The Machine (12 page)

“Let me just say this: Driessen can hit,” Bench told the
Sports Illustrated
reporter who had come to do a story on Driessen, a story with the headline “Reds Rookie Is a Tough Cookie.”

Rose was even more astonished, and he offered the greatest compliment he could ever offer another man.

“He hits about like me,” Rose said.

Oh, Danny Boy could hit, but boy, Danny could not field. Sparky tried him at third base in 1973 and 1974, but he was so bad there that even Sparky couldn’t put up with his defense. The Reds lost one game because Danny simply forgot to step on the base for the third out. The Reds lost when baseballs comically skidded between his legs. Danny looked like a natural first baseman; that was the biggest reason why the Reds had tried to trade Tony Perez. But Doggie was back at first base again (“You no take my job,” Doggie had told Danny with that smile on his face). There was no place to play Danny, and it drove Sparky mad. “Who would you rather have hit with the bases loaded, Danny or Vukovich?” he asked reporters repeatedly. That was
the genius of this move. Pete Rose would go to third base. Danny Driessen would go to left field. The Reds would take off.

And the move was indeed genius…though Sparky had the wrong reason. It would not be Danny Driessen who turned around the Reds’ season. There was someone else—a right-handed hitter who didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t fool around, a powerful-looking man who read the Bible every day and quietly stewed on the bench. George Foster prayed daily for a chance. And he was about to get that chance.

May 3, 1975

CINCINNATI
REDS VS. BRAVES

Team record: 12–12

“You were born at the wrong time, Pete,” Tom Callahan would tell Pete Rose. Callahan understood that feeling of being from a generation not quite your own. Callahan wrote the sports column for the
Cincinnati Enquirer,
and he was still young, just twenty-seven. He felt older. He felt like he should have written columns long before, when sports titans walked the earth, when Babe Ruth hit colossal home runs for sick children, when Luis Firpo knocked Jack Dempsey through the ropes of the boxing ring, when Red Grange scored five touchdowns and passed for a sixth against Michigan. Maybe that’s why Callahan felt himself drawn to Pete. Rose played like he belonged to another time—he ran to first base on walks, he brazenly slid into second base to break up double plays, he showed up every day with this feverish enthusiasm that came right out of the 1920s.

“You know who loves you, Pete?” Joe Morgan would say all the time. “Women who are in their eighties. Those are your fans.
Because you play like the ballplayers they used to watch when they were young.”

Of course, lots of guys played baseball like the old-time players. But Pete, he lived like old-time players, he seemed to live in that mythical simpler time, when ballplayers ate steaks every night (Rose had his medium rare with a baked potato and iced tea) and signed autographs for kids (Bench grew tired of signing autographs; Rose never did) and sneaked girls up into their rooms (Pete was never especially coy about it) and loved the game unconditionally. Whenever Callahan wanted to find Rose after a game, he would go to Pete’s house and find him sitting in his car and listening to a West Coast game on the radio. Whenever Callahan wanted to find Pete on an off-day, he would just go to the track—Pete always loved going to bet on the horses and the dogs at the track. Pete loved the action, sure, but beyond that he seemed to love the smoke and haze and whiskey and shady characters and old gamblers and lost money. Pete didn’t smoke or drink himself—fast cars, fast women, and fast horses were enough vice for him—but he still liked being around the smoke and gin.

He loved old stories. Waite Hoyt was a hard-drinking old Yankees pitcher who knew the Babe and Ty Cobb and all the rest of those old baseball greats. He had also been a radio announcer for the Reds back in the early 1970s, and Pete would talk to him for hours. Pete would ask him to repeat the same stories again and again. Later, Callahan would hear Pete tell those stories, word for word, facial expression for facial expression. It was eerie. A few year later, when Pete Rose was chasing Ty Cobb’s record for most hits, the
New York Times
sportswriter Dave Anderson asked Rose how much he really knew about Ty Cobb. Rose, being Rose, indelicately answered, “I know everything about Ty Cobb except the size of his cock.”

