Hairs vs. Squares Page 5

  Regardless of its origin, the nickname became immensely popular, and the organization trademarked it. In 1970 the Big Red Machine’s wrecking ball attack wreaked havoc on the National League. Cincinnati stormed to 102 victories, a franchise record at the time. The Reds won the Western Division by 14½ games and swept Pittsburgh in the National League Championship Series (NLCS) but was beaten by Baltimore in the World Series.

  The wheels came off the Big Red Machine in ’71. Problems began that January, when center fielder Bobby Tolan tore his Achilles tendon playing for the Reds’ basketball team. Tolan missed spring training but still made an unusually quick recovery. By May he was able to begin working out. While running in the outfield at Dodger Stadium, Tolan broke down again. The man who had teamed with Rose at the top of the batting order in 1970, batted .316 and stolen a league-leading 57 bases, scored 112 runs, and legged out 56 extra-base hits was out for the season without having played a single game.

  When Tolan went down with an injury, he took Cincinnati’s speed with him. Reds second baseman Tommy Helms thought losing Tolan upset the balance of the team. The Reds were never out of a game with Tolan in the lineup, Helms said, because Bobby would get on base and the bombers—Bench, May, and Perez—would bring him home.

  Tolan’s injury was just the start of the Reds’ troubles. Strange things were happening in Cincinnati’s spring training in ’71. Amid talk of a new National League dynasty, southpaw Jim Merritt, a 20-game winner in 1970, struggled with a sore left arm. May, who had launched 34 homers the season before and driven in 94 runs, collided with the Mets’ Tim Foli at first base in an exhibition game in St. Petersburg, Florida, banged up his knee, and was lost for three weeks. Perez hurt his hand sliding into third and wouldn’t be right physically the entire season. Shortstop Dave Concepcion tore ligaments in his right thumb and missed a month. By the time the Reds were ready to head north for their season opener, they did so minus Merritt and right-handed complement Wayne Simpson, who had been 14-3 the summer before and had led the league with an .824 winning percentage.

  Injuries helped drop the defending league champions to a fourth-place finish behind front-running San Francisco. The Big Red Machine was in serious need of recharging, and Howsam responded. He had a history of building championship clubs, having arrived in St. Louis in August 1964 with the Cardinals nine games back in the pennant race and putting together deals that eventually delivered a World Series title. The Cardinals claimed another Series title in 1967 and repeated as league champions in ’68.

  Howsam was a Branch Rickey disciple. As owner and operator of the Class AAA Denver Bears, a club that had a working relationship with Rickey’s Pittsburgh Pirates, Howsam had known the Mahatma since the 1950s. He had overcome a potentially disastrous flippant first encounter with Rickey and his son Branch Jr.

  Upon their initial encounter Howsam rather loosely greeted the man known mainly as “Mr. Rickey” with an informal, “Hi, Branch!”

  He then turned to Branch Jr.

  “Hi, Twig!”

  Howsam survived and went on to become a Rickey protégé. When the Mahatma was winding up his days as a Cardinals consultant in 1964, he advised team owner Gussie Busch to name Howsam the club’s new GM. Howsam oversaw the Cardinals’ rise to the top of baseball in the mid-1960s, with some help from his future Reds manager.

  In 1965, when Howsam was GM in St. Louis, Anderson was hired to skipper the Cardinals’ Rock Hill farm club in the Western Carolina League. Anderson didn’t really know Howsam at the time. Sparky’s immediate superior was Sheldon “Chief” Bender, a World War II veteran and Purple Heart recipient who spent sixty-four years in baseball as a player, manager, scout, scouting director, and farm system director.

  Anderson soon discovered how Howsam operated when the GM called a meeting during spring training in ’65 in St. Petersburg. The night before the meeting Anderson dined with Bender, Cardinals superscout Mo Mozzali, and coach George Kissell. Talk soon turned to Julian Javier, who had played second base for St. Louis since 1960. Known as “Hoolie” by some and “the Phantom” by Cardinals catcher Tim McCarver for his ability to avoid runners sliding into second, Javier was also considered one of the fastest men in baseball. He led the team in stolen bases every season from 1960 through 1963 and teamed with first baseman Bill White, shortstop Dick Groat, and third baseman Ken Boyer to form an all-Cardinal infield in the 1963 All-Star Game.

