The Machine (27 page)

“Don’t read this,” she said as she woke him up.

“What?” Tony mumbled.

“Don’t read this,” she said, and she showed him the paper. “You look at it, and you don’t even know you played.”

Tony looked at his wife for a moment. There was deep love between them. Baseball marriages were not built for distance, but Tony and Pituka knew that they belonged together. Johnny and Vickie had hoped for a fairy-tale marriage, but Tony and Pituka lived in the real world. She protected him, and he was strong for her. Tony looked at his wife, and Pituka looked back. Her eyes were red with rage.

And then, without saying a word, Tony rolled back over and went back to sleep.

October 7, 1975

PITTSBURGH
REDS VS. PIRATES

Playoff Game 3

Gary Nolan wanted to grab all the feelings and senses of this moment—the smell of the Pittsburgh air, the midnight black of the sky, the moths fluttering in the lights, the sound of the crowd, the colors everywhere, the feeling of the dirt beneath his spikes, the sweat on his forehead, the way Pete chattered away at third base, the way Johnny pumped his fist to inspire him. He wanted to put it all away, in a bottle, no, in a jewelry box, snap the lid shut, have those feelings there to enjoy whenever he needed them. Gary was pitching in the playoffs again.

First inning, Gary faced Willie Stargell, the great slugger for the Pirates, and he threw his changeup, that fluttering pitch, and the big man swung hard but way too early. In the third, it was Richie Zisk, the son of a gravedigger, who stood in the box. Gary again threw his soft changeup. Zisk waved the bat helplessly. Strikeout. Nolan’s arm felt great. His mind felt sharp. He knew exactly what he wanted to do. In the fifth inning, with two runners on base, he threw his best fastball, and he watched Pittsburgh’s Ed Kirkpatrick hit a high and harmless pop-up behind the plate. Gary then struck out his opposing pitcher, John Candelaria.

It was beautiful. In this moment, Gary felt like he did when he was eighteen. He was doing exactly what he was born to do. When the game ended, Pittsburgh’s Richie Hebner would unwittingly give Gary the compliment of his life. He said: “Guys come back to the bench and say, ‘Damn, I just missed it.’”

“You are pitching your
ass
off,” Pete Rose shouted happily as he threw the ball to Gary with a little bit of extra strength. The Pirates’ rookie pitcher, John Candelaria, was pitching his ass off too. He threw a hot fastball and a biting curveball, and he kept striking out Reds hitter after Reds hitter—Candelaria would strike out fourteen in the game. Gary retaliated by tying up the Pirates hitters in knots. Gary felt a bit like he was pitching against his own youth. And he was holding his own.

Then, in the sixth, Gary made his one mistake. He thought Pittsburgh’s Al Oliver was expecting a changeup. So he threw a high fastball. And the instant he let it go, Gary realized that it was a mistake. He could see that Oliver had been waiting for that pitch. He had it timed. And he did not miss. Oliver crushed a long home run that scored two runs, and Pittsburgh led 2–1. Gary stared down at the ground. Then he heard Pete shout: “We’ll get you that run back. Hell, I will personally get you that run back, Gary. Don’t worry about it. Two runs are not enough to beat the Big Red Machine. No chance.”

Gary struck out Stargell again. He got the brilliant young Dave
Parker to fly out to left field. He walked off the field, and Sparky met him at the top of the step. “Hell of a job, Gary,” Sparky said to him as he looked in his eyes. “Hell of a job. Thank you.”

Pete Rose remembered the home run he had hit in New York in the playoffs a couple of years earlier. It was an odd memory to pop into his mind now, with the Reds losing by a run to the Pirates in the eighth inning. But that sort of thing happened to Pete sometimes. A memory would emerge in his mind, and he would let it play all the way through. Pete remembered that the score was tied, and the New York fans were glaring hate at him, and their boos were spiked with daggers. They did hate him—hated him for jumping Bud Harrelson the day before, hated him for being the star of the other team, hated him for being Pete Rose, the cockiest, brashest, boldest, and toughest son of a gun around. They hated him with all the zeal with which they would have loved him had he played for the New York Mets.

All their hate, all those boos, all of it made Pete focus harder. “Those stupid sons of bitches never figured it out,” Pete would say. “Boos never bothered me. I loved when they booed me. It was silence that bothered me.”

He hit the home run that won that Mets playoff game, and he ran around the bases while the boos got louder and louder, and all the way around the bases he thought,
See, Dad? I showed them. I showed every damn one of them.

