The Machine

by Joe Posnanski

  “If this ain’t the number-one pastime, I don’t know what is,” Pete babbled to reporters after the game. “My God, you couldn’t have more exciting things than that. It has to be the greatest World Series game in history. My son and I will be talking about this one for a long time to come.”

  October 22, 1975

  BOSTON

  REDS VS. RED SOX

  World Series Game 7

  Series tied 3–3

  Losers. Pete Rose stomped the dirt off his cleats, marched through the dugout, a crazed look on his face. He stopped in front of each man, glared, his face a mask of rage, an angry drill sergeant, a harsh father, an unforgiving judge. In the moment, Rose hated every last one of these sons of bitches. He knew that, in the moment, they hated him too. But they did not hate him enough. They could not hate him enough. They could not hate him with the white-hot disgust that burned inside him right now. The Cincinnati Reds were going to lose. He could not believe it. Impossible.

  All year, Pete had felt sure of the ending. They all felt sure of the ending. Yes, there would be some drama. There would be some hard moments. That was baseball. That was life. But in the end, Pete, Joe, Johnny, Doggie, Sparky, Ken, George, Jack and Gary, Rawly and Will, all of them, they all believed that the Big Red Machine would prevail. They believed it. And now they trailed the Red Sox 3–0, and it was the bottom of the sixth inning, and Fenway Park was alive with something that sounded out of place in Boston—a hopeful cheer, a cocky cheer even, the feeling in New England that it was finally their time, finally the Red Sox would win.

  Sparky was sweating through his uniform. He had not slept. He blamed himself for the loss in Game 6, and now he blamed himself again. How could he lose with this team? How? He thought about the long walk, the one he had made after the Reds lost the World Series in 1970, and the one he made again after they lost the World Series in 1972. When a manager loses, he has to do the right thing and walk to the other side, congratulate the victors. That walk hurt more than anything else. Sparky started to think that he would have to make that walk again. Sparky did not know if he had the strength.

  “What are you so worried about?”

  Sparky looked up. It was Doggie, and he had that smile on his face.

  “What do you mean, Doggie?” Sparky said. “We’re losing 3–0.”

  “Ah,” Doggie said. “Don’t worry. I hit a home run.”

  And Sparky came alive. Doggie was right. This wasn’t any normal baseball team. This was the Machine. Sparky got up, and he started pacing the dugout too, just like Pete, and he was saying: “Look, fellas, we got some outs left. I don’t want anyone to panic…. Somebody get on base, and Bench, Morgan, or Perez will hit a home run.”

  Doggie went up in the sixth inning with Johnny on first base after Pete had, typically, barreled into second base and forced Denny Doyle to make a bad throw on what looked like a sure double play. Doggie went up to the plate looking for Boston starter Bill Lee to throw him that slow curve just one more time. Lee had gotten a strike on Doggie with that curve back in the second. Doggie wanted just one more look at it.

  Fisk did not call for that curve—he knew better. But Bill Lee threw it anyway. Fred Lynn was standing out in center field, and he saw that curveball floating, and he saw the look in Tony Perez’s eyes. He thought: Oh, oh. Perez started his swing, then pulled back and started it again.

  Up in the Fenway Park press box, the dean of Cincinnati sportswriters, Si Burick, watched the pitch come in. Si had been writing for the Dayton Daily News for fifty years. He was the son of a rabbi, and he had started writing about sports in the paper when he was sixteen—four years before the stock market crashed. Si saw the pitch, and he watched Tony double-clutch, and before Tony even swung the bat, he whispered two words that he thought nobody else could hear.

  “Home run.”

  And it was a home run, a long home run that sailed over the Green Monster, into the black of night, and nobody ever saw it land.

  After Doggie hit his home run, the Reds still trailed by a run, but the Machine arrogance had returned. It’s a sports cliché for a player to say, “We knew we were going to win.” But it is the sports cliché that every member of the Big Red Machine would repeat in the months and years after Game 7. The long season of triumph and failure, jokes and hurt feelings, arrogance and charity, it all had to end with glory. They were the Machine.

