Authors: Joe Posnanski
And with that, Sparky put down his fork, like he had been waiting for the question all along. And he said: “Bubula, I’ll tell you exactly what’s going to happen. Now they’re all going to find out what a real genius I am.”
June 18, 1975
CINCINNATI
REDS VS. BRAVES
Team record: 39–26
First place by two and a half games
“Businessman Special” in Cincinnati.
Bob Howsam came up with the nutty idea to bring back afternoon games for those fans who wanted a little old-fashioned weekday baseball. He had this image in his mind of a stadium filled with men in business suits, all of them wearing hats, like it was 1938 all over again.
“A baseball game is like a Broadway show,” he would say in interview after interview. Yes, it was all a show, and that was why he insisted on the players wearing uniforms precisely the same way, why he would never allow his catchers to stand in the on-deck circle while wearing their shin guards (“It just looks terrible,” he told Sparky), why the Cincinnati Reds batters were never to be seen wearing their baseball caps underneath their batting helmets. It was all a show, and it had to be precise.
“He treats us like we’re a fucking chorus line” is how Johnny Bench described it. And there was something to that: Howsam had this image in his mind, this brilliant image of what baseball in Cincinnati should look like. And the more other teams spiraled away from that image, the more certain he felt that the Reds stood for something bigger than baseball.
For years, the “Businessman Special” crowds in Cincinnati were sparse and grumpy—it was a fine idea in theory, but in reality few people really had the freedom in the 1970s to knock off work and head out to the ballpark. Plus, it was damned hot and humid in Cincinnati in the summer; there was a good reason Cincinnati was the first major league team to play under lights back in 1935. There was nothing in baseball quite like the midwestern fire of St. Louis and Cincinnati and Kansas City in the afternoons.
But Howsam stuck with the idea. And here it was, a Wednesday afternoon against a terrible Atlanta Braves team, and more than thirty thousand people poured into Riverfront Stadium. They were not all wearing suits like Howsam had envisioned, but it was still beautiful. The town was falling for this team again.
Nobody could believe the heat. You could actually see it lifting off the field in waves, like desert heat in the movies. Johnny Bench had been playing in Cincinnati for almost eight years, and he had never felt this sort of oven burst as he walked out of the clubhouse and onto the field. He knew before the game even began that he would lose five pounds before it was over, maybe ten pounds. He was edgy. They were all edgy—they were playing the Braves, who were no match, who did not even belong on the same field. “Let’s play quick,” Johnny muttered to his pitcher, Jack Billingham.
With the score tied in the third inning, Bench came to the plate, and he swung angrily and ripped a hard ground ball down the third-
base line. The ball smashed right into the knee of third-base umpire Lee Weyer. And while he hopped around in pain, the ball bounced out to center field. It was ruled a ground-rule double, two runs scored, and Bench stood at second base with a big smile he could not quite hide. Well, at least someone else would feel a little bit of pain on this preposterously hot day.
“You ever hit an umpire before?” Joe asked in the clubhouse after the game.
“Wanted to,” Bench said. “But never did.”
The Reds won again, and Weyer sent the baseball into the clubhouse and asked Bench if he would sign it. Bench, the kid who had practiced signing autographs at McKinney’s Texaco station back in Oklahoma, had grown out of the habit; he did not like signing autographs. But he happily signed this one.
“What did you write on it?” reporters asked him.
“Sorry,” Bench said.
Everybody was talking about
Jaws,
the movie. Lines were stretching around movie theaters. Movie critics were calling it the scariest movie ever made. “
MAY BE TOO INTENSE FOR YOUNGER CHILDREN
,” the poster warned.
SUPER SHARK
was the headline on the cover of
Time
magazine. A movie had never quite taken over America like this one…but then, a movie had never before opened up in 409 movie theaters around the country simultaneously. It was the first summer blockbuster in Hollywood history.
The timing was perfect: as summer began in 1975, it seemed like everyone wanted something to take them away, something bloody and jolting and utterly unreal and yet, at the same time, too real. Movie reviewers at newspapers wrote two reviews of the movie—one reviewing the movie itself, another reviewing people’s reactions. In a couple of weeks,
Jaws
would be shown in 675 theaters—more theaters
than any movie ever—and there would be a new
Jaws
movie poster telling people to “See what you missed the first time after closing your eyes.”