Now he stepped to the plate, and it was the eighth inning, man on base, and the Pirates fans booed him, and that memory played in his mind. He had failed to get a hit his three chances against Candelaria. But Pete Rose always loved hitting in the late innings, with the game on the line, with his body warm and his eyes honed. He hit .393 in the eighth inning in 1975, and when Candelaria threw his fastball, Pete saw it good. He swung hard. He hit it hard. Pete Rose was not a home run hitter, of course, but he knew how one felt coming off the
bat. He had hit another playoff home run. The Reds led. Pete was the hero again. He ran around the bases easily, happily, and he could hear his teammates in the dugout, and one (was that Joe’s voice?) shouted: “Man, that must have been a piece-of-shit pitch if
Pete
hit a home run on it. The kid’s done.”

And then those Pirates sons of bitches scored the tying run in the ninth, and Pete suddenly wasn’t the hero.

No, Eddie Armbrister was the hero, which did not surprise him at all. He had been guaranteeing all year that he would be the hero. He hardly played at all. He had gotten only sixty-five at-bats all year. He had mostly been used as a pinch runner and a defensive specialist—the turd of turds, as he liked to say—but all year long he’d be chirping at the batting cage: “Don’t forget about me. I’m the key to this team. You will see. When it comes down to the end, I’ll be the big man.” Armbrister was from the Bahamas—just the third major league player ever to come from the Bahamas—and the guy was always happy. Always. Sparky did not get it (“What the hell is he so happy about? The guy’s hitting .185”), but he realized that whatever he asked Armbrister to do, the kid did. If Sparky needed a bunt, Eddie bunted. If he needed someone to play any of the outfield positions, Eddie played them. If he needed someone to pinch-run, Eddie would run his heart out. He did it all happily, joyfully, like coming off the bench and bunting was his life’s dream.

Casey Stengel, the great Yankees manager, had just died a week earlier, at age eighty-five, and the papers were all reporting perhaps his most famous quote: “The key to being a good manager is to keep the five guys who hate you from the five guys who are undecided.” Sparky had his own quote about what being a manager was all about: “Every great team needs at least one guy who enjoys picking up the trash.” Eddie was the happiest garbage man in baseball.

Sparky sent Armbrister up there in the tenth inning, Ken Griffey
on third base, score tied. “Just give me a fly ball,” he had told Eddie.

“Okay, Skip!” Armbrister said, and he smiled real big, and he hit that fly ball to center field. Ken scored, the Reds won the pennant, and Armbrister wandered around the clubhouse, champagne pouring off him, and he shouted: “I told them. I told them. Nobody listened. But I told them all. I told them, at the end, I’d be the big man. And look at me now. I’m the biggest man.”

Sparky Anderson called his old friend Milton Blish back in California. Milt had been the man who put Sparky Anderson in the car business when it looked like his baseball career was over. Milt had been the man who taught Sparky everything there was to know about human nature and how to treat people and what to do about feelings. Milt was dying of cancer. Sparky had been calling him all year, and at first there was hope, but now the illness had moved past miracles. Milt was going to die soon. He wasn’t ever going to sell another car. He wasn’t ever going to make it back to Santa Anita to lay down a few bad bets. All that was left for him was a few minutes of comfort surrounded by a few hours of pain.

“You won it, huh?” Milt said on the phone.

“We won it, Milt,” Sparky said. “The boys did it. The boys are the best.”

Milt paused, and then he began to thank Sparky. Sparky cut him off.

“Milton,” Sparky interrupted, “real friendship means you don’t ever have to say thank you.” Milton knew the line. It was what he had told Sparky over and over when he was the one doing the saving.

“I want to make an announcement,” Sparky said to the reporters soon after he hung up, and there were still a few tears in his eyes. “I am dedicating this victory to my good friend Milton Blish.” The reporters pulled out their pads.

“How do you spell it, Sparky?” someone asked.

“B-L-I-S-H,” Sparky said. “He’s an old friend of mine. One of my real friends.”

“How do you spell it, Sparky?” someone else asked.

“B-L-I-S-H,” Sparky said again. “He’s on his back now. I call him ‘Uncle Miltie.’ He loves the Detroit Tigers, Los Angeles Dodgers, the Rams, and USC. I told him, ‘God Almighty, Miltie, you’re having a bad year.’” Sparky stopped.

“How do you spell his name, Sparky?” someone else asked.

