The Machine Read online

  Bob Howsam believed he inspired the name. Howsam ran the Cincinnati Reds, and he thought of himself as something of an innovator. Back in the 1950s, he owned a minor league baseball team, the Denver Bears, and he came up with so many gimmicks and promotions that some years the Bears drew more fans than teams in the major leagues. He would try anything. Once, he approached a chemist and asked if it was possible to concoct a spray that could make the ballpark smell like a bakery. He explained: everyone loves the smell of bakeries. The chemist explained: no, it is not possible.

  When Howsam became general manager of the Cincinnati Reds in 1967, he wanted his team to have an image based on an identity that separated them from the times—something altogether separate from the hippies, long-hairs, and bra-burners who danced to that sitar music in the Summer of Love. He wanted a baseball team that would not terrify the good and decent family folk of Cincinnati. He decreed that every Reds player would wear his hair short, his uniform would be wedding gown white, and his shoes tuxedo black. No one would wear a beard, of course. On the field, the pant legs of their uniforms would end just below the knee, and everyone would see the red of their socks. Off the field, they would wear ties and jackets. He wanted them to be, yes, a machine, a Big Red Machine, as powerful and inoffensive and coldly efficient as the big red Zamboni machine that polished the artificial turf field at Riverfront Stadium between innings. Howsam would believe until the end of his life that it was his Zamboni machine that inspired the name. It did not. The team was routinely called the Big Red Machine by 1970, when his Zamboni first swept the field.

  A sportswriter in Los Angeles named Bob Hunter claimed to have coined the name back in August of ’69, just after the Reds scored nineteen runs in a game against Philadelphia. Hunter had quit law school to become a baseball writer, and he became somewhat known for his witty nicknames—his favorite being the time he called Bill Singer, a pitcher known for his endurance, “the Singer Throwing Machine.” Hunter always claimed that after the Reds scored all those runs in Philadelphia, they went to Los Angeles, and he felt like they deserved a nickname that fit their offensive majesty. He carefully considered the color of the uniform and their relentless run-scoring power and dubbed them the Big Red Machine. The trouble with his story is that the Reds did not go to Los Angeles for a month and a half after the Philadelphia stampede. And by then the name had been in papers all over the country.

  The best bet is that Dave Bristol, the old Reds manager, came up with the name himself. Bristol was one of those men held in bondage by the game; he never quite received as much as he gave. Bristol was a good baseball player, but not quite good enough to play even a single game in the major leagues. He was a faithful manager, but baseball owners rarely felt the same faithfulness to him. Bristol would be hired and fired repeatedly in his life. As he said, in his Georgia drawl, he never took it personal. He had to be around baseball. He needed the game. And this is what happens when you need them more than they need you. Bristol’s destiny was to spend a lifetime managing losing baseball teams for vain millionaires like tycoon Ted Turner, who once fired Bristol so he could manage the Atlanta Braves himself. Turner’s experiment in self-reverence lasted one day—plenty of time to make Turner into a national laughingstock—and then the beleaguered Turner mercifully fired himself and rehired Bristol. At the end of the year, Turner fired Bristol again.

  In 1968, though, Bristol was young and blissfully unaware of his tortured baseball destiny. That year, Bristol’s Reds suddenly and rather unexpectedly started hitting baseballs very hard. Bristol seemed as shocked by this turn as anyone—the two previous seasons his Reds had hardly scored any runs at all. The Reds scored more runs in 1968 than any other team. They scored more runs still in 1969. And sometime during that year—maybe it really was after that nineteen-run sonic boom in Philadelphia—a giddy Bristol began calling his team the Big Red Machine.

  Bristol never claimed to have come up with the nickname on his own. Maybe someone mentioned it to him. He could not remember. And he did not care. His Reds were marvelous. Pete Rose banged 218 hits that summer when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Two sluggers, Tony Perez and Lee May, cracked long home runs. A twenty-one-year-old catcher named Johnny Bench burst into stardom. The Reds scored runs at will, and after happy games, Bristol would wander into his clubhouse and see his players sitting on stools, still in uniform, drenched in sweat, raising beer cans to each other. They toasted: “How about the Machine? How about us? Nobody can stop the Big Red Machine!” It was, Bristol would say, the best time of his life. Then it ended. The Reds scored many runs, but they finished third. Bristol was fired. Howsam decided Bristol had taken the Machine as far as he could.

