The Machine (30 page)

All of his teammates knew that nothing ever got to Doggie, that he was the Big Dog, impervious to pressure, invulnerable to slumps,
the man you wanted at the plate when the game was on the line. Everyone remembered Dave Bristol’s famous line: “Sooner or later, if the game lasts long enough, the Big Dog will win it.”

That was the man Doggie expected to be. He loved baseball. He loved being around his teammates, loved to start fights with them, loved to coax them into starting fights with each other. He loved being respected, being the Big Dog—it was so much bigger than any of the dreams he had in Cuba. But in the end, he had to hit. He had to drive in runs. He had to come through in the biggest moments. That’s what made it work. That’s what made him the Big Dog.

He tried to look calm. But Pituka could see through him. She made him drive to the ballpark a different way on that Thursday just to change his luck. “Which way?” he asked her. Pituka said she did not care as long as it was different. He drove down Columbia Parkway in their Oldsmobile Toronado. And Doggie said to her: “I hope I bat fifth tonight. There are no hits for me in the fourth spot.” He sounded down.

When Sparky got to the ballpark, Sparky was waiting for him.

“Hey, Doggie, I looked it up,” Sparky said.

“You looked up what?”

“You only need a few more at-bats and you’re gonna set the World Series record,” Sparky said. “Gil Hodges went oh-for-twenty-one in the 1952 World Series. What are you now? Oh-for-seventeen? Eighteen?”

“Fourteen, Sparky,” Doggie said, and he tried not to smile.

“Doggie, do yourself a favor and don’t get a hit for the rest of the World Series. You know those two little boys of yours, Victor and Eduardo? If you don’t get a hit, they can tell their kids someday that Grandpa set a World Series record that nobody ever touched. Whadya say, Doggie? You gonna do it?”

“I don’t want that record,” Doggie said.

“You don’t know what you’re saying. Here you are with a chance at the all-time record, and you’re turning your back on it?”

Doggie walked back into the clubhouse, and there was Pete, and he said: “So, am I gonna have to carry your sorry ass again today, Big Dog?”

And there was Joe: “Hey, Doggie, I’ve been telling you all this time. You’re nothing but an old Cuban, and you’re all washed up. You can’t even hit that American League pitching.”

And there was Doggie, in the middle of it all, shouting: “I don’t want that record. I want some hits.” He looked at the lineup card in the dugout. He was hitting fifth. And all of a sudden, he had that feeling. This was going to be a good night. He came up to face Boston’s Reggie Cleveland in the second inning. He struck out on three pitches.

The next time Doggie came to the plate, it was the fourth inning and the Reds trailed 1–0, and Johnny Bench had just smashed a line drive down the third-base line that Rico Petrocelli leaped and caught. The Red Sox were making every play. The Reds players were beginning to wonder about destiny.

“I’ll tell you what,” Pete said to his lifelong friend Don Zimmer, who was coaching third for the Red Sox. “I don’t know if we’re going to win this thing. But if we do, we’ll be beating some battling bastards.”

Doggie stepped in, and Cleveland pitched. It was a curveball. And it was not just any curveball—it was a hanging curveball, hanging like a piñata, hanging like a chandelier, hanging like the sorts of pitches that the Big Dog saw in his sleep. If he missed this pitch, well, then maybe it was not meant to be, maybe he was cursed by the fates, or maybe it was simply time to pay back for all the good fortune he’d had in his life.

He did not miss the pitch.

Doggie crushed the ball to left field—you could tell just by the way Cleveland’s neck snapped as he tried to follow the ball that it was gone. Doggie ran to first base and clapped his hands happily, his only sign
of emotion. Then he jogged easily around the bases while everyone in Riverfront stood for him. After he touched home plate, he jogged straight to the Reds dugout, and they were all waiting for him, all his friends, all those sons of bitches who tortured him. Pete was first, and he slapped Doggie on the butt and grabbed him by the neck and shouted, “You are the Big Dog!” Joe had the biggest smile on his face. Davey hugged him. And Sparky was in the middle of it, and he said: “You blew your chance, Doggie. You blew your chance at setting the all-time record.”

“No more talk about the record,” Tony said. “No more.”