  “It’s not something that most people can understand,” Pete Rose would say. “But we were too good to lose that World Series. The Red Sox were a good damned baseball team. But we could not lose that World Series. If the Red Sox had scored ten runs, we would have scored eleven. We could not lose.”

  The final details lacked the drama of Doggie’s home run or Carlton Fisk’s home run or Joe Morgan’s clubhouse rant or Sparky Anderson’s bullpen genius. In the seventh inning, Ken Griffey walked, stole second base (yes, he was hitting seventh in the lineup again, where he could steal bases without upsetting Joe Morgan), and scored on Pete’s single. And Pete could sense a shift in the crowd then. To his ears, they no longer sounded hopeful.

  Then, ninth inning, with the scored tied, Griffey walked again. He moved to second base on a bunt. Rookie left-handed pitcher Jim Burton walked Pete with two outs. And Joe Morgan came to the plate. Joe would always remember how cold it felt, that New England chill. He would always remember how aware he was of the situation, how he knew that this was the childhood dream, the one he had talked about with his father time and again: seventh game of the World Series, two outs, winning run on second base. Joe’s father would ask: are you good enough?

  With the count two and two, Joe chased after a nasty slider. He connected with the ball, but he did not hit it well…vibrations shook through his hands. He heard a hollow sound. The ball blooped toward center field. Joe did not know if the ball would land; the Red Sox had Fred Lynn playing center.

  But Fred Lynn was playing deeper than he normally would. He had no choice; the Fenway outfield was mud, and he simply could not take the chance of a ball getting hit over his head. Lynn raced forward. He would always believe, for the rest of his life, that if the outfield had been dry, he would have caught Morgan’s ball. But he did not catch it. The ball dropped for a soft single. Ken Griffey scored the run. The Reds led the game.

  In the ninth, Will McEnaney—that quirky lefty—got Juan Beniquez to fly to right field, and Bob Montgomery to ground out to shortstop. And finally, he faced the great Yaz. Of course, Yaz was one of McEnaney’s heroes—Yaz was everybody’s hero. McEnaney threw his best fastball, and Yaz hit a high and lazy fly ball to Cesar Geronimo in center field. “I knew right as soon as he hit it,” McEnaney would say years later, “that Geronimo would get it and we had won. There wasn’t a place Yaz could hit it out there that Geronimo would not chase it down.”

  Geronimo did catch it. And then jumped up and down in joy. Marty Brennaman shouted, “This one belongs to the Reds.” Johnny Bench raced to the mound, and Will McEnaney jumped into his arms—a perfect shot for the cover of Sports Illustrated. Pete ran to Joe, and they hugged for a long time. The whole team huddled together in the Fenway chill. All of them except Sparky. He walked back into the clubhouse. He did not want to be on the field—that was for the players. He wanted his moment alone. There were tears in his eyes. The Reds were what he had always hoped. Winners.

  SUN CITY

  February 2008

  SUN CITY, ARIZONA

  Joe Morgan said, “I promised myself I wasn’t going to do this.” And then he started to cry. Joe stepped away from the lectern, stood silently for a few moments, and then began again. “I shouldn’t be crying,” he said. “This is not supposed to be a sad occasion.”

  There were many different people in the retirement home. There were baseball people, and family members, and a few old friends. Bob Howsam had died. Joe was right, no one wanted this to be a sad day. Howsam lived to be eighty-nine years old. He had done everything he wanted in his life. He had owned a baseball team
and a football team, he had built a stadium, he had raised a family. Buck O’Neil, the great Negro Leagues player, always said that funerals were for people who died too young. Everyone else deserved a celebration.

  But Joe said he was not crying for Bob Howsam. He was crying because the man was gone. And his time was gone. And baseball—the kind of baseball Bob Howsam stood for—was gone too. Joe had stayed around baseball. He won two Most Valuable Player Awards with the Reds. He played for another decade or so. He became a famous baseball announcer. And he believed something got lost, something that we will never get back.

  “I remember standing with Bob Howsam after we won the World Series in 1975,” Joe was saying. “And we were kings of the world.”

