The Machine by Joe Posnanski Read Free Book Online Page B

hearing the stories about his potential. Every winter Nolan ‘guarantees’ twenty wins for the coming summer, and every summer Nolan spends half the time on the disabled list. He hardly ever pitches.”
    Nolan pleaded with Sparky to believe him. “Don’t you think I would be out there pitching if I could?” he asked. Sparky seemed unconvinced. His teammates wondered too. There was another unspoken rule when you were on the Machine: you did not complain about pain. Johnny Bench played catcher for 150 games every year—who hurt more than he? He never talked about it. Pete Rose never missed a game, ever, and he played baseball like a stunt man—he crashed into second basemen, shrugged off beanballs, dove into bases headfirst. Little Joe Morgan had been spiked, cut, slashed, knocked into the outfield, and slapped with tags that felt like Joe Frazier left hooks. He did not talk about it. If you wanted to play for the Machine, you did not show weakness, you did not back down, and you did not get hurt. Nolan tried again to pitch, but each delivery felt like surgery without anesthetics.
    “When’s Nolan going to pitch again?” reporters asked Sparky.
    “Hell, I don’t know,” Sparky said, and he could not mask the disdain. “Ask him.”
    The Reds’ doubts hurt as much as the arm. One day, the Reds executive Dick Wagner called Gary and said that the club had set up an appointment for him with a dentist. A dentist! “We think this will cure you,” Wagner said. Well, Gary went to the office, and the dentist fished around in his mouth for a few minutes and finally said, “I have found your problem. You have an abscessed tooth.” Gary shook his head; he had never felt any pain in his tooth. The dentist explained that such pain often transfers to another part of the body—maybe the right shoulder. The dentist pulled the tooth, and he promised Gary relief.
    There was no relief, of course; his shoulder hurt more than ever. Dentists from around the country wrote in to say that there was no way an abscessed tooth could cause a man’s arm to shoot with pain. Gary understood. The Reds had sent him to a witch doctor. They thought the pain was all in his head. He winced and grimaced through the playoffs and World Series, then moved his family out of Cincinnati, back to Oroville, where he would not have to hear whispers about gutlessness or see any more dentists. He pitched two games in 1973. He did not pitch at all in ’74. He would sit at home watching television— Mannix was his favorite show—and he knew that his career was over. The pain felt unbearable and permanent.
    “I’ve been dead for two years,” Gary said to Pete Rose. “And no one has even thrown me a funeral.”
     
    Many years later, Gary Nolan would look back and say he had two overwhelming thrills in the game of baseball. The first was something universal, something they all treasured. He loved putting on a major league baseball uniform. He loved being in the clubhouse, loved to hear the cheers and boos, loved striking out Willie Mays, loved the way the beer tasted after victories. Simply, Gary loved being a big league baseball player.
    The second thrill was more specific and more personal. It happened one day in 1974, when he went to see Dr. Frank Jobe, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ orthopedic surgeon. Jobe, in his own way, transformed baseball as much as Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, and Roberto Clemente. When Gary went to see him in 1974, Jobe was also seeing a Dodgers pitcher named Tommy John, who had badly injured his elbow. John’s career was over—pitchers did not come back from damaged elbows—but Jobe had this long-shot idea. Jobe thought that he might fix the elbow by replacing the damaged ligament with a ligament taken from another part of the body, like the wrist or the knee. Nobody had ever tried anything like it. Jobe placed John’s odds of pitching again at one hundred to one. But Tommy John did pitch again; he pitched as well as he had