The Machine Read online

  “Just do what I did,” Johnny Bench had said in that cutting, know-everything voice he had perfected. A year earlier, Johnny had gone into his salary meeting with the Reds, and that son of a gun handed them a blank contract. Pete had to admit that was a ballsy move. Johnny said: “Pay me what you think is fair,” and he smiled and walked out of the room, like John Wayne. Yes, Pete could not deny it: John had style. But he was also coming off a great year. And the Reds loved him, they worshipped him, they paid him $150,000 just to see the smile on his face. If Pete ever did something like that, ever just gave the Reds a blank contract, they would not pay him enough to cover his car payments. Pete felt the Reds had it in for him. Of course, he felt that way about everybody.

  “Pete, we feel like we are being more than fair here,” Wagner said, and his voice was beginning to boom now. Bad sign. Wagner had a nasty temper. A year before, the guy had cursed out the team chaplain. Bob Howsam had negotiated salaries himself, but that was in a gentler time. Now players were getting brassier, getting advice from agents, working more closely with their union boss, Marvin Miller. So Howsam had Wagner, his hit man, do the negotiating. “He would sit in his ivory tower and pretend that he was above it all,” Reuven Katz would say many years later. “And he would have Wagner fight his bloody battles.”

  Wagner told Rose that the Reds—because they valued him, because they knew how much he had meant to them over the years, because he was named the league’s Most Valuable Player in 1973—would not cut his salary by $30,000. They would only cut it by $10,000.

  “I’m not taking a pay cut,” Pete said.

  “I understand your emotions, Pete, but when you did well, the club was always willing to cater to your needs, and now…”

  “I’m not taking a pay cut,” Pete said, and with that he got up and said, “And I am not some fat boy.” He stormed out of the room. On his way out to his car, he would remember, he muttered to himself, “Damn it, I cannot believe I brought up those walks.” Three days later, Rose signed a contract with the Reds. The salary numbers were not released, which suited Pete just fine. That way he did not have to explain why he had taken a $5,000 pay cut from those sons of bitches.

  February 21, 1975

  CINCINNATI

  The Netherland Hilton

  Johnny Bench felt good about the numbers in the paper. There were 650 pounds of roast beef here, 100 pounds of roast ham, 1,200 egg rolls, and 4,000 mixed drinks. There was a five-tiered, five-foot-high chocolate cake—5 being the number Johnny Bench wore as catcher of the Cincinnati Reds. The newspaper said the food alone cost $8,000, which was about right, give or take a couple hundred. People would have to be impressed. The median income in America was barely more than $12,000. Johnny Bench spent $8,000 for the food at his wedding.

  Vickie Chesser wondered again how this had happened. Everything had moved so fast—too fast, her friends kept telling her. But they could not see it. Johnny was perfect. They did not know him. They had not seen the way he acted around little Phillip Buckingham. Phillip was five, all kinds of curly hair, his body ravaged by leukemia. Sick children are drawn to ballplayers, and ballplayers are drawn to sick children, and Vickie would watch as the two of them talked, soul to soul. Sometimes, when they talked, it seemed like Phillip was the adult and Johnny the child. She saw the way Phillip looked at Johnny, so full of love, so full of life. No, her friends could never understand. For the first time in her life, she was in love, really in love.

  Johnny had hoped that Bob Hope would make it in for the wedding. He knew that President Gerald Ford would not make it, not with Vietnam smoldering to its inevitable conclusion. And Johnny was not surprised when Joe DiMaggio sent his regrets. The talk show host Dinah Shore wanted to come, but she could not get away. But the singer Bobby Goldsboro was there, and John had hoped Bob Hope would make it too. They had traveled together to Vietnam to entertain the troops. There was this one time, funny story, this one time when Johnny was in the back of the plane sleeping on a bed of blankets with Tara Leigh, she was one of the Ding-A-Ling sisters, she was one of the Golddiggers, the girls who would add a little sex appeal to The Dean Martin Show on television. Beautiful girl. Anyway, they were huddled together, just trying to get some sleep, nothing untoward going on, and Bob Hope wandered back and ended up stepping on Johnny’s head. Bob told that story all the time. Got big laughs. Johnny had really hoped that Bob Hope would make the wedding, but his schedule would not allow it.