  Bob Howsam hired Sparky Anderson to manage the Reds in 1970. That shocked everybody. “Sparky Who?” was a headline in the next day’s paper. Sparky was like the other woman who shows up at the reading of the will and walks out with the house and the Rolls. He was thirty-five years old when he was hired—he was younger than any other manager in the game—but his hair was shock white. He kept a can of black hair dye with him, and he smeared that stuff through his hair constantly, but he could never quite paint over the white, and he could never quite convince people he was as young as his years.

  He had one of the odder playing careers in baseball history. He played one full season in the big leagues. And that was all. That doesn’t happen much. Baseball seasons bleed into each other, players get called up and down, they get second chances. Not Sparky. He was George Anderson when he first began playing ball, Georgie to his friends. They began to call him Sparky because of his violent temper. He got thrown out of dozens of games. During one of his many umpire spats in the minor leagues, a local radio announcer shouted, “Look at the sparks fly! That’s one sparky fella!” Sparky became known throughout baseball for his uncontrollable rage, which was better than being known for his other flaw: he could not hit a lick. The Philadelphia Phillies liked his spirit and traded three players for him in late 1958, and they named him the starting second baseman for the 1959 season. On opening day, eighth inning, Sparky lined an RBI single off of an aging star, Don Newcombe. He played almost every day that summer when Explorer 6 sent back photographs of Earth and Hawaii became a state. And at the end of the season, the Phillies’ management still liked Sparky’s spirit, but they did not like his .218 batting average or his home run total. (He hit zero—“Never even hit one off the wall,” Sparky would say.) They sent him down, and Sparky would never play another game in the major leagues.

  He did play in the minor leagues for a while longer, and he became a manager, but his temper still raged. One day, Sparky found that nobody in baseball wanted him around. He sold cars for a while, Ramblers, and he was pretty lousy at that too. He only made a living because his boss, Milt Blish, would throw some extra business his way. Yes, Milt Blish saved his life. He was quite a man. And whenever Sparky tried to thank him, Milt would wave him off and say: “Real friendship means you don’t ever have to say thank you.”

  Yes, Milt told Sparky that he had to put away those unhelpful feelings. He put it bluntly: feelings are for chumps. When Sparky would try to sell cars, he would get angry when people tried to cheat him. He fell for sob stories. If a customer talked about how little money he had, Sparky would say: “Look, I really don’t think you can afford this car.” He kept doing that until he realized that he was going broke, and the wise Milt Blish said, “George, don’t you realize those people are just going to another car dealership to buy a car they can’t afford?”

  So Sparky put away those feelings. When he got another chance to manage a minor league team, he was transformed. Sure, he still got angry with the umpires. Sure, he still raged against his players. But now he cut the rage with funny stories, scraps of wisdom he had run across…he became a character, a baseball manager right out of central casting. When he became the Reds manager, people said that Bob Howsam must have lost his mind. People wrote letters to the editor and called Sparky a small-time
nobody. Everybody made fun of the way he talked, his mangling of grammar, his lack of education, the clothes he wore, the lingering gray in his hair. On a bus ride in that first year, Lee May, a massive first baseman from Alabama, grew tired of Anderson’s constant chirping. May said, “Aw, what do you know? You’re just a minor league motherfucker.” And that’s what the Reds called him.

  Well, so what? Feelings? Nothing more than feelings? Who needed them? All Georgie Anderson wanted his whole life—all he ever wanted since he was a boy living in a two-room house in the heart of the neighborhood that became Watts—was to be around baseball. Then, against odds, against hope, he became manager of the Big Red Machine. Feelings? Forget it. He told friends, “There ain’t no way I can lose.” First year, he took those players of the Big Red Machine and he flattered them, whipped them, inspired them, insulted them, and guided them to the World Series. Yeah. First year. How did they like their minor league motherfucker now?

  The Reds lost that World Series to Baltimore—the Orioles’ third baseman, Brooks Robinson, the human vacuum cleaner, made a series of superhuman defensive plays. “Guy busted us up single-handed,” Sparky muttered. Well, it was okay. “I’ve still got the best team in baseball,” he said. “I guarantee ya we’ll win it all in ’71.”