  Still Mozzali, Kissell, and Bender spoke of the possibility of dealing Javier before the season started. Despite having been with the Cardinal organization just three weeks to that point, Anderson felt compelled to speak.

  “Does he have good range?” he asked.

  Yes, he was told. Javier had arguably the best range in the National League.

  “Does he make the double play?”

  Hoolie was the best, Anderson was told.

  “Then why the hell,” Sparky asked, “are you talking about trading him?”

  In the clubhouse the next day, Bender, Mozzali, Kissell, big league boss Red Schoendienst, Anderson, and three other minor league managers met with Howsam. After Schoendienst talked about the team, Howsam turned to Mozzali, who brought up the possibility of a trade involving Javier.

  “Mr. Howsam,” Mozzali began, “we were talking at dinner last night, and Sparky here had some opinions that I think you might want him to bring out to all of us.”

  “Yes,” Howsam replied. “I’d like to hear his opinion.”

  In his autobiography Anderson recalled being petrified. Three weeks with the organization and he’s supposed to tell the brass what to do?

  Anderson apologized for speaking out at dinner, but when Howsam repeated that he wanted his views, Sparky said it didn’t seem logical to deal the league’s number one man at his position for someone else’s number two, three or four guy.

  Howsam thanked Anderson for his views. Javier stayed with St. Louis and anchored the infield for the great St. Louis squads of the sixties. Anderson never took credit for the non-trade. What was more important to him was that he learned what kind of man his boss was. Howsam was a listener; he would hear any man’s opinion. And he never considered himself above taking the counsel of even the newest and lowest-ranking man in his operation.

  After three years in St. Louis, Howsam moved from the Gateway City to the Queen City. Employing Rickey’s principles, he transformed the Reds from a shoestring operation to one of the sport’s most sophisticated franchises.

  Howsam fit perfectly in the conservative burg. He wasn’t big-city slick or articulate, but as Sandy Hadden, the commissioner’s aide, once said, Howsam was well respected and had a lot of friends who were influenced by what he thought.

  With help from Wagner, his number two man, Howsam instituted a marketing strategy so refined that it rivaled what the Dodgers were doing in the foothills of Hollywood. For the first time in their long history the Reds aggressively sold season tickets. They expanded their base from twelve hundred to seventeen thousand and through in-stadium questionnaires and phone calls built a list of eighty thousand fans on computer.

  After drawing as many as one million fans in a season just four times prior to Howsam’s arrival, the Reds became the first team aside from the Dodgers to draw at least two million in back-to-back seasons. It helped that the Reds moved on June 30, 1970, from tiny Crosley Field, with its 29,600 seating capacity, to Riverfront Stadium, which at 53,000 could accommodate almost twice as many paying customers. In 1972 local brewers produced a print ad highlighting the fact that Riverfront was the lone stadium in the world located within one mile of four major breweries.

  Cincinnati was a beer-driven culture and economy, and its brewers had been major sponsors of the Reds for decades. When the team played in Crosley Field, buildings beyond the outfield wall were plastered and painted with beer ads, and additional signs were posted on the foul poles inside the park. Beginning in 1942 the Burger Beer Broadcasting Network and later Wiedemann sponsored the Reds on radio. In 1956
Hudepohl sponsored the team on TV, an association that would last through the Reds’ championship years of 1975–76.

  By 1970 Howsam not only had a new state-of-the-art stadium, but he had also succeeded in rebuilding the Reds into a state-of-the-art team. It was a juggernaut that in 1970 rumbled to the franchise’s first postseason appearance since 1961, and Howsam was its architect.

  But as the Big Red Machine prepared to rev up for the 1972 season, its power gear had become a question mark.

  Johnny Lee Bench was named the National League’s Most Valuable Player in 1970 after hammering 45 homers, plating 145 runs, and batting .293—all of this at the tender age of twenty-two. A native of Oklahoma City, one-eighth Choctaw Indian on his father’s side, Bench was already drawing comparisons to the great catchers of the past: Mickey Cochrane, Gabby Hartnett, Bill Dickey, Josh Gibson, Roy Campanella, and Yogi Berra.