  Vickie knew that Johnny had only called her in December because he heard from a buddy that she was “one swinging lady.” Well, he had been given bad information. She didn’t swing, you know. He called her up cold, no introduction, and invited her to come with him to Las Vegas. Her first reaction was to hang up the phone, but there was something strong in his voice, something solid. He offered to send her a plane ticket and buy her a separate room. “What do you have to lose?” he asked, and there was something about that voice, something so sure, something different from all the other guys she had dated. Then he invited her to join him at a wedding. What could go wrong at a wedding?

  Johnny had told teammates after the 1974 season ended that it was time for him to get married. He was almost twenty-seven. He’d had his fun. Johnny had always lived an orderly and planned life. Before his first full season in the major leagues—that was 1968—he announced that he would win the Rookie of the Year Award. He won that. He then told reporters that he would become the best player in baseball. That happened in 1970, when he hit 40 home runs and drove in 148 runs, numbers no catcher had ever reached. And Johnny Bench wasn’t a normal catcher; he revolutionized the position. He snagged pitches one-handed. He pounced on bunts with the quickness of a snake striking. His arm was a marvel—he threw out so many base runners that by 1972 players had more or less stopped trying to steal against him. Time magazine put him on the cover that year, with the understated headline: “Baseball’s Best Catcher.” He told reporters that baseball was not big enough to hold him, that he needed to stretch out, and he did that too. He sang in nightclubs. He played a guard on the television show Mission Impossible and a waiter on The Partridge Family. He hosted his own television show and opened his own restaurant in Cincinnati. Now, he said, it was time to get married. All he needed was the perfect wife. He saw Vickie Chesser in an Ultra Brite toothpaste commercial on television. She had a nice smile.

  Vickie liked the way he looked. Johnny had a round-faced handsomeness; there was something vulnerable in the way he looked. And yet, at the same time, he seemed bulletproof. He seemed so sure all the time—sure of where he was going, sure of what would happen when he arrived, sure of their future together. Their courtship happened in a rush; within days of their meeting, he was talking marriage. He overwhelmed her. Vickie did not care for baseball, but her father back in South Carolina explained that Johnny Bench played with such vividness and authority that you could not take your eyes off him. Vickie understood that. He had power. When he proposed to her three weeks after they met, she could not think of anything to say except yes.

  Johnny liked that she knew nothing about baseball. It made him feel like something deep in them connected. He also liked the way they looked together. At first, Vickie had talked about having the wedding in her hometown, in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, but they both knew that could not happen. Well, he knew it for sure. Johnny was a Cincinnati star. He had a Cincinnati wedding in mind, one that would stop the town cold. He did it all—wedding planner, press agent, groom. A friend offered to buy the liquor. A thousand invitations were sent out. Thirty cooks were hired to prepare the food. “It’s a chance to show my artistry,” Stuart Johnsen told the Associated Press; Johnsen was in charge of decorating the eighteen-pound baked salmon. Story after story appeared in the newspapers about the happy couple. When Johnny was asked how he would describe his future wife, he said: “Shapely.”

  Vickie marveled at Johnny’s certainty; it was like he had been planning for this wedding his whole life. He wanted a big, g
audy, celebrity-filled wedding; well, that’s what she wanted too. She chose a china pattern but happily switched to Lennox Laurent because she saw how much Johnny liked it. She chose a crystal pattern and changed that too when Johnny showed a preference for Genova by Baccarat. Well, the Genova was nicer. She let him open their wedding presents. “He gets such a kick out of it,” she told a reporter. “I just like to watch him.”