  The team collapsed instead. The Reds stopped scoring runs. They lost more games than they won. Rumors swirled that Sparky would be fired. How about that? They were thinking about firing him one year after he took the Reds to the World Series. Well, so what? “We’ll win it in ’72, I guarantee it,” he told reporters. That spring, he worked his players to exhaustion—Sparky’s favorite, Johnny Bench, called that spring training camp “Stalag 13,” the concentration camp from the television show Hogan’s Heroes. Pete Rose called Sparky “the Exorcist.”

  “Why’s that?” Sparky asked.

  “’Cause you work the devil out of us,” Rose said, big goofy grin on his face.

  Who cares? When the season began, Sparky mercilessly yanked his pitchers out of games the instant they showed weakness. They hated his guts for it…who cares? Sparky never liked pitchers anyway. He bullied and charmed his team back to the World Series, and this time they played the roughneck Oakland Athletics, a team made up of players with long hair and mustaches, every kind of hippy-dippy ne’er-do-well. Sparky knew a team like that could not beat his disciplined, controlled, pristine Big Red Machine. Only, the A’s won the World Series in seven games. Sparky said the loss felt like dying.

  And so it went. In 1973, Sparky guaranteed his team would win. The Machine got beat in the playoffs by an unimpressive New York Mets team and an angry New York crowd that constantly seemed on the brink of rioting. “New York ought to be the next atomic bomb testing site,” Anderson said after that loss, and then he apologized, and he felt dead inside. Then came 1974 and the worst season of all. The Reds won 98 games, more than every team but one. But that one team was the Los Angeles Dodgers, and they won 102 games and went to the playoffs instead. This was beyond heartbreak. Sparky Anderson lived in Los Angeles. He hated, just hated, the Dodgers.

  “You know how you judge yourself?” Sparky would tell his players. “You judge yourself by what’s on the back of your baseball card.” The back of Sparky’s baseball card stated that in five years his Reds had won three division championships and two pennants, but they had never won it all. That seemed good. But Sparky did not see it quite that way. Sparky figured that for five years he had the best team in baseball, the very best, and they had never won it all. Whom could he blame? Johnny Bench? Hell, no, Johnny Bench was the greatest catcher Sparky ever saw. Pete Rose? Hell, no, nobody ever played the game with more guts and energy than Pete. Joe Morgan? Hell, no, that little man could beat you every which way you could be beaten. The team? Hell, no. The Machine was the best goddamned baseball team Sparky ever saw.

  He blamed himself. “I’m not good enough,” he told friends. “It’s me. I’m costing this team. I’m the weak link.” Then he would snap out of it and shout, “But I’ll show them! Nobody in the world could manage this team better than ol’ Sparky.” Feelings. Who cares?

  Things were unhappy at his home in Thousand Oaks. He wanted baseball to begin so he could get away. Sparky had not spoken to his oldest son, Lee, for more than a year. They were having the same fight that fathers and sons were having all over America.

  “You’re going to cut your hair,” he said as he watched Lee working on his motorbike in the garage. Lee’s hair was down to his shoulders. He looked, well, cliché or not, he looked like a girl. “Come with me right now, I’m taking you to the barber.”

  Lee did not even look up. Quietly, he said, “No.”

  No. Just like that. For a moment, Sparky thought about settling things like he had always settled things, with fists and rage and sparks. But he could not fight his own son. Instead, he cut him off. He stopped talking to Lee. Every now and again, he felt like breaking through the silence, only he would see Lee, and he would see that his hair had grown a little bit longer, and he would seethe again and turn his back. He was Sparky Anderson, baseball manager of the Machine, the cleanest-cut team, the team that represented the America he believed in. If a player grew his hair too long, Sparky had relief pitcher Pedro Borbon cut it. If the player refused to cut his hair, Bob Howsam traded him. This was how it had to be: Sparky would talk to reporters for hours about how this country was going to hell, what with the drugs and sex and atheism and, especially, the long hair. Think about this, he would say. If a man can’t be counted on to cut his hair, how can you count on him to pitch the eighth inning? How can you count on him to be a good neighbor or keep our communities safe or help heal our sick? How can you count on him to be a good son and do all the right things? Sparky could not even stand to look at his own son.

