The Machine by Joe Posnanski Page A

rules. Everyone had to keep his hair short—the reliever Pedro Borbon had been charged with the role of team barber. Everyone had to wear black shoes, all black; clubhouse boys were responsible for blacking out any white logos with shoe polish. Everyone had to wear his pant legs at the knees so the red socks would be seen. No one could wear a beard. No one could be seen in public without a jacket and tie. No one could drink any alcohol on the team plane. And so on. And so on.
    The thing that separated the Reds, though, was not the rules themselves. It was the way the players took the rules. “What the hell would Bob Howsam or Sparky have said if I decided to wear my hair long?” Pete Rose would ask. “What would they have done if Johnny Bench decided to wear his pants low? What if Joe Morgan had wanted to wear a mustache? What do you think they would have done? They would not have done shit.”
    Perhaps. But the men of the Machine did not break the rules.They did not bend the rules. No, it was the opposite: they embraced the rules, and in a strange way, they even loved the rules. The Reds players saw themselves as defenders of another time, a better time, a time when the great St. Louis Cardinals player Stan Musial would smoke under stairwells so that no kid would see him. The Reds players like Johnny and Joe and even Pete saw themselves as baseball players from that time before America lost wars, before the college kids burned draft cards, before Sports Illustrated ran a cover photograph of Chicago White Sox first baseman Dick Allen with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth.
    “We need more heroes, especially for our young people,” Johnny Bench told the St. Petersburg Times sports editor Hubert Mizell. “Even if we have to keep ’em a little naive, it’s worth it…. I was seventeen years old before I knew that any major league ballplayer smoked or drank. It didn’t hurt [me] either.”
    Yes, those Reds players had a pretty good idea what a ballplayer was supposed to be like: he was supposed to drink milk and say “gosh” and hit home runs for sick children in hospitals. And while none of the Reds players did those things, well, they came close enough. Anyway, they kept their hair short. They acted the way a ballplayer was supposed to act.
    Mike Marshall, on the other hand, did not. Marshall was the Dodgers’ relief pitcher, and he was the one guy who scared the living hell out of the Reds. He was just so…odd. There was nothing at all physically intimidating about the man. Marshall was thirty-two years old, balding, no taller than five-foot-ten. His muttonchop sideburns curved toward the corner of his mouth, and he wore a bushy mustache, and he seemed to be trying to look like Alexander II of Russia. Marshall did not throw hard at all; it was his tepid fastball that inspired Jim Bouton, in his classic book Ball Four, to invent “Doubleday’s First Law”: “If you throw a fastball with insufficient speed, someone will smack it out of the park with a stick.”
    So why did Marshall terrify the Reds? For one thing, he was a doctor; anyway, that’s what people called him. He wasn’t the sort of doctor the Reds players could appreciate; he did not set casts or pull tonsils. He had earned his doctorate in kinesiology. When games ended, he shunned groupies of all ages and shapes and spent his free time with researchers. During the off-season, he taught classes at Michigan State. The topic of his dissertation was “Classifying Adolescent Males for Motor Proficiency Norms.” It made Marshall angry when reporters got that wrong.
    Dr. Mike Marshall was less a baseball player and more like, say, Bobby Fischer, the American chess genius who that same week abdicated his place as world chess champion rather than face off against the Soviet Union’s Anatoly Karpov. Fischer seemed to be standing on some sort of principle, though nobody quite knew what principle or where he stood on it.
    Marshall, too, seemed to stand