Free The Machine by Joe Posnanski Page A

that. He tried to make up for it when he was given a season pass from Major League Baseball and had his key speechwriter, Robert Orben, write a few “ad-libs” for the occasion.
    “I played football in college, but I also had a great interest in baseball,” Orben wrote for Ford. “There’s something about a sport where you don’t have to wear a helmet that appeals to me.” Ford, noting that baseball players do wear helmets, crossed out the line. He did not want to be mocked again.
    “There are a lot of similarities between baseball and politics,” Orben wrote and President Ford said. “One of the worst things you can hear in baseball is: ‘You’re out.’ Same thing in politics.”
    With Ford back in Washington, the designated politician of the day was Robert Taft, the Ohio senator and grandson of former president and baseball pioneer William Howard Taft. In his younger days, William Howard Taft had played baseball in Cincinnati—it was said that he could hit with power—but his real contribution to the game was that he became the first president to throw out the first pitch at a game. That was 1910. A legend was built that day: The story went that Taft—the heaviest American president—grew uncomfortable in his small seat and stood up after the top half of the seventh inning. When he stood, everyone in the stadium stood, and that was the first seventh-inning stretch. That story, like most great baseball stories, is probably not true.
    Robert Taft rolled into the ballpark in a horse-drawn carriage. He looked good, everyone thought, considering that a biting wind blew through the stadium and Taft had suffered a heart attack onlytwo months earlier. The senator wore a giant button that read, G O R EDS , B EAT THE B UMS . He threw out the first pitch to Johnny Bench. Everyone cheered. Jim Lovell, the astronaut who brought Apollo 13 home after an explosion, stood to be recognized. Everyone cheered again. The largest crowd ever to see a baseball game in Cincinnati—52,526 people—crammed into their seats at Riverfront Stadium. Sparky was handed a microphone.
    “I can honestly say this is the finest baseball team we have ever brought north,” he said. “We’re going to make you proud.”
     
    Across the way, in the other dugout, the Dodgers relief pitcher Mike Marshall shook his head. “Well,” he muttered, “it’s good to see that Sparky’s as full of shit as ever.”
     
    Here was the lineup that Sparky Anderson sent out to face the Los Angeles Dodgers that opening day, along with the ages and approximate salaries of those players.
     
Pete Rose
left fielder
33 years old
$150,000
Joe Morgan
second baseman
31 years old
$120,000
Johnny Bench
catcher
27 years old
$175,000
Tony Perez
first baseman
32 years old
$110,000
Dave Concepcion
shortstop
26 years old
$75,000
Cesar Geronimo
center fielder
27 years old
$26,000
Ken Griffey
right fielder
24 years old
$18,000
John Vukovich
third baseman
27 years old
$16,000
Don Gullett
pitcher
24 years old
$31,000
     
    It was a good lineup, a great lineup even, though it had holes. Concepcion was not a powerful enough hitter to be batting fifth.Griffey was too good a hitter and too fast a base runner to be batting seventh. And Vukovich…Sparky did not want him in the lineup at all.
    The Reds were playing in what everyone expected to be the toughest division in baseball, the National League West. Most sportswriters thought the Dodgers would win the division and, after that, the World Series. The Reds were picked second, but many people expected the Atlanta Braves to contend too; the Braves had great pitching led by the knuckleballer Phil Niekro and a young pitcher named Buzz Capra. The Houston Astros had been a pretty good team in 1974, though tragedy struck in January when star pitcher Don Wilson was found dead in his Ford Thunderbird, which had been running inside the garage. The San Francisco Giants, after years of success, were on the downturn, and the San Diego Padres