Joe led off the sixth inning with a walk, and then he went to work on Boston’s Reggie Cleveland. He took an enormous lead at first base. He taunted Cleveland. The Reds led the game 2–1, and Joe had a feeling. It was time to take over. It was time to get in Reggie Cleveland’s head.

Cleveland threw over to first base. Then he threw over there again. And he threw again. And again. A fifth time. A sixth. He threw over to first base a seventh time. It was mesmerizing and boring all at once. The crowd began to boo, but their booing did not seem angry. It was as if they were mocking Cleveland too. Throw over as much as you want, he’s
still
going to steal second base. Here it was, finally, that Big Red Machine arrogance that had been missing the whole World Series. Cleveland threw over to first base an eighth time.

Joe loved it. He kept taking a bigger and bigger lead. After Cleveland finally threw a pitch to Johnny—“Finally, he let Johnny in on the action,” Curt Gowdy told the TV audience—he threw over to first base four more times. That made twelve total. He threw another pitch, and then threw over to first base five more times. Astonishing. He threw to first base seventeen times in all, surely a World Series record, though, for good reason, nobody keeps up with such things. Then Cleveland threw a pitch to Johnny Bench, who hit a routine
ground ball to the second baseman, what looked like a double-play grounder…only Red Sox second baseman Denny Doyle wasn’t there. He had been so bluffed by Joe Morgan’s base-stealing threat that he vacated his spot and moved toward second base. The ball scooted behind Doyle and into right field. Doyle kicked the ground, Morgan ran to third, and Bench ran to second after Dwight Evans made a wild throw.

And Doggie walked up to the plate. The crowd cheered. The hitless stretch was over. He was the Big Dog. He fouled off a pitch that barely reached the seats. He fouled off another pitch. He fouled off a third, and this time it looked like Carlton Fisk would have a chance—Fisk chased madly after the ball, and then he dived into the dugout area where all the photographers snapped pictures. The ball landed just out of his reach.

And then Reggie Cleveland tried to throw another breaking ball, and he left it up again. Hanging. And again, Tony Perez did not miss. He smashed the ball high into the left-field stands. He ran around the bases easily, coolly, the way he had a couple hundred times before. The Reds won. They were one game away from being World Champs.

“Tony Perez was not in a slump,” Pete told reporters afterward. “He just didn’t get any hits. Big difference. With Doggie, that’s a big difference.”

October 21, 1975

BOSTON
REDS VS. RED SOX

World Series Game 6
Reds lead the Series 3–2

One of the greatest games in baseball history was delayed by three days because of rain. Three days of rain might have killed the nation’s
appetite for baseball, but for some strange reason it did precisely the opposite. The rain was like Hitchcock’s bomb under the table…everyone waited anxiously, nervously, for the bomb to go off.

In Oakland, manager Alvin Dark got himself fired. It was considered impolite to fire a manager during the World Series when everyone’s attention was supposed to be focused on the big games, but this was something of an emergency. Dark had gone in front of a congregation at a Pentecostal church and preached that his team’s owner, Charlie O. Finley, was going to hell unless he mended his ways. Well, you had to admit, it was a bold move. Finley fired him immediately. When asked for comment, Finley said he had asked his mother and she did not think he would go to hell.

“And,” Finley added, “she knows more about those things than Alvin Dark.”

Umpire Larry Barnett had his life threatened again, this time by telegram, and it was taken seriously enough that his family was being guarded around the clock. A few columnists made the point that sports in America were being taken too seriously.

The Reds went to work out at Tufts University. They had been offered a chance to work out at Harvard, but Sparky said: “I understand they’ve grown pretty radical over there…and I’m a conservative.” The only trouble with Tufts was that nobody knew where it was, and the Reds got lost on the way out there. The team bus stopped for directions, and players in full uniform walked into the gas station—service station, it was called in 1975—and asked for help. “That had to blow the guy’s mind,” Pete would say. Mind blown or not, the owner’s directions did not get them to Tufts. The next time, the bus stopped at a bakery.

When they got to Tufts, Sparky watched the workout, and he sounded happy. “The human mind is a very, very funny thing,” he told Red Smith. “If they were sitting around looking at the rain, pretty soon they’d be thinking about the sixth game coming up. Now
they’re running around, having fun, and not worrying about anything.

