The Machine (10 page)

“You tell me,” Sparky said to Scherger. “How?” Scherger nodded and shrugged. He had known Sparky for more than twenty years—Scherger was actually Sparky’s minor league manager back in Santa Barbara in 1953. He knew Sparky when he was wild, out of control, when he played baseball with more of an edge than any player Scherger had ever known. None of these players would even recognize Sparky back then. He always seemed a beat away from attacking someone—an opposing player, a teammate, an umpire, whoever.

Sparky had harnessed that temper, but he had not lost it. Scherger
could see that Sparky was about to lose it. Truth was, Vukovich wasn’t hitting too bad—he had a .294 average through the first eight games—and it was too early in the year to start panicking. But Sparky had that look, the look he’d had when he was nineteen years old and wanted to beat up the world. Vukovich was a dead man, and the poor son of a bitch didn’t even know it.

On a cold April day in Los Angeles, the Dodgers pitched an old legend, Juan Marichal, in the third game of the series. Marichal had been a great pitcher in the 1960s—he won more than twenty games six times during the decade. Marichal had a most remarkable windup.
Time
magazine once ran a nine-photo sequence of Marichal’s pitching delivery. In one of the photos, Marichal’s left foot is above his head. In another, Marichal’s arms have flailed to the side like he is conducting the Boston Pops. They called him “the Dominican Dandy.” But on this day, he was thirty-eight years old, his left leg did not lift as high, his fastball did not rush in as hard. Marichal had not pitched especially well in four years; hitters whispered that the great Marichal had nothing left. Nobody knew it when the game began, but this would be the last time Marichal pitched in the big leagues.

In the second inning, with the game scoreless, Marichal walked Ken Griffey to load the bases. John Vukovich was scheduled to hit. Maybe if it had been a different day, different circumstances, Sparky would have left it alone. Maybe if the team had not crumbled against Don Sutton’s pitching the day before, he would have left it alone. Maybe. But Sparky’s team was in the tank. His family was breaking apart. The Dodgers were laughing in his face.

“Danny, grab a bat,” Sparky yelled out to Dan Driessen. Then, turning to Vukovich, he said, “Vuke, you sit this one out.”

The dugout fell silent, and Vukovich stared at Sparky for a second. At first, he thought this had to be a joke…Sparky was not really going to pinch-hit for him in the second inning. Managers never
pinch-hit for a player in the second inning. It had to be a joke, but if it was a joke, Vukovich did not get it. Then he watched it happen. Driessen grabbed a bat and walked on the field. The public-address announcer said, “Now batting for John Vukovich, Dan Driessen.” All the Reds players were looking at Vukovich—this was really happening. Sparky Anderson was pinch-hitting for him before he even got his first at-bat of the game. Vukovich had never even heard of such a thing, not in high school, not in Little League, not ever. His whole body felt hot, he knew his face was red, and he could almost taste blood.

Vukovich just stood there with his mouth open. What to do? Talk to Sparky? Yell at him? Hit him? Throw a bat? He only knew that he had to do something. Vukovich knew that he was a weak hitter. He knew that Sparky saw him as the weak link in the Machine. But this was something more, this was personal, this was Sparky just kicking sand in his face. Vukovich looked at Sparky again, for just an instant. Then he grabbed his bat, and he started screaming. He walked into the tunnel, and he shouted curse words in an order that did not form sentences, and then he meticulously smashed every lightbulb in the tunnel leading back to the clubhouse.

Back on the field, Dan Driessen fouled out to third base.

The Reds pummeled Marichal in the third inning. Pete doubled. Johnny singled him home. Tony Perez homered. Cesar Geronimo singled. Dave Concepcion singled. Ken Griffey doubled them both home. Sparky still seethed in the dugout. Vukovich showed him up. This punk third baseman who couldn’t hit water if he fell out of a boat showed him up. It was unacceptable. It could not be tolerated. Sparky, above all, believed in order. That was why he could not stand to see Lee with long hair. That was why he treated stars better than he treated the other players. When Sparky went out to the mound to take out a pitcher, there was a right way to do it. The pitcher was
supposed to put the baseball in his hand softly—like he was handing over important documents—and then walk to the dugout without saying a word. And if a pitcher ever mouthed off, ever, well, Sparky did not like it.

