The Machine by Joe Posnanski

sure, those were not things that made a man. A man was…well, all George Foster really knew was that he could not fail. He would drive Geronimo in. He would win the game. He would not fail.
    The Dodgers pitcher was Charlie Hough, a twenty-seven-year-old man from Honolulu whose career had ground to a halt in the minor leagues until he learned how to throw a knuckleball. There is something mystical about the knuckleball. Baseball is a game of speed. To a fan in the stands, everything moves fast: the pitches, the crack of the bat, the runners, the fielders, the umpires’ calls. The knuckleball moves slowly. It doesn’t fit the eye, doesn’t keep up with the pace of the game. The knuckleball pitcher hardly seems to be trying. But the knuckleballer isn’t going for speed. He is trying to throw the baseball so that it does not rotate—when thrown well, the ball dances and quivers to the whims of air resistance, bouncing like a balloon in the wind. When thrown well, a knuckleball is not only impossible to hit with a baseball bat, it’s darned near impossible to catch with a padded mitt. Bob Uecker, the old Braves catcher, used to say that the secret to catching a knuckleball was to wait until it stopped rolling and then pick it up.
    George Foster stepped into the batter’s box and watched a coupleof knuckleballs float by. Nerves were supposed to go away once the action began, that’s what everyone said, but Foster only felt his hands shake. He saw a knuckleball coming, and he swung hard. He topped the ball. No! He saw the ball rolling slowly down the third-base line, fair territory. No! Foster started to run to first base, and he felt like he was stomping grapes, he was barely moving at all. He had been exercising in the dugout all game long to stay warm, to prepare for this moment, and now his legs felt cramped. It was like that dream, the one where you run and run but you stay in place, you gain no ground. Still, he ran.
    Foster could not see what was happening behind him. Geronimo raced for home; he would score only if Foster could make it safely to first. The Dodgers’ third baseman, Ron Cey, rushed forward—well, he sort of rushed; Cey’s wobbly running style had earned him the nickname “the Penguin”—and scooped up the ball and threw hard to first base. The baseball and George Foster reached first base at the same time. First-base umpire Paul Pryor had been a minor league baseball player for a few years, and he had been an umpire in the big leagues since 1961. He had made calls like these too many times to even think about them. It was all instinct.
    “Safe,” Pryor shouted.
    The Reds won the game. The largest crowd ever to see a baseball game in Cincinnati stood and stomped in the chill. Reds players rushed out to jump on Geronimo and Foster. A couple of the Dodgers players rushed Paul Pryor for a moment, then angrily slipped away. “I know in my heart we had the man,” the Dodgers’ first baseman, Steve Garvey, said, but nobody around cared much about Garvey’s sour grapes.
    “George beat the throw by that far,” Sparky Anderson said in the clubhouse, and he held out his shaky hands for everyone to see. “My hands, they always shake,” he said happily.
    Foster cheerfully talked to reporters. Pat Darcy, the Reds’ rookie pitcher who held the Dodgers scoreless in the thirteenth andfourteenth innings, looked over the bottle of champagne that Joe Morgan gave him as a gift. “From my own personal stock,” Morgan said. Pete Rose told reporter after reporter how this was a big win, huge, enormous.
    And Joe Morgan, the Reds’ star second baseman, leaned back contentedly on his stool and pulled out a cigar. “The Dodgers,” he said, “can’t possibly believe they are better than us.”
    April 9, 1975
    CINCINNATI
REDS VS. DODGERS
    Team record: 1–0
    They were called Reds, yes, but they were the most conservative outfit in sports. Bob Howsam and Sparky Anderson created this seemingly endless list of