The Machine (28 page)

“Nothing,” Pete told Fisk the next time he came to the plate, and he said it with wonder in his voice. “The guy’s got nothing.”

The Red Sox could not score either, though they were having an easier time with Reds starter Don Gullett. In the second, they got two hits
and a walk, but failed to score when Dwight Evans was thrown out at the plate by Davey. In the third, Fisk hit a long fly ball to left that would have been a home run on another day; on this day, the ball died in the wind and was caught by George Foster on the warning track. In the sixth, the Red Sox loaded the bases, but then Cecil Cooper grounded into a double play to end the inning. The afternoon was cold and damp, and the game did not have much rhythm.

Then Yaz changed everything. George Foster led off the seventh inning with a single, and Davey followed with a low, sinking line drive that seemed a certain hit. The players in the Reds dugout jumped off the bench. The Reds would have runners on first and second, nobody out…only they saw Yaz charging. Yaz was playing left field again; he had moved out there to replace Jim Rice. And even though Carl Yastrzemski had slowed, even though he was no longer the man who, almost single-handedly, carried the “Impossible Dream” Red Sox of 1967 to the pennant, even though he felt a dull pain where his youth used to be, none of that mattered when he played left field at Fenway Park. Yaz was a cop, and left field was his beat. He knew every square foot, he recognized every small hump, and he made sense of every tiny ditch. He rushed in on Davey’s ball, and he dived for it, and he dropped his glove underneath the ball just as it was about to hit the ground. It wasn’t just a great catch…it was a knockout. “He knows how to play left field in this park,” Joe would say afterward with grudging appreciation. The Reds did not score the entire game.

And in the bottom of the inning, Luis Tiant—who had not gotten a hit in a major league game since 1972—lashed a single past Pete Rose at third base. The Reds were doomed. Boston scored six runs in the inning, the first by El Tiante himself. He was so surprised by his own good fortune that he actually missed home plate. Tony had the ball at the time, and Davey shouted to him,
“Throw home! He missed the plate!”
But Fenway Park was so loud and chaotic that Doggie did not hear him, and Tiant rushed back and stomped on the plate to make it count.

After the game, the men of the Machine sounded defiant and bitter, like men who had been hustled in Times Square but still could not quite believe it. “It wasn’t difficult,” Bench griped to reporters who kept asking how hard it was to face Tiant on a day like this.

“That’s the weakest five-hitter I’ve ever seen,” Sparky said.

“All he has is a lot of legs and arms,” Ken Griffey said.

“I saw him perfect,” Pete said. “I wish I could say he was great, but he wasn’t. We hit the ball hard all day.”

It was the loser’s lament. Sparky could not sleep all night. He wondered—he could not help but wonder—if maybe something did happen to the Reds in the World Series, if maybe they did lose a touch of their invincibility, if maybe there was a little something missing. It made him angry to think about it. And it made him sad.

“I was told this was a seven-game series,” Sparky told the reporters. “We’ve been beaten before. The only thing they’ve won is one game…. If they think they’re playing a bunch of lambs, they better wait until it’s over.”

October 12, 1975

BOSTON
REDS VS. RED SOX

World Series Game 2

Johnny Bench sneered. That wasn’t like him. He always played baseball with that placid look, a hint of a smile, like he knew something—like he knew that he was better than you, and there was no point in making a big deal about it. But now, ninth inning, he stepped into the box, and he kicked at the dirt and glared at Boston pitcher Bill Lee, and he most definitely sneered. The Reds trailed
in the game 2–1. The air was still heavy from the rain. “Here’s what I think about Boston,” Pete said in the dugout (he was practicing for reporters). “The lobster’s good, but the weather’s worthless.”

The Reds had scored one run in seventeen innings. It was confusing. “We need something good to happen,” Pete said to third-base umpire George Maloney, and they did. The Machine simply could not get going. Bill Lee had tied them up all night—Bill Lee and the lousy weather. Rain stopped the game for twenty-seven minutes. The Red Sox scored the go-ahead run after Davey botched a ground ball. “We’re playing like a bunch of chumps,” Pete said.