“I still feel good,” the kid pitcher Pat Darcy said to Sparky once. Only once.

“Yeah?” Sparky snapped. “You feel good? You’ll feel better in the shower.” And when that game ended, Sparky gave the kid the verbal beating of his life. It wasn’t personal. Darcy just needed to learn.

Now, this no-hit third baseman was going around breaking lightbulbs, acting like he’d actually done something in his life. Sparky stewed on the bench. Then watched the lead fade. In the fourth inning, the Penguin hit a two-run homer for the Dodgers. “You see?” he shouted at Scherger, but loud enough for everyone to hear. “You see what a third baseman is supposed to do? How in the hell am I supposed to win without a real third baseman?”

The Reds made the score 6–2 in the seventh inning. The Dodgers came back in the bottom of the inning against that kid Darcy. Dodgers outfielder Jimmy Wynn, who had the colorful nickname “the Toy Cannon,” crushed a grand slam to tie the score.

“No, I wasn’t trying to hit a home run,” the Toy Cannon said after the game. “But I have to admit it did enter my mind.”

Mike Marshall shut out the Reds in the top of the ninth. Steve Garvey hit the game-winning single in the bottom of the ninth. The Reds lost again. They dropped into fifth place.

“I’m going to kill our third baseman,” Sparky said as he walked through the dark tunnel back to the clubhouse.

Sparky decided to wait until the next day before confronting Vukovich. It was a bad decision; his ulcer kept him up all night. Then Sparky arrived at Dodger Stadium early, and he sat in the visiting manager’s office, and he stewed. When Vukovich walked in for the
meeting, Sparky wondered if he should let him close the door. He wanted everyone to hear what he was about to say.

“There’s one thing you better get straight, kid, and I mean get it straight right away,” Sparky began. “I run this ball club.”

Vukovich sat there and stared at Sparky. He knew going in that he had to take his medicine. He still knew he was right, knew that what Sparky had done was, in the baseball vernacular, “horseshit.” But when it came down to it, Vukovich was still a no-hit third baseman who loved baseball and only wanted a chance to play. He wasn’t going to win any fights with Sparky Anderson.

“I’ll pinch-hit for anyone anytime I think it can help me win a ball game,” Sparky shouted. “According to my statistics sheet here, you don’t happen to be a star in this game yet.”

Vukovich thought:
More horseshit.
Sparky knew damn well that you don’t pull a man for a pinch hitter in the second inning. Now he was going to rip Vukovich’s batting average…pure, unadulterated horseshit.

“You won’t give a guy a chance to prove anything,” Vukovich shouted. “You will kill a guy’s confidence.”

“I’m not here to build your confidence,” Sparky roared. Vukovich sat back and reminded himself to shut up. He had to take it. He had no choice. Sparky was unloading. “I’m here to win a baseball game, and if I think I can win by pinch-hitting in the
first inning
, then, by God, I’ll pinch-hit for you in the first. So you just play your position….”

Vukovich sat there, drained, and just waited for the battering to end. But it would not end; Sparky went on and on. When Sparky finished—and it seemed like it took him hours to finish—he asked Vukovich if he had anything else to say. Vukovich had plenty to say. But he did not say a word. He walked out into the clubhouse, and his teammates avoided his gaze.

“You know,” Shug said to Sparky after the meeting, “the kid does play good defense at third base.”

“I don’t give a damn about defense right now,” Sparky shouted.

That night, Vukovich started at third base, and Sparky—perhaps feeling bad—waited all the way until the eighth inning to pinch-hit for him. The Dodgers tied the game in the bottom of the ninth. The Dodgers scored the game-winning run in the eleventh when Reds first baseman Dan Driessen made an error. Marshall pitched three scoreless innings to get the Dodgers victory.

“We can’t do anything right,” Sparky said.

The Reds could not do anything right, but they did get one break in the early part of 1975. Two days after Marshall beat the Reds for the last time, he pitched against San Francisco. On the third pitch of the game, he threw a curveball and then collapsed in agony. He needed help leaving the field. He told the doctor that it felt like someone had stuck a knife in his side. He would pitch only twice in the following six weeks. He was not indestructible.