  While the reverend spoke at Christ Episcopal Church that day, Johnny leaned over to Vickie and whispered: “Hey, you clean up pretty nice.” And she said: “You look pretty good yourself with your hair combed.” It was like something out of a movie. At the reception, Pete Rose kidded Johnny about a quote in the paper where he talked about being a fan of bigamist Brigham Young. Pete and Merv Rettenmund were the only players from the Machine at the wedding; the others already were down in Florida getting ready for the season.

  “You know what they say about married guys?” Pete said.

  “What’s that?” Johnny asked.

  “They can’t pull the ball no more,” Pete said. Johnny laughed. He would always pull the ball. Across the crowded room, Vickie was getting tossed and twisted and hugged from every direction. She had a nice smile.

  Johnny and Vickie cut the cake, shoved pieces in each other’s mouths, kissed for the cameras. The day after the wedding, Johnny and Vickie headed for Florida and the start of a new baseball season. Before leaving, though, they got a phone call. Little Phillip Buckingham had died.

  February 28, 1975

  TAMPA

  Spring training

  The players would each remember Sparky Anderson’s spring training speech a little bit differently in later years, but everyone recalled his main point. He announced that the Machine was made up of two different kinds of players. First, there were the superstars. To be more specific, Sparky said, there were four superstars—Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, and Tony Perez. Those four made their own rules. Those four had no curfew. Those four had special privileges. If Johnny wanted to go golfing every so often during spring training, he could go. If Pete wanted to blow off some steam at the dog track, well, Sparky might give him a few extra bucks. If Joe needed to come in late so he could finish school, that was all right by Sparky. If Tony needed a little rest, then Sparky would fluff the pillow. Those four were royalty.

  “The rest of you,” Sparky said, “are turds.”

  This was the law of the Machine. Sparky never hid it. He knew some managers tried to treat everyone equally. Well, Sparky was not one of those men. He had learned another of the great rules of doing business from the car salesman Milt Blish: you scratch my back….

  “If you want to be treated like one of them,” Sparky said to the turds as he pointed toward Bench and Rose, “you have to play like one of them. You have to work like one of them. I don’t treat everyone the same. I don’t believe in it. I’ll give you as much as you give me.”

  Then Sparky looked out over the players who made up the Machine, the team that had to win, and he very clearly said the words that so many of them would remember for the rest of their lives. He said: “Boys, this team is like my television set. Nobody messes with it.”

  “I’ll be honest with you,” the kid relief pitcher and turd Will McEnaney would say more than thirty years later. “None of us ever knew what the fuck Sparky was talking about.”

  Sparky picked his least favorite turd on the first day of camp: a kid name John Vukovich. Sparky had seen bad hitters all his life. Hell, he had been a bad hitter all his life. But this new guy, Vukovich, well, he was a whole other level of bad. First time he saw Vukovich go through batting practice, he already had a nickname in mind: “Balsa.” That was because whenever Vukovich hit, the ball seemed to just dribble off the bat like milk off a baby’s chin, and the dead sound Sparky heard made him wonder if the kid’s bat was made out of balsa wood.

  “Can’t you do anything with him?” he asked his hitting coach, Ted Kluszewski, whom everyone called Big Klu.

  “What do you want me to do, shoot him?” Big Klu asked back.

  Sparky considered the offer. A couple of months earlier, Bob Howsam had told Sparky that the team was going to trade Tony Perez to get a third baseman. Sparky had mixed emotions about it. He loved Perez—everybody loved Doggie—and the guy was still one helluva tough hitter. But a trade made some sense. The Reds needed someone to play third base—it was the one overwhelming flaw of the team. Six different men had played third base the year before, and not one of them was worth a damn out there. Danny Driessen had been Sparky’s great hope; he was young and determined, and like Sparky told the reporters, he was one helluva hitter. Trouble was, Danny Driessen looked scared out of his mind when he played third base. They call third base “the hot corner”—baseballs rush at you like angry wasps—and Danny couldn’t handle that. One time he simply forgot to step on the base to force out a runner. Kid was terrorized out there. No, Danny couldn’t play third base. But he could play first base, a much safer defensive position, and Sparky found himself daydreaming about a trade and a new infield, with Danny at first base and a young star like New York’s Graig Nettles or Kansas City’s George Brett playing third.