Sparky shouted: “Milt Blish! B-L-I-S-H. Milt Blish, goddamnit.” He was worn out. He did not want to answer any more questions. Across the country, earlier in the day, the Boston Red Sox had beaten the Oakland A’s to win the American League pennant—that was a surprise. The Reds had been expecting to play the A’s, the three-time World Champions, the team that beat them in the ’72 World Series. Everyone was peppering Sparky with questions about the Red Sox, Fenway Park, the emotion of winning, the fear of losing, and Sparky simply felt overwhelmed.

“They must be a great ball club,” Sparky said about the Red Sox. Someone else asked how to spell Milt Blish’s name, and Sparky walked off, into his office, leaving the champagne and celebration behind.

October 10 to October 22

October 10, 1975

BOSTON

Day before the start of the World Series

To the Reds players, “the Wall”
looked like the Eiffel Tower or the Leaning Tower of Pisa or some other place that they had heard about. Most of them had never seen the Wall. It was strange, really, but baseball was divided—American League and National League—and there wasn’t much mixing of the two. Pete had been playing ball in the major leagues since ’63—there had been four U.S. presidents in his big league years—and he had never seen “the Green Monster,” the giant wall that towered over left field at Fenway Park. Pete stood at home plate and stared at it, the thirty-seven-foot wall (plus two inches) made of wood and covered in concrete and tin. A twenty-three-foot screen extended over the top. The wall, officially, was 315 feet from home plate, but nobody believed that. It looked so much closer. An expert had studied aerial photographs and determined that it was 304 feet away. It looked closer still.

“Nice little ballpark they have here, huh, Pete?” Joe asked. “Nice and definitely little.”

Johnny Bench was mesmerized by it. Johnny was a dead pull hitter; that meant that he hit almost everything to left field. He flew out to the left fielder thirty-seven times in 1975, and as he stood there at home plate looking at the Wall, he tried to calculate how many of those outs would have been doubles or home runs here in Boston. It was scary for Johnny to think about what kind of numbers he might have put up had he played half his games at Fenway Park.

“Wow, you can reach out and touch it from here,” George Foster said to Hal McCoy, the beat writer for the
Dayton Daily News.
And then George began tiptoeing toward the wall. “Shhh,” he said. “Don’t wake it up.”

The Boston players mostly complained about how nobody respected them. Pitcher Rick Wise came up with the idea to have all the Red Sox players wear T-shirts with a giant letter U, and then underneath—in case anyone missed the symbolism—the word U
NDERDOG
written in script.

“Nobody believed in us in March, in June, in August, and nobody believes in us now,” Wise moaned. “And here we are.”

“Even if we won,” another Red Sox pitcher, Bill Lee, said, “we’d get picked for third place in 1976.”

“No one has given us any credit or thought we had talent all season,” catcher Carlton Fisk told reporters. “So it’s like starting new every day.”

There was truth in the complaints—few had expected the Red Sox to make it to the World Series. The Red Sox had for years found their own certain rhythm: they were always good but never quite good enough. Every year since 1968, the Red Sox had won more games than they lost. Every year since 1968, they finished just off the pace. Their 1974 season was typical—the Red Sox were in first
place in late August, then they lost eight in a row and faded to third place. They were thoroughbreds who could not go the distance. People in New England saw it as a character flaw. Also, the Red Sox lacked pitching.

But the texture of the team changed in 1975—they were (as the author John Updike had written about a Boston team years before) a much nimbler blend of May and December. Three dazzling young outfielders revitalized them. The twenty-three-year-old left fielder, Jim Rice, scowled and hit long home runs. The twenty-five-year-old right fielder, Dwight Evans, thrilled fans with his consistency and his remarkable arm. And in center was Fred Lynn, a phenomenon. He was twenty-three, a rookie, and he finished second in the league in hitting, drove in one hundred runs, and scored one hundred runs. He played this kamikaze center field—he crashed into walls after fly balls seemingly every other day. He caught most of them. No rookie center fielder since the young Joe DiMaggio had come to dominate baseball the way Lynn did in 1975.

The three young outfielders were so good that the venerable Carl Yastrzemski—the beloved “Yaz”—moved to first base. He had been a symbol in left field, as iconic in Boston as the Wall itself, but he was thirty-five years old, and in 1975 he was more an old warrior than a star. “I’ll do whatever I can to help the ball club,” he said, and he played all but ten games at first base, and he made the All-Star team for the tenth straight year.

