was the Big Dog, impervious to pressure, invulnerable to slumps, the man you wanted at the plate when the game was on the line. Everyone remembered Dave Bristol’s famous line: “Sooner or later, if the game lasts long enough, the Big Dog will win it.”

  That was the man Doggie expected to be. He loved baseball. He loved being around his teammates, loved to start fights with them, loved to coax them into starting fights with each other. He loved being respected, being the Big Dog—it was so much bigger than any of the dreams he had in Cuba. But in the end, he had to hit. He had to drive in runs. He had to come through in the biggest moments. That’s what made it work. That’s what made him the Big Dog.

  He tried to look calm. But Pituka could see through him. She made him drive to the ballpark a different way on that Thursday just to change his luck. “Which way?” he asked her. Pituka said she did not care as long as it was different. He drove down Columbia Parkway in their Oldsmobile Toronado. And Doggie said to her: “I hope I bat fifth tonight. There are no hits for me in the fourth spot.” He sounded down.

  When Sparky got to the ballpark, Sparky was waiting for him.

  “Hey, Doggie, I looked it up,” Sparky said.

  “You looked up what?”

  “You only need a few more at-bats and you’re gonna set the World Series record,” Sparky said. “Gil Hodges went oh-for-twenty-one in the 1952 World Series. What are you now? Oh-for-seventeen? Eighteen?”

  “Fourteen, Sparky,” Doggie said, and he tried not to smile.

  “Doggie, do yourself a favor and don’t get a hit for the rest of the World Series. You know those two little boys of yours, Victor and Eduardo? If you don’t get a hit, they can tell their kids someday that Grandpa set a World Series record that nobody ever touched. Whadya say, Doggie? You gonna do it?”

  “I don’t want that record,” Doggie said.

  “You don’t know what you’re saying. Here you are with a chance at the all-time record, and you’re turning your back on it?”

  Doggie walked back into the clubhouse, and there was Pete, and he said: “So, am I gonna have to carry your sorry ass again today, Big Dog?”

  And there was Joe: “Hey, Doggie, I’ve been telling you all this time. You’re nothing but an old Cuban, and you’re all washed up. You can’t even hit that American League pitching.”

  And there was Doggie, in the middle of it all, shouting: “I don’t want that record. I want some hits.” He looked at the lineup card in the dugout. He was hitting fifth. And all of a sudden, he had that feeling. This was going to be a good night. He came up to face Boston’s Reggie Cleveland in the second inning. He struck out on three pitches.

  The next time Doggie came to the plate, it was the fourth inning and the Reds trailed 1–0, and Johnny Bench had just smashed a line drive down the third-base line that Rico Petrocelli leaped and caught. The Red Sox were making every play. The Reds players were beginning to wonder about destiny.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Pete said to his lifelong friend Don Zimmer, who was coaching third for the Red Sox. “I don’t know if we’re going to win this thing. But if we do, we’ll be beating some battling bastards.”

  Doggie stepped in, and Cleveland pitched. It was a curveball. And it was not just any curveball—it was a hanging curveball, hanging like a piñata, hanging like a chandelier, hanging like the sorts of pitches that the Big Dog saw in his sleep. If he missed this pitch, well, then maybe it was not meant to be, maybe he was cursed by the fates, or maybe it was simply time to pay back for all the good fortune he’d had in his life.

  He did not miss the pitch.

  Doggie crushed the ball to left field—you could tell just by the way Cleveland’s neck snapped as he tried to follow the ball that it was gone. Doggie ran to first base and clapped his hands happily, his only sign of emotion. Then he jogged easily around the bases while everyone in Riverfront stood for him. After he touched home plate, he jogged straight to the Reds dugout, and they were all waiting for him, all his friends, all those sons of bitches who tortured him. Pete was first, and he slapped Doggie on the butt and grabbed him by the neck and shouted, “You are the Big Dog!” Joe had the biggest smile on his face. Davey hugged him. And Sparky was in the middle of it, and he said: “You blew your chance, Doggie. You blew your chance at setting the all-time record.”

  “No more talk about the record,” Tony said. “No more.”

  Joe led off the sixth inning with a walk, and then he went to work on Boston’s Reggie Cleveland. He took an enormous lead at first base. He taunted Cleveland. The Reds led the game 2–1, and Joe had a feeling. It was time to take over. It was time to get in Reggie Cleveland’s head.

  Cleveland threw over to first base. Then he threw over there again. And he threw again. And again. A fifth time. A sixth. He threw over to first base a seventh time. It was mesmerizing and boring all at once. The crowd began to boo, but their booing did not seem angry. It was as if they were mocking Cleveland too. Throw over as much as you want, he’s still going to steal second base. Here it was, finally, that Big Red Machine arrogance that had been missing the whole World Series. Cleveland threw over to first base an eighth time.

  Joe loved it. He kept taking a bigger and bigger lead. After Cleveland finally threw a pitch to Johnny—“Finally, he let Johnny in on the action,” Curt Gowdy told the TV audience—he threw over to first base four more times. That made twelve total. He threw another pitch, and then threw over to first base five more times. Astonishing. He threw to first base seventeen times in all, surely a World Series record, though, for good reason, nobody keeps up with such things. Then Cleveland threw a pitch to Johnny Bench, who hit a routine ground ball to the second baseman, what looked like a
double-play grounder…only Red Sox second baseman Denny Doyle wasn’t there. He had been so bluffed by Joe Morgan’s base-stealing threat that he vacated his spot and moved toward second base. The ball scooted behind Doyle and into right field. Doyle kicked the ground, Morgan ran to third, and Bench ran to second after Dwight Evans made a wild throw.

  And Doggie walked up to the plate. The crowd cheered. The hitless stretch was over. He was the Big Dog. He fouled off a pitch that barely reached the seats. He fouled off another pitch. He fouled off a third, and this time it looked like Carlton Fisk would have a chance—Fisk chased madly after the ball, and then he dived into the dugout area where all the photographers snapped pictures. The ball landed just out of his reach.

  And then Reggie Cleveland tried to throw another breaking ball, and he left it up again. Hanging. And again, Tony Perez did not miss. He smashed the ball high into the left-field stands. He ran around the bases easily, coolly, the way he had a couple hundred times before. The Reds won. They were one game away from being World Champs.

  “Tony Perez was not in a slump,” Pete told reporters afterward. “He just didn’t get any hits. Big difference. With Doggie, that’s a big difference.”

  October 21, 1975

  BOSTON

  REDS VS. RED SOX

  World Series Game 6

  Reds lead the Series 3–2

  One of the greatest games in baseball history was delayed by three days because of rain. Three days of rain might have killed the nation’s appetite for baseball, but for some strange reason it did precisely the opposite. The rain was like Hitchcock’s bomb under the table…everyone waited anxiously, nervously, for the bomb to go off.