  In the end, though, Howsam did not trade Tony Perez. Instead, he went out and traded for Balsa, a part-time player from Milwaukee who was a magician with the glove. His hands, Sparky thought, were like boxers’, but he could not hit his own weight. Hell, he could not hit Sparky’s weight. Through four mostly bleak seasons, Balsa’s batting average was .157.

  “With our lineup, you won’t need his hitting,” Howsam had told Sparky. “We’ll still score plenty of runs. Just put him at third base and let him make all the plays—every hit he gets will be a bonus.”

  Before spring training started, Sparky could admit that Howsam made some sense. Even after spring training started, he could admit it when he was away from the ballpark, at the hotel, by the pool, lounging in the sun. Howsam’s words rang true on lawn chairs. Sparky would put Vukovich at third base and let him save all those runs with his brilliant defense. And sure, the Machine would still score plenty of runs. Sparky had Tony Perez back, he had his guys Bench and Morgan and Rose, he had a few turds who showed promise—yes, in the lazy humidity of midafternoon, Sparky had himself convinced. But early the next morning, he would come back to the ballpark in Tampa, and he would feel that moist Florida chill on his arms, and he would watch Balsa hit slow, useless ground balls during batting practice, he would watch Balsa hit candy bloops to the shortstop. Then the rage would bubble all over again—there was no way on God’s green earth that he could have that turd playing every day for the Big Red Machine. Not this year.

  “Fix him, damn it,” he screamed at Big Klu.

  “You mean that literally?” Big Klu asked.

  “I don’t know what I mean,” Sparky said, and he kicked the dirt.

  “The Nautilus machine” became the punch line for Tony Perez’s favorite spring training joke. Baseball players—most of them anyway—did not lift weights in 1975. The compelling wisdom of the time was that baseball players who lifted weights would lose their flexibility, though the compelling wisdom of the day may have been written by baseball players who did not want to lift weights. Let the football players do that stuff.

  Still, the Reds had one of the very first Nautilus pullover machines. It was a gift from Arthur Jones, the inventor. Jones had this idea that he could create a machine that would help everyday people build up their muscles without going to a dark gym and lifting enormous barbells for hours. Who had the time to be Charles Atlas? Jones hoped to spread the word of his miraculous machine by giving one to the Cincinnati Reds. He wanted to say that his machine pumped up the Big Red Machine.

  Of course, none of the players used the thing except to hang jockstraps on it. Nobody even knew how to use it. That was why Tony Perez invented the “Nautilus machine list.” It was a simple gag: He would walk around the clubhouse and suddenly notice a player. And he would say, “What are y
ou doing here? You are supposed to be working on the Nautilus.”

  The player would laugh. But Tony would look at him seriously.

  “You gonna be in big trouble with Sparky,” he would say. He pronounced “big” like “beeg.” “He put you on the list. Didn’t you see the list?”

  Some players fell for it. Most didn’t. But it tickled Doggie either way.

  “Hey, fatty,” Doggie said to Joe Morgan. “How much you eat this off-season? It’s a good thing your name on list to work out on Nautilus today. We can’t have a fat second baseman. I cannot go and field all your ground balls.”

  Morgan smiled. He always thought that this was what made the Machine different. This was their power. Nobody had feelings. Nobody showed weakness. Nobody took offense. When you played for the Machine, you never worried about the other team heckling you—the cruelest taunts always came from your own dugout. They called Morgan shrimp, midget, piss-ant, and much crueler and cruder stuff. But it was okay. Joe knew how to fight.

  “Doggie, what are you even doing here?” Joe asked. “Weren’t we supposed to trade you? I guess we couldn’t find even an American League club that would take your sorry ass.”