Free The Machine by Joe Posnanski

Anderson stopped on the way to the ballpark to buy three hibachi grills. It was always cold on opening day in Cincinnati. As he drove, Sparky reminded himself again not to make any guarantees. He had to control himself.
    It was never easy for him. The trouble was that Sparky was two men at heart. He was Georgie Anderson, son of a housepainter, a hardscrabble kid who would read the Bible now and then and lie out at the pool every day and daydream back to the happiest days of his life, his young days in South Dakota, in a little town called Bridgewater, where the jail was never locked and his father would spend Halloween sitting inside the family outhouse with a shotgun to be sure nobody stole it. Georgie Anderson had a heart of gold and a quiet nature. Georgie could not send a steak back if it was overcooked; he didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. Georgie would let the phone ring because he did not feel like talking. Georgie would drink milk to soothe the ulcer that burned inside. Georgie spent every day of the off-season walking through his yard in California, pulling any weeds that dared to appear. Georgie sometimes felt like he could be happy for the rest of his life pulling weeds.
    Few people knew Georgie Anderson. They knew Sparky Anderson, manager of the Big Red Machine, purveyor of wit, guardian of baseball’s tradition, soother of ill feelings, botcher of the English language, defender of an America gone by. And as Sparky Anderson, he could not stop talking. He could not stop entertaining. He could not stop making bold predictions. Because if there was one thing thatSparky knew completely, it was that he had the best damned baseball team that had ever been put forth on God’s green earth. He would get going on Johnny Bench or Pete Rose or Joe Morgan, especially Joe. He loved that little man, and well, he would sometimes start crying in the middle of a sentence, that’s how much he loved those guys. They could play baseball better than he ever dreamed, better than anyone else, and still they listened to Sparky, they played hard for Sparky, they kept their hair trimmed and their uniforms clean and their minds on the game, all for Sparky. He wanted to tell the whole world about them. He wanted to shout out their names. He needed to guarantee victory because that’s what they deserved. Victory.
    Trouble was, year after year, he predicted the Reds would win the World Series, and then the Reds did not win the World Series and he felt terrible. He had made his stars look like losers, like chumps. Every year, he told himself to shut up, let the season play out, let everyone see for themselves the wonders of the Big Red Machine. But then some loudmouth sportswriter would talk about the Dodgers, and Sparky would say, “The Dodgers? Hell, the Dodgers ain’t even in our league.” And it would start all over again. Sparky could not help himself.
    “I’m not going to guarantee anything this time,” he had told the press. Of course, a couple of days later he had said, “If the Dodgers are going to beat us, they’re going to have to win a hundred games.” And then for the column in the Cincinnati Post he wrote (through his ghostwriter Earl Lawson), “We’ve got a good ball club, a real good one, and I think if we stay injury free we’ll still be playing in October.” It was another guarantee.
    Now it was opening day, and his Reds were playing those Dodgers, and Sparky knew that they would give him a microphone and have him address the sellout crowd. It was a bad place to put Sparky Anderson, and he knew it.
     
    President Gerald Ford could not make it to Cincinnati for opening day, just like he could not make it to Cincinnati for Johnny Bench’s wedding. Vietnam was collapsing. The king of Saudi Arabia had been shot. The world would not stop. Ford liked baseball all right, though he had gotten some grief for supposedly saying that he watched a lot of baseball on the radio. Ford felt certain he did not say