  It is true, there was no drama for the Reds in 1975, no story line. Geronimo caught the final pop-up, and Will McEnaney jumped into Johnny Bench’s arms. Almost immediately after the season ended, Johnny and Vickie divorced. She would tell Tom Callahan that his exact words to her after that season were: “Now I’m through with two things I hate: baseball and you.”

  Joe got the Most Valuable Player Award, and Pete was named Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year, and Sparky spent the off-season talking to clubs and groups. Doggie went home to Puerto Rico as a hero—nobody was talking about trading him.

  In 1976, the Reds just won boldly and decisively. They toyed with the Dodgers for the first two months and then, in early June, moved into first place for good. They led the National League in every single offensive category in 1976—every single one. They scored the most runs, got the most hits, cracked the most doubles, triples, and home runs, stole the most bases. It was a rout. They swept the Philadelphia Phillies in the playoffs, clinching the final game with a three-run rally in the ninth. George homered. Johnny homered. And Ken Griffey, who always found a quiet way to be the hero, drove in the game-winning run.

  The Reds then swept the Yankees four straight in the World Series. Nobody even seemed willing to argue the point anymore. The Big Red Machine, the team that Bob Howsam built, was as good a team as had ever been put together. And they might have been a little bit better.

  Joe said he was standing with Howsam in the hotel after the Reds had put away the Yankees in the Series, and he saw tears building in the old man’s eyes. “Then he turned to me,” Joe said, “and he said, ‘Joe, this is it. There will never be another team like this. Ever again.’”

  Joe began to cry again. Things did change after 1976. Players won the right to become free agents, so players did not stay in the same place as much. Players started earning larger salaries, which made owners reluctant to hold on to stars. The Machine broke up. They traded away Doggie and Will McEnaney before the 1977 season. Howsam and Sparky finally gave Danny Driessen a chance to play first base. He hit well, but something was lost.

  Sparky was fired in 1978—Johnny Bench himself told reporters that he thought Sparky had lost the team and he no longer had the fire he’d once had. Dick Wagner flew out to California to fire Sparky personally. Then Sparky saw something he never expected: he saw Dick Wagner cry. Sparky went to Detroit the next year, and he won another World Series there. He went on to the Hall of Fame.

  Pete Rose left Cincinnati after the 1978 season too; he always believed the Reds did not want to pay him fairly after he got divorced from Karolyn. He would come back to Cincinnati in 1984 to play and manage. In 1985, he broke Ty Cobb’s all-time hit record. In 1989, he was suspended for life for gambling on baseball games.

  Johnny stuck around in Cincinnati to the bitter end. He was only thirty-five when it became clear to him that he could no longer play well enough to go on. He hurt and ached all over. He and Carl Yastrzemski retired the same year, 1983. And they went into the Hall of Fame together five years later.

  Joe himself left after the 1979 season. He signed with his old team in Houston, of all places. He was released a year later, signed again, traded, released, and signed one more time. He had a hard time letting go of baseball, though to the end he was able to do the little things that great players do. To the end, he was able to mess with pitchers’ minds.

  “I look back now,” Joe said, “and I think Bob was exactly right. I don’t think there will ever be a team like us. We cared about each other. We still care about each other.”

  He looked around the room. He was the only member of the Big Red Machine there.

  November 2008

  CINCINNATI

  The eight men—the Great Eight, they call them in Cincinnati—sat around two tables in a sports art gallery. They were not sitting in any particular order. Pete Rose was on the end. Joe Morgan was on his right, Johnny Bench on Morgan’s right, and Tony Perez on Bench’s right. At the other table, George Foster sat next to Ken Griffey, who sat next to Cesar Geronimo, who sat next to Davey Concepcion. They were there to talk about the old days and eat some food. The ticket price was $2,500.

  There were no pitchers there, which was typical. No one ever gave the pitchers of the Machine much credit. Sometimes the pitchers felt slighted. “You would think that we couldn’t pitch at all,” Gary Nolan would say.

  “We had a damned good pitching staff,” Jack Billingham would say.

  “It’s all a bunch of horseshit,” Will McEnaney would say.

  Still, they all knew that this was how it was—that when people thought of the Machine, they thought of these eight men, the greatest baseball team ever put on the field.