  Walter Alston, who skippered the Dodgers in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, said at the time that Bench would be the National League’s catcher in the All-Star Game “for the next 10 years.” From the day in 1967 day when he completed his minor league apprenticeship with the Buffalo Bisons, where he crushed 23 home runs—one of his every four hits was a homer—and was tabbed Minor League Player of the Year, the career arc for Bench was progressively upward.

  His future manager knew it. Anderson never forgot the first time he saw Bench play. It was the fall of 1965, and Anderson traveled along with the Cardinals’ other minor league managers to the Florida Instructional League to check out the organization’s prospects. Sparky was coaching third for St. Louis’s Instructional League team in a game against a combined Cincinnati-Houston squad. From his vantage point in the coaching box, Anderson began studying the opposing catcher. Watching him work, Anderson thought, “This boy’s a good-looking catcher. He must’ve played for awhile.”

  Between innings Anderson asked players on his team about the opposing catcher. It was the first time he would hear the name “Johnny Bench.” Anderson was told that Bench was still a baby—only seventeen and just out of high school in Oklahoma. He’d only been playing professionally for one season, at Tampa.

  It was hard for Anderson to believe that Bench was so skilled at such a young age. Two years passed before Anderson saw Bench again, this time in a night game in Tampa between the Reds’ Buffalo farm team and a club comprised of their other minor league teams. Bench was catching for Buffalo, and Anderson noted that the kid’s body had filled out and his actions behind the plate were more polished.

  Berra noted the same thing. The former backstop for fourteen Yankees’ World Series teams, Berra had seen Bench play in the minors. “He can do it all now,” Berra said then. Ted Williams signed a baseball for Bench at the time, the inscription reading, “A Hall of Famer for sure!”

  Bench joined the big club in August 1967 and in ’68 spent his first full season in the majors. His impact was immediate. Collecting 15 homers, 82 RBIs, and a .275 batting average, Bench was named NL Rookie of the Year, the first time a catcher had earned the award. He claimed the first of his ten consecutive Gold Glove awards, the first rookie to win the honor. He made an appearance in that summer’s All-Star Game in the Houston Astrodome. It was the first of ten straight Midsummer Classics for Bench, who was named to the NL team fourteen times.

  In ’68 Bench had been named an alternate behind Jerry Grote of the Mets. But in an NL locker room before the game, Giants great Willie Mays approached the Oklahoma kid.

  “You,” Mays told Bench, “should’ve been the starting catcher.”

  Bench was the NL’s starting catcher the following season, when he improved his season totals to 26 HRs, 90 RBIs, and a .293 batting average. The 1970 season was Bench’s best, and the stories spread about him sounded like urban legends:

  He could hold seven baseballs in one of his huge hands, and his big paws allowed him to adopt the hinged glove and one-handed catching style popularized in the mid-1960s by Randy Hundley of the Chicago Cubs. “They’re the biggest mauleys I’ve ever seen,” Cubs skipper Leo Durocher said;

  He once caught a pitch from Reds fastballer Jim Maloney bare-handed;

  Trained by his father, Ted, to throw 254 feet from a crouch—more than twice the distance from home plate to second base—Bench’s beeline bullet throws to the bag amazed even his own pitchers, who wished they could throw like Bench.

  Bench was confident in his abilities; he predicted he would win the NL’s Rookie of the Year honors and was once quoted as saying, “I can throw out any man alive.” But he was also humble. When Anderson said Bench would do more for baseball than Babe Ruth, Bench asked that he not be spoken of in such glowing terms.

  Bench had difficulty comprehending that kids were idolizing him the same way he had idolized fellow Oklahoman Mickey Mantle. Part of the reason was that it had been such a short time since he had been on the other end of the hero worship.

  Following the breakout season in 1970, Bench was ready for another big year in ’71. Usually a slow starter, Bench instead got off to the best start he’d had in baseball. Injuries, however, helped bring down the Big Red Machine, and the incredible 70-30 start they had enjoyed in 1970 was nowhere in evidence in ’71. The Reds couldn’t put their “real” club on the field, Anderson said. They started poorly and their situation did not improve.