Pitching was a problem, as always in Boston, but Luis Tiant, a cigar-chomping Cuban who claimed to be thirty-four and looked fifteen years older, pitched with verve and gusto and a thousand gyrations. The quirky lefty Bill Lee won seventeen games and the hearts of Boston newspaper writers. Nobody could fill a reporter’s notebook like Bill Lee. They called him “Spaceman.” “When I get nervous, I yawn a lot,” he told those reporters. “By tomorrow, I’ll be yawning up a storm.”

The Red Sox moved into first place at the end of June and stayed
there the rest of the season. Then, surprisingly, they beat the three-time World Champion Oakland A’s in three straight games in the playoffs. And the games were stunningly easy. Oakland led only once the whole series, and for only three and a half innings. The Red Sox won even without Rice, who had broken his wrist in the last week of the season when he was hit by a pitch. Rice would not play in the World Series either. This was another reason most people around the nation picked the Reds to breeze through the World Series. It was precisely what the Red Sox wanted.

“Let them underestimate us,” growled Carlton Fisk, the team’s soul, the tough New England catcher who was born in Bellows Falls, Vermont, grew up in Charlestown, New Hampshire, and went to school at the University of New Hampshire. He could never put into words what it meant to him to play for the Boston Red Sox.

“Let them underestimate us,” he said again. “We’ll show them again.”

Hotel rooms in Boston were scarce. Tickets to the game had sold out in two and a half hours. The Reds stayed at a place called the Statler-Hilton Hotel, and for much of the day leading into the World Series, Reds players tried to come up with the best punch line about the size of the rooms. They went vaudeville. “My room is so small that I have to leave it to change my mind.” “My room is so small that the mice checked out.” “My room is so small that the bed is in the bathtub.” And so on. Pete was the consensus winner. He and a few teammates stepped on the elevator. “Damn,” Pete said. “What are all you guys doing in my room?”

They looked good. During the playoff series against Pittsburgh, the Reds had unexpectedly, and to much applause, suspended the rule requiring ties and jackets. “Well, it was getting silly,” Bench told reporters. Sparky told the Reds that as long as they wore jackets in public, they did not need ties. It was a relief and an unusual gift of
freedom from the Reds’ front office. For the World Series, though, order was restored: ties were again mandatory. There were as many stories in the Boston papers about what the Reds wore walking off the plane as there were about what they hit during the season.

“Well, discipline is good,” Johnny told the newsmen. “That’s the problem with America. Nobody gets any discipline. Kids are desperate for discipline.”

Johnny didn’t like the reinstatement of the tie rule, but he was in no mood to fight. He felt worse than he had all season. His shoulder still throbbed from the collision months earlier, but now he also had a cold so intense and heavy that he felt like his head was drowning. His marriage was about to end. He was about to play in the World Series, and baseball was no fun at all.

But this was the World Series, this was his stage, his star-spangled rodeo, and he had to perform. The pressure was intense. The Reds had to win this time. There could be no excuses. They were better than the Red Sox, Johnny felt sure of it. If the Machine lost, there would be no hiding the truth.

October 11, 1975

BOSTON
REDS VS. RED SOX

World Series Game 1

The greatest World Series that ever was began on the same day that a new show called
Saturday Night
debuted on NBC. (Later, after the Howard Cosell show
Saturday Night Live
was canceled, they would adjust the name.)
Saturday Night
was a variety show featuring music and stand-up comedy—the show began with comedian George Carlin doing his bit about football and baseball—but most mostly there were bizarre skits, the most bizarre of those featuring a
performer named Andy Kaufman. His routine was unlike anything ever seen on television. He stood in front of a record player, stared at the audience, then put the needle on the record. The theme song from the cartoon
Mighty Mouse
began to play. Kaufman stared at the audience silently, and then, when the chorus began, he dramatically lip-synched the words “Here I come to save the day!” Then he stared at the audience for thirty-nine seconds while the song played in the background. When the chorus came up again, he once again dramatically lip-synched: “Here I come to save the day.” The skit was bizarre and ridiculous and, quite possibly, brilliant.

Five convicts escaped from a top-security penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, using some sort of mechanical gadget they built in their prison shop course. Singer Neil Sedaka’s “Bad Blood”—a song he wrote in honor of Elton John, who revived Sedaka’s career—jumped to number one on the charts. In Elyria, Ohio, a seventeen-year-old named Randal Carmen, who had been kept on life support for three weeks while his parents pleaded with the hospital to let him die mercifully, was declared legally dead. In Washington, Democrats and Republicans argued about tax cuts.