For two whole games, the Reds had not managed to hit the Green Monster even one time. And when Johnny sneered, everyone on the Red Sox knew that was precisely what he intended to do—hit a ball over the Green Monster. “I thought he would be trying to pull the ball,” Yaz would write in his newspaper column the next day. Everyone thought that. Boston center fielder Fred Lynn took a few steps to his right. And Bill Lee, seeing that sneer, tried to trick Johnny Bench. He threw his first pitch about two inches outside…he expected Bench to try to hit it over the Wall, and he would end up coming over the ball and hitting a nice routine ground ball to short.

Only this was the thing: they had all misread the sneer. Johnny knew exactly what everyone was thinking, and he had no intention of trying to hit the ball off the Wall. He waited for the outside pitch, and then he whacked it to right field. The pull hitter went the other way. There was nobody there—right fielder Dwight Evans had shifted so far left that he was not even in the television picture when the ball landed. Bench rounded first, then headed into second base with a double. When he got to the bag, he felt the baseball whack him in the head—Dwight Evans’s throw had gotten away and bounced up and hit him. He glared at Evans. Then he turned around, reached into his pocket, and pulled out his batting glove. For reasons all his own, Johnny liked to wear a batting glove when he was on the bases.
He did not smile. He did not clap. He had this look that said, simply, “Okay, now it’s time to play like men.”

Red Sox manager Darrell Johnson walked out to the mound and called for Dick Drago, Boston’s meanest-looking relief pitcher. Drago had a dark mustache and intense eyes, and he was known all around baseball for being one of the loudest and most ruthless name-callers in the game. He was a tough guy from Toledo who would come into games, throw hard and heavy fastballs, and dare you to hit them.

Doggie stepped in, and he could only manage to hit a soft ground ball to short. That did move Johnny to third, though, with only one out. George Foster stepped into the box, and he needed only to hit a reasonably long fly ball to score Johnny and tie the game. Pete and Joe stood on the top step of the dugout, and they screamed at Drago. Then, just as Drago was about to pitch, George did what he loved to do. He held up his hand and stepped out of the batter’s box.

“It makes pitchers mad,” George had said, and he was right—the move did infuriate many pitchers. But Drago was not the type. He rolled his eyes. They battled, Drago threw his hardest stuff, George fouled off one, then two, then three pitches. “He’s really blowing those fastballs,” the announcer Joe Garagiola said to the television audience. Drama. The air was so cold, the audience could see Drago’s breath. Foster wiggled his black bat. Drago threw another hard fastball. Foster fouled it back again.

“This is great stuff,” Garagiola said. And it was great…only baseball among the sports could give you this kind of odd tension, the breathless suspense, where nothing much was happening at all. This was Alfred Hitchcock’s bomb theory come to life. The British film director James Blue had asked Hitchcock, the great filmmaker, about suspense.

Hitchcock, instead, talked baseball:

He said: “Four people are sitting around a table, talking about baseball, five minutes of it, very dull. Suddenly a bomb goes off. Blows the people to smithereens. What does the audience have? Ten
seconds of shock. Now take the same scene. Tell the audience there’s a bomb under the table, and it will go off in five minutes. Well, the emotion of the audience is different because you give them the information that in five minutes’ time, the bomb will go off.”

Hitchcock hated baseball. But nobody ever explained it better. The beauty of baseball was in the suspense of the moment, the suspense of an angry-looking pitcher and loud man from Ohio glaring at a Bible-reading and soft-spoken man from Alabama with a black bat in his hands. Everyone knew Drago would throw the hardest fastball he could throw. Everyone knew Foster would swing as hard as he could swing.

Drago stepped on the rubber and got ready to pitch, and then Foster did it again. He stepped out. This time, Drago looked away in disgust. Only now, he decided to pull off a little trick of his own. When Foster stepped back into the batter’s box, Drago set up to pitch, and suddenly, unexpectedly, he shook his head to catcher Carlton Fisk. He shook his head? Why? Catchers signal what pitch they want thrown, of course, but Drago was throwing only one pitch all game—his fastball. It was his best pitch, his only pitch for a moment like this. But now he shook off Fisk. Was he going to try to trick Foster? Was he going to throw a curveball or some sort of sloppy slow stuff and get Foster off balance? No? Well, then, why was he shaking off the signal from Fisk? These are the games between batters and pitchers—one steps out of the box, another shakes off a signal, everyone trying to get in everyone’s head.

