by Mark Frost
Coming to the plate to lead off an inning and behind in the game, Morgan slightly changed his approach to an at bat, doing anything necessary to get himself on base for the power hitters behind him to drive in. Morgan tensed, chewing gum and flapping his left arm as if jacking himself up, still looking for the fastball early in the count. Tiant came inside with a changeup that fooled him and caught the corner for a strike to even the count.
Now thirty-two, Morgan had been a good player for the Houston Astros from the moment he broke into their starting lineup in 1965, and he’d gotten steadily better, improving every aspect of his game, but the team failed to advance with him. Morgan ended up marooned in a fractured, hostile environment, exacerbated by the Astros manager, Harry “The Hat” Walker, a former batting champion and eleven-year veteran of the National League from Pascagoula, Mississippi. (He’d earned that nickname for constantly fiddling with his cap—Walker played before batting helmets—between pitches during at bats.) Walker was an old-school martinet at a time when young people in the game—and throughout the culture in general—were demanding a larger say in how they were used and treated by their elders. Walker wouldn’t give them an inch. Morgan and many of the other black and Latin players on the team also felt that Walker was one of baseball’s most overt racists, and a sadist who took perverse pleasure in testing and breaking the spirit of his minority players. The proud and dignified Morgan was one of the last men on the team to snap back at Walker’s constant provocations, but once he did, his relationship with the entire organization quickly soured. A toxic environment festered in the Astros clubhouse, and Joe Morgan—one of the most talented and intelligent players in all of baseball—ended up with a tarnished reputation as a troublemaker among the good old boys network around the league.
Tiant knew he had Morgan thinking—Would he come back with the fastball now?—and upset his expectations again, painting the outside corner with a slow curve for a called second strike.
Among the many innovations that Cincinnati general manager Bob Howsam had brought to the Reds when he took over in 1967 was a highly disciplined approach to trades. Howsam had served his apprenticeship in the 1950s under Branch Rickey, the onetime Cardinals and Dodgers GM, who had moved on late in life to run the Pittsburgh Pirates. One of the keenest baseball minds of all time, Branch Rickey had invented the farm system for the Cardinals and went on to break the color barrier with Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers, creating the modern prototype for a first-class national baseball organization. Bob Howsam had learned the game at Rickey’s elbow, while running the Pirates’ Single-A franchise in his native Denver, and it was Rickey’s recommendation to the August Busch family that resulted in Howsam’s first major-league job, as a GM for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1964. (In the interim, Howsam had founded the Denver Broncos, one of the charter franchises in the upstart American Football League.) The team that Howsam inherited in St. Louis won a World Series that very fall, and would repeat as champions three years later, but when Howsam’s mentor Branch Rickey passed away in 1965, the Busch family chose to replace him with one of their beer executives, who constantly meddled with Howsam’s decision-making. When the opportunity presented itself two years later, Howsam accepted the chance to make a fresh start in Cincinnati. As part of their established off-season routine, Howsam and his staff assembled a detailed annual survey of every team around the majors, identifying and rating players who would fit the speed, power, and defense profile of their ball club. Sparky Anderson came on board in 1970, and having spent most of his minor-league years in the Branch Rickey-designed Dodger system, he immediately grasped the scope and ambition of what Howsam was attempting to build in Cincinnati. They had both learned that there was a right way to find, mold, and shape major-league ballplayers, creating a disciplined and principled organization from top to bottom; by 1972 the Reds were indeed a “machine,” in the best sense of the word. Howsam—who was given the additional title of team president in 1973—had also learned that the system wouldn’t produce all the pieces they needed to succeed, that trades were a crucial tool for refining and finishing their roster; sometimes one player can turn a good team into a great one. When they fell short in their first trip to the World Series in 1970, Cincinnati put Houston Astros second baseman Joe Morgan at the top of their wish list. Once Morgan joined the squad, Pete Rose, the Reds’ dominant locker room personality—who if he’d been anyone else might have resented the arrival of such an equally outsized presence—made it a point to become Little Joe’s best friend on the team. Sparky made a conscious decision to put their lockers side by side, and the sharp, nonstop, needling, back-and-forth vaudeville routine that these two high-voltage characters began running with each other—masking the mutual respect and affection they soon came to develop—set the tone for the rest of the room. The message was clear: Not even the Reds’ superstars could get away with giving anything less than a total commitment to excellence. Their entertaining corner of the clubhouse quickly became known as the “Circus.”