Of course, the
New York Times
—“the Old Gray Lady”—could not report it quite that way. So the quote was delicately repackaged like so: “I know everything about Ty Cobb except the size of his hat.” Rose was furious. He knew damn well that Cobb’s hat size was 7
⁵
/
₈
.
This was Kentucky Derby day, and Pete Rose did not wake up thinking about playing third base. No, he woke up thinking about Foolish Pleasure, the superhorse that was running that day at Churchill Downs. Rose prided himself on being able to pick the Kentucky Derby winner. As it turned out, he was absolutely right: Foolish Pleasure would win the Derby, passing Avatar and Diabolo, who would bump into each other down the stretch. Pete would win some money on that. Then, like a guy snapping out of a dream, he remembered that he was playing third base that day for the first time in almost ten years.

He picked up the phone and called George Scherger.

“Sugar Bear,” he said, “what are you doing today?”

“Thought I’d go fishing,” Scherger said.

“Naw. Why don’t you come out to the ballpark and hit me some ground balls at third base?”

“Damn it, Pete,” Scherger said. “What time?”

“Early. How about one
P.M
.?”

“Damn it, Pete,” Scherger said, and he hung up the phone. He’d be there, of course.

Sparky considered calling Bob Howsam to tell him that he would play Pete Rose at third base. He decided against it. For one thing, he was the manager of the team. He had to be allowed to run the team the way he knew how. As the old line goes, it’s always easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

Second, though, he was desperate. Sparky tried to hide this from everyone, but the Holiday Inn manager, Jeff Ruby, could see it in his friend’s face. Sparky had convinced himself that if he did not do something, something drastic, this team would lose, and he would get canned. “They’ll fire me in a heartbeat, bubula,” Sparky said over breakfast. Ruby thought Sparky was being a bit melodramatic, and he said, “They’d never fire you, Sparky.” But worry creased Sparky’s face.
The Reds had lost as many as they had won, they trailed the Dodgers by four games (and were even behind the Atlanta Braves—the stinking Braves!). Sparky knew he had the best team going. But he also knew that the best teams sometimes faltered, and then managers got thrown out on the street.

Sparky watched Pete take some ground balls before the game. He looked okay. He wasn’t smooth, he wasn’t agile, and, of course, Howsam was right about his weak arm. But Sparky had to believe that Pete would work hard enough; he would not embarrass himself over there.

“What’s news, Sparky?” That was Chief Bender, the Reds’ director of the minor leagues. Chief was a good baseball man—he’d been in the game for twenty-five years. There had been a good pitcher known as “Chief Bender” in the early part of the century, and Chief was often confused for him. He didn’t seem to mind. He never tired of baseball. He went to a game every day—major league game, minor league game, it didn’t matter. He had to be around it.

“I’m playing Rose at third today,” Sparky said.

Chief’s face reddened. He looked hard at Sparky, as if he was trying to determine if he had just heard an inscrutable joke. Sparky was not joking.

“Well,” Chief began slowly, “Bob’s in Arizona.”

“Chief, I’m gonna tell you something,” Sparky said, and there was a bit of snap in his voice now. “It doesn’t matter where Bob is. You know we haven’t won yet, and we’re starting off slow this year. I look at it this way: it’s me or nothing right now. I’m gonna play him at third base.”

Chief gave Sparky that hard look again. Then he sort of shrugged and walked off. It was Sparky’s funeral.

Ralph Garr was Atlanta’s leadoff batter that night. He was fast, and he had slapped and run his way to a .353 batting average in 1974, the best
batting average in the National League. Garr had a unique talent for hitting baseballs precisely where he wanted to hit them. He saw Pete Rose at third base, and he smiled.

Up in the radio booth, Reds announcer Marty Brennaman watched closely. Sparky had told Marty that Rose would play third base, but Marty did not believe him. Now he was out there. Marty watched as Garr cracked a ground ball to third. Rose took a step to his left, kind of lost his footing, grabbed the ball, stumbled slightly again, steadied himself, threw the ball across the diamond. “He got him,” Marty told his radio listeners. “How about that Pete Rose?”

The Reds won the game 6–1. Gary Nolan pitched nine innings and allowed only one run—his best pitching performance since he came back from the shoulder surgery. Pete had a key hit, and he did not make a single error. Sparky had this feeling that everything was about to change.

Early the next morning, at his second home in Arizona, Bob Howsam picked up his morning newspaper and saw what he thought was a misprint. The box score showed Pete Rose playing third base. He called up Chief Bender.

