The Machine (5 page)

Gary noticed how Carol, his wife, was looking at him through the netting as she sat behind home plate. How many times had he seen that haunted look the last couple of years? She was scared for him. Well, hell, it figured. He was scared too. This was their last shot. There was no point in making it sound any prettier than that. Gary had not won a major league baseball game in more than two years. He had not even pitched in a real big league game since August 1973, back before Watergate blew up. Gary stood on the mound, threw the last of his warm-up pitches, and then reached around with his left hand and massaged his right shoulder; the shoulder did not hurt exactly, but it did not feel right either.

All around the field, newspaper reporters watched him closely; their spiral reporter’s pads were out and pointed at him. He was the story of camp: the Amazing Comeback of Gary Nolan. He was what everyone was talking about. Sparky, too, was staring at him, piercing him with his eyes, and teammates in the field leaned forward toward him. Gary could not shake the feeling that on his first pitch of the game, the stitches holding his shoulder together would rip apart and his arm, quite literally, would detach and fly toward home plate.

How did he get here? Gary remembered so vividly that warm summer evening in Oroville, an old gold rush town in California that—like most gold rush towns—had dwindled and deteriorated
through the years. Gary was ten years old, of course—that’s the most magical age to be a baseball fan—and he sat on the living room couch next to his old man, Ray. They listened on the radio to the San Francisco Giants ball game. The announcers were Russ Hodges and Lon Simmons. “Tell it bye-bye, baby,” Russ used to say when one of the Giants—like Willie Mays or Hank Sauer or Orlando Cepeda—hit a home run. Gary had started injecting “Tell it bye-bye, baby” into his daily talk.

“So, this is what you want to do, huh?” Ray asked Gary. Ray did not care for baseball. He worked as a switchman for the Union Pacific. He worked hard, of course, and like so many men of his generation, Ray did not make time in his life for fantasies and childhood dreams.

“Baseball, huh?” Ray continued. “So you think that’s what you want to do with your life?”

Gary looked up at his dad, and then he said the funniest thing. He said: “Yeah. But is it real?”

Ray didn’t know what to make of that. Is it real? Is what real? “The baseball,” Gary said. “Is it real? Are they really playing? Is this really happening, or is it…just…is it real?” The next day, Ray loaded Gary into the car, and they drove 150 miles along bumpy two-lane roads and managed to get to Seals Stadium on Sixteenth and Bryant. They watched the Giants play the Dodgers. Other baseball-playing men, when looking back at their first baseball game, remember sentimental things. They recall holding hands with their fathers, the hugeness of the players, the vivid crayon green of the grass, that singular ballpark smell of popcorn and sweat and cotton candy and beer. Gary remembered that it was all so real, so tangible; he had seen his own future up close. Gary did not dream about playing big league baseball like other boys he knew. He planned for it. He had been born for it.

Gary was such a good pitcher in high school that baseball scouts scalded the asphalt on California 70 to Oroville. Sometimes there would be twenty-five scouts sitting in the stands—he was like a sec
ond gold rush. Gary threw a dazzling fastball. He had impeccable control. He had that certain poise that young pitchers (and young men) rarely have: he seemed to know precisely what he was doing. The Reds drafted Gary in the first round of the amateur draft just days after he turned eighteen years old. The Reds sent their top negotiator, Jim McLaughlin, to Oroville to cut a deal. Jim wanted to work with the father; that’s how these things normally went. “Naw, talk to Gary,” Ray said. “He’s a grown man.”

Gary negotiated his own deal, and he signed for $40,000. The number was so large that the Reds refused to release it; the newspaper reporters duly called it “a gigantic deal.” Gary thought he could have gotten even more money, but he did not want to waste time fighting for pennies. He rushed toward his destiny. Gary pitched his first major league game when he was still eighteen years old. The first batter he faced was Sonny Jackson, known as a tough out. Gary struck him out on three pitches. The second batter he faced was Jim Landis, an eleven-year veteran who had played in an All-Star Game. Gary struck him out too.

“Were you nervous?” the reporters asked after that first big league game. Nervous? He shrugged. He told them: “I don’t get nervous; I was hit harder in high school.”