Then Drago pitched. A fastball, of course. Foster swung hard and hit a high pop-up that was blowing back to the infield. Yaz ran up and kept running and caught the ball just beyond where the shortstop stood. It was not deep enough to score Johnny Bench. Foster had failed. There were two outs. The Reds were almost dead.

Davey Concepcion stepped up, and he crossed himself like he always did. Here it was again: his chance to be a hero. He looked small in the
moment. He was listed at six-foot-one, but standing next to the six-foot-two Fisk, he looked like someone’s little brother. Everyone stood at Fenway Park, stood and screamed, a wall of sound. Drago threw his fastball, and Davey was overwhelmed. Strike. There seemed no way that Davey could hit that fastball. He would have to swing before Drago even let go of the ball. Drago threw another fastball, which was just high. “That was the hardest one he’s thrown all night,” announcer Dick Stockton said. The cheers became wails.

Davey tapped the bat on the ground and waited. Drago wound up again, and he threw his hardest fastball yet, only this time Davey’s bat flashed. He chopped the ball into the ground, and it bounced up high. Boston’s second baseman, Denny Doyle, got a good jump on the ball, he ran hard to the right, he backhanded the ball, and he turned to throw to first base. Only Davey was already on the bag. Johnny Bench had already scored. The game was tied. And Doyle put the ball back in his own glove. Fenway was almost silent.

The run changed the complexion of the game and the Series. Something good had happened. Now Davey Concepcion stole second base (though he came into the bag with such force that he slid right over it; Boston shortstop Rick Burleson should have been able to tag out Davy, but he was too busy arguing with the umpire). Then Ken Griffey was at the plate—he was still hitting seventh in the lineup—and he could not wait for Drago’s fastball. Griffey loved fastballs. Curveballs and sliders and knuckleballs still bothered him. But the harder the fastball, the more Ken liked it. He fouled off a couple of Drago’s pitches, and then he whacked a ball to the gap in left-center. Davey scored. Griffey eased into second with a double. That was the first time the whole Series that a Reds player had hit a ball that reached the Green Monster.

Rawly Eastwick finished the job in the ninth. Sparky marveled—Eastwick did not look nervous at all. Rawly got Rick Burleson to hit a foul
ball that Griffey caught. Pinch hitter Bernie Carbo, a player Sparky had managed and nurtured, lashed a hard line drive to left field, but George Foster was there to catch it. And then Cecil Cooper hit a very high pop-up to shortstop. Sparky breathed out…he felt like he had been holding his breath for five innings. Then he looked out on the field, and he could not quite believe what he saw. He saw Davey circling under the ball. And he saw Pete Rose running toward him yelling.

And this is what Pete was yelling: “Catch that ball, Bozo! You better catch it! You’re the hero if you catch it!”

Pete was yelling so loud, and he was so close to Davey, and then the wind pushed the ball toward home plate. Davey had to take three steps forward, and Pete had to jump out of the way just to avoid a collision. Davey caught it. He glared for a second at Pete. And the Big Red Machine celebrated. Now, finally, they were going home.

“We have men in this clubhouse,” Sparky said. “There are no crybabies here.”

October 14, 1975

CINCINNATI
REDS VS. RED SOX

World Series Game 3
Series tied 1–1

Ed Armbrister sat in the Reds clubhouse after the game, and he was surrounded by reporters. He was the hero, the World Series hero, only it wasn’t at all what he expected.

“That’s destiny, mon,” he said.

Destiny involved a simple play, one of the simplest and oldest plays in baseball. It happened in the tenth inning, tie score. The Reds’ first batter was Cesar Geronimo; he got a big cheer because he had made a great catch in the tenth on a long fly ball hit by Yaz. “You sit and
watch ball games year after year,” Curt Gowdy said on TV. “How many times when that player makes a great play in the field does he come in to lead off the inning?” It was a classic baseball question, one that mathematicians tackled later. Their conclusion: it happened about one in nine times.

Geronimo lashed a hard ground ball into center field for a base hit. And Sparky sent Ed Armbrister up to sacrifice-bunt Geronimo to second base. There was no mystery about it. For as long as people had played baseball, they had bunted runners from one base to the next. Armbrister was not especially skilled at this; he had only one sacrifice bunt all season. But Sparky had come to believe that Armbrister was the man to call when he needed small favors. The Boston infielders moved close to the plate. Everyone was ready.