I broke two of my reading guidelines when tackling Joe Posnanski’s The Machine
The good news is that I liked The Machine quite a bit – not as much as I loved The Soul of Baseball, which isn’t really a baseball book anyway, just a book about some people who played the game, but that’s an absurdly high standard. I won’t pretend to give The Machine an objective review, so I’ll focus on why I would recommend it.
I turned two during the 1975 season and have no memories of the Big Red Machine other than my parents telling me about those teams (including their dismantling of the Yankees in the 1976 World Series) when I was first becoming a baseball fan about five or six years later. Posnanski does a good job of keeping readers in the flow of the season, which started slowly for the Reds but turned into a romp that didn’t end until they faced the Red Sox in October, while also weaving in short but telling anecdotes about the team’s central personalities – primarily Rose, Anderson, Morgan, and Bench, and if you need their first names, well, you’re probably not the target audience here anyway.
Posnanski does a good job of humanizing Rose and Morgan, both of whom needed it for obvious yet totally unrelated reasons, while somewhat demythologizing Johnny Bench, who was one of baseball’s last true Hollywood stars, although he’s now better remembered for Krylon commercials and his gigantic hands. (Truckasaurus.) Rose doesn’t come off as sympathetic, just as pathologically driven; you won’t forgive his transgressions, but you can at least somewhat understand how he reached that bottom. Morgan, meanwhile, comes off as the cerebral player we all thought he was, given his stat lines, but that he did his best as an announcer to convince us that he wasn’t. (Disclaimer: I’ve never met Joe Morgan, and have no idea what he’s like as a person or as a student of the game.) Anderson, Tony Perez, Davey Concepcion, and Ken Griffey (Sr.) don’t get quite the same treatment, although I found the quiet rage of Griffey, still evident in contemporary quotes within the book, more reminiscent of Barry Bonds than of Ken Griffey, Jr., who had more of a reputation in baseball circles as an idler and a bit of a diva.
The Machine kicks into high gear at the end of the book when the nobody-respects-us Red Sox reach the Series and finally give the Reds the test they didn’t have all season. Those games were dramatic and come off as such on the pages, especially the epic Game 6, which Posnanski evokes through quotes and stories, including Rose’s boundless enthusiasm for what he correctly identified at the time as one of the greatest games in baseball history.
Posnanski mentions the team’s ethnic makeup and players’ obliviousness to it a few times during the book, but I wonder if that was truly a coming of age for MLB players post-Civil Rights Movement or just a function of winning breeding good chemistry. Was it unusual at the time to have a lineup – and the book is mostly about the lineup – that was so racially balanced? Did contemporary news sources see it as a big deal? In 1960, it would have been, and in 1980 it would scarcely have been noticed. I don’t know where 1975 fell on that continuum.
Posnanski’s writing has always spoken to me and, as you’d expect, the book absolutely flies – I knocked it off on a weekend trip to LA earlier this month. The friend who gave me this as a gift made a damn good call.
They’re fingers, Pam, not kielbasas.
Posnanski is remarkable. I’ve never seen anyone write so much, so well, so quickly. His output is staggering.
I’m a Reds fan, but the Big Red Machine was before my time, too. So, I was excited to see Joe tackle the subject. Not surprisingly, the book is a great read. It’s been a while since I read it, but I remember two things jumping out at me at the time.
First, Sparky’s borderline contempt for his pitching staff. Given the emphasis and value placed on pitchers and pitcher health in the modern era, Sparky’s attitude certainly stood in stark contrast.
Second, was how few of the guys actually came across as being likeable. I thought Griffey Sr. came across the best, but I also took away a new appreciation for Pete Rose. The rest seemed like they would fit right in with today’s elite athletes. In an era of Tiger Woods adhering to a philosophy of “stepping on competitors’ necks” when he had a lead, Lance Armstrong steamrolling everything and everyone that stood in his way on the road to victory, and Michael Jordan displaying a level of competitiveness (and, a corresponding lack of grace, as evidenced by his HOF induction speech) rarely seen or matched, I wonder if performing at an elite level requires the type of no-holds-barred approach exhibited by all of the aforementioned athletes. Can elite athletes be decent and compassionate? Or, does the required level of competitiveness necessarily involve abandoning compassion and decency for others?
Bringing it back to Posnanski, I remember reading an article he wrote about Lebron James winning his first championship. He analogized Lebron’s journey to that of Fast Eddie Felson, played by Paul Newman, in The Hustler. In that movie, Felson had to learn how to win. A process that required a toughening of personality and, on some level, a willingness to destroy/sacrifice others in order to win. Posnanski’s point was that Lebron had learned how to win and played in the NBA Finals with an icy determination. That he had somehow taken the step needed in order to dominate through sheer force of will. That he now had the ability to impose his will on the game.
In The Machine, Posnanski wrote a great book about one of the greatest teams ever, but lately I’ve wondered about the true cost of such greatness.
I was about to turn 7 in 1975, so my memories of the time are not what they once were, but I can testify that almost every kid in my school could recite “the lineup” by heart. It was pretty damn cool for our odd little midwestern town to be the center of the baseball universe for half a decade. I’ll never forgive Ken Burns for spending like 2 minutes on the Big Red Machine, and most of that to set up yet another chapter about the @#$%$%^^% Yankees.
Are you at all troubled by the way Joe Posnanski handled the Penn State/Joe Paterno situation? I would like to be able to read his books/columns, which I used to enjoy, but I keep returning to this question: If it had been Posnanski’s kids that had been molested, would he have written the book? If the answer is no, as I assume it is, then doesn’t it make him something of a hypocrite?