  Instead, he sat in his favorite chair at home, and he read stories about how the Dodgers—with their star Steve Garvey, who was being called “Captain America”—were the best team around. He read how his Reds were through. He read those stories over and over; he wanted to memorize every word. He wanted every slight, every insult, to pierce through him.

  “The Dodgers are no dynasty,” he suddenly yelled toward his wife, Carol. “They’re a onetime deal! You hear me!”

  Carol heard him. The phone rang—a sportswriter from Cincinnati calling to talk baseball.

  “Don’t write this,” Sparky said, “but the Dodgers are done. You mark my words: you’re going to see something, boy. We’re going to give people a show like they never seen before.”

  February 3, 1975

  CINCINNATI

  Dick Wagner’s office

  Pete Rose heard himself bragging about all his walks, and it made him sick. It had come to this. Pete Rose hated taking walks. Everyone knew that. He would sometimes swing the bat at bad pitches on purpose to avoid taking a walk. This cut to the heart of Pete Rose the ballplayer. Harry Rose did not raise his son to walk. The Roses did not accept charity. Pete would by God take first base, conquer it. There was a game in 1974, the Reds trailed the St. Louis Cardinals by seven runs in the late innings. Bob Gibson was pitching for the Cardinals, “Bullet Bob,” the scariest pitcher in the game. Batters hit a measly .228 against Gibson over his seventeen-year career, and he took every hit personally. Gibson threw a pitch inside, Pete tried to pull out of the way, and the pitch ticked Pete’s uniform.

  “Ball hit him,” the umpire, Bill Williams, shouted, and he pointed toward first. “Take your base.”

  “The ball didn’t hit me, Bill,” Rose shouted back, and he stepped back into the batter’s box.

  “Yes, it did, Pete, I heard it hit you, take your base.”

  “No. You heard wrong. I’m telling you the ball didn’t hit me.”

  “You’re taking the base, Pete. The ball hit you, quit being silly….”

  “I’m not taking the base, Bill. Didn’t hit me. Let me back in the box.”

  Pete kept arguing during a lost game that the baseball did not hit him, he
did not want the free base, he wanted to get one more swing at the most intimidating pitcher of the time. In the end, the umpire made him take first base, but Pete did not take it well. For the rest of the inning, he yelled, “The ball didn’t hit me!” That’s how much Pete hated walks. He wanted to swing away. Always.

  Now, though, Pete Rose talked about walks. It was humiliating. In 1974, Pete had 106 walks, the most of his career, and through gritted teeth he said that old Little League line: “Hey, a walk is as good as a hit, right?” Pete explained that all those walks helped him score the most runs in the National League. That was worth something, right? Rose looked across the desk at the Reds’ vice president of administration, Dick Wagner, to see if his words were having an effect. Wagner glared back blankly. Dick Wagner was a hard man. For years, he managed the Ice Capades. He knew how to intimidate athletes and squeeze dimes out of small-town promoters.

  “Pete,” Wagner said quietly, “this is not about your walks. This is about your batting average. I believe you hit [here Wagner lifted a paper close to his face], yes, you hit .284, which is, of course, well below your usual standard. I know you were as disappointed as we were. As you know, we pay you to hit .300. Also, we noticed that you are not in quite the same shape you once were. You seem heavier this year. And with your age…”

  Wagner went on like this for a while. Rose stopped listening. He never should have brought up those walks. He was Pete Rose, “Charlie Hustle,” a surefire Hall of Famer, a hitting machine. Still, what choice did he have? The Reds wanted blood. They wanted to cut his pay. Rose led the whole National League in runs scored, and they wanted to slash his salary by more than $30,000. Every year it was like this—Rose had to fight for every dime. He had to threaten to show up late to spring training. He had to threaten to sit out the season. He had to go to these agonizing sessions (and without his agent, Reuven Katz—the Reds would not let Katz in the door) and defend himself like it was Nuremberg. This is how it was for baseball players in 1975. Teams owned players for perpetuity. Most players had second jobs in the off-season. The game was about to change, and players were about to make more money than they had ever dreamed. But it had not changed yet. And Pete Rose, with his .284 batting average in 1974, felt naked and alone.