April 20 to May 17

April 22, 1975

CINCINNATI
REDS VS. GIANTS

Team record: 7–8

Johnny Bench could not remember
a time before he wanted to be a hero. Like most ballplayers, he got that from his father. Ted Bench was one helluva ballplayer in the army. Ted was squat—a filled-out five-foot-nine—but he had this arm you would not believe. Ted was a catcher, and every time he uncorked a throw to second, he would hear the sighs of the crowd. Some people saw that arm in action and told Ted that he ought to pitch, but Ted Bench did not think anyone should tell a man what to do with his life. Ted quit high school as a senior because his baseball coach put him on the bench for a few days. Later, Ted would tell his sons, the coach tried to put him in a game.

“Get in there, Bench,” the evil coach said in the parable.

“Naw,” Ted replied. “I don’t wanna go in. If you don’t start me, I can’t go in.” And with that, the story went, Ted Bench quit the team,
quit school, joined the army, and wowed the hard men of the Greatest Generation with his rocket arm.

The lesson in the story was for the boys to figure out. For a while after he got out of the army, Ted still had some vague dream of playing big league ball, but he was twenty-six, and he already had two sons, and he had bone chips floating around in his elbow. He came back to Oklahoma with his wife, Katie, looked for steady work, and finally found some driving a truck for a propane company in a little town of six hundred called Binger. On the side, Ted played sandlot baseball on diamond-hard fields covered with rocks and sand. He planned to raise a big league ballplayer, planned it even before he got married. His oldest son, Ted Jr., had the heart of a ballplayer, but he lacked the talent. His second son, William, might have had some talent, but there was something missing. Johnny had everything. Even when Johnny was a toddler, he could throw. Yes, sir, he was the one. Ted went to work on him right away. Ted would hit high pop-ups to his son in Oklahoma cornfields. Ted would have Johnny practice his throw to second base again and again and again until every throw landed on the corner of the bag. Johnny would always remember Saturdays, going with his father to Helms Grocery, buying a gallon of Neapolitan, and racing home to catch the
Game of the Week
on their black-and-white TV.

“There he is, John,” Ted would say, and he would point to the screen at Mickey Mantle, the great Yankees outfielder who had grown up in Oklahoma.

“I’m going to be a professional baseball player too,” Johnny would say.

“Yes, you are,” Ted said.

Johnny first alerted the world to his baseball destiny when he was in the second grade and the teacher asked the ubiquitous question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Johnny never could figure out why every other boy in the class offered what seemed to him mundane ambitions—policeman, fireman, teacher, farmer.
There was something about growing up in a small town, something comforting and confining all at once, something that Johnny Bench would spend his life celebrating but, even more, running away from. Johnny announced that he intended to play baseball for a living. And every school year—in school essays, in class speeches—Johnny would remind every teacher and every student in his class that his goals had not changed.

Ted started a youth baseball team—the Binger Bobcats—and he made Johnny his catcher. He made Johnny a catcher for practical reasons: that was the easiest route to the big leagues. There were never enough good catchers in this world. Johnny loved it. He was good at it. He would block balls thrown in the dirt and catch pop-ups behind home plate, and when he made those practiced throws to second base, eyes would bulge. “That boy of yours is gonna play in the big leagues,” people would say to Ted.

“Yes, he is,” Ted said.

None of it was easy, of course. The Benches were just getting by—Ted only had enough money to keep the Binger Bobcats going for a couple of years. When he ran out of sponsorship money, he drove Johnny twenty miles to Fort Cobb to play. When Ted could not drive him to Fort Cobb, Johnny and his brothers and friends played baseball games using Milnot milk cans as balls and broken bats sliced in half. And when brothers and friends were not around, Katie would watch in wonder as Johnny stood out in the driveway and, for hours at a time, threw chunks of gravel up in the air, and hit them with a chipped baseball bat.

Ted and Johnny talked so much about him playing in the big leagues that soon it became almost plain, mundane, like planning a family vacation. Johnny never doubted that he would play in the majors. When he was in school—Johnny would always remember this—he got a C in penmanship. It devastated him. For one thing, Johnny Bench did not get Cs in anything—he had to be a success in everything or else he felt like a failure. But more, much more, he
could not afford C-level penmanship. Johnny intended to sign a lot of autographs in his life.

