The Machine (11 page)

“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 liked 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.

“Bust ’em up, kid,” Sparky said to McEnaney as he walked back to the dugout.

God, Sparky loved Will McEnaney. True, McEnaney lived a bit of a wild life. He had been thrown off his high school baseball team back in Ohio for doing all kinds of stupid kid things. And all through the minor leagues, he was always busting curfew and sneaking women into his room and Lord knows what else. But when he got to the mound, he attacked, he threw strikes, he believed that nobody could get a hit off him. Sparky appreciated it.

A bunt moved the Giants’ runners to second and third. Sparky smiled—a bunt, eh? San Francisco’s manager, Wes Westrum, wanted to get into a little chess match with ol’ Sparky? Well, that was fine. Wes was a good player in his day; he’d played on a couple of All-Star teams back when he was with the Giants in the 1950s. But, Sparky knew, Wes was no match for his own strategic excellence. Sparky had McEnaney intentionally walk Gary Matthews, and Will McEnaney struck out Von Joshua. Take that, Wes. Two out.

One more time Sparky walked out to the mound. Will had done his job. He called for one more pitcher, a right-hander this time, Clay Carroll, to finish off the job. God, Sparky loved Clay Carroll. Everyone called him “the Hawk” because of that hook in his nose. Year after year, Sparky had Carroll come into games and get important outs—the previous five years Sparky had called for Carroll more than three hundred times. And this time, he was giving Carroll an easy assignment: all he had to do was retire a no-hit rookie named Horace Speed. Colorful name. Speed was actually slow, one of the wonderful quirks of baseball. Speed had just been called up to the big leagues, and he was about to get sent down, and there was no way that he was going to get a hit off Clay Carroll. And he didn’t.

Instead, Carroll’s fastball slipped out of his hands, and the ball hit Horace Speed.

“He just hit that son of a bitch,” Sparky said in wonder. And he stared at the field. And he said again, “He just hit that son of a bitch.” He watched Speed jog to first, which allowed Chris Speier to jog home with the tying run. Incredible. Sparky hated Clay Carroll. He hated Will McEnaney. He hated Pedro Borbon. He hated all his pitchers. In the ninth inning, with the score tied, with Clay Carroll still pitching, some guy named Chris Arnold got a single. Who in the hell was Chris Arnold? Two batters later, Chris Speier came up one last time, and he ripped a double to left field, scoring the winning run for the Giants. Sparky sat in the dugout, numb. The war was lost. The country was in shambles. He hated everybody in the whole damned world.

May 2, 1975

CINCINNATI

Team record: 12–11

Sparky had to do something about his weak third baseman. The club was spinning in the mud. There were a couple of reporters out there writing that if Sparky didn’t get this thing turned around quick, the Reds were going to fire him. The general manager, Bob Howsam, told Sparky not to worry, but isn’t that what they tell dying patients too? The writers had to be getting it from somewhere, right? Even sportswriters didn’t just make up stuff like that.

He had to do something about Vukovich. But what? He had this crazy idea—crazy, but it just might work. He just needed an opening. And now, like fate, he saw that opening. He saw Pete Rose before the game taking a few ground balls at first base. This was the moment.

“What are you doing there, Peter Edward?” Sparky said as he walked out on the field.

“Aw, just breaking in this new glove for Fawn,” he said. Fawn was Pete’s daughter.

“Yeah,” Sparky said. Then he looked longingly over toward third base. “I sure wish you were playing over there instead.”

“Where’s that?” Pete asked. “You mean third base?”

“I sure could use you there,” Sparky said. “Give me a chance to get Danny Driessen and George Foster in the lineup more.”

“Are you serious?” Pete asked, and he looked over at third base.

This was it. This was the moment. Sparky knew he was taking a big chance. Back in 1966, a Reds manager named Don Heffner had moved Rose to third base. And it was a disaster. Rose was just twenty-five at the time, and he was a second baseman who had just hit .300 for the first time in his big league career. He had just made his first All-Star team. He was just beginning to make his mark in the game. Heffner utterly misread him. When Pete asked why he was being moved to third, Heffner told him to shut up. He was moving to third because that’s what the manager wanted. Mistake. Rose had never responded well to authority, except the authority of his father. Rose moved to third, but he hated it. He hit .200 the first three weeks of the season, and he was miserable, and he was not afraid to say it. Heffner finally moved Rose back to second base, but it was too late. Heffner got fired two months later. Pete Rose’s succinct scouting report of his old manager: “He was an asshole.”