  “Okay,” Marty Brennaman said. He was the master of ceremonies. “Who was the one guy who wound everybody up, the one guy who started the most trouble?”

  Seven Reds all looked and pointed at Tony Perez. He had a look of mock horror on his face. “Me?” he asked. “I don’t do nothing.”

  They all laughed, and drank wine, and talked about the old days. They remembered how Sparky used to pull his pitchers. They remembered how much Davey wanted to be a star. They remembered how quiet George used to be. George, in his later years, had found his voice. He had started a petition to get himself on the television show Dancing with the Stars.

  “Can you even dance?” Johnny asked him.

  “All black guys can dance,” George said.

  They remembered certain games, certain stadiums, the good moments. Johnny remembered how they were color-blind—“I didn’t see black or Hispanic or any of that, I just saw teammates,” he said—and Davey Concepcion remembered how they all kidded him, and Ken Griffey mostly stayed quiet and in the background. Joe did most of the talking; he always did. He talked about how they were family—they bickered and they fought and they didn’t like each other and they loved each other.

  “What is your best memory?” someone asked Joe, and Joe looked around the room at the Big Red Machine. For a moment, he seemed at a loss for words.

  Then he said: “All of it.”

  THE FIELD OF DREAMS

  March 2008

  LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

  Pete Rose sits in the Field of Dreams, a sports store in the Caesars Palace Shops in Las Vegas. He sits behind a card table and a velvet rope and two young men who scream like circus barkers: “Come see Pete Rose! Come see the Hit King!” Pete Rose calls himself the Hit King, signs his baseballs that way too, because he cracked 4,256 hits in his long career. No one ever got more.

  Pete is guarded by a young woman, Sarah, who, he rarely fails to point out, has a great ass. She does not seem to mind being reminded about her ass, or anyway, she has grown used to it. There are various job-related quirks when it comes to working with Pete Rose. Appreciating ass compliments seems to be one of them.

  “So this woman, she sits down right here, right next to me,” Pete is saying, and he points at the spot next to him as if it were a historical landmark. “And she has really big breasts, you know? I mean, really, she has big breasts. And she’s like leaning over the table, like, um, you know…”

  Pete realizes that at this point in his presentation he needs a stand-in to give the story a visual. He calls over to Sarah and asks her
to play the woman with the big breasts. She nods. You get the sense that this is a recurring role for her. She sits next to Pete, leans far over the table.

  “So,” Pete says, “she’s really showing off her breasts, you know, like I didn’t notice them. And then I say to her, ‘Where are you from?’”

  At this point, he pauses and begins the little demonstration.

  “So, where you from?” Pete asks Sarah, who plays the large-breasted woman.

  “Titsburgh!” she says triumphantly.

  “Titsburgh?” Pete asks. “Is that in Tennsylvania?”

  And then Pete Rose laughs. He does not laugh casually, no, he laughs hard, hard enough that he can hardly breathe, hard enough that if he were drinking, liquid would spew out of his nose. He laughs like this is the single funniest thing he has ever heard, and he is hearing it now for the first time.

  Pete Rose is sixty-seven years old and defiantly not retired. He sits here on a chair at the Field of Dreams four times a week, six hours a day, and he listens to people praise him and ask him the same questions and tell him that he got screwed by the people who run baseball. Pete was banned from the game in 1989 when an investigation determined that, while managing the Cincinnati Reds, he gambled on baseball games. Gambling is the cardinal sin of baseball; there is a sign in every clubhouse in the major leagues that warns against it. For almost twenty years, Pete adamantly denied that he bet on baseball. Then he wrote a book in which he admitted that, in fact, he did bet on baseball, he even bet on his own Cincinnati Reds. But, he aggressively pointed out, he always bet on his Reds to win. To him, this makes all the difference. He was a competitor.

  Every day Rose sits on this chair, and he signs the baseballs and photographs and jerseys and posters and homemade paintings and baseball cards that people bring to him. “One woman, she brought me a Babe Ruth card,” Pete is saying. “She couldn’t see too well. I said to her, ‘This is a Babe Ruth card.’ She said, ‘Isn’t that you?’”