A little later that year—this was 1967, two days after the start of the Six-Day War—Gary struck out Willie Mays four times in a game. Willie Mays! His hero! Nobody had ever struck out the “Say Hey Kid” four times in a single major league game. The next afternoon, Gary jogged happily in the outfield, and he heard a loud, piercing whistle. He turned around, and there was Willie Mays motioning Gary to come over.

“Son,” Willie said, “I was overmatched.”

Well, there it was: destiny. Where do you go from there? He had overmatched Willie Mays, his hero, maybe the greatest player who ever lived, and he had just turned nineteen. Dave Bristol, the Reds manager, told the press, “He ain’t got no ceiling,” and the double
negative did not restrain his emotions. Gary struck out 206 batters that first year, more than any nineteen-year-old since the great Bob Feller back in 1938. “Don’t be scared,” Feller told him, man to man, when the season ended. “Make them scared of you.”

Gary knew exactly what Feller meant. They both knew what it was like, to be nineteen and commanding and bulletproof. The next spring, Gary felt a twinge in his arm. He kept on pitching. He felt other twinges. Then he started to notice that his arm hurt more often than it felt right. Then, one day in ’72, he felt like there was a spear sticking out of his arm.

How did Gary get from there to here, from nineteen-year-old phenomenon who overmatched Willie Mays to twenty-six-year-old long shot trying to impress a crowd of cynics on a dusty spring training field in Tampa? His stomach tumbled and twisted, and again he saw his Carol behind home plate, looking at him with the worried face, like they were about to walk into the doctor’s office and find out the results of a cancer test. He tried to give her a knowing smile, a wink, but he could not pull it off. She could see through him. Carol had lived four houses down in Oroville. They married at seventeen and had their first son before the Reds signed him. She did not know baseball, but she knew everything about him. She knew he was scared.

Gary winced as he threw the last of his warm-up pitches, though his arm did not hurt. He winced out of habit. His arm had hurt so much, for so long, that pain had become a part of him. Now there was a numbness where the pain had been. The pain was gone, but so was the electricity that had buzzed in his arm in 1967. Gary could not throw particularly hard anymore. He could not snap off a curve that dived to the ground. He no longer could look at batters with his childlike disdain and think,
Buddy, you have no chance.
He had to be a different pitcher now, a magician, an illusionist, he had to bend the ball crooked when they expected it straight, throw it slow when
they anticipated fast, pitch it up when they were looking down. Gary missed his old arm. In a strange way, he even missed the pain.

People had doubted him. That was what hurt most. He remembered that when he first felt the pain in his arm, Sparky Anderson had told him: “Pitchers have to throw with pain. Bob Gibson says every pitch he’s ever thrown cut him like a knife. You gotta pitch with pain, kid.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Gary wondered. He knew about pain. He had pitched with pain. He tried to explain that this was a different pain, agonizing pain that shot through his body when he released the ball. This was not pain you pitch with. Sparky sighed, sent the kid to the doctor, but the X-rays came up negative. And Sparky told him again about Bob Gibson pitching through pain. “You’ve got to be tough. You’ve got to keep on pitching through the pain.”

And the cycle was formed. Gary pitched…and when he pitched, he pitched well. But the pain was overwhelming. He had to stop. He went to Sparky. The X-rays came up negative. Sparky would tell him to pitch again.

In 1972, Gary Nolan might have been the best pitcher in baseball. By mid-July, he had won thirteen games, his ERA was a remarkable 1.81—all of his promise and all of his talent were finally coming together. And he was miserable. His arm throbbed constantly—even when he slept. Then, midway through the year, the pain jumped even higher, to a whole new level, and he had to stop, he could not pitch even as Sparky implored him to go on. The pain roared through him. “Enough to make you cry,” he told reporters, which didn’t make it sound any better.

“Trade Nolan, sell Nolan, release Nolan. In short, get rid of him,” a reader from Dayton wrote in a letter to the
Cincinnati Enquirer.
“I am tired of hearing the stories about his potential. Every winter Nolan ‘guarantees’ twenty wins for the coming summer, and every summer Nolan spends half the time on the disabled list. He hardly ever pitches.”