“I see Rose at third,” he said. “That’s a mistake, isn’t it?”

“No, Bob,” Chief said. “Sparky put him at third base.”

“Oh, my God,” Howsam said.

May 4, 1975

CINCINNATI
REDS VS. BRAVES

Team record: 13–12

Every few years, people would widely decide that baseball was about to die as the national pastime. This was one of those times in America. The nation was changing—for the better, for the worse,
nobody knew—but people seemed to agree that baseball moved too slow for a modern America. “Baseball is in trouble,” said James J. Kilpatrick, the man on the right in the point-counterpoint segment of the television news show
60 Minutes.
“It’s too old-fashioned and needs some rule changes to make the game more exciting.” It was pretty jarring to have Kilpatrick—the traditionalist who was only beginning to come around on desegregation—call a sport “too old-fashioned.”

But that was the popular opinion in 1975. Baseball was a sport of the past. And football—professional football specifically—was the sport of the time. Football had everything that baseball lacked—violence, danger, a ticking clock. Comedian George Carlin, who had gained some fame after being arrested for performing his “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” routine in Milwaukee, traveled around with a new routine about baseball and football.

“You know football wants to be the number-one sport,” he told audiences. “And I think it already is, because football represents what we are. Europe Jr. We play Europe’s game. What was Europe’s game? That’s right. ‘Let’s take their land away from them.’…Ground acquisition. And that’s what football is. Football is a ground acquisition game. You knock the crap out of eleven guys and take their land away from them.”

Then he itemized a few of the differences between baseball and football. Football, he said, is technological. Baseball is pastoral. Football is played in a stadium, baseball in a park. In football you wear a helmet, in baseball you wear a cap. In football you get a penalty, in baseball you make an error (“Whoops!” Carlin would shout). It was a great bit, but it was more than that. America was not the same country it had been twenty years earlier, before civil rights, before two Kennedys were assassinated, before Vietnam, before Kent State, before Watergate. Carlin wondered, lots of people wondered, if America had the patience for a pastoral game played in a park. He wondered if baseball was as outdated as candy kitchens and ice-cream socials.

The people who ran baseball worried too. “I think you will see teams disappearing in the near future,” the baseball commissioner and acting voice of doom, Bowie Kuhn, told reporters. Kuhn was always predicting the end of the world, but he had a point. The economy was troubled. The nation was changing. Baseball responded with Tootsie Rolls.

The first
Baseball Encyclopedia
—all 2,338 pages—was published in 1969. It weighed more than six pounds, and it was exorbitantly priced at $25, but it was a marvel. It was the first book to have the statistics of every single player in the history of professional baseball. The
Baseball Encyclopedia
set free the minds of many baseball fans across America, and one of those was a college student named Mark Sackler. He decided, for fun, to take a mechanical calculator and total precisely how many runs had been scored in the history of the game. He found that more than one million runs had been scored, and he thought that was interesting. And he forgot about it.

A few years later, he got his first electronic calculator, and he decided to add up all the runs scored again. This time, though, he only added up the American and National Leagues—he did not worry about the runs scored in the Federal League and the Union Association and all the other defunct leagues. He found something interesting: the one millionth run would be scored in baseball in 1975. He was working in radio then, and he got together with a promoter, and they tried to sell the one-millionth-run idea as a big celebration for baseball. At first, they tried to get McDonald’s to sponsor the event, but McDonald’s owner Ray Kroc was ambivalent about baseball. He owned the perennially ghastly San Diego Padres, and he was not especially happy about it. He had paid $12 million for the team, and in his first game as an owner—the first game of the 1974 season—he raced up to the press box in the eighth inning, grabbed the public-address microphone, and shouted: “I have never seen such
stupid ball-playing in all my life.” McDonald’s did not get behind the one-millionth-run promotion.

But the Tootsie Roll people did. They felt like it was time to expand the company. Tootsie Roll, like baseball, had been around since the turn of the century, and like baseball, the candy reflected another time. In 1896, a man named Leo Hirshfield opened a small candy shop in New York, and he created small chocolate-flavored rolls that he sold for a penny apiece. He named the candy after the nickname he had for his daughter Clara—he called her Tootsie.