Now Tiant finally came with the fastball, low and over the plate, and Morgan made solid contact but hit it straight to Denny Doyle at second base, who made the easy toss to first for the out.
That brought up catcher Johnny Bench. Bench had been so remarkable since the moment he stepped into the Reds’ starting lineup that it was something of a shock to remember he was only twenty-seven. He not only owned the kind of outsized, folk-tale talent that had already redefined how people thought of the catcher’s position, he possessed the intelligence and temperament to handle the nonsensical insanity that the world heaps on your doorstep when you achieve sudden stardom in the U.S. of A. Equally remarkable, Johnny had grown up light-years away from that spotlight, in the tiny country town of Binger, Oklahoma. Blessed with a solid, upright working-class family, and a father, uncle, and two older brothers who were baseball crazy, he found an early home behind the plate on the local Little League team coached by his dad, and he came of age during the golden years of Mickey Mantle, Oklahoma’s greatest homegrown export since crude oil; the Mick offered living proof that there was at least one way out of Binger. Before he turned ten, Johnny Bench saw that path ahead of him lit up like a runway. He grew strong from picking cotton and peanuts in the field, and by the time he graduated as valedictorian of his high school class in 1965—although he’d want you to know there were only twenty-one seniors in the school—he was a man among boys.
Tiant came in sidearm with a curveball that Bench chopped foul down the third base line. Johnny looked a tad frustrated; he’d been looking for a fastball.
During Bench’s senior year, the bus carrying his high school baseball team lost its brakes coming down a hill on their way back from a road game, flipped over, and rolled down a ravine. After he extracted himself, unhurt, and helped pull injured kids from the wreckage, Bench realized that two of his lifelong friends and teammates had been thrown from the bus and killed instantly. The emotional toll of the tragedy echoed throughout his last months in Binger; Johnny felt himself changing in response, a hardening he felt powerless to stop even as he watched it happening. As long as he could remember, he’d possessed the ability to stand outside himself, coolly observe the world around him, and take whatever comes. His extraordinary talent and athleticism had already set him apart from his peers, and he clearly seemed destined for bigger things; the accident rendered him even more distant and self-contained, harder to know. It also, strangely, prepared him for the transient, itinerant life of professional baseball, where men you’ve worked and played alongside for years can vanish from your life in a flash.
Tiant missed outside with a slider to even the count at 1–1.
The Reds drafted Johnny Bench in the second round of the 1965 draft—a young outfielder from Detroit named Bernie Carbo became their first pick—for a grand total of $14,000. Eight thousand of that bonus was set aside as insurance for tuition if baseball didn’t pan out and Johnny decided to go to college, which never became an issue. Af
ter his first season away from home with Cincinnati’s rookie and instructional league clubs, he earned an invite to the Reds’ spring training in 1966. He had barely turned eighteen, and knew from the moment he arrived at camp in Tampa, just from looking at the players around him, that he belonged there. The Reds thought so, too; out of dozens of prospects throughout the organization, they had already made it clear that Johnny Bench was going to be their next big-league catcher.
Now Tiant challenged him, with the best fastball he’d thrown all night; looking dead-red ready for it, Bench swung mightily but missed for strike two.
