The Machine by Joe Posnanski Read Free Book Online Page A

he had just turned nineteen. Dave Bristol, the Reds manager, told the press, “He ain’t got no ceiling,” and the doublenegative did not restrain his emotions. Gary struck out 206 batters that first year, more than any nineteen-year-old since the great Bob Feller back in 1938. “Don’t be scared,” Feller told him, man to man, when the season ended. “Make them scared of you.”
    Gary knew exactly what Feller meant. They both knew what it was like, to be nineteen and commanding and bulletproof. The next spring, Gary felt a twinge in his arm. He kept on pitching. He felt other twinges. Then he started to notice that his arm hurt more often than it felt right. Then, one day in ’72, he felt like there was a spear sticking out of his arm.
     
    How did Gary get from there to here, from nineteen-year-old phenomenon who overmatched Willie Mays to twenty-six-year-old long shot trying to impress a crowd of cynics on a dusty spring training field in Tampa? His stomach tumbled and twisted, and again he saw his Carol behind home plate, looking at him with the worried face, like they were about to walk into the doctor’s office and find out the results of a cancer test. He tried to give her a knowing smile, a wink, but he could not pull it off. She could see through him. Carol had lived four houses down in Oroville. They married at seventeen and had their first son before the Reds signed him. She did not know baseball, but she knew everything about him. She knew he was scared.
    Gary winced as he threw the last of his warm-up pitches, though his arm did not hurt. He winced out of habit. His arm had hurt so much, for so long, that pain had become a part of him. Now there was a numbness where the pain had been. The pain was gone, but so was the electricity that had buzzed in his arm in 1967. Gary could not throw particularly hard anymore. He could not snap off a curve that dived to the ground. He no longer could look at batters with his childlike disdain and think, Buddy, you have no chance. He had to be a different pitcher now, a magician, an illusionist, he had to bend the ball crooked when they expected it straight, throw it slow whenthey anticipated fast, pitch it up when they were looking down. Gary missed his old arm. In a strange way, he even missed the pain.
    People had doubted him. That was what hurt most. He remembered that when he first felt the pain in his arm, Sparky Anderson had told him: “Pitchers have to throw with pain. Bob Gibson says every pitch he’s ever thrown cut him like a knife. You gotta pitch with pain, kid.”
    “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Gary wondered. He knew about pain. He had pitched with pain. He tried to explain that this was a different pain, agonizing pain that shot through his body when he released the ball. This was not pain you pitch with. Sparky sighed, sent the kid to the doctor, but the X-rays came up negative. And Sparky told him again about Bob Gibson pitching through pain. “You’ve got to be tough. You’ve got to keep on pitching through the pain.”
    And the cycle was formed. Gary pitched…and when he pitched, he pitched well. But the pain was overwhelming. He had to stop. He went to Sparky. The X-rays came up negative. Sparky would tell him to pitch again.
    In 1972, Gary Nolan might have been the best pitcher in baseball. By mid-July, he had won thirteen games, his ERA was a remarkable 1.81—all of his promise and all of his talent were finally coming together. And he was miserable. His arm throbbed constantly—even when he slept. Then, midway through the year, the pain jumped even higher, to a whole new level, and he had to stop, he could not pitch even as Sparky implored him to go on. The pain roared through him. “Enough to make you cry,” he told reporters, which didn’t make it sound any better.
    “Trade Nolan, sell Nolan, release Nolan. In short, get rid of him,” a reader from Dayton wrote in a letter to the Cincinnati Enquirer. “I am tired of