Pete Rose had his own summer release—he had written a diary of the 1974 season with the
Cincinnati Enquirer
’s Bob Hertzel. The book was called
Charlie Hustle.
Pete hated the book. Well, he didn’t hate what was written in the book—as he told friends, he didn’t even read it. No, it was just that he had become convinced that the book was bad luck, that it was part of the reason he did not hit .300 in 1974. The book had distracted him. Pete had always just lived. Now, though, he found himself watching things and thinking,
Yeah, that will be a funny thing to put in the book.
There was this one time in 1974 when he was in a slump—he’d gone two games without a hit—and he went into the clubhouse after the game.
“We’d better guard the pool tonight,” Joe Morgan said. “Pete might just jump out of his window into it. We’ll find him floating, facedown, in the morning.”
“Don’t worry about that,” hitting coach Big Klu said. “He won’t hit that either.”
That was funny stuff, and Pete wrote it down. But maybe it was bad luck to tell everybody about it. Maybe he should have kept his focus on the game. Or maybe Pete just felt like he gave away too much of himself. The critics were not especially kind. The book apparently had made him seem shallow and driven by his numbers and, well, obsessed. There was his description of the charms of San Francisco: “Sophisticated? Lovely? Filled with charm and excitement? Bull. Candlestick Park is a sad excuse for a ballpark.”
Oh, yeah, the critics had a ball with that. Well, what was everybody laughing about? Candlestick Park was a pit. Sure, he was stat-driven and obsessed, Rose knew that, but maybe that was his secret,
maybe that was why he hit .300 every year, maybe that was why he made himself into a ballplayer when everybody kept telling him he was too slow and couldn’t throw and didn’t have any power. Maybe he should not have written the damned book. Anyway, he just wanted to get away from 1974. His slump was over. He had gotten hot. He just wanted to get up there and hit.
Saturday night in Houston, in the stale, air-conditioned air of the Astrodome, he stepped into the batter’s box. He stared at J. R. Richard, a twenty-five-year-old man-child who stood six-foot-eight and could throw a baseball one hundred miles per hour but had only the vaguest notion of where it was going. This was Pete’s kind of pitcher, his kind of challenge. “I hear you can throw hard, kid,” he shouted at Richard. “Let me see a little bit of that heat.” Richard reached back and fired his best fastball. Pete whacked a line drive for a base hit. Best feeling in the world, ripping a hard fastball.
“I thought you were supposed to throw the ball hard,” Pete said next time he stepped up to face Richard. “That didn’t seem too hard to me.” Richard threw his fastball as hard as he could, maybe even a little harder, and Pete ripped it into the gap for a double. There was no way to throw a fastball past him when he felt like this, when his eyes felt sharp, when his whole body felt as sensitive as a tuning fork. He was hitting .319. He felt alive.
The game went on. The Reds thought they won in the top of the tenth when they scored twice, but the Astros scored two runs in the bottom of the inning to keep the game going. The game stretched on and on, and in the fourteenth inning Rose came up again, only this time he faced Joe Niekro, the brother of the great Braves pitcher Phil. The Niekros threw knuckleballs. And unlike fastballs, knuckleballs just pissed off Pete Rose. Hard fastballs, like J. R. Richard’s fastball, spoke to Pete Rose. He thought baseball should be like a gunfight at high noon, two men under a high sun, facing off, one winner and one loser, one quick and one dead. Pete wanted a pitcher to throw his best fastball, and he would swing his best swing, and they would see
who was the better man. Pete felt pretty certain that he was the better man.
Only Joe threw that knuckleball, which danced and dropped and rose and turned, and that wasn’t right. That was like bringing a boomerang to the O.K. Corral. “I’d rather try hitting a hummingbird than a knuckleball,” Pete the author had written in
Charlie Hustle
. He had faced Joe Niekro one time in six years. He struck out.
“Just swing hard,” he reminded himself. This was Rose’s strategy against the knuckler—swing hard so that even if he made an out, at least he would not foul up his swing for the next two weeks. Niekro fluttered the knuckleball his way, and Rose lashed at it, and he smacked a double. The next batter, Ken Griffey, singled in Rose for the game-winning run.
“I feel reborn,” Pete told reporters after the game.
“Have you seen
Jaws
yet?” he was asked.
“I
am Jaws,
” he said.