“This is a gimmick. And I like gimmicks. Life is a gimmick, for that matter, until the big guy upstairs sends the word.”

Sparky Anderson was happy. It even surprised him. Maybe it was because he saw his team, the real Machine, emerge in the last game. Maybe it was because he finally felt that destiny had turned. But, no, it was something else, something personal. Sparky sat down with Dave Kindred, the young newspaper columnist from Louisville, and opened up. He told Kindred all about the fight he had been having with his son Lee.

“There was no way I could win,” Sparky said. He told Dave that the fight had been over the length of Lee’s hair. He talked about how it had broken up his family, and how his wife had asked him if he would stand by his son if he committed murder. “Of course I would,” Sparky had said. And then he thought about it, and it all made sense to him.

Sparky said: “When we had argued there in the garage [a year earlier], I told him, ‘Someday you’ll respect me as your father.’ And he said: ‘I already do respect you.’ I didn’t understand how he could say that and still have the long hair.

“I was being the child, and Lee was being the man. I wasn’t man enough to father my own son.”

Dave Kindred realized something: this was not Sparky Anderson talking. No, there was no show here. There was nothing behind his words. He was not looking to motivate, not looking to teach, not looking to entertain. This was George Anderson, who had scrapped for everything his whole life, who had made the major leagues though he could not hit, who had managed games with such fury that he drove himself out of the game, who had sold cars for Milt Blish when
baseball seemed lost, who had come back to manage the best damned team that had ever been put together.

“I always hid my feelings before,” Sparky said. “But now…we’re together. That’s all he wanted. Affection.”

And what George Anderson did not say, could not say, not in the middle of the World Series, was this: that was all he wanted too.

By the time the rain finally subsided and they played Game 6, anticipation was frenzied. Scalpers—if you could find any around Fenway Park—were asking for $60 and $70 dollars per ticket, about ten times street value. More people around the country huddled around their televisions than had ever watched a baseball game. It was delicious. Here were the Red Sox, destiny’s punch line, a team that had not won a World Series since 1918, when World War I was raging and a young pitcher and outfielder named Babe Ruth hit eleven of the team’s fifteen home runs. For almost sixty years after that, the Red Sox came to represent something heroic and doomed: brilliant possibilities and inevitable disappointment. The Red Sox won the pennant in ’46, after Ted Williams came home from war, but they lost to the St. Louis Cardinals in a heart-wrenching seventh game of the World Series. In ’48, the Red Sox tied Cleveland for the pennant and then lost to the Indians in a one-game playoff. In ’49, they lost the last two games of the year to the ever-present Yankees and lost the pennant with it. In ’67, carried by Yaz and a sense of providence, they won the pennant again. And they lost to the Cardinals one more time in a heart-wrenching seventh game of the World Series. Yale professor and Red Sox fan A. Bartlett Giamatti—who would, late in his life, have his own sad waltz with Pete Rose—summed up the cursed voyage of Red Sox fans with his eleven-word summation of baseball: “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.”

And here were the Cincinnati Reds, remarkable and coarse and emotional and family and Machine, a team that spoke for the heart
land. Here were the Reds, baseball’s first professional team, the best team in baseball for five years running, but still uncrowned, still uncertain of where they belonged.

In the bottom of the inning, Gary Nolan tried to sneak a fastball past Fred Lynn and failed: Lynn crushed a long, three-run homer to center field. And that was how it began, this four-hour-one-minute game that would leave everyone spent, would get players babbling, and would set off church bells. The Red Sox led 3–0.

Luis Tiant started for the Red Sox, and for a while he was as elusive as ever. In the second inning, he struck out Doggie. In the third, he struck out Geronimo, and in the fourth he struck out Bench again. Johnny was in agony. His shoulder hurt, he had an awful cold, and he was ready to end his marriage and become an eligible bachelor again. Vickie was already telling people about their wedding night: she said that after the guests had been fed and the dancing had been done, Johnny had slipped away to play a new video game called “Pong” with his friends. When she later told this to Tom Callahan, a mistake was made by editors, and it was reported that Johnny Bench had played Ping-Pong with friends on his wedding night.