So here’s what he did: Johnny went down to Ford McKinney’s Texaco station there in Binger, and he practiced signing autographs. Over and over again, Johnny would sign his name—rounding out the top of the J, making sure the H and two Ns were precisely the same height and width, adding an extra swirl in his B. He signed his name again and again, and then, when he had the letters just right, he started handing out his autographs to people around town. “Keep this,” he said. “I’m going to be famous.” He liked doing that so much that he did it again the next week. And then again. After a while, Ford McKinney had a shoe box full of Johnny Bench signatures. Years later, he would say he still had them around somewhere.

That was the Johnny Bench everyone in Binger knew: the cocky kid who signed autographs at the gas station and believed without a doubt that he would play major league baseball, and then he would be a major league star, and then he would marry the prettiest girl in the world. It had to happen that way. It was preordained. The Reds drafted Johnny in the second round in 1965 and offered him a measly six grand and some school tuition, a pretty insulting offer. But Reds scout Tony Robello knew just how to make the deal happen. He said: “John, if you make it, you will have more money than you could ever want.” That was something Johnny Bench understood. He signed the contract. He knew that he would make it.

He played the next year for the Class A Peninsula Grays in Newport News, Virginia, and from the start he was something to see. He hit long home runs—ten of them over the
HIT A HOMER HERE, WIN A FREE SUIT
sign—and he showed off his gun of an arm, and he told people, “Forget Babe Ruth. Remember Johnny Bench.” At the end of the year, in one of the quirkier moments in minor league baseball history, Peninsula actually retired Johnny Bench’s uniform number. Minor league teams did not retire uniform numbers for one-year players, but then, none of them had ever seen any
thing quite like him. Anyway, Johnny took it all in stride. Retire his jersey? Why not? He smiled and waved to the crowd and then took his ten free suits and went up to Triple A Buffalo. He played less than a year there and hit twenty-three more home runs. Then the Reds called him up to the big leagues. Johnny’s first day, he announced to the catchers on the team that he had not come to be anyone’s backup; he had come to be the new starter, he had come to be baseball’s biggest star, and they might as well know that right up front. They hated him immediately.

Hated him…but what could they say? Johnny may have been an arrogant little jerk off the field, but on the field he was Mozart. He wasn’t just playing baseball better than any of them; he was revolutionizing baseball. Catchers through the years had caught pitches with both hands, using the right hand to secure the baseball in the glove. The Chicago Cubs’ Randy Hundley, who made it to the big leagues a couple of years before Johnny, was the first major league catcher to catch one-handed. But Johnny Bench made one-handed catching an art form. He had huge hands—he could hold seven baseballs in one of them—and he would scoop pitches out of the dirt like he was a shortstop picking up a ground ball. He could get the ball from his glove to his throwing hand so fast, it seemed like a card trick. He moved like a dancer around the plate on bunts. And when he had a bat in his hand, he hit long home runs to left field.

There was something else about him too—maybe “conviction” is the right word. He knew better. There’s a story Johnny would tell often involving a pitcher named Gerry Arrigo. Johnny was a rookie, and Arrigo was pitching one day against the Dodgers. Arrigo was not throwing his fastball with any authority at all that day—as ballplayers say, he was throwing meatballs. Johnny kept signaling Arrigo to throw his curveball instead, only Arrigo kept shaking off those signals. Johnny walked out to the mound, told Arrigo that his fastball did not have any heat, and Arrigo told him to pipe down and get behind the plate. Johnny shrugged, went behind the plate, and called
for another curveball. Arrigo shook him off. Johnny called for the curveball again. Arrigo shook him off again. Then Johnny called for the fastball, Arrigo threw it, and Johnny reached out with his right hand and caught the ball barehanded.

“You should have seen his face,” Johnny said.

