The Machine by Joe Posnanski Read Free Book Online

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 second 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