Nolan pleaded with Sparky to believe him. “Don’t you think I would be out there pitching if I could?” he asked. Sparky seemed unconvinced. His teammates wondered too. There was another unspoken rule when you were on the Machine: you did not complain about pain. Johnny Bench played catcher for 150 games every year—who hurt more than he? He never talked about it. Pete Rose never missed a game, ever, and he played baseball like a stunt man—he crashed into second basemen, shrugged off beanballs, dove into bases headfirst. Little Joe Morgan had been spiked, cut, slashed, knocked into the outfield, and slapped with tags that felt like Joe Frazier left hooks. He did not talk about it. If you wanted to play for the Machine, you did not show weakness, you did not back down, and you did not get hurt. Nolan tried again to pitch, but each delivery felt like surgery without anesthetics.

“When’s Nolan going to pitch again?” reporters asked Sparky.

“Hell, I don’t know,” Sparky said, and he could not mask the disdain. “Ask him.”

The Reds’ doubts hurt as much as the arm. One day, the Reds executive Dick Wagner called Gary and said that the club had set up an appointment for him with a dentist. A dentist! “We think this will cure you,” Wagner said. Well, Gary went to the office, and the dentist fished around in his mouth for a few minutes and finally said, “I have found your problem. You have an abscessed tooth.” Gary shook his head; he had never felt any pain in his tooth. The dentist explained that such pain often transfers to another part of the body—maybe the right shoulder. The dentist pulled the tooth, and he promised Gary relief.

There was no relief, of course; his shoulder hurt more than ever. Dentists from around the country wrote in to say that there was no way an abscessed tooth could cause a man’s arm to shoot with pain. Gary understood. The Reds had sent him to a witch doctor. They thought the pain was all in his head. He winced and grimaced through the playoffs and World Series, then moved his family out of Cincinnati, back to Oroville, where he would not have to hear whis
pers about gutlessness or see any more dentists. He pitched two games in 1973. He did not pitch at all in ’74. He would sit at home watching television—
Mannix
was his favorite show—and he knew that his career was over. The pain felt unbearable and permanent.

“I’ve been dead for two years,” Gary said to Pete Rose. “And no one has even thrown me a funeral.”

Many years later, Gary Nolan would look back and say he had two overwhelming thrills in the game of baseball. The first was something universal, something they all treasured. He loved putting on a major league baseball uniform. He loved being in the clubhouse, loved to hear the cheers and boos, loved striking out Willie Mays, loved the way the beer tasted after victories. Simply, Gary loved being a big league baseball player.

The second thrill was more specific and more personal. It happened one day in 1974, when he went to see Dr. Frank Jobe, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ orthopedic surgeon. Jobe, in his own way, transformed baseball as much as Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, and Roberto Clemente. When Gary went to see him in 1974, Jobe was also seeing a Dodgers pitcher named Tommy John, who had badly injured his elbow. John’s career was over—pitchers did not come back from damaged elbows—but Jobe had this long-shot idea. Jobe thought that he might fix the elbow by replacing the damaged ligament with a ligament taken from another part of the body, like the wrist or the knee. Nobody had ever tried anything like it. Jobe placed John’s odds of pitching again at one hundred to one. But Tommy John did pitch again; he pitched as well as he had before, sometimes better. The procedure became known as “Tommy John surgery.” And it saved countless pitchers’ lives.

Jobe took X-rays of Gary’s shoulder from a different angle, and sure enough, he found a one-inch bone spur swimming in there. Jobe thought that if he removed the bone spur, Gary had a chance to pitch
again—certainly he had a better chance than Tommy John. The Reds management—even after hearing about the bone spur—did not want Jobe to perform surgery. They still thought that Gary just needed to get tougher. But Gary knew the surgery was his only chance. Jobe removed the spur, and Gary did the rehabilitation quietly and away from the ball club.

And that was how he ended up on the mound here in Tampa, pitching both without pain and without the arm-explosion of his youth. He pitched three innings against the Minnesota Twins. He did not give up a run. The baseball scouts who had come to see Gary Nolan shrugged…he did not look bad, but he was not the same. His fastball was gone. But Gary knew that. The fastball
was
gone. Yesterday was gone. The only question in his mind was: could he still get hitters out? Gary thought that maybe he could.

And the second thrill of his life? No, it was not pitching well that day in spring training while his wife watched from behind the net. It was not striking out Willie Mays four times. It was not even the day he made it to the big leagues. No, the second thrill in baseball happened when Frank Jobe found that sharp bone spur and said very softly: “I have no idea how you pitched in that sort of pain. You must have been in agony.” Someone believed him. And Gary felt like a man again.