June 24, 1975
ATLANTA
REDS VS. BRAVES
Team record: 43–27
First place by three games
The genius sat on the bench and watched his starting pitcher, Pat Darcy, very closely. It was the eighth inning, and Darcy had pitched a beauty. The Reds led the Atlanta Braves 3–0—all the runs coming on Joe Morgan’s home run off a Phil Niekro knuckleball—and Darcy had baffled the Atlanta hitters all night long. It was a Sparky Anderson kind of pitching performance. The Braves had not even moved a runner to second base since the first inning. Sparky’s ulcer was calm. He felt at ease.
Then Darcy made the critical mistake—he walked Rowland Office, the Braves’ leadoff batter in the eighth inning. Sparky saw that some of those pitches were high. Sparky had this theory about high pitches—high pitches, if allowed to continue, became long fly balls, and then became home runs. He walked slowly to the mound to go take Pat Darcy out of the game.
“Good game, kid,” Sparky said, and Darcy wanted to say something back, something like, “You’re taking me out now? I’m pitching a shutout.” He wanted to say something like, “No, I have a lot left, I’m throwing good, I have to finish this thing.” He wanted to say a lot of things. But talking, he knew, was strictly prohibited. He handed Sparky the baseball and walked slowly to the clubhouse. Fred Norman came into the game.
Starting pitchers in 1975 expected to finish their games. In 1975, they finished about one-fifth of the games they started (compared to three decades later, when starters finished only one in forty games they started). They expected the chance to get out of their own jams, to finish what they started. Some pitchers would shout their managers off the mound. Some would refuse to give up the baseball. But it wasn’t like that in Cincinnati.
And more, Sparky Anderson had come up with the genius plan. With Don Gullett out, he was going to change pitchers whenever he felt it in his gut. Sparky knew that his pitchers hated him. He knew that they felt underappreciated. And he did not care, not even one bit, because Sparky felt like he understood pitchers. Yes, he did. He understood better than they did when they were losing their stuff. He understood that the quickest way to lose a game was to stick with a pitcher too long because of personal feelings.
And the game was changing. He was changing it. That’s why he was smiling at that breakfast with Jeff Ruby, because it all became clear to him. He had this great bullpen of pitchers. He had Will McEnaney, that flaky lefty who didn’t seem to fear anything. He had Pedro Borbon, his crazy righty who would pitch every single day if
he could. He had Clay Carroll, the Hawk, his veteran righty who had pitched in more games than any Cincinnati Reds pitcher ever and who knew how to get batters out. And finally, he had the new kid, Rawly Eastwick, who liked painting and reading and doing all sorts of intellectual things that Sparky didn’t understand or trust, but on the mound he was all ballplayer—Rawly had the kind of arrogance that made him believe that nobody could hit him.
Sparky understood in that moment that it was his bullpen that would make the Reds champions. Sure, he cried the night Gullett got hurt—cried for Gullett himself. The kid probably would have won the Cy Young Award if he’d stayed healthy. But by morning, there were no more tears. Sparky saw the future. The bullpen was the future.
“Why did you take out Darcy?” Morgan asked back in the dugout, mostly because he wanted to get Sparky going. And of course, he did.
“You want to know why?” Sparky said, and he said it loud enough for everyone to hear. “I’ll tell you why. Because if you want to stay in the game, it’s like dance steps, boys. You need to play the song in your head like a waltz—one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three. You play it like that, and I’ll just sit right here in the dugout and enjoy it. But you start going one-two-three…four-five, well, we’ll see you later. We’ll get somebody else out there who wants to get somebody out.”
Fred Norman got out of the eighth inning unscathed. He started off the ninth by allowing a walk and then a single. Sparky made his slow walk out to the mound again. He pulled Norman out and put Pedro Borbon in. Borbon got a double-play grounder and foul fly ball, and the game was over. Three pitchers—and two were ticked off—but the Reds won, and that was all that mattered.
“Just follow my lead, boys,” Sparky said happily as he walked back into the clubhouse.
Lee Trevino, the only professional golfer out there who consistently could beat Jack Nicklaus, was struck by lightning while sitting under a tree at the Western Open in Oak Brook, Illinois. Tennis players Jimmy Connors and Ilie Nastase yelled at a man in the crowd at Wimbledon, causing quite the stir in London. A woman named Nancy Fitzgerald won the Indianapolis city golf tournament, though she was eight months pregnant at the time.