Although there had been talk of putting Bench on the Reds’ roster as their third catcher that first year, the consensus was that a little seasoning would do him more good. A season of Class-A ball for the Peninsula Grays in the Carolina League followed; Bench hit twenty-two home runs and drove in sixty-eight in ninety-eight games. Behind the plate he already showed a veteran’s grasp of baseball’s most demanding position; how to call a game, defend the plate, handle pitchers, position his fielders. His throwing arm immediately became the stuff of legend; he threw out three runners in one inning in the Carolina League All-Star Game. The Grays retired his number after the season, an almost unheard of honor in the minors, which the club had never conferred on anyone before. Near the end of the season, after breaking his thumb in a game a few days after losing his virginity—not hard for a born-and-raised Baptist to connect the dots between those events—he was driving home to Oklahoma late at night when a drunk driver broadsided his car. A seat belt saved his life, but he spent two days in the hospital and they had to shave his head to close the gash in his skull. Just eighteen, he’d already had two close looks at the valley of the shadow, and those barricades he’d already put up to protect himself from the unknown drew in a little closer. Pitcher and fellow top prospect Gary Nolan never forgot their meeting a few weeks later back in Florida, when he pulled into the team’s motel and laid eyes on Johnny Bench for the first time, sitting poolside, his shaved head stitched like a baseball and still painted orange from the Mercurochrome, singing “If I Were a Carpenter” in full voice. Wow, thought Nolan, that’s my new catcher. He’s nuts. Six months older, Nolan made the big club that spring and won fourteen games for the Reds, finishing third in the National League’s Rookie of the Year voting behind the Mets’ sensational Tom Seaver. Bench made the leap from A-ball to the Reds’ Triple-A team in Buffalo, where his equally impressive performance changed nobody’s mind that he’d soon become a fixture behind home plate in Cincinnati.
Instead of coming back with the fastball, Tiant threw a dazzling slow curve that nicked the outside corner. Bench didn’t swing, and didn’t protest—a real man knows when he’s been beaten—but simply turned and walked briskly back to the dugout without a backward glance.
Luis Tiant appeared in complete command of himself, his pitches, and the game; he’d thrown four different pitches to Bench with four different deliveries, like a jazz artist riffing an inspired solo. Just as the Reds had spotted his tendency to start hitters with fastballs, Tiant hadn’t thrown one to the first two men he’d faced in the inning. So far the best hitters on the best hitting team in baseball looked almost helpless against him. Stan Williams, Luis’s former teammate with Cleveland and Minnesota, the man who helped salvage his career after the injury, had become the pitching coach for the Red Sox before the 1975 season. Williams had lasted fourteen years in the majors, a tall, menacing power pitcher, with a reputation for throwing hard and inside. Only recently retired, he stayed sharp by throwing batting practice for the Red Sox. He watched Tiant now from the dugout steps, marveling once again at the range and control of his repertoire; Luis was cruising now, and the Fenway crowd relished every pitch.
Tony Perez followed Bench to the plate for his second at bat, with two outs in the inning and nobody on. Doggie set his bat and stared out at Tiant, determined, all business, looking for that fastball. Luis started him with his oddest pitch of the night, a slow hesitation pitch that wouldn’t have cracked a pane of glass, fluttered almost like a knuckleball, and just missed the outside corner for a ball.
Tony Perez’s approach to hitting had become so thorough and professional it was almost impossible to fool him with the same pitch twice. Tiant didn’t try to, coming back with a fastball that caught the outside corner for a called strike.
After he originally cracked their starting lineup as a first baseman in 1965, the Reds moved Perez to third two years later when another big young slugger named Lee May came along whose only position was first base. The two men grew into their prime power together, hitting more than 250 home runs between 1968 and 1971; add Johnny Bench’s 113 to that number over the same period and you had the most dangerous murderer’s row in contemporary baseball. But when the Reds fell short to Baltimore in the 1970 World Series, and failed to make the playoffs the following year, Howsam and Anderson pulled the trigger on the deal with Houston for Joe Morgan. The deal would grow more complicated, but from the start Houston demanded a power-hitting first baseman in return. Knowing they could shift Perez over to his old spot, Lee May was moved on to the Astros in the Morgan trade and Tony Perez moved back to first.
Another glance to the heavens, and a sidearm fastball missed outside for ball two. Tiant had thrown forty-five pitches in the game to date, and not one of them had come inside on a batter; for the most part he was pitching to and hitting that two inches of black on the outside corner of the plate.