Sparky hoped that this time would be different because he wasn’t telling Pete to move to third base. He was coming to Pete with his hat in hand. If Sparky knew Pete Rose, that would make all the difference. “So what do you say?” Sparky asked.

Pete did not hesitate. “Well, if you think it will help the club, sure. When you thinking?”

Sparky said: “Tomorrow.”

And Pete said three words: “Tomorrow? Damn. Okay.” Then he ran into the dugout for a moment and reemerged.

“What did you get there, Peter Edward?” Sparky yelled.

“A cup,” Pete yelled back as he ran toward third base. “I’ll help the club, but I’m not going to risk my family’s future for you.”

More than thirty years later, Pete Rose thought back with wonder to that moment. “Who else would just agree to play third base in the middle of the season?” he asked. “Just like that. Who else? You name me one star player who would do that. I was an All-Star in left field. I hadn’t played the infield in, what, five years?”

Eight years.

“Damn right. Eight years. Now you tell me, who would agree to just switch positions to help the club? Do you know any great player that would have done that? I’ll bet you could not name a single great player who would have done that.”

He smiled in that challenging way…go ahead, name one. He was probably right, though. Rose was the oddest kind of player. He was undeniably and admittedly selfish—he played for glory and fame and money and statistics. But he was bizarrely selfless and generous too. In his career, he moved around to six different positions (and was an All-Star at five of them). He invited rookies to stay at his home. He always picked up the check. Will McEnaney would always remember that on his first day in the big leagues, Pete Rose walked over to him and said, “You can’t wear those shoes.” Rose then pointed to the shoe boxes in his locker and told Will: “We probably wear the same-size shoes. Go ahead, help yourself. Take as many as you want.”

When Sparky approached Pete to play third base in 1975, it wasn’t by accident and it wasn’t spur of the moment. He’d been thinking about it for a couple of months, going back to spring training, ever since he saw John Vukovich swing a bat. Sparky knew all about what had happened with Don Heffner. He could not afford to alienate his team leader. But Sparky had this instinct about people. He figured
that if he asked Pete Rose to play third, if he could appeal to Pete’s generous side without trespassing on his pride, then Pete would jump at the chance to play third base.

“Sparky could just get us to do stuff,” Pete would say all those years later. “I don’t know what it was. We just liked the guy, I guess. It wasn’t just me. Johnny did stuff for Sparky. Joe did stuff for Sparky. Tony did stuff for Sparky. I don’t know if there was another manager who could have brought all those egos together.

“I knew Sparky was using me when he asked me to play third. But that was the thing. He
asked
me. He didn’t tell me, because that wouldn’t have worked. He asked me, and he explained to me why he wanted to do it, and that’s all I ever asked. Sparky knew how to handle people. He knew more about psychology than Freud.”

Pete then said something that probably explained Sparky better than anything else.

“Sparky,” he said, “reminded me a lot of my dad.”

Sparky wanted to keep the Pete Rose experiment secret for as long as he could. He did not want anyone to know, not even his general manager, Bob Howsam. He had a good reason for this: there was no way Howsam was going to let him play Pete at third base. Howsam had made his thoughts clear on that subject time and again: he believed that Pete did not have a good enough arm to play third base. Sparky did not disagree with that, but he believed the situation had gotten dire. The Reds were playing lousy. And he had to do something.

There were two advantages to playing Pete at third base. One, he could get Balsa off the field. But the second thing, the most important thing, was that he could put Danny Driessen out in Pete’s old position, left field, and Danny Boy could really hit. What a story. What a discovery. Danny Driessen did not even play baseball in high school down in Hilton Head, South Carolina. He was just a talented
kid goofing around with baseball on weekends down south. Then he worked up the nerve to send Howsam a letter asking for a chance to play professional ball.

Howsam signed him—all it cost was a plane ticket and a Cincinnati Reds yearbook. Danny was eighteen years old then, rawer than a fresh bruise, and when he went to the minor leagues in Tampa, he didn’t hit worth a damn. He was homesick. He felt alone. It happens to young baseball players. Some never get over it. But Danny’s second year, back in Tampa, he hit .327. It turned out he was a hitting prodigy—he only needed to be fooled by a pitch once and the next time he would crush it. He moved up to Double A, and he hit .322. They moved him up to Triple A Indianapolis, and he hit .409 in his first forty-seven games—he hit the ball so hard that the Reds simply could not keep him in the minors anymore. They brought him up to the big leagues, and in one hundred games he hit .301 there too. Even the players on the Machine were awestruck.