In a way, that was the look on all their faces when they saw Johnny Bench play ball. He won the Rookie of the Year Award. Then he started in the All-Star Game. In his third year, 1970, he had the greatest year a catcher ever had. He hit 45 home runs—that was a record for catchers. He had 148 RBIs—that was another record for catchers and would remain a record into the next century. That year only 62 brave souls tried to steal a base against him, and he threw out almost half of them. He carried the Reds to the World Series, and he was a phenomenon: the subject of a feature story in
Life
magazine, on the cover of
Sports Illustrated,
the fastest-rising star in the game.

Baseball stardom was not enough. Johnny sang in nightclubs. He went to Vietnam with Bob Hope. He met with presidents. He hosted his own television show. He became friends with stars, like the singer Bobby Goldsboro, who hit it big in 1968, during Bench’s rookie year, with a song called “Honey.” He dated models and a
Playboy
centerfold, and once took Miss World USA Lynda Carter to a golf tournament. It wasn’t a real date, but word got out. Lynda became pretty upset, come to think of it. She thought Johnny had leaked it. He scoffed. Johnny did not have to leak anything. He was the most famous baseball player in the world. In 1972, when he had a growth removed from his lung, he had received thousands of letters in the hospital. When he married Vickie, he received almost as many letters from brokenhearted women.

He was twenty-seven years old, and he had everything. And then, on this day in Cincinnati, everything changed. Fifth inning, scoreless game, San Francisco’s Chris Speier singled to left field with a runner named Gary Matthews on second base. Johnny stood at home plate and waited for Pete Rose to get the ball and throw it home.
Rose got to the ball, and he threw home—Rose did not have a strong arm. The ball slowly made its way to the plate, and so did Matthews, who was six-foot-three, weighed about two hundred pounds, and was called “Sarge.” Johnny could see that the baseball and Sarge were going to get to the plate at almost precisely the same time; he was in a tough spot. He wanted to catch the ball, get out of the way, and tag Matthews as he rushed by—nobody pulled that bullfighter maneuver better than Bench. But he did not have time. Instead, he stood in front of the plate, and he leaned forward to catch the ball, and he tried to protect himself. Sarge crashed into Johnny and sent him flying backward.

That’s when Johnny Bench felt a whole new kind of pain. It was sharp and biting and deep inside his left shoulder. He groaned. Then he got up—nobody, not even the people who hated Johnny Bench, ever questioned his toughness. He stayed in the game. He waited for the pain to go away. Only it did not go away. And what Johnny Bench did not know that day in Cincinnati was that the pain would subside, and it would recede, but it would never go away. He would play the rest of the 1975 baseball season in agony.

Bottom of the ninth inning, same game, and Joe Morgan danced off second base. The team was in the tank, but Joe was playing great. He felt great. He had spent the off-season punching a speed-bag every single day. “What are you, training to fight Muhammad Ali?” his pal Pete Rose sneered.

“Maybe I’ll knock you out,” Morgan said.

He felt fast. He felt light. Float like a butterfly. Sting like a bee. Baseballs cracked off his bat; the sound was louder than before. It seemed like every ground ball he hit scooted past a diving infielder. He saw the pitches so much more clearly; he had heard hitters talk about being in this zone where even the hardest fastballs seemed to be floating to the plate, as if underwater. Now he understood. He had
walked fifteen times in sixteen games. He had reached base every single game this season. He was on his way to something historic, a season for the ages. Only the rest of the guys were playing lousy.

“Come on,” he shouted after he hit his double and took his lead off second base. Tony Perez came to the plate. This was exactly the kind of situation Doggie loved: man on second base, see the ball, hit the ball. Only Doggie struck out—he wasn’t hitting worth a damn. Up stepped Geronimo, and Geronimo wasn’t hitting either, and Morgan just knew he was going to die at second base.

Then something happened, something even Joe Morgan with his brilliant sense of language had a hard time explaining. The game slowed down. He had this feeling of destiny. He knew what was going to happen before it happened. Joe watched San Francisco pitcher Charlie Williams throw the ball in the dirt, and the ball bounced off rookie catcher Marc Hill. It was a wild pitch, and Joe took off for third base. Only then, suddenly, he slowed, no, more, he almost stopped about twenty feet from third base. He watched Hill grab the ball, and he watched him look toward third, and then he watched him throw the ball. It was exactly as he saw it. Hill’s throw was wild, and it skipped past third base and into left field. Morgan raced around third and scored the winning run.