During Cincinnati’s subsequent rise to dominance, while Rose, Morgan, and Bench garnered most of the headlines, Tony Perez had quietly become the most indispensable part of the Big Red Machine. For nine seasons in a row he had driven in more than ninety runs; his steadiness and consistency weren’t flashy qualities, but they served as the bedrock of the Reds’ offense. He also remained their most even-keeled leader on and off the field, where his serene sense of self, generosity of spirit, complete lack of insecurity, and built-in bullshit detector somehow kept all the other big egos in the Cincinnati clubhouse in line.
Tiant threw a wicked, tempting curve that broke outside and nearly provoked Perez to lean forward and attack, but he checked his swing and the count went to 3–1. He looked down to third base coach Alex Grammas for the sign and got the green light. Tiant went after the outside corner with a slider, a hittable pitch, and Perez fouled it back to fill up the count, 3–2. When Tiant came back with a fastball, Perez fought it off again.
Tiant didn’t like the next ball umpire Satch Davidson threw him and tossed it back. When Davidson nearly threw the next one over Tiant’s head—he had to leap for it—the crowd let Davidson hear it.
Tiant’s next pitch hit the outside corner, but it was up in the zone, and Perez, his timing locked in as he saw his third fast pitch in a row, got the meat of the bat on it and lined a shot toward right that glanced off a diving Denny Doyle’s glove after one hop and skittered all the way out to Dwight Evans. After a patient at bat, Tony Perez finally had his first hit of the Series off Tiant, and the Reds had their second hit of the game.
Left fielder George Foster stepped into the box, decided his right shoe was untied, signaled for time, stepped out, and, while he was at it, retied both shoes. In response, Tiant played catch with Davidson again, trying out a new ball, eager to get the one that Perez had spanked out of the game.
“A little gamesmanship,” said Garagiola, amused, watching the two men try to out-stall each other. “Nothing wrong with it.”
Luis went into his stretch and now came in with his first first-pitch fastball of the inning, up in the zone. Foster, waiting for it, took a big cut and fouled it straight back. After another delay as Foster stepped out of the box and rubbed dirt on his hands, Tiant threw a big overhand curve. Foster took only a half swing at it below his knees, but with his immense strength he hit it hard on the ground into the hole to shortstop Rick Burleson’s right. Burleson took three quick steps to his right, scooped it up, and fired it to Doyle covering second
for the force-out on Perez, but the ball hooked left on him and pulled Doyle off the bag. Doyle lunged out and got a glove on it, slowing it down and probably saving a run. Perez hopped up out of his slide and ran to third, but had to hold there when Doyle tracked the ball down as it trickled onto the outfield grass. Foster held up at first.
Error, Burleson—his first, and the fourth Red Sox gaffe of the Series. Reds at first and third, two out.
Looking at the replay from the left field camera, former infielder Tony Kubek thought that Doyle might have made the throw look worse than it was by coming straight across the bag, cheating toward first instead of circling slightly to his right. Whatever the reason for the error, aflame with self-disgust, “Rooster” Burleson kicked at the dirt and returned to his position.
Shortstop Davey Concepcion crossed himself and stepped into the box, for the first Reds’ at bat in the game with a runner in scoring position. Tiant, calm and cool, pitching from the stretch, missed the outside corner with a low fastball for ball one. He came back with his tantalizing slow curve, which dove down and missed in the same spot for ball two.
Thinking a move ahead, in case they kept the inning alive and he needed someone to pinch-hit for Billingham in the pitcher’s spot two batters later, Sparky told his best pinch hitter, Terry Crowley, to get loose again and put Larry Shepard on the phone with the bullpen, where Clay Carroll took off his jacket and began to throw.
Ahead in the count, Concepcion saw Grammas flash him the sign to swing away; they expected a fastball here. The crowd broke into their “Loo-ee, Loo-ee” chant. Tiant came with the fastball, and Concepcion fouled it straight back for a strike. Still ahead 2–1, Concepcion got the swing sign from Grammas again. Tiant fooled him with the next pitch, a live fastball that would have made his father proud, darting to the right and catching the inside corner, the first pitch he’d thrown there all night. Concepcion stepped out to collect himself, rubbed some pine tar on his bat in the on-deck circle, and looked into the dugout, where Sparky shouted some words of encouragement. The count was even now, 2–2.