In Boston, pitcher Luis Tiant faced the Machine. There was something mystical about Luis Tiant, the ancient El Tiante. He had come from Cuba, and he was of an uncertain age. His face was wrinkled and creased, and his stomach hung over his red belt. He claimed to be thirty-four years old, but Tony Perez said: “All I know is, Tiant was a big national hero when I was a boy growing up in Cuba…and now he’s one year older than me.”

The Tiant name meant something special in Cuba: Luis Tiant Sr., El Tiante’s father, had pitched in the Negro Leagues in the years before Jackie Robinson, before men of color could play in the major leagues. Luis Sr. had a hundred different windups: sometimes he threw sidearm, sometimes he hesitated in the middle of his motion, sometimes he stopped and started like a man pitching under a strobe light. Luis Sr. did not throw hard, but he did not have to throw hard:
his pitching was sleight of hand, a rabbit from a hat. It was said that he should have worn a tuxedo to the mound and charged admission. Buck O’Neil, a Negro Leagues hitter, would remember a time when Luis Sr. threw the ball to first base to pick off a runner. The batter was so baffled by the motion that he actually swung at air.

El Tiante, the son, did not need such tricks when he was young. When Luis first pitched for Cleveland in the midsixties, he pitched with power. In 1968, the famed “Year of the Pitcher,” Tiant overwhelmed hitters with his fastball. He led the American League in earned run average and shutouts, he struck out more than one batter per inning, and he threw fastballs past bats. Then his arm began to throb, his shoulder hurt, his fastball lost its sting, and in 1971 his career appeared to be over. That was when El Tiante entered the second stage of his career. The son became the father. He began to turn his back to the batter when he pitched. He would pitch from different angles, throw at different speeds, and mix in different spins; he would add in Elvis pelvis thrusts and James Brown slides, and he would talk to hitters while he pitched, talk out loud—he would shout, “Hit it, baby!” while the ball was on its way to the plate. “It looks like Tiant has added another pitch,” the Yankees catcher Thurman Munson told the columnist Dick Young that year. “Now, he has about fifty.”

The brilliant Roger Angell described several of Tiant’s many windups in what would become a classic piece in
The New Yorker.
One Angell called “Call the Osteopath,” and this was one where it appeared that Tiant was having a seizure in the middle of his windup. Another he called “the Runaway Taxi,” where Tiant seemed to see a taxi rushing at him and, at the last second, violently dived out of the way to escape a certain crash. And perhaps the best one was “the Slipper-Kick,” where Tiant abruptly moved like he was kicking off his left shoe.

The Reds players insisted that they would not be mesmerized by Tiant’s shell game. “I don’t give a shit about that,” Pete said. “Hell, his head could fall off while he’s pitching, it doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m looking at the ball.”

“See the ball, hit the ball,” Doggie said.

But when the game began, they found themselves under El Tiante’s spell. In the first inning, Pete, Joe, and Johnny went down quickly. In the second, Doggie, George, and Davey did the same. They seemed to be hitting the ball hard, but always right at Red Sox defenders. “Come on,” Joe screamed at his teammates. “The ball is
right there.
”

Joe did line a single to center in the third, and there was a brief moment of drama. Now it was time for Joe to do some hustling of his own. He took a huge lead off first base, an enormous lead. “Joe wants Tiant to throw to first,” Tony Kubek told the national television audience. And Tiant did throw to first—once, and then twice, and on the third throw he almost picked off Joe. “This is a real gunfighters’ duel,” said his partner Curt Gowdy.

El Tiante’s fourth throw to first was called a balk by first-base umpire Nick Colosi, and Joe clapped and happily jogged to second base. The Boston crowd booed. The players on the Red Sox bench screamed so savagely at Colosi that he finally had to point to them as a warning. Tiant himself simply glared at Colosi with hate. Joe felt good. He had gotten into another pitcher’s head.

Only he had not. You cannot hustle the hustler. Tiant dueled with Johnny Bench, an interminable thirteen-pitch at-bat with nine foul balls, the last of them a foul pop-up that Carlton Fisk caught near the Red Sox dugout. Then Doggie came to the plate. Everyone on the Reds knew that there was no one in baseball you would rather have at the plate with a man on second base than Tony Perez. But Doggie simply watched strike three zip over the outside corner.