  Bench believed the Reds had resigned themselves to the belief that this wasn’t going to be their season. Realizing their chase of the Giants and Dodgers was futile, the Reds went into a slide. By August 1 they were a season-high eighteen games behind in the standings.

  Bench played much of the summer in a funk. What Sparky saw was a guy trying to carry the load and thus pressing too much. His batting average dipped from .293 to .238, his home runs from 45 to 27, his RBIs from 148 to 61.

  Reds fans resented watching their star catcher/slugger struggle. Bench knew Cincinnati was a very conservative town. Its German-Bohemian traditions were centered on hard work and production. The Cincinnati citizenry watched as Bench appeared on Mission Impossible and drew a smoldering glance from Lesley Ann Warren. He joined actress Ursula Andress, dancer Lola Falana, singer Gloria Loring, and the Gold Diggers dancers in entertaining U.S. troops at Christmas on Bob Hope’s USO Tour. He played golf with Arnold Palmer and was introduced to Frank Sinatra and Spiro Agnew.

  All of the above might have gone over in New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago, but Cincinnati was another story. The negative response from fans bothered him and he withdrew. In his mind, he had gone from MVP to MDP—Most Disappointing Player. He was jeered by Reds fans as he walked to the plate in Riverfront Stadium and, following an out, was booed even more loudly as he headed back to the dugout.

  Bench took the booing personally and felt the fans showed a lack of memory and lack of appreciation. Chicago Cubs star third baseman Ron Santo thought the same. “How quickly they forget,” he told Bench during a Cubs-Reds game.

  As the second baseman for the Houston Astros in 1971, Joe Morgan watched the Bench saga unfold from the outside. In his autobiography Morgan theorized that Bench’s problem in 1971 was that he realized he might never have another year like 1970 again. The Reds catcher was a mature guy on the outside, Morgan thought, but there was no way he could be that mature on the inside at such a young age.

  Morgan knew it was hard in a young player’s mind to keep boos from affecting him. When you’re twenty-three or twenty-four, you want cheers all the time. Morgan believed it difficult to say to a man like Bench that he had to accept the bad with the good. Johnny had only had the good. Now he was getting the bad.

  The slump and the booing were just part of Bench’s bad times. As his income had begun to rise, Bench began looking for good investments. By his own admission, he was a frugal guy—mainly, he thought, because he had been raised pulling cotton for two cents a pound and delivering newspapers. However, many of his investments went bad.

  Bench and Rose, the two most visible stars of the Big Red Machine, went into a number of
businesses together. In early 1970 they opened the Rose-Bench Lincoln-Mercury dealership in Dayton with a wheeler-dealer named Hy Ullner. Ullner was a self-made millionaire who operated Rink’s Bargain City. He went on TV as the “Bargain City Kid,” complete with a holster and six-shooters, and shot the TV screen full of bargains.

  Despite Ullner’s salesmanship, the Rose-Bench dealership failed, largely due to the fact that Dayton at the time was second in the nation in unemployment and was lurching through one labor strike after another. Most people in town weren’t in the mood to buy cars, and it wasn’t long before Rose and Bench had to close their dealership.

  Bench lost $27,000 in the venture, about one-third of his savings at the time. Bench and Rose went in on another venture, but that didn’t work out either. Rumors circulated in and around Cincinnati of differences between the two Reds stars. But the business problems Bench and Rose experienced didn’t affect their relationship in the locker room. Rose, the Cincinnati Kid, had taken Bench under his wing when Johnny had first come up to the majors. And even though Bench believed his breakout 1970 season had been a challenge for Pete—who was no longer the only star in town—Bench knew that more than anything else, Rose wanted to win.

  What did affect their relationship was a fan newsletter called Pete Rose’s Reds Alert. Rose put his name on it, but the newsletter was written by Bill Matthews, a guy Bench believed showed up at the ballpark only once or twice during the season. Bench thought Matthews issued some “cheap shots” about some of the Reds’ players. Some of the players had hard feelings, particularly since Pete’s name was on the newsletter.

  Bench went to the front office and stated that while freedom of the press was fine, the newsletter bearing Rose’s name was hurting the team. Bench took his case to Rose, confronting him before a game about having a newsletter that was being used to cut on his teammates. Management sided with Bench. Rose, who was being paid